Impactful scientific discovery is not possible without funding to support research, and three UC Santa Cruz students created short videos that won top prizes in a national competition hosted by the Science Coalition, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting federal government investment. in fundamental scientific research.
The winners of 2024 Fund It Forward Student Video Challenge from UC Santa Cruz include undergraduates Jules Rivera and Liza Tsyvinsky, as well as Ph.D. student Mariam Ayad. Ayad took second place in the graduate student division of the competition; Tsyvinsky and Rivera finished second and third, respectively, among undergraduate applicants.
To highlight the importance of continued federal funding, their 90-second videos take viewers inside UC Santa Cruz research labs and, as you might guess, the ocean. In Ayad’s video, she explains how she studies coral reefs using remote sensing technologies to monitor their health. After an unprecedented marine heatwave in 2023 caused mass bleaching along the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, Ayad swam in scuba diving gear to collect data to create a 3D digital model to to capture the extent of the bleaching event.
“Without coral reefs, we would not be protected from storm surges, leading to more extreme flooding. Marine species would lose their habitats, leading to a collapse of our food sources,” says Ayad. “We need to fund it because we need the science to understand how we can save reefs in this changing climate.”
Tsyvinsky, a third-year chemistry student, studies cancer mutations, testing whether specific mutations could be detected in gene expression data. For his entry, Tsyvinsky presents UC Santa Cruz Treehouse Children’s Cancer Initiativewhich uses computational approaches to genetic data to identify less toxic or more effective treatments.
“It is through funding that emerging scientists like me can be supported in learning scientific methods and introduced to a health problem that needs attention more than ever,” Tsyvinsky says in his video:
Rivera, a fourth-year biochemistry and molecular biology student, is conducting research on Alzheimer’s disease with fruit flies. Rivera’s video begins by zooming around campus on an electric skateboard, followed by images of our towering redwoods, finally entering a long hallway lined with doors, each seeming to offer the promise of scientific discovery.
“Federal and other funding is very important for research like ours,” Rivera says. “Every day when I go to my lab, I pass many other labs doing amazing things, and you never know when the next breakthrough might happen.”
You can see all the winning videos from the 2024 Science Coalition competition on YouTube.