About Us
The Ocean Sciences Department is an inclusive, supportive, and innovative community of people involved in oceanography and other marine sciences. We offer undergraduate and graduate courses in these disciplines. Students have access to a wide variety of research facilities and equipment through faculty sponsors. In addition to research and instructional activities along the California coast, interests of the core faculty and their students include biological, chemical, and physical oceanography; sediment, marine, organic, and trace metal biogeochemistry; marine plankton, phytoplankton ecology, paleoceanography, aquatic microbial ecology, ecological modeling, and remote sensing (satellite oceanography); numeric modeling of coastal and basin-scale dynamics; midwater ecology and climatology, among others.
#3
Global rank for research influence by citation index (2018)
#3
Best Marine Biology School in California (2022)
20+
Research partners in institutions and facilities along Monterey Bay
Explore Ocean Sciences News
The latest high-impact science in Ocean Sciences

AAAS names UC Santa Cruz organelle discovery most outstanding paper in 2024
The discovery by UC Santa Cruz researchers of a new organelle within single-celled algae that converts nitrogen gas into ammonia continues to be celebrated by the science community, this time by winning the prestigious AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize.

“An Aesthetics of Resilience” fosters interdisciplinary conversations and research
https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/09/aesthetics-of-resilience.html

Scientists discover first nitrogen-fixing organelle
https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/04/nitrogen-fixing-organelle.html