The Baskin School of Engineering, known simply as Baskin Engineering, is the school of engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It consists of six departments: Applied Mathematics, Biomolecular Engineering, Computational Media, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Statistics. The school was formed in 1997 and endowed with a multimillion-dollar gift from retired local engineer and developer Jack Baskin. Although it is a relatively young engineering school, it is already known in the Silicon Valley region and beyond for producing prominent tech innovators, including the founders of companies including Concur Technologies (now SAP Concur), Pure Storage, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Cloudflare, eGain Corporation, Ceph, Dovetail Genomics, Unnatural Products, Brilliant NextGen, ShopKick, Cruz Foam, Five3 Genomics, and a host of other startups. In 2023, it was ranked as the #2 public school for engineering salaries in the United States by The Wall Street Journal. Baskin Engineering is a leader in the field of games and playable media, and was the first school in the country to offer a graduate degree in Serious Games. The school is also renowned for its research in genomics and bioinformatics, having played a critical role in the Human Genome Project. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz were responsible for creating the UCSC Genome Browser, which continues to be an important open-source tool for researchers in genomics. In 2022, the Baskin School continued this work finishing first truly complete sequence of the human genome, covering each chromosome from end to end with no gaps and unprecedented accuracy, is now accessible through the UCSC Genome Browser.
Degrees offered The Baskin School of Engineering offers degrees in the following areas:
In addition to these degree programs, the Baskin School also offers emphases in Computational Media, Human Language Media and Modeling, Robotics and Control (graduate minor), Scientific Computing, and Statistics
Research
Research areas Because of its proximity to Silicon Valley, the Baskin School of Engineering has strong ties to technology corporations and start-ups, and tends to focus its research on innovations in big data, cyber-physical systems, genomics, and computational media. Its current research areas include:
Algorithms, logic and complexity Artificial intelligence and machine learning Bayesian statistics Bioinformatics and genomics Communications, signals, and digital image processing Computational biology Computer hardware: architecture, chip design, FPGAs, and electronic design automation Computer games Computer security and privacy Computer vision, visualization, and graphics Cyber-physical systems Database systems Data science Distributed systems Electronic circuit Human–computer interaction Mathematical modeling and numerical analysis Nanoscience and nanotechnology Natural language processing Networks Photonics and electronic devices Power systems and energy engineering Programming languages Real-time systems Remote sensing and environmental technology Robotics and control Systems biology Software engineering Storage systems Vaccines and antiviral therapeutics
Role in sequencing the human genome In May 1985, Robert L. Sinsheimer, then Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, conducted a workshop on the feasibility of sequencing the human genome. Sinsheimer and his colleagues in the Biology Department had determined that the project would require developing more powerful methods for genetic mapping and cloning, an automated means of sequencing, and improved means of data storage, and invited leading scientists in all these areas to the workshop. The group determined that the task was feasible, but was split on whether it would be worth the time and funding. It would take another several years before an academic consortium could obtain the funding needed for the task. The publicly-funded Human Genome Project was officially launched in 1990, with the backing of the NIH and other organizations throughout the world. In 1998, the private Celera Corporation started a parallel sequencing project that was able to proceed more quickly and at a lower cost than the public project because it made use of the data that the academic consortium had made openly available. Researchers in the consortium became nervous that if Celera was able to complete the sequencing project first, it would patent the results and restrict the redistribution and scientific use of the data. In May of 2000, Jim Kent, a biology graduate student at UC Santa Cruz who had a background as a computer programmer, approached Computer Science Professor David Haussler and offered to write an assembly program using a sampler strategy. Haussler had rigged together a makeshift supercomputer out of 100 Dell Pentium III processor workstations for the genome project, but Celera was working with one of the most powerful computer systems available at the time, and their chances looked grim. Desperate to try anything that might allow academics to keep the genomic data open-source, Haussler gave Kent the go-ahead. In what has been described by other scientists as an almost miraculous feat, Kent took less than a month to write a program, GigAssembler, that allowed the Human Genome Project to assemble and publish the first human genome sequence on June 22, 2000, just a few days before Celera completed theirs. After UC Santa Cruz published their draft of the human genome online, Kent began programming the UCSC Genome Browser to allow researchers to search 21 tracks of information aligned with the DNA sequence to help them identify genes. The Browser continues to be an important open-source tool for uncovering the causes of disease and develop new treatments. In 2004, David Haussler became the inaugural member of the Biomolecular Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz. Today he is the scientific director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, as well as the scientific co-director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). Jim Kent is currently the director of the UCSC Genome Browser Project and a research scientist with UCSC’s Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering. The Santa Cruz Genomics Institute continues to be leaders in the field of genomics, with a commitment to open-source research.
Student demographics
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