About University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) is a public land-grant research university located in Santa Cruz, California. Founded in 1965, UCSC is known for its progressive educational philosophy and innovative teaching methods. The university encompasses 2,001 acres of rolling hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean and serves approximately 17,812 undergraduate and 1,952 graduate students across its ten residential colleges. Each college has its own unique theme and community, fostering a close-knit environment that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration. UCSC is classified as an "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" institution and is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU). The university boasts a distinguished faculty that includes Nobel Prize winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and recipients of prestigious awards such as the MacArthur Fellowship.
#393
QS World University Ranking
19,764
Total Enrollment
65%
Acceptance Rate
Accreditations and Rankings
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#393
QS World University Ranking
19,764
Total Enrollment
65%
Acceptance Rate
Accreditations and Rankings
University of California, Santa Cruz Highlights
Career Outcomes and Placement Information
The University of California, Santa Cruz offers comprehensive career services designed to support students in their professional development. These services include personalized career counseling, workshops on resume writing and interview preparation, as well as access to job fairs featuring top employers across various sectors. UCSC emphasizes experiential learning through internships that allow students to gain practical experience while studying. The Career Services office maintains partnerships with numerous organizations to facilitate internship placements aligned with students' career goals. Additionally, online resources are available that include job listings and career advice articles.
Faculties
These are the expert instructors who will be teaching you throughout the course. With a wealth of knowledge and real-world experience, they're here to guide, inspire, and support you every step of the way. Get to know the people who will help you reach your learning goals and make the most of your journey.
4.2
44
Reviews
27,677
Students
1
Course
Dr. Dom Massaro is a Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a notable career in innovative language research involving preschool and school children, as well as adults. He has significantly advanced the field through empirical, theoretical, and technological contributions. Dr. Massaro was among the first to apply Bayesian principles to language understanding and is renowned for developing Baldi, a computer-animated face that produces accurate visible speech. Currently serving as president of Psyentific Mind, he leverages technology and behavioral science to address real-world challenges. Additionally, he invented the Kid Klok, an educational analog clock designed for easy reading, and has developed successful language learning products for children with hearing loss and autism.
4.8
22
Reviews
9,879
Students
1
Course
Abel Rodriguez is a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He joined UCSC in 2007 after earning his PhD in Statistics and Decision Sciences from Duke University. An accomplished author, he has published two books and over 40 journal and conference papers. His research interests encompass Bayesian nonparametric methods, machine learning, spatiotemporal models, network models, and extreme value theory.
4.9
2,662
Reviews
1,20,862
Students
1
Course
Bettina Aptheker is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught for 40 years. Her popular course, Introduction to Feminisms, was taught for 30 years. She held the Jack and Peggy Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair for Feminist Studies from 2017 to 2020 and previously held a UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (2012-2015). Aptheker is the author of several influential books, including The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (2nd edition, 1999) and Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became a Feminist Rebel (2006). Her current research focuses on “Queering the History of the Communist Left in the United States.” As a scholar-activist, she is actively involved in anti-racist work and frequently speaks about the #MeToo movement.
3,156
Students
1
Course
Dr. Jessica Kendall-Bar is a Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. Her interdisciplinary research integrates engineering, data science, ecology, and visualization to study the behavior and physiology of marine animals in the context of climate change. For her dissertation, she developed a groundbreaking non-invasive system that recorded and visualized the first marine mammal sleep data at sea, published in Science.
4.9
12
Reviews
5,125
Students
1
Course
Erika Zavaleta is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz, leading a diverse research group focused on conservation science and ecology in response to climate, atmospheric, and biodiversity changes. With 85 publications, including 13 in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science, she has made significant contributions to understanding ecological community responses to climate change. Zavaleta received the Ecological Society of America Sustainability Science Award in 2007 for her work on climate and wildfire impacts in Alaska's boreal forest. Recently, she was honored with two American Publishers Association’s PROSE Awards and a California Book Award for her book Ecosystems of California (2016). As director of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program, she trains future conservation leaders and serves on advisory boards for several organizations focused on climate adaptation and conservation biology. Her current research includes studying the responses of migratory songbirds and alpine food webs to environmental changes in Telluride.
4.7
24
Reviews
9,719
Students
1
Course
Grant Hartzog is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Global and Community Health Program. Hartzog received his PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1992. His research focuses on the regulation of transcription elongation and its connections to chromatin structure and RNA processing in yeast.
4.7
24
Reviews
9,719
Students
1
Course
Greg Gates, M.D., began his medical career in 1970 before serving three years in the Air Force as a flight surgeon. He then practiced for 25 years in emergency rooms and urgent care clinics in the Monterey Bay area. The concept for an undergraduate course in medicine emerged in 2001, leading to its first offering at UC Santa Cruz in 2017, developed in collaboration with Professor Grant Hartzog. A grant from the University of California system in 2019 enabled the creation of an online version of the course, now accessible across all ten UC campuses.
