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Division of Physical & Biological Sciences
Nat Sci II Annex
University of California
Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Phone: 459-2931
Fax: 459-4161
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Student Research

Performing basic scientific research in state-of-the-art facilities provides real-world experience and a context for what is learned in the classroom. It helps students understand the idea of "experimental fact": how elusive a definitive observation may be and the value of good observations. There are research opportunities in both our campus laboratories and out in the field. Even faculty in our graduate programs sponsor independent studies, senior thesis research projects, and hire undergraduates as laboratory staff.

Undergraduate Research Symposium
The Undergraduate Research Symposium serves to recognize and promote the outstanding undergraduate research that is being carried out at in the Physical and Biological Sciences while providing students with the experience of presenting their research results in a professional scientific forum. This facet of undergraduate education is one that exemplifies the commitment to excellence in teaching and research that characterizes undergraduate education here at UC Santa Cruz.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)
MCD Biology offers two upper division courses that give more students the opportunity to learn in a real research environment. Professor Manuel Ares, Jr., offers Biology 185F and 185L through a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to support the development of interdisciplinary biomedical scientists at the undergraduate level. Students in his courses are learning by conducting research in genomics. [More]

FEATURED STUDENT BIOS

Elena Nilsen, Ocean Sciences
Elena's scientific interests are focused on characterizing carbon cycling, nutrient dynamics and anthropogenic impacts on estuarine and coastal ecosystems using sediment geochemical techniques. The first chapter of her thesis was recently submitted for publication. She has made substantive progress on chapters two and three, and received the Best Student Paper Award at the Society of Wetland Scientists Meetings in September 2002, and an Outstanding Student Paper Award at the American Geophysical Union Meetings in December 2002 for presenting this work.
Elena's outside interests include promoting equal education and environmental stewardship. She teaches science content at elementary schools in a migrant farming community in Salinas, CA through the Monterey Bay Science Project/Language Acquisition in Science Education for Rural Schools (LASERS). She also volunteers throughout 2002 as an Environmental Services Intern at the California Coastal Commission in Santa Cruz.

Eric Kramer, Physics
Eric Kramer is studying for the Ph.D. in Physics. His thesis involves several topics in elementary particle physics. Under the supervision of Professor Michael Dine, Kramer already has one significant publication making a prediction for experiments currently underway at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the KEK facility in Japan. Studying the violation of an approximate symmetry of nature, known as “CP” (for charge conjugation and parity), this symmetry is equivalent to the symmetry of “time reversal” in which the laws of nature are symmetric between time running forwards and time running backwards. Understanding how this symmetry is broken is crucial, not only for what it tells us about the laws of nature, but also for understanding how we came to be here: why, from the early universe, a state emerged with matter, rather than a mixture of matter and anti-matter. Kramer and his collaborators (Dine, Nir, and Shadmi), in “CP Violation and the Scale of Supersymmetry Breaking”, Phys Rev. D63,116005 (2001), made a specific prediction for the present experiments arising from a combination of ideas associated with some of the most interesting ideas in present theoretical physics, supersymmetrey (hypothetical new symmetry of nature) and string theory. Eric is a most respected teaching assistant and continues to research on the subject of “Grand Unification”.

Frank Black, Environmental Toxicology
Frank's research interests include the specification, transport, and fate of trace metals in aquatic systems. His current focus is on mercury, a potent neurotoxin ubiquitous in the natural environment due to anthropogenic activities. While all forms of mercury are toxic, methyl mercury is the form most toxic and most readily bioaccumulated up the food chain, with concentration s of mercury in fish from contaminated areas often exceeding state health standards. Frank's research will characterize the spatial and temporal variability in the concentration and stability of organic ligands in aquatic systems which form strong complexes with ionic mercury and methyl mercury. This complexation is expected to control the speciation, and thus the transport, bioavilability, and toxicity in many aquatic environments
Frank's research experience in the geochemistry and hydrology departments at Sandia National Labs has proved invaluable for the success of his current work. While an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, he received Andrew Mellon, Richter Memorial, and Earth Science Department Grants to carry out his senior honors thesis of stable isotope analysis of paleosols around volcanoes in Ecuador and Costa Rica. Frank presented his findings in an oral presentation at the earth sciences symposium, as well as a poster presentation at the Reed Competition for distinguished senior honors thesis research, where he was awarded second prize and associate membership in the Sigma Xi scientific research society. Frank was more recently awarded a Chancellor’s Fellowship at U.C. Santa Cruz.
Frank's interests outside of graduate school involve working with youth and teaching outdoor skills, environmental education, and science.He has done this by leading backpacking and mountain biking trips in the Rocky Mountains, teaching geology and ecology at an alpine environmental education center in Switzerland, and serving as a judge at the Santa Cruz County Science Fair.

Sarah Cunningham, Mathematics
Sarah C. Cunningham received her B.A. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley in 2001, graduating with highest honors in the major. She also received the Dorthea Klumpke Roberts prize for exceptional scholarship in mathematics, given to the top five graduates every year. She entered the Ph.D. program at U.C. Santa Cruz in 2002, having received the Provost’s Fellowship for the 2002-2003 school year.
Her research interests lie in the representation theory of finite groups, specifically Alperin’s weight conjecture and some related conjectures. During February 2003, she participated in an international workshop on these conjectures, and in April 2003 she began writing computer programs to test a version of Alperin’s conjecture on specific groups.
Sarah spent the summer of 2002 teaching mathematics to underprivileged eighth-graders in San Francisco in a program called Aim High.

Quinn Eastman, Ph.D., Science Writing
When it comes to science, Quinn has always jumped in with both feet. He studied lymphocyte development, DNA repair and recombination, and Wnt signaling in the laboratory. Quinn's years in research taught him that the thrill of jumping into a new topic, exploring, asking questions, putting it all together and then explaining it to others is what drives him. Five years ago, Quinn wouldn’t have imagined calling himself a writer. Now, finding a way to combine writing with science training truly seems like the right choice, the place he belongs.

Esther Wei-Yun Landuis, Ph.D. pending
As a Harvard Immunology PhD student, Esther not only gained insight into Ikaros gene regulation in the developing immune system but also learned that she would rather tinker with words and phrases than with mice and bacteria. Fondly recalling her initial foray into science communication as an undergraduate writer for the Stanford Daily science page, she was excited to "test the writing waters" again as a graduate student. Esther's essay on academic-business interplay in biomedical research was published in the Harvard Health Caucus 2001 Working Paper Series, and she has also written several articles for the Harvard Medical School publications FOCUS and WebWeekly.

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