Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. We're so pleased to see you here today. This is an interesting topic for all of us. I suppose most of us don't know. I know I don't know much about it, but I'm so ready to learn and we've got the right person to help us do that. Just a brief word or two in my commercial spot here. I passed out some flyers that Ollie is sponsoring a trip to the Marston House and the Museum of Balboa Park. Museums, pardon me, of Balboa Park on Saturday, November 10th. My goodness, that's coming up right away. But there's still room. And if you would like to go, please take action. I've got more of these flyers if you need them. A reminder that next week we will be fortunate to have Dr. Richard Matthews, who's a professor in the Department of Planning, Policy and Design. And it will be on a topic that may not sound fascinating unless you happen to have children or grandchildren in college. And so it's about student loans and what's looming on the horizon on that particular topic. Something I really don't think we can ignore. When I glance at my grandson, who's getting a lot of support, I might add. He's going to still wind up, if he graduates in four years and buy gully, he'd better at that price. And he's going to walk out of college with a debt of about $40,000 in student loans. And gosh, that's a hard way to start things, you know? So I thought he's got a lot of research and he's going to share it with us next week. The week after that is our Chancellor, Michael Drake, who will be speaking on topics of his choice about our university. And I hope you're here to greet him. It's been a couple of years since he's been to the forum, although he certainly appears in other places. But I hope that you are here to greet him. And then in December we will have two final speakers, Charis Cuban from the School of Social Ecology, on Rethinking Crime and Immigration. A lot of rumors on that topic. And she's the lady with the research in hand. And she's fairly new to UCI. And then on December 12th, Lisa Grant Ludwig, who's an associate professor in environmental health and geology, will be talking about the storm clouds gathering living in a seismic world. A little bit more about things about climate change, folks, which is upon us. So that's the end of the commercial. We'll start again in January, taking the winter break and we'll start again, I think it's January 16th, if that's a Wednesday. And that will be Mark Petraca returning to talk to us about the election 2012 and what next. And that should be interesting. So he did share with me that if the election didn't go the way he hoped, he would change the title and it would be election 2012, where can we move? So, but you know, Mark, you know that. So anyway, today we have a very special guest, Dr. Peter Donovan, who is the director of the Sulin-Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center here at UCI, an absolute jewel in the crown of our university that we're terribly proud of. And he is the director of the man who makes it happen, along with a very talented team of people. He is from London, did his university studies there, came to the University of Maryland and worked there for a bit. Then at Johns Hopkins University Stem Cell Research Center and UCI recruited him happily so about six or seven years ago and he's been here ever since. And he's going to help us learn more about stem cell research. Dr. Donovan. Can people hear me all right? No. No? Okay. It's a pleasure to welcome you all to UCI. Some of you I know are familiar with our campus and some of the people at my table are new to UCI. So I thought I'd tell you a little bit about the campus to start with. It was founded in 1965, so it's not yet 50 years old. It's the largest employer in Orange County about the same size as Disney and it's almost as fun to visit here as it is to visit.  It generates an economic impact from about $3.9 billion annually. So it's a really incredible place. There's some fantastic stuff going on at this campus and recently the Times of London reviewed all the universities under 50 years of age and UCI was in the top three. So for a brand new university effectively it's doing really, really well. If you look at universities that are comprehensive that have schools of arts, sciences and so on UCI is the top university of those under 50 years of age. So it's something we're very proud of and I think the community here should be proud of too that it supported this university and made it one of this today. This is just the beginning. What did the President say last night? The best is yet ahead of us. So we believe that too about UCI. So as Julie said, I came here about six to seven years ago. The campuses have a long history of research in regenerative medicine. Some of the farming faculty members studied organisms like hydra and flies that can regenerate body parts and so when California began to support stem cell research those people were now in positions where they could really say UCI should be heavily involved in this and as I'll tell you, we're now leading the world in this area of research and we're very proud of that. So I hope at some point you'll have an opportunity to visit our facility. This is Sue and Bill Brecht Hall. It's a SIRM Institute. That means it was also funded by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the state agency that supports stem cell research. And I'm a little bit biased but it is the best building on the campus. And I say that not because it's a nice building that looks nice and works well for us but because of the people in it and some of those people are shown for life and we have about 20 faculty members and about 200 students, technicians, doctoral fellows all working on one or other aspect of stem cell research and regenerative medicine and we're passionate about our work because we really believe that this field will transform medicine and in the next few minutes I'll try and explain to you why we believe that and convince you that that really is true. So it was opened in May of 2010. It was the first building that's kind to be constructed in California. You might not know what UCI stands for. It actually stands for under construction indefinitely. You might have heard of some of the things that UCI is good at but it's really good at building things. And all the other universities and the UC system said they could build it in time with the only people that did it. And we opened a month ahead of schedule and it is a fantastic facility. I hope at some point you'll have the opportunity to come and visit it. I think in the packets you have there's an e-mail address. We'd love to have you come and visit. It's a fantastic facility in part because of the work that we're doing now. And just in a month's time we'll open a bivarium where we will begin testing stem cells to see if they can then be put into patients to treat a variety of diseases. Work that we're already doing provides a state-of-the-art facility to do that. And that was the result of a new ground from the National Institutes of Health for $12.7 million. So we've been very successful at getting funding as well to support this work. So it's interesting that the title of this group is the OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute. It turns out that stem cells have a really important part in learning. There are stem cells in your brain that are very important