Students make winning videos about importance of federal support for science research

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.”