Research
Westside Research Park fosters world-changing research by bridging disciplines, technologies, and industries.
From genomics and neuroscience to robotics, energy, and agricultural technology, researchers at Westside Research Park are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge—transforming discovery into bold solutions that shape the future of our region and beyond.
Research labs and centers
Arts
Social Documentation Laboratory
UC Santa Cruz’s film and digital media department opened new state-of-the-art lab to support graduate students in socially engaged media production. The lab features accessible, sensory-friendly spaces and professional-grade equipment to foster experimentation, inclusion, and interdisciplinary collaboration between M.F.A. and Ph.D. students. The space enhances the department’s mission to combine critical scholarship with creative work, providing a venue for both media creation and thoughtful dialogue on social justice issues.
Master of Fine Arts Studio
Students translate concerns for environmental and social justice into contemporary art practices through professional training that combines project-based research, seminars, faculty mentorship, electives, visiting artists, and peer critiques. Working individually and collaboratively, in the studio and in the field, students experiment with different approaches to build their practices conceptually and practically, while critically and creatively exploring art’s role as a catalyst for radical change.
Baskin School of Engineering
Braingeneers
The Braingeneers are a team of researchers working with with cerebral organoids—3D models of brain tissue carefully grown in the lab. They apply modern artificial intelligence approaches to develop the first scalable system to study the behavior of human neural circuits using stimulus-response-reinforcement experiments, uncover how genetic changes enhanced human brain architecture and computing capacity during primate evolution, and enable an unprecedented window into brain development.
Human Aware Robotics Exploration (HARE) Lab
HARE Lab focuses on human-robot interaction and the development of prototype autonomous systems designed to support manual applications such as labor-intensive work, including agriculture, and to reduce risks for emergency personnel in search and rescue operations.
jLab in Smart Sensing
The jLab researches wireless sensing and communications systems, with a focus technology that supports sustainable practices. Their work includes designing novel sensing paradigms for agriculture, inventing techniques for ultra-low power communication in indoor sensor networks, and exploiting non-traditional energy sources, such as microbes, for sustainable sensing.
Nanostructured Energy Conversion Technology & Research (NECTAR) Lab
In the NECTAR lab, researchers develop advanced materials for target applications that include harvesting, converting, storing, generating, and transmitting energy as well as reducing energy consumption. By applying new knowledge at material, device, and sub-system levels, the lab aims to provide resources to drive all aspects of the rapidly emerging global economy.
Shared Robotics and Flying Arena
The shared robotics and flying arena provides an advanced testing and development space for autonomous systems, aerial robotics, and related technologies. Designed for experimentation and collaboration, the arena supports research in navigation, sensing, control systems, and human-robot interaction, enabling breakthroughs that advance both academic research and practical applications in robotics.
Smart Power Lab
The Smart Power Lab specializes in renewable energy and grid technologies, developing innovative strategies to optimize energy efficiency and sustainability in power systems by integrating artificial intelligence, data analytics technologies, new materials, and hardware solutions.
Teodorescu Lab
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Mircea Teodorescu is part of the Braingeneers, who interface biology and engineering through mathematical modeling, rapid manufacturing, embedded electronics, and sensing. They focus on applications in biomolecular engineering, biomechanics, robotics, and assistive technology.
UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute
Genomics Institute Labs and Centers
The Genomics Institute’s work bridges disciplinary gaps to apply the combined power of engineering, mathematics, and the biological and physical sciences to create innovations that improve our world. Researchers at the Genomics Institute make concrete impacts on human health and conservation.
Colligan Clinical Diagnostic Lab
The newly licensed lab will identify life-saving treatment options for pediatric patients with hard-to-treat cancers by analyzing patient samples for RNA abnormalities.
Physical and Biological Sciences
Baumbach Lab
The Baumbach research group is focused on quantum phenomena in bulk crystalline materials, with an emphasis on structural, magnetic, and electronic states that derive from transition metal, lanthanide, and actinide elements. To do this, the lab follows an approach based on the development of design principles, crystal growth methods, and elucidation of phenomena using scattering, electronic, and thermodynamic probes.
Lederman Lab
The Lederman group in the physics department at UC Santa Cruz seeks to understand the fundamental properties of materials in reduced dimensions. In many cases, the electronic interface interactions in nanoscale materials are expected to be the basis of future electronic devices.
Velasco Lab
The lab aims to characterize and manipulate the properties of two-dimensional materials with unprecedented sensitivity and atomic scale precision. The properties of these materials are being intensively studied because of their unique electronic and structural attributes, which may form the basis of future electronic devices. Recent specific interests include relativistic quantum chaos and encoding quantum information with electron orbits and spins.
The Ramirez Lab
The focus of the lab is the discovery and exploration of novel electronic phases of matter in pursuit of new principles and technologies. They use a variety of measurement techniques down to cryogenic temperatures to probe a large variety of materials, including magnets, semiconductors, superconductors, and more.
The Yan Lab
The Yan lab focuses on atomic and nanoscale structural and property tailoring, and in-situ and operando study of functional materials through combined synthesis and advanced microscopy approaches.
Science and Engineering
Materials Science and Engineering
MSE research at UC Santa Cruz encompasses the areas of quantum materials, spintronics, photovoltaics, photonics, and biomaterials — with projects spanning experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches to drive comprehensive research.
Social Sciences
Monterey Bay Archaeology Archives
The Monterey Bay Archaeology Archives is a UC Office of the President-recognized nonprofit repository for archaeological materials from the greater Monterey Bay region.