Инженерная школа Баскина: от истоков к лидерству в геномике и технологиях.

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 Pure Storage, Cloudflare, Concur Technologies, 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.

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. 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.

In the 2018 2019 school year, there were 4,165 undergraduate students associated with the Baskin School of Engineering, 3.1% whom were African American/Black, 42.1% Asian, 15.4% Hispanic/Latino, 0.6% Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian, 26.1% white, and 9.8% international. Women make up 21% of the undergraduate population in the Baskin School, while men make up 78%.

For the 2018 2019 school year, there were 562 graduate students associated with the Baskin School of Engineering, 1.7% of whom were African American/Black, 11.7% Asian, 6.3% Hispanic or Latino, 24.3% of White, and 48.3% international. The graduate population of Baskin Engineering is 28% female, and 71% male.

The main UC Santa Cruz campus is located just thirty miles from one of the largest global centers of technology and innovation in the Silicon Valley and has spent decades cultivating relationships with industry leaders in the area through its Silicon Valley Initiatives. Faculty and students regularly collaborate with industry on research projects, which has led to many students getting internships and permanent jobs at leading companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook. Business Insider has ranked UC Santa Cruz one of the top twenty schools to land a person a job in the Silicon Valley. The Baskin School of Engineering conducts classes, career training, and professional development programs at the UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley satellite campus located on Bowers Avenue in Santa Clara, California to further facilitate relationships between university researchers and industry leaders. The satellite campus currently houses a professional masters program in games and playable media, a distance education site for some BSOE graduate level courses, shared satellite offices for BSOE faculty, the BSOE corporate development staff offices, and a shared office for BSOE administration and BSOE local IT staff support. The Santa Clara location opened in April 2016 and is the co location of the UCSC Extension and UCSC Silicon Valley Academic Operations.

The Baskin School of Engineering is housed in the Jack Baskin Engineering building, located on High Street at the north most end of the UC Santa Cruz main campus. The structure was completed in 1971 and was originally the Applied Sciences Building before the engineering department was formed in the 1990s. In the summer of 2004, UC Santa Cruz completed construction on a 212 seat Baskin Engineering Auditorium and Engineering 2 building to provide more space for the growing department, right across from the original engineering building. The Physical Sciences Building began providing additional space for biomolecular engineering programs and groundbreaking for a new Biomedical Sciences Building began in 2010. In 2019, the UCSC Genomics Institute, an Organized Research Unit (ORU) based in the Baskin School of Engineering, moved to a new facility at 2300 Delaware on the west side of Santa Cruz, and were later joined by Baskin Engineering labs that work with smart power and robotics/motion capture. The facility, known now as the Westside Research Park, is an enormous complex with three buildings encompassing 240,000 gross square feet of space. It is located three blocks from Natural Bridges State Beach and includes state of the art clean rooms, office space, loading docks, luncheon areas, and a thirty foot tall, net enclosed arena to provide airspace for robotics testing.