UC Santa Cruz announces recipients of Chancellor’s Innovation Impact Awards
The awards recognize transformational work across UC Santa Cruz – in the arts, engineering, humanities, physical and biological sciences, and social sciences.
Sandra Messick | UCSC | June 2, 2023
Tracking COVID-19, DNA sequencing, and prison abolition were among the groundbreaking research and creative scholarship projects recognized by the inaugural
Chancellor’s Innovation Impact Award Program, presented May 30 in an event at the University Center on the UC Santa Cruz campus. This new program celebrates the university’s talented faculty, researchers, staff, students, and community partners for their outstanding contributions to innovation and creativity.
“Our university has a track record of research excellence, trail-blazing scholarship, exciting innovation and expansive creativity,” said Chancellor Cynthia Larive. “These awards give us the opportunity to recognize the transformational work taking place across UC Santa Cruz that is impacting society for the better.”
Managed by the Innovation & Business Engagement Hub, the awards recognize transformational work across UC Santa Cruz – in the arts, engineering, humanities, physical and biological sciences, and social sciences.
“Our faculty colleagues lead ground-breaking research, creative scholarship, artistic production and innovation,” said Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer. “Through these endeavors, many of them multidisciplinary, we better understand our changing world and create knowledge, technologies and modes of expression that empower individuals and communities.”
The award categories include Innovator of the Year, Lifetime Achievement in Innovation, and Community Changemaker. This year’s recipients are world leaders in tracking and mapping the COVID-19 virus and its variants in real time, creators of technology that is transforming how we understand our own human DNA, abolitionists working to change the narrative and understanding of society’s reliance on prisons and policing, and community partners supporting innovators and students, helping them connect with the local ecosystem and develop as entrepreneurs.
Innovator of the Year
This award recognizes faculty and associated project teams that may include staff and students for innovative or creative work that, during the past 12 months, has resulted in societal impact or has reached a milestone that positions the innovations and creativity for near-term societal impact. Recipients receive $10,000 to further advance their efforts.
Russ Corbett-Detig – Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering
Russell Corbett-Detig and his team (Angie Hinrichs – Bioinformatics Programmer, Genome Browser Team, UCSC; Yatish Turakhia – UC San Diego assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and former Genomics Institute postdoctoral scholar; and Bryan Thornlow – former student working with Corbett-Detig) developed a tool called Ultrafast Sample Placement on Existing tRees, commonly known as UShER, that quickly became fundamental in battling COVID-19.
The computational tool enables real-time SARS-CoV-2 tracking and helps researchers identify new lineages of the virus. The easy-to-use tool and online server creates an evolutionary tree that helps scientists understand genomic mutations by creating new branches on the tree, showing the relationships between virus samples and the order in which mutations happened along various lineages as the virus evolves. The result today is a phylogenetic tree of more than 14 million genomes and growing.
“We think UShER is going to be applied to tracking almost every major human pathogen,” Corbett-Detig said. “What we’re calling this new paradigm of phylogenetics is online phylogenetics. The idea is that you’re never stopping, you’re just always growing. It’s always online. You’re just growing it forever.”
UShER, a free tool, is now used worldwide by the majority of public health organizations to identify COVID-19 and its variants, as it is the default software behind Pangolin, the ubiquitously used tool for assigning COVID-19 sequences to their most likely lineage. Corbett-Detig and his team are also expanding the software to enable analyses of other pathogens, including the recent spread of monkeypox and drug-resistant tuberculosis. UShER is fully-integrated into the UC Santa Cruz Genome Browser.
Read on the UCSC Newcenter.