Scholars in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) examine knowledge production, scientific practices, and therapeutics in social and cultural context. At UCSC, STS scholars analyze the symbolic dimensions and representational practices of global and community health; …
Sustainable Food
The global food system is now facing the need to deliver a sustainable supply of nutritious food for more than 9 billion people by 2050 while minimizing environmental impacts, sustaining biodiversity and adapting to climate crisis. UCSC faculty are researching agroecological strategies and methods …
Gut Microbiome
The collection of microbes that resides in the human intestine profoundly influences our metabolism, our immune system, and our susceptibility to infections. The hundreds of thousands of genes in the genomes of these microbes are attractive targets for therapeutic intervention because they are …
Anthropocene
Adapted in a wide range of disciplinary contexts to describe an era in which humanity has profoundly transformed earth systems, the Anthropocene has also been used to come to terms with how the resulting changes to earth’s climate, ecologies and biologies are affecting global and local contexts for …
Migration & Health
Despite the fact that migrants tend to be healthier than is normal for both the countries that they leave and the countries to which they move, immigration is associated the world over with illness and health insecurity. Whether this is due to racist and xenophobic cultural discourses that blame …
Environmental Health
Environmental health refers to the area of public health that aims to identify environmental hazards and examine how they are shaped by physical, chemical, biological, social, and structural factors. These hazards can be evaluated at the global scale (e.g., climate change) as well as from regional …
Indigenous and Traditional Healing
UCSC is located on the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore …
Epigenetics
Epigenetics is a fast-growing field in biology that originally aimed to understand the phenotypic expression of the genotype. Today, epigenetics covers from the study of mechanisms of gene expression regulation during the development of complex organisms, to the study of phenotypic alterations …
Toxicology
Human activities over the past several centuries have not only profoundly modified the physical environment that we live in, but also the chemical environment, such that many chemical toxins are now ubiquitous throughout the Earth’s biosphere. Toxicology is the study of how exposure to …