4.6
502
Reviews
1,50,367
Students
1
Course
Herbert Lee is a Professor of Statistics in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also serves as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. He earned his B.S. in Mathematics from Yale University and both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University, he joined the UCSC faculty in 2002. As an applied Bayesian statistician, his research interests encompass computer simulation experiments, inverse problems, optimization, spatial statistics, classification and clustering, and neural networks. He has authored two books, Bayesian Nonparametrics via Neural Networks and Multiscale Modeling: A Bayesian Perspective (co-authored with Marco Ferreira), along with a variety of academic papers.
4.4
2,194
Reviews
5,28,574
Students
8
Courses
Ira Pohl is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Fellow of the ACM. He is part of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering and has authored numerous works on programming languages including C, C++, C#, and Java. His research interests span artificial intelligence, programming languages, practical complexity problems, heuristic search methods, deductive algorithms, and educational and social issues. In his leisure time, he enjoys walks and bike rides by the ocean and occasionally plays chess in a coffee house.
995
Students
1
Course
Jizhou Kang is a doctoral student in Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, having joined the department in 2019 after completing his M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests encompass Bayesian nonparametric methods, ordinal regression, high-dimensional data analysis, models for longitudinal data, causal inference, and machine learning.
4.6
45
Reviews
9,475
Students
1
Course
Kelvin Lwin is an AI architect with a decade of experience teaching technical subjects related to computer science and artificial intelligence/deep learning in both industry and academia. He has held various leadership roles, including Chief AI Officer at byteLiberator and CEO of Alin.ai, where he focuses on personalized AI education for K-12 students. Lwin served as an instructor at UC Santa Cruz for the course "AI, Empathy & Ethics" and has extensive experience in developing AI systems, particularly in computer vision and industrial applications.
4.9
80
Reviews
55,541
Students
1
Course
Matthew Heiner is a doctoral student in Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His academic focus includes Bayesian statistics, specifically techniques and models that enhance statistical analysis
4.8
19
Reviews
2,602
Students
1
Course
Matthew Lasar was raised in coastal New Jersey and Manhattan during the 1960s, where a lecture about Richard Nixon's alleged involvement in JFK's assassination sparked his interest in evidence gathering. He earned a BA from the City College of New York, an MA in history from UC Davis, and a PhD from Claremont Graduate School. Lasar has authored three books on community media and currently teaches courses on conspiracy theories, the Cold War, and the FBI at UC Santa Cruz. He resides in San Francisco with his spouse, Sharon Wood, and their cats, Dora and Molly.
21,872
Students
2
Courses
Murray Baumgarten (B.A. Columbia, Ph.D. Berkeley) is a Distinguished Professor of English and Contemporary Literature in the Literature Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He serves as the Co-director of Jewish Studies and is the Founding Director of The Dickens Project. Baumgarten has published extensively on modern Jewish and English writing, alongside original fiction and translation. His recent work focuses on the Jews of Venice and the afterlife of the Ghetto. Together with Professor Peter Kenez, he has taught the course “Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry” for many years and has received a campus award for excellence in teaching.
3,706
Students
1
Course
Nada Miljkovic is an educator, founder, community builder, and artist currently serving as the Interim Managing Director of UCSC’s Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development. She teaches a wide range of subjects, including ethics, entrepreneurship, and digital storytelling. As the co-founder and CEO of GetVirtual and the founder of Artist on Art, LLC, Nada is actively involved in fostering community engagement. She also serves as President of several Bay Area nonprofit boards, including the Arts Council of Santa Cruz County and E.A.R.T.H. Lab in San Francisco. Nada resides in Santa Cruz, California, with her family.
71,856
Students
3
Courses
Peter Kenez, Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A founding faculty member of UCSC's Stevenson College, he has been teaching Russian and modern European history since 1966 after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research interests include Russian history, Eastern Europe, 20th-century Europe, and Soviet film. Kenez has taught various courses, including Modern European History and the Holocaust, and has received an Excellence in Teaching award.
4.4
7
Reviews
4,539
Students
1
Course
Raquel Prado is a Professor of Statistics in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has been a faculty member since 2001. She holds a Ph.D. in Statistics and Decision Sciences from Duke University and is a Fellow of both the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). Her research focuses on developing and implementing modeling, inference, and prediction tools for data with temporal and spatio-temporal structures, particularly in analyzing non-stationary and large-dimensional biomedical signals and neuroimaging data. Prado has published extensively, including the book Time Series: Modeling, Computation, and Inference (second edition co-authored with Marco Ferreira and Mike West).
5
5
Reviews
4,993
Students
1
Course
Remy Franklin is a coach and educator dedicated to helping individuals step back from daily pressures and align their lives with what truly matters. He teaches Life Design to college and graduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Remy holds a BA in Music and Environmental Studies from Dartmouth College and a master's in Human Geography from the University of Arizona. He is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) recognized by the International Coach Federation and serves as a mentor coach with the Academy for Coaching Excellence
4.9
9
Reviews
10,628
Students
1
Course
Ricardo Sanfelice is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned his B.S. degree in Electronics Engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2001. Sanfelice joined the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, and Computation at UC Santa Barbara in 2002, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 2004 and 2007, respectively. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT and has also visited the Centre Automatique et Systemes at the Ecole de Mines de Paris.