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UCLA COLLEGE

Members of the Academic Senate’s Legislative Assembly voted Feb. 8 to endorse a new degree designation for students in the UCLA College: the Bachelor’s of Arts and Science. It would become the third degree that the College awards if the proposal is approved by the UC Office of the President. The College faculty voted online for the change 215 in favor, 29 against. The new degree could be offered as early as this fall. To qualify for it, a student would have to complete one major that leads to a B.A. degree and another major that leads to a B.S.

STUDENT AFFAIRS

A new resource center that’s dedicated to helping graduate students reach their academic and professional goals with a one-stop shopping approach to information-gathering will hold an open house Feb. 24 at B11 Student Activities Center. “Graduate students generally don’t spend their first year on campus in a group-living situation, so they don’t have access to social and informational networks like undergraduates do,” said Christine Wilson, coordinator of the new resource center. The center, which is already hosting lectures and workshops on topics ranging from child care to résumé writing, will ease graduate students’ social and intellectual isolation and help those who “have no idea of where anything is on campus other than their department, the library and Murphy Hall,” Wilson said. The open house for all graduate and professional school students will be from 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. To learn more about the new center, visit http://gsa.asucla.ucla.edu/gsrc/.

UCLA COLLEGE

More than 130 UCLA undergraduates are co-authors on a new paper providing evidence that thousands of genes are likely to interact to play a role in eye development in the widely studied fruit fly, Drosophila. The students of the class taught by Utpal Banerjee, professor and chair of molecular, cell and developmental biology, genetically manipulated 1,375 Drosophila strains to create homozygous mutant clones in the eye. Banerjee was awarded a $1-million grant by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2002 to create a “fundamentally different research environment for a significant number of undergraduates at UCLA.” Published in the current issue of the journal Public Library of Sciences Biology, the new research may have implications for the genes underlying human eye development.