Illustration by Christine Hipp.

The way we store and access data in the modern world is changing, now more than ever. To keep up with the times researchers at UC Santa Cruz have spent years trying to find a place just to fit it all.

After over a decade of research into data storage, UCSC will soon open the new Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS) with collaboration and financial support from some of the information industry’s biggest names.

Darrell Long, a UCSC professor of computer science and a storage systems researcher, said there is an enormous amount of data out there — “big data,” as he referred to it — that is constantly being saved in huge quantities. Without a comprehensive filtering method, going back to find old files will be difficult, he said.

“We keep accumulating data — so much that it can easily get lost in space,” Long said. “We want to make it easier to find it.”

For years, the Storage Systems Research Center, which is part of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, has analyzed a wide array of data storage topics. The new CRSS however has the backing of the National Science Foundation — arming UCSC researchers with an increased arsenal of tools. The CRSS also has over a dozen sponsors from major tech companies, including Hitachi, Intel, HP, IBM, Samsung and SanDisk. Altogether, the CRSS has a $465,000 annual budget at its disposal.

Graduate student Ian Adams said UCSC’s research has kept sponsors interested, and the program funded. He added that graduate students involved in the program were seeing “no shortage of job offers.”

“A lot of us are leaving soon, so all of these projects could use more help,” Adams said.

Adams said he is excited by the recent access to a research project concerning genomic data alongside Hitachi and UCSF.

“There are a lot of different projects going on at the same time, so all of us are kind of working on different things,” Li said.

Professor Long said he hopes to preserve the format of current files as the days of our lives integrate with a digital environment.

Illustrated by Christine Hipp

Entrepreneurs bridge the gap between innovation and the marketplace. A new emphasis on entrepreneurship at UC Santa Cruz highlights the importance of this connection.

Narinder Kapany, known as the father of fiber optics, recently donated $500,000 to the Jack Baskin School of Engineering (Jack Baskin) to establish an endowed chair of entrepreneurship.

“My association with bright UCSC students and visiting lectureship by established entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers, patent attorneys, financial experts and marketing persons made the entire process very attractive to me,” Kapany said.

The creation of an endowed chair will increase the opportunities for UCSC students to learn entrepreneurial skills.

“[The chair] can use [the endowment] to cede research, or they can use it for travel, or they can use it to bring in visitors,” said Arthur Ramirez, the dean of engineering at Jack Baskin. “It’s money that’s fairly unrestricted by other programmatic needs that they can use to develop the program.”

The creation of the chair required not only the donation, but also the approval of the campus provost, Alison Galloway. This reflects the university’s support of programs that teach students how to manage technology and information, Ramirez said.

That the chair was established through the school of engineering is no coincidence. Ramirez said entrepreneurship skills are highly useful to engineers, who design much of the technology demanded by the modern marketplace.

“Entrepreneurship has become one of the most commonly used routes to bring technology into the marketplace,” Ramirez said, “but it requires a different set of skills. It overlaps with traditional management, but an entrepreneur is a different kind of manager than you would find in a big corporation. And so, just like regular management need to be taught, we thought entrepreneurship would be a good match for this campus.”

Although entrepreneurship is not restricted to the field of engineering, the donation was given to Jack Baskin because it has a history of encouraging entrepreneurship.

“We’ve had the plurality of entrepreneurship activities,” Ramirez said. “We started the center of entrepreneurship two years ago, and there are several faculty and students in engineering who have started companies. I wouldn’t say the majority, but I think there’s more entrepreneurship activity in engineering than any of the other divisions.”

In addition, the Technology and Information Management (TIM) program is part of the school of engineering. This program offers instructional courses on technology and information management, which are integral parts of entrepreneurship in the sciences.

“These days, [science and technology] are the quickest routes to commercialization,” said Brent Haddad, associate dean of engineering for technology management. “Some of the obvious connections to the private sector will come out of engineering, chemistry, biochemistry and so forth because they’ll be medical and electronics applications.”

Kapany typifies a scientist who used entrepreneurship to move technology that he developed into the marketplace. His innovation in fiber optics revolutionized communication technology in the 1970s, and continues to have a major impact on computer networking and telecommunication technologies today.

“His own life provides a prime example of that because he did some of the seminal, original research on fiber optics,” Haddad said. “And then he was able to move that into the private sector and really change electronics by introducing these amazing innovations that took hold and became important products used all over the world.”

During the 1970s, Kapany worked at UCSC as a research professor. While at UCSC, Kapany taught courses in entrepreneurship. This was ahead of his time, Ramirez said.

“[Kapany] is a pretty inventive guy,” Ramirez said. “He invented the idea of bending light, carrying light in a very pure fiber, but then he went on to create companies after that.”

UCSC started to focus on entrepreneurship research soon after its founding, Haddad said. Kapany’s presence at UCSC enhanced this focus.

