Gratitude to the UC San Diego faculty.

Thank you for leading UC San Diego through its greatest period of growth, expanding the campus to more than 46,000 students while insisting that a world-class research education stay within reach of first-generation families.

Thank you for spending four decades teaching brains and machines to learn from each other, from the Boltzmann machine to the science of sleep, and for the open online course that taught millions of us how to learn.

Thank you for following the money instead of just the malware, showing that the way to beat cybercrime is to understand it as a business, and for proving a car could be hacked before the industry believed it.

Thank you for building the computational microscopes that let the world watch the SARS-CoV-2 virus breathe, and for putting simulation at the front line of drug discovery.

Thank you for teaching generations of economists how to read time itself, and for showing the world how oil shocks ripple through recessions long before anyone else connected the pipes.

Thank you for building a data science institute from a blank page into a school that thousands of students now call home, and for treating data science as a discipline with its own soul rather than a buzzword.

Thank you for mapping how galaxies grow up across cosmic time, and for founding a brand-new astronomy department while working to make the field itself more open to everyone who looks up.

Thank you for composing music that lets us hear coral reefs and vanishing landscapes, and for proving that a concert hall can be a place where science and conscience sing together.

Thank you for building telescopes that hunt the universe's first light, and for writing honestly about losing the biggest prize in science so that the rest of us could learn what science is really for.

Thank you for teaching the world how blood actually flows, building bioengineering at UC San Diego into a field so strong the department now carries your name, and for mentoring generations with the same gentle rigor at 95 that you had at 40.

Thank you for insisting that philosophy of mind must meet the actual brain, founding neurophilosophy when both camps doubted it, and for writing about conscience and morality in plain language any curious person can love.

Thank you for discovering the warming power of gases beyond carbon dioxide and the brown clouds over South Asia, then carrying that science to popes and presidents so the poorest three billion would not be forgotten in climate policy.