Participating Organizations

The University of California San Diego

UC San Diego is a powerful magnet for those seeking a fresh, next-generation approach to education and research. Since its founding over four decades ago, UC San Diego, one of the ten campuses in the University of California system, has rapidly achieved the status as one of the top institutions in the nation for higher education and research. UC San Diego’s graduate and professional schools include Scripps Institution of Oceanography; School of Medicine; School of International Relations and Pacific Studies; Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences; Jacobs School of Engineering, and Rady School of Management. U.S. News and World Report ranks UC San Diego as 8th best public university in the nation, and 38th among the nation’s top 50 universities. UC San Diego’s annual revenues are $2.4 billion. (23% of this total is from the federal government for research; 12% is from the State of California for education) and total research funding for 2006-07 was $714 million. The National Science Foundation ranks UC San Diego 7th in the nation in federal R&D expenditures. The university’s faculty and alumni have spun-off at least 200 local companies, including more than a third of the region’s biotech companies. In addition, the campus is San Diego County’s 3rd largest employer (behind the federal government and state government), with a monthly payroll in excess of $96 million and nearly 27,000 employees.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) is one of the oldest, largest, and most important centers for marine science research, graduate training, and public service in the world. Today, SIO has more than 1,600 scientists, students and staff who pursue SIO's diverse multidisciplinary research mission. SIO faculty pioneered many fields of marine studies and initiated an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to studying the oceans, air, land, and life as unified systems. In the 1960s, Scripps director Roger Revelle joined with community leaders to create University of California San Diego; SIO is currently a department of UCSD. SIO scientists were the first to discover rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and they continue global leadership including service as lead and contributing authors for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments. Research on algal and cyanobacterial processes range from studies of mico-satellite DNA to understand the diversity and molecular ecology of aquatic photosynthetic organisms to Earth-observing satellite time-series of changes in oceanic productivity in response to climate change, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and El Nino – La Nina cycles. Underpinning the world-class studies of ocean photosynthetic ecology and physiology are more than a dozen international leaders in cyanobacterial and algal research whose expertise spans genomics through biochemistry, cellular physiology, drug discovery and interdisciplinary systems ecology. The cadre of algal and cyanobacterial experts is complemented by a large group of marine microbial ecologists, physiologists, and molecular biologists who study viruses, bacteria and micro-grazers. Importantly, the interdisciplinary approach to ecology pioneered by SIO has resulted in a deep and broad expertise at SIO in the area of aquatic microbial ecology that must be understood, in order to design and deploy stable, commercially-viable, algal mass culture systems for bioenergy and other products.

The Scripps Research Institute

TSRI is the world's largest private, non-profit biomedical research facility. Since its founding in 1961, the Institute has become internationally recognized for its basic research into immunology, molecular and cellular biology, chemistry, neurosciences, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, virology and synthetic vaccine development. Particularly significant is the Institute's study of the basic structure and design of biological molecules; in this arena TSRI is among a handful of the world's leading centers. The Institute’s philosophy emphasizes the creation of basic knowledge in the biosciences for the application of medical and material discoveries, the pursuit of fundamental scientific advances through interdisciplinary programs and collaborations, and the education and training of researchers preparing to meet the scientific challenges of the next century. The Institute offers an interdisciplinary Ph.D. graduate program in chemical and biological sciences at The Kellogg School of Science and Technology as well as a postdoctoral fellowship program. For the last two years, the Institute’s graduate studies program was ranked by U.S. News & World Report in the top ten of the most outstanding in the country. The bulk of the Institute's funding is provided by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies, with additional support received through collaborative industrial partnerships and from private foundations and individuals.