This past year marked UC San Diego's entrance into a period of exhilarating growth. Driven by California's population expansion and the phenomenon often referred to as Tidal Wave II, enrollment on the campus is projected to increase by an additional 10,000 students over the next ten years. This enrollment growth will require a corresponding increase in faculty and staff. The challenge over this next decade will consist of sustaining the excellence of UC San Diego's teaching and research programs, the eminence of its faculty, and the quality of education provided to students. These challenges, however, will be far outweighed by the opportunities that accompany them.

As the campus moves into the twenty-first century, recruitment of new faculty is a top priority. UC San Diego's commitment to recruiting premier faculty will not be compromised by the challenge of hiring roughly 475 new faculty and 450 replacements for faculty throughout the decade. Faculty will be recruited both to strengthen cutting-edge research in established areas of strength and to allow the campus to develop exciting new research programs in areas of future excellence.

Judging from the past year's successful recruitments, the prospects of sustaining the UC San Diego tradition of faculty excellence are very promising. Outstanding new appointments were made in every division, at both the junior and senior levels. Among the new senior faculty joining UC San Diego are Michael Norman (Physics), perhaps the world's very best computational astrophysicist; Margaret Schoeninger (Anthropology), a distinguished biological anthropologist and leader in paleo and con-temporary isotope studies concerning diet; Larry Smarr (Computer Science and Engineering), who is known worldwide for his role in creating the modern information infrastructure; and Leslie Stern (Visual Arts), who has a stellar international reputation as an accomplished critic and scholar of film and media.

New faculty members at the junior level include Kate Antonovics (Economics), a promising theorist whose primary fields of research are labor economics, applied macroeconomics, and public economics; Nicole King (Literature), whose works on African-American literature, cultural studies, and literary theory provide substantive analyses of twentieth-century African-American literature and culture; James Nieh (Biology), formerly a Harvard Junior Fellow and already the recipient of several prestig-ious prizes; and Stefan Savage (Computer Science and Engineering), one of the top computer scientists graduating this year and a true rising star. These and other new hires are not just leaders in their fields, but are the scholars who will be defining their fields in the years ahead.

UC San Diego research programs and faculty are already benefiting enormously from the opportunities associated with growth. The campus is currently planning for the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technologies [Cal(IT)2], proposed as one of three new UC centers that will be created under the Governor's Research Initiative in Science and Technology. Cal(IT)2 intends to team UC San Diego and UC Irvine researchers, students, and academic professionals to study and guide future science and technology trends that will determine the nature and capabilities of the next generation Internet and examine the impact of this new information infrastructure on California. UC San Diego will also be launching a bold new research, teaching, and service initiative-California Cultures in Comparative Perspective-to focus on the broad implications of the expansion of the state's native minority and immigrant populations and explore the new epistemological, conceptual, and methodological challenges created by these sweeping changes. Both of these initiatives represent major interdisciplin-ary collaborative research efforts that will be an important part of the signature of UC San Diego in the years to come.

One of the most exciting aspects of the current growth period is the development of novel undergraduate programs in new areas of research. Interdisciplinary research initiatives in Bioinformatics led to the creation of new undergraduate degree programs in Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics and in Biotechnology offered by the Departments of Biology and Bioengineering. The undergraduate interdisciplinary major in Environmental Systems launched this year was a derivative of the Center for Environmental Research and Training. A new undergraduate major in Applied Biological and Physical Sciences is being developed as a tangent to vigorous collaborations between faculty in the Departments of Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Engineering, and Physics. Faculty in Social Sciences and Humanities are mounting a research initiative in International Studies and simultaneously designing a new interdisciplinary undergraduate major in which students will benefit from innovative research synergies that will be stimulated by the proposed International Studies Center. Student interest in the Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major, an offshoot of faculty collaborations in the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, has quickly exceed-ed the expectations of program authors in the Departments of Music and Visual Arts. A similar area of focusóart, culture, and technologyóhas been chosen as the academic theme for the new Sixth College, which will open in fall 2002. The campus is enormously optimistic. Just as it takes pride in its past, so it has confidence in its future and looks forward to the opportunity to build an academic future that is even more remarkable than the past, and to ensure that its students, faculty, and staff are beneficiaries of the growth as it develops.