Impactful scientific discovery isn’t possible without funding to support the research, and three UC Santa Cruz students have created short videos that took top prizes in a national competition held by the Science Coalition, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to sustaining the federal government’s investment in basic scientific research.
The winners of the 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 took second and third, respectively, among the undergraduate contestants.
To underscore the importance of continuing federal funding, their 90-second videos take viewers into UC Santa Cruz’s research labs and, as you might guess, into 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 heat wave in 2023 that caused mass bleaching along the Florida Keys and in the Caribbean, Ayad swam back and forth in SCUBA gear to gather data to create a digital 3-D model to capture the extent of the bleaching event.
“Without coral reefs, we wouldn’t have protection from storm surges, resulting in more extreme flooding events. Marine species would lose their homes, resulting in a collapse of our food sources,” Ayad says. “We need to fund it forward because we need science to understand how we can save the reefs in this changing climate.”
Tsyvinsky, a third-year chemistry major, studies cancer mutations, testing if specific mutations could be detected in gene-expression data. For her entry, Tsyvinsky introduces UC Santa Cruz’s Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative, which uses computational approaches to genetic data to identify less toxic or more effective treatments.
“It’s through funding that rising scientists like myself can be supported in learning scientific methods and be introduced to a health issue that needs attention more than ever,” Tsyvinsky says in her video:
Rivera, a fourth-year biochemistry and molecular biology major, does Alzheimer’s-related research with fruit flies. Rivera’s video starts with her zooming onto campus on an electric skateboard, followed by footage of our soaring redwoods, ultimately entering a long hallway lined by doors—each seeming to offer the promise of scientific discovery.
“Federal funding and other funding is so important to research like ours,” Rivera says. “Everyday, when I go to my lab, I walk by many other labs that are doing incredible things, and you never know when the next breakthrough might happen.”
You can see all the winning videos from the Science Coalition’s 2024 competition on YouTube.
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