Campus Partners With Britain for Research
In an effort to accelerate research in the areas of tissue engineering and stem cells, UCSD has joined forces with the SETsquared Partnership, a collaboration of British universities in Bath, Bristol, Southampton and Surrey.
The SETsquared Partnership has ties to four companies on Britain’s Alternative Investment Market with a combined value of more than $265 million and has raised more than $53 million for projects. The Partnership, which represents nearly 6,500 researchers and 8 percent of British research funding, has also supported more than 170 tech companies.
The partnership will officially begin in the first week of May, and will feature a ceremony with comments from Chancellor Marye Anne Fox and meetings between British scientists and their colleagues from the UCSD biology and engineering departments, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
UCSD Institute Announces Awards
The Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, based at UCSD, announced winners of its Innovative Research Awards last week, which are given based on “ideas that bridge different levels of organization of brain and mind.”
The awards, which amount to nearly $300,000 and average about $30,000 each, were granted to nine of 40 applicants from faculty across UCSD, its Neurosciences Institute, Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and Scripps Research Institute.
The faculty members given awards spanned across many fields, including anthropology, cognitive science, neurobiology, political science, psychiatry and psychology.
The Kavli Institute was established in November 2004 after a $7.5 million gift from physicist Fred Kavli.
The institute explores the origins, evolution and mechanisms of human cognition, ranging from behavior studies to analyses of physical and biochemical functions in the brain.
Students March to Support Immigrants
Dozens of UCSD students and staff took to the San Diego streets last week to participate in a pro-immigration march from Balboa Park to the County Administration Building.
The march featured as many as 100,000 people and, and some participants chanted in English and Spanish and waved both American and Mexican flags.
The protest was part of a recent trend that has spread to every corner of the nation in past weeks, sparked by the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of a bill in December that makes entering the country illegally a felony.
