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Administrative Messages


December 7, 2000

To: The Campus Community

From: Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood

Re: UCSC receives major research award

Dear Colleagues,

At a news conference in Sacramento at 12:30 p. m. today, Governor Gray Davis announced the first three California Institutes for Science and Innovation. UC Santa Cruz is a partner in one of those institutes, the Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3). A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, holder of a UC Presidential Chair, and Director of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, Professor David Haussler will serve as co-director for the new institute.

Awarded $100 million each over the next four years are the QB3 Institute, centered at UC San Francisco with a major research component at UC Santa Cruz and at UC Berkeley; the California Nanosystems Institute at UCLA; and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego.

During his announcement, Governor Davis also pledged to work with the state legislature to fund a fourth center headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley. That proposed Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) also includes a UC Santa Cruz partnership, led by Dean Patrick E. Mantey, Professor of Computer Engineering. If next year's legislative and budget processes proceed as anticipated, the CITRIS project will be funded in 2001-2002, making UC Santa Cruz an integral partner in two of the four California Institutes.

Taken together, this award for the Santa Cruz portion of QB3 and the potential awarding in next year's budget of our portion of the partnership in CITRIS will bring to our campus $12 million in new state capital funds and proposed matching funds of $24 million for a total of at least $36 million in research-related funding. Perhaps more importantly, our partnership in these two new Governor's Institutes positions the campus and its faculty and students for major opportunities and recognition in the emerging and exciting areas of bioengineering, quantitative biomedical research and information technology. 

Please join me in congratulating all of the faculty who worked so diligently on these two proposals. I extend a particular thank you to Dean Mantey, Professor Haussler, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Jim Gill, as well as Campus Provost John Simpson, Associate Vice Chancellor Meredith Michaels, Capital Planning Director Fran Owens and Assistant Director Ann Pace of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, for their excellent work in creating and submitting these two proposals. 

As we look forward to the new millennium, I am very pleased to note this significant achievement that marks a new milestone in our campus's history as a major research university. The link below takes you to the news release that is being distributed today. It includes reference to several web sites at which you can find more details.

Press Release: http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/press_releases/archive/00-01/12-00/institute.html



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