The online life sciences news site Mendelspod recently posted a piece titled: UCSC Up To More than Bioinformatics. Well, we knew that of course. CIRM has awarded researchers there more than $28 million in grants, including $7 million toward their new stem cell research building. One of those awards funds a very cool project adapting telescope technology to the problem of tracking stem cells in the body (we wrote about that work here).

The story was about a recent UCSC two-day meeting on aging and stem cells, which grew out of a smaller meeting where the school’s 10 training grant recipients would share their work. The meeting included a lunch panel featuring our own Uta Grieshammer, science officer at CIRM, and CIRM grantees Paul Knoepfler and Dennis Clegg (the full speaker list is here). 

The story quotes  Camilla Fosberg, Co-director of their Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells:

“The Stem Cell Institute at UCSC is capitalizing on the strengths the university already has in genomics,” concluded co-director Camilla Forsberg.    In addition to world class computational biology, the university also boasts an RNA Center.  Richard Gregory, the newcomer from Boston funded by CIRM, is an RNA biologist. 

Mendelspod will be posting a follow up story about stem cell research at UCSC that we’ll be watching for.

A.A.