With a three-minute talk entitled “Using Geometry to Build Better Birth Control,” engineering graduate student Geoff Hollett took first place at the UC San Diego Grad Slam competition held April 5. Now in its fourth year, the event challenges graduate students across campus to break down their research into bite-sized, jargon-free presentations that can be enjoyed by a broad audience.
How can California better prepare for droughts and floods? Tashiana Osborne, a graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is studying atmospheric rivers—the primary source of rainfall in the region. These ribbons of water in the atmosphere make the difference between a prolonged dry spell and an unusually wet winter.
UC San Diego’s Divisions of Biological and Physical Sciences will launch a Research Communications program designed to address that need. Funded by a two-year, $225,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the new effort seeks to improve the ability of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and other researchers on campus to communicate their work to the public.
Researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego mined the FDA Adverse Effect Reporting System (FAERS) database for depression symptoms in patients taking ketamine for pain. They found that depression was reported half as often among the more than 41,000 patients who took ketamine, as compared to patients who took any other drug or drug combination for pain.
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences announced today the membership election of Christopher K. Glass, MD, PhD, professor in the Departments of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
Pancreatic beta cells help maintain normal blood glucose levels by producing the hormone insulin — the master regulator of energy (glucose). Impairment and the loss of beta cells interrupts insulin production, leading to type 1 and 2 diabetes. Using single-cell RNA sequencing, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have, for the first time, mapped out pathways that regulate beta cell growth that could be exploited to trick them to regenerate.