The modern health revolution toward precision medicine and gene-specific treatments starts at UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering laboratories, with pioneering scientists who cracked the human genome code in 2003. Years later, the famous lab is expanding its work to help personalize gaming and social sciences.

“Santa Cruz is famous for one particular thing — the sequencing of the human genome. … This is the place where we were able to assemble the human genome for the first time and publish it on the Web,” said Alexander Wolf, Dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

Wolf spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the ACGSV 14th Annual GROW! Awards in Mountain View, California. They discussed the transformation of genetics research and the innovations to interactive media. (* Disclosure below.)

This university’s multi-million-dollar breakthrough has transformed the campus into a highly sought-after incubator for newer technologies in medicine and beyond. Santa Cruz researchers are working on spinning out new sequencing techniques to improve personalized medicine and reduce the computing costs of parsing through so much data.

“Precision medicine is the goal. If you know the genome history and if you can apply that to the drug treatments, it’s fantastic,” Wolf said.

Media through algorithms

It’s not all about life sciences, either. Applying computing methods perfected in genome analysis, UC Santa Cruz scientists are working with psychologists, journalists and game developers for the disruptive trend toward computational media.

The university’s burgeoning computational media department is reaching into Silicon Valley, where the campus has a branch in Santa Clara, with faculty growing since January 2018. Wolf explained that computational media is a method by which media can be generated through algorithms by generating meaningful rich text.

“You can get a game to be much more personalized to the player,” Wolf stated. “It can understand that experience, understand the interests of the game player, and then tailor itself to that player.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ACGSV 14th Annual GROW! Awards. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the ACGSV 14th Annual GROW! Award. Neither the Association for Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE