The Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) will celebrate its 5th Anniversary on Thursday (June 21) with a series of free public lectures, documentaries, lab tours, networking sessions and roundtable discussions about future research initiatives.
CISA3 is based in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and is a partnership of Calit2, the Jacobs School of Engineering, and UCSD's Division of Arts & Humanities.
The anniversary coincides with a shuffle of responsibilities among CISA3 leaders. Founding director and UC San Diego alumnus Maurizio Seracini (Class of '73, Bioengineering) will remain actively involved in CISA3 research, but has been asked by the campus to take on a leadership role in launching a UCSD-Italian research collaboration focused on engineering and medicine. Taking his place as director of CISA3 is computer science and structural engineering professor Falko Kuester, who has been an associate director of the center since its inception.
Kuester is also the principal investigator on a $3.2 million, five-year Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) focused on training, research and education in engineering for cultural heritage diagnostics (TEECH). NSF awarded the grant in August 2010, with a large portion of the funding to support UCSD graduate students working on interdisciplinary projects in this emerging field.
"The IGERT TEECH project has become a critical vehicle for funding CISA3 research because most of its funding goes to support graduate students at UCSD and on field expeditions abroad," said Kuester. "Most of the other costs have been borne by Calit2 or private donors through the Jacobs School, so philanthropy remains critical to the center's success."
More than $1 million has beent donated by roughly 50 individuals and philanthropic foundations over the past five years, and that figure tops $1.4 million when in-kind gifts are included. Donor funds are primarily used to support the center's research and field projects in Italy, Jordan and Mongolia, including several projects in partnership with the National Geographic Society. Major donors and supporters of CISA3 have included Paul and Stacy Jacobs, Robert and Natalie Englekirk, Kevin and Tamara Kinsella, Rick Sandstrom and Sandra Timmons, Linda Brandes, Doug Carlson, Steve and Sue Hart, Ken Widder and Jacki Johnson, among others. (Full list of donors.)
Seracini, a National Geographic Fellow, will continue to play an active and integral role in CISA3 as the leader of its current and future projects in Italy, including the high-profile search for Leonardo da Vinci's lost mural, ‘The Battle of Anghiari'. Efforts in late 2011 to undertake an endoscopic survey in the Hall of the 500 in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio turned up intriguing new clues to the likely location where the Leonardo mural may have been hidden behind a new wall erected 450 years to safeguard the da Vinci masterpiece, but the findings fell short of conclusive evidence that the mural is still there. CISA3 has also begun a long-term project to document and analyze Florence's 600-year-old Palazzo Medici, widely considered to be the birthplace of the Renaissance. Seracini also has access to works in the permanent collection of the Uffizi Gallery, including da Vinci's "The Annunciation".
The public is invited to visit Atkinson Hall on the UC San Diego campus from 1-8 p.m. on Thursday.
For more information about ways to support CISA3 and the World Cultural Heritage Society, please contact Sarah Beckman, Director of Development, at sbeckman@ucsd.edu or call (858) 534-7320. To contribute via the Web, click on "Give Now" to be directed to the UC San Diego Giving site.
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