“[Kapany] saw the importance of moving good ideas out of the laboratories and universities and into broader use,” Haddad said. “There are uncounted great ideas that emerge from universities that just don’t go anywhere outside of universities … Dr. Kapany realized this is an area where you could actually take productive steps to move those good ideas into broader use, and everybody would benefit if we did.”

Kapany is most closely aligned with engineering, Ramirez said, which influenced his decision to donate to the engineering school. Entrepreneurship, however, is not exclusive to the hard sciences.

“When we think about entrepreneurship, we’re thinking campus wide,” Haddad said. “Anyone can be an entrepreneur, it’s just moving a good idea from the good idea stage to a practical application that helps society. That could be a good idea about anything.”

Haddad supports the spread of entrepreneurship to different departments on campus. “There are other areas of innovation, such as helping development projects in developing countries,” Haddad said. “That’s happening as well — here on campus, and we want to encourage that kind of entrepreneurship.”

While the possibilities created by having an endowed entrepreneurship chair are broad, currently, there are no candidates for the position.

“They have the requirement of having a PhD,” Ramirez said, “but also having been a successful entrepreneur and are at the stage in their life where they want to give back as opposed to starting another company.”

The search for someone who meets these requirement will not be taken lightly, Haddad said.

“It usually takes a long time to establish a new faculty member because the commitment is so long-term that you just want to take your time and do a really thorough job,” Haddad said. “It’s like you’re hiring a family member, you want to get it right.”

Photo of Lauren Lui. Photo by Morgan Grana.

When Lauren Lui walks into work, she puts on her lab coat and safety goggles. She is surrounded by beakers, Bunsen burners and microscopes — all objects you would expect to find in a lab.

Although this is a typical day for Lui, it’s a scene that is more rare than one would imagine in the 21st century, as the fields of science and engineering are still primarily dominated by men.

By college graduation, men outnumber women in nearly every science and engineering field across the country, and in some cases, the difference is extensive. At UC Santa Cruz, women make up only 15 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients in physics and engineering majors, according to UCSC’s Office of Informational Research.

“The biggest challenge in women getting involved in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] is feeling that they belong to the high-tech world,” said Lui, a UCSC graduate student and Communication Chair of Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE).

Although statistics demonstrate that girls compare closely with boys in standardized math and science tests at the K-12 level, the stereotype that women are not “capable enough” for these fields persists. Once enrolled in a four-year university, women are not nearly as involved as men in the STEM fields, even though there are groups at the professional and collegiate levels trying to change this through outreach.

At UCSC, 54 percent of students and 42 percent of faculty make up the current female undergraduate and staff population. Female students comprise 14 percent of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, compared to 55 percent of all humanities majors.

Groups like UCSC’s Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) aim to advance women’s roles in STEM fields by reaching out to female students both before and during college.

In July 2011, Margaret Ortega’s position as WiSE’s director of diversity recruitment and retention in the graduate division was eliminated. WiSE now reports directly to dean of graduate studies Dean Miller and is completely student-run. Although WiSE still has funding from the UCSC Women’s Center and the Center for Bio-molecular Science and Engineering Research Mentoring Institute (CBSE), it has lost the guidance and support Ortega’s position offered.

WiSE has taken the initiative to improve the number of women in STEM fields on campus. It has been able to expand and survive despite budget cuts by letting graduate students run the organization.

“We currently have a staff advisor in CBSE — Zia Isola — and we benefit greatly from her mentorship. I worry about what would happen if her position was eliminated, too,” Lui said.

WiSE encourages UCSC members by connecting them to mentors, and providing networking opportunities as well as seminars and discussions, to further learning through outreach.

When Lui was an undergraduate at UC Davis, she endured the challenges of feeling isolated from her major, which was mathematical and scientific computation with an emphasis in biology. She said with a small number of women in her classes, it was hard to relate to anyone, and she felt outnumbered.

“When I was an undergrad, one of my computer science classes had only three women,” Lui said. “It just makes you feel weird, when you’re the only one wearing pink. It’s hard being one of the few girls.”

In 2010, WiSE decided to expand its outreach to high schools and middle schools in Santa Cruz County, focusing not only on women, but on retaining people from all underrepresented backgrounds.

Lui said outreach at an early age is important to piquing girls’ interest in the sciences.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

“Women might have not been encouraged at an early age,” Lui said. “So you miss out on a huge pool of talent. It’s important to have this diversity because we bring a different point of view to these fields.”

Stacey Falls, an advanced placement (AP) chemistry teacher at Santa Cruz High School, is one of the three local teachers who have worked with WiSE.

Although Falls had no prior knowledge of WiSE before allowing the group to come into her classroom, the organization was persistent and made it evident that outreach was important.

“They really made a point of calling me back over and over,” Falls said. “But I didn’t know the people who were so persistent in calling were part of a program named WiSE, and I didn’t realize it had anything to do with women in science and engineering.”

After WiSE got in contact with Falls, she noticed some students began to develop enthusiasm for the STEM fields.

