Confronting COVID
As the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, UC Santa Cruz faculty are deploying their resources and expertise to help humanity find its way out of the grip of the deadly infection.
Photo by Carolyn Lagattuta
Lisa Renner | UC Santa Cruz Magazine | October 2020
As the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, UC Santa Cruz faculty are deploying their resources and expertise to help humanity find its way out of the grip of the deadly infection.
Faculty members are working on myriad COVID-related projects, including developing quicker tests for the virus, fine-tuning mathematical models that predict how the virus will spread, and developing remote patient-monitoring systems.
Here are a few of the projects UC Santa Cruz science and engineering faculty are working on.
Rebecca DuBois: Antibody evidence
Rebecca DuBois, an associate professor of biomolecular engineering with expertise in virology and vaccine development, is working on a serological test to identify people with previous exposure to COVID-19.
DuBois’s test determines the level of antibodies (proteins that fight the virus) in people’s blood, which shows if they were exposed. Her test produces results in 20 minutes, far shorter than the six hours it takes with the gold-standard test commonly used, Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA).