1995-2004
David Cope — EMI
1995: In this photo, taken in the winter of this year, UC Santa Cruz music professor David Cope is shown working with EMI — a computer program he invented to help him compose. The project, Experiments in Musical Intelligence, provoked both admiration and controversy for its ability to create music.
A year earlier, he released a CD of EMI’s music with Centaur Records.
(Photo: Mickey Pfleger)
Alumna Laurie Garrett
1996: Alumna Laurie Garrett received the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, Columbia University announced in April. She became the first of five UCSC graduates to win a Pulitzer Prize.
A science and medical reporter, Garrett won the award for a series of articles a year earlier in Newsday about the 1995 outbreak of the ebola virus in Zaire.
Garrett, a graduate of UCSC’s Merrill College, visited the campus during the spring quarter as a Regents' Lecturer. During her visit, she delivered a public lecture echoing the title and substance of her recent book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. In it she describes a grave threat posed by a whole new host of infectious diseases.
(Photo: Kris Krug)
Central California Writing Project
1997: This summer marked the 20th anniversary of the Central California Writing Project (CCWP) on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The project, which exists to improve the teaching of writing in California’s schools, provided services to well over a thousand teachers from Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito Counties in its first two decades.
“When people learn to write well they’re not just learning a skill, they’re learning how to claim their voice and articulate it,” said the late Don Rothman, CCWP founder and director and a senior lecturer in writing at UCSC. Rothman, who passed away in 2012, added: “When people write about ideas that are significant to them, they want to share their work, and through sharing they become active participants in society.”
(Photo: Scott Rappaport)
The UCSC genome bioinformatics group
2000: In June of this year, UC Santa Cruz researchers assembled the human genome sequence using graduate student Jim Kent’s 10,000-line computer program.
A month later, the UCSC genome bioinformatics group — led by faculty member David Haussler (pictured) — released the first working draft of the human genome sequence on the web. Scientists downloaded half a trillion bytes of information from the UCSC genome server in the first 24 hours.
(Photo: Elena Zhukova)
