Professor and Associate Director
Basic Sciences Division, Fred Hutch

Dr. Harmit Malik studies genetic conflict, the competition between genes and proteins with opposing functions that drives evolutionary change. His research could have implications for a range of diseases, from HIV to cancer. As part of this work, his team developed an approach for identifying genes that divide one species from another, which could help solve the riddle of how new species evolve. Dr. Malik also studies the evolutionary processes that drive our body’s interactions with viruses, including contemporary scourges like HIV as well as ancient viruses whose fossils litter our genome. With Hutch colleagues, he has characterized the rapidly evolving interface between proteins on human cells and viruses that make us sick. This work has highlighted surprising deviations from “textbook” models of these interactions, and it is revealing gene variants that could influence our susceptibility to infection.

His lab has been able to describe functional outcomes of ancient host-virus arms races by resurrecting both host and viral proteins from the evolutionary record. His work has received significant accolades for him and his lab members. Most recently, he was awarded the 2017 Eli Lilly Prize in Microbiology, the most prestigious prize awarded by the American Society of Microbiology, and elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2019.

(Source: Fred Hutch Cancer Center; American Society for Microbiology, https://asm.org/Biographies/Harmit-Malik,-Ph-D)

Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, UCSC

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz's research focuses on the violent universe with an emphasis on stellar explosions, gamma-ray bursts and accretion phenomena. He is particularly interested in understanding the physical processes that govern accretion onto relativistic objects such as black holes and neutron stars.

Ramirez-Ruiz holds the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair for Diversity in Astronomy at UC Santa Cruz. According to Ramirez-Ruiz, one of the greatest challenges to the astronomical community has been building environments where people with historically marginalized identities (Black, Indigenous and Latinx) can thrive. This critically limits the pool of innovative minds who may gain exclusive access to cutting-edge research and thus, who can shape the future of the field through transformative science, mentoring, and professional leadership.

Since joining the UCSC faculty in 2007, Ramirez-Ruiz has won multiple awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard, the Niels Bohr Professorship from the Danish National Research Foundation, the HEAD Mid-Career Prize from the American Astronomical Society, and the Bouchet Award and the Dwight Nicholson Medal from the American Physical Society.  He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As the director of the Lamat Institute, he works vigorously to support the promotion and retention of women and historically marginalized students in STEM.

(Source: UCSC Astronomy and Astrophysics; UCSC News Center September 19, 2022)

Nada Miljkovic is a UCSC Crown College Continuing Lecturer who has helped developed many of the Crown I&E classes as well as co curricular programing such as the Lean Startup Bootcamp. She is CEO and co-founder of GetVirtual, a student run Project Management Internship Program, the Board Chair of United Services Agency, a non profit, and founder of the podcast  Artist on Art. She comes to teaching after a career in construction project management and getting her Master's Fine Arts in Digital Arts and New Media at UCSC in 2009.

(Source: https://www.cied.ucsc.edu/team; )

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