A week in UC news

California public college students now automatically pass through first CalFresh barrier

All California undergraduate public college students that are enrolled at least half-time at their college will now automatically meet some eligibility requirements for CalFresh. 

While visiting the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that students will no longer have to work at least 20 hours a week to be eligible for CalFresh. Now, associate’s and bachelor’s degree programs at all California public colleges and universities count as job-readiness programs. 

According to a senior research manager at the California Policy Lab, Jennifer Hogg, student eligibility for CalFresh could increase by around 37%, to a total of 880,000 students.  

This expansion came after federal funding cuts led to CalFresh Benefits being paused in November 2025 — leaving thousands of students across the country not having access to their benefits for over a week. 

D.O.E. awards UC Berkeley researchers funding for AI research

The U.S. Department of Energy (D.O.E.) awarded four Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers Early Career Research Program awards. Each researcher will be awarded $875,000 to fund their research for the next five years. 

All of the awardees plan to focus their research on applying artificial intelligence (AI) to physics, biology and chemistry. Awardees Dan Wang and Marcus Noack will focus on physics research, with Wang using AI to control particle accelerators. 

The third awardee, UC Berkeley assistant chemistry professor Bingqing Cheng, will use AI to try to find how electric fields affect chemistry. The fourth awardee, Asmit Bhowmick, plans to focus his research on molecular biophysics and integrated bioimaging. 

The awards were given by the Office of Science of the D.O.E., which supports 32,000 researchers nationwide. 

Reports show UCSD staff attend student protests undercover, report organizers’ names to UCPD

The Students’ Civil Liberties Union (SCLU) found that UC San Diego’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life employed community specialists to attend student protests undercover as students during the 2024-25 academic year. 

Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Patricia Mahaffey, confirmed in a statement to UCSD’s The Guardian that the specialists filed reports to the UCSD Police Department after the events. Mahaffey claimed that the reports did not contain identifiable information about attendees or speakers. 

However, the SCLU reports show that the specialist’s reports identified UCSD students by their full names. According to the reports, UCSD hired the specialists after the 2024 Palestine Solidarity Encampment. 

SCLU president Aryan Dixit claimed that the specialists’ positions focused on Palestinian and Muslim on-campus events. The University denied this claim, stating that “no events were deemed higher priority.”

While the University has stated the specialist role no longer exists, The Guardian could not independently verify that there are no specialists on the UCSD campus. 

A version of this article appeared on p. 2 of the Oct. 22 print edition of the Daily Nexus.