“A group of graduate students came to my class,” Falls said. “They were awesome. My AP chemistry students were pretty excited about getting to know and hang out with grad students. I know my students felt like they got insight into the life of grad students.”

The graduate students decided to involve the AP chemistry class in their own research.

“The group of graduate students did some science-y activities related to their work,” Falls said. “Later, my students voted on which grad student’s work they were most interested in, and they came back and did more in-depth activities related to their research.”

Falls said gender dynamics “influence not only whether women study science in the first place, but also what kind of science they are more prone to study.” Based on Falls’ experience as a college student, women are drawn to “fuzzy science,” like environmental science or biology, as opposed to chemistry or engineering.

UCSC’s numbers support Falls’ theory — women actually make up 59 percent of ecology and evolutionary biology majors, while only having a presence of 11 percent in computer science.

Falls said she recognizes that if students are given the appropriate exposure to the STEM fields in high school and then go into a four-year university, they are able to decide if the STEM fields are a right choice for them.

However, the need to get women involved in STEM fields as undergraduates is only half the issue. Although women represent 50 percent of all Ph.D.s, and make up a large part of scientific research in some fields, they are still more likely to fall out of STEM fields before attaining a concrete position, according to a study done by UC Berkeley in 2009.

Perhaps this is because often women are more likely than their male counterparts to leave their careers in STEM fields, often out of a desire to start a family.

The “Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline” study, conducted by UC Berkeley, found that many research universities do not give much help to women in this situation.

“[S]ome universities may not be complying with Title IX,” the study states, “which requires that research universities receiving federal funds 1) treat pregnancy as a temporary disability for purposes of calculating job-related benefits, including any employer-provided leave, and 2) provide unpaid, job-protected leave for ‘a reasonable period of time’ if the institution does not maintain a leave policy for employees.”

Fourth-year and information systems management (ISM) major Evelyn Caño wanted to be in a field that would develop her skills in problem solving and challenge her knowledge of the world.

“I wasn’t told that my field is uncommon,” Caño said. “I just discovered it on my own from my experiences in my own classes. The ratio of women to men has always been uneven.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Outreach was what first sparked Caño’s interest in her major.

“I was invited to attend the Engineering Summer Bridge Program at UCSC for a week, during the summer as an incoming freshman,” Caño said. “My sophomore year, I took my first information systems management course and felt that not only was I exposed to engineering and technology early, but also the management and business perspective, which I found to be a very attractive combination.”

Female students, including Caño, may feel intimidated by their male peers when studying together, but students are still able to build a community and connect with each other when studying.

“The few women that I see in the field are close, but the guys are not exclusive either. We all work together,” Caño said. “[It’s not] until upper divisions that you find out who is going to stick with you. I’ll admit it was hard getting a study buddy.”

Caño said a recent review session for one of her computer engineering courses brought her to a new realization.

“At that moment, it crossed my mind that maybe seeing four girls sitting together, the male students probably assumed they were in the wrong class,” Caño said. “[All these comments] made me feel like some males underestimated women’s potential for majoring in engineering, or possibly just assumed women found no interest in the field.”

As one of the few female professors in the UCSC Jack Baskin School of Engineering, Tracy Larrabee experienced firsthand the isolation that many women feel within the STEM departments.

“I thought time would fix this,” Larrabee said. “I thought the existence of role models would fix this. I thought society’s liberalization would fix this. I was wrong. I’m done trying.”

Larrabee’s high school teachers told her she could not go into the sciences because of her gender.

“I was told point blank [by my teachers] that I couldn’t do it,” Larrabee said. “More than once, [I heard] that girls couldn’t, in general, and that I couldn’t specifically. I had a better education, apparently, than kids get now — even if the current education is much more politically correct.”

Students in the Molecular Biomechanics Laboratory course needed to thaw out their samples and then freeze them in liquid nitrogen during a lab assignment. Photo by Morgan Grana.

According to a 2011 study conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, K-12 schools do not have the resources nor the support necessary to provide students with quality science learning opportunities because of budget cuts in state funding.

Former middle school teacher Preetha Menon taught sixth through eighth grade science, but left teaching to go back to school and address specific education issues in her own school system. She said that often, not enough time was spent on science in her classroom.

“In most elementary schools where the majority of my middle school students came from, [the students] did not experience much science learning,” Menon said. “Most students would tell me that they had science classes only once a week in the fourth and fifth grades, and in the lower grades, it was taught occasionally.”

This past fall Baskin Engineering announced on its website that a record number of women are pursuing degrees in computer science and computer engineering.

UCSC third-year molecular cell and developmental biology major Alex Benanti said it is up to women to bring a fresh perspective to the relatively male-dominated STEM fields.

“It is now our turn to work hard to further our presence as women within the sciences,” Benanti said, “not that we should ever seek to overshadow our male counterparts. Rather, we should aim to partner with the men currently in the field and bring our perspective from a woman’s point of view to strengthen the scientific discipline as a whole.”