for learning. So right now you're actually all using your stem cells. And hopefully. And actually we have stem cells throughout our bodies that are responsible for keeping us alive and helping us respond to injury or damage. And those stem cells are spread throughout our bodies. There are stem cells in the bone marrow. Probably people are fairly familiar with those because of patients that have cancer and have a bone marrow transplant to replace their blood system. And those bone marrow stem cells produce all the cells in the blood system. The red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body and the lymphocytes that fight disease. The mast cells that release histamine and make you allergic to things. Those are all made by stem cells in the bones of our body. And there are also stem cells in our gut that line our entire intestinal system and turn over on a daily basis to create new linings of our gut. And then there are stem cells in our skin as well. I wonder how many of you this summer got sunburned? A few of you. A few of you. You're all sensible people probably. You did it in New York. You did it in New York, yes. So did I. I was actually told when I came here because I'm British I actually shouldn't go out because I'm not used to it. I'm serious. They said 20 minutes a day. In England this year the summer was on a Tuesday. When you get sunburned you probably remember that your skin peeled and was lost. And that skin is replaced by stem cells that are lower down in the skin that divide to replace the cells in the outer layer of your skin. And that process of replacement happens in a lot of different tissues. And that was known for a long time. Actually the reason why people knew about bone marrow stem cells skin stem cells and intestinal stem cells is that in the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the radiation caused so much damage to individuals it damaged the stem cells in those compartments that individuals died because of infections because they couldn't replace their skin and they died of infection because they couldn't replace the lymphocytes in their bone marrow. An unusual event that told us a lot about stem cells. And then in the last 10 or 15 years people identified stem cells in the brain. This was a new finding that actually we do produce new cells in our brain. That was good news for those of us that lost because we saw what we were doing. Those stem cells, as I tell you, have really important properties. So these cells are in our bodies all the time. They're helping us repair after disease or injury. And they're fantastic stem cells. I'll show you a little bit of work using that type of stem cell. But they have limitations. So the stem cells in the brain that we call neuronal stem cells can't make blood. The blood stem cells can't make intestines and so on. So they're restricted. They tend to be restricted to the organ system in which they are found.  The skin stem cells make skin, but they don't swap between them. And also it's a little bit difficult when we take them out of the individual and put them into the lab to grow them in large numbers. So they can only make certain things and they're not exactly expandable. Although they are fantastic cells. And so one of the other cell types that some of us use here are so-called pluripermin stem cells. And there are a number of different types of those, but I'm going to focus on one that you probably heard the most about. And that's the embryonic stem cell. And those cells, they're derived as you can see here from what's called a plasticist. That's the structure that's formed in the first three days after fertilization of the egg when the embryo is about 100 cells in number. And if you take those embryos and put them into a dish in the laboratory, the cells in that embryo will grow and make a stem cell that is called a pluripermin stem cell. And I'll explain what that means and how to differ from the adult stem cells in a little bit. Those embryos come from in retrofertilization products when couples go for fertility treatments. Often they'll generate more embryos than they actually need. Once they've had the children that they want, they often have severe embryos in the freezer and they give them a choice about what to do with those because it actually costs money to take them to the freezer. And so the IVF clinic says what do you want to do with those embryos? Do you want to throw them away? Do you want to give them to another couple or do you want to donate them for research? Most people don't want to just throw them away. Most people from it up there want to give them to other people. So in general, they're tempted that once they're donated for research and we can then use them to make this incredible cell type that has enormous potential for the human disease that I'll tell you about. This is how we grow stem cells. This student here is working in a cabinet and above the cabinet in a white box is a massive filter just like the filter in your home air conditioning system. And it's much, much finer. It filters out all the dust, bacteria, viruses and the blower that pushes the air around blows past that filter and produces completely sterile air. The stem cells obviously don't like to be around viruses or bacteria. So we've grown them in these conditions. These are conditions that are very similar to the way in which chips of computer are made in a really clean environment. So the student will work in that box and then next to it, to what we call incubators, those are like little undercounter refrigerators that you might have seen and we keep them at body temperature because that's what the stem cells like to grow at the same temperature on bodies.  I've actually got one here. Maybe many of you when you were a biology class at school saw what this is. So it's about the size of the palm of your hand and we put the stem cells in there and we grow them in a liquid that's sterile and they'll grow in a completely fillless plate and when they fill this plate there are about 5 million stem cells in that dish. And then how many of your keen gardens so you've cut away the strawberries maybe we take the cutting and put it in the next and so on and that's how we actually grow the stem cells. Once the plate is full we take it to the next, we put in a new plate and so in an incubator of this size we can expand these cells over and over and fill the entire incubator full of these Petri dishes and then we'll have 1.5 billion stem cells. So one of the things that distinguishes these cells from adult stem cells is that we can grow them in massive scale in industrial scale and keep them as stem cells and once we have done that we can then turn them into theoretically every cell type in our body. So can you see this is moving? Who doesn't guess what a stem cell tract is? A heart cell. So we took the stem cells and turn them in this case into heart cells that will beat just like our own hearts. And this is one example. I can show you lots and I will show you lots but this is one of the most obvious because it beats and beats and beats. And then those are with the heart cells but these are a few examples from the labs here at UCI of cells that we have made in the labs here from these embryonic stem cells. These green cells here are actually what we call neurons those are the cells that migrate out of your brain down your spinal cord out to your equipment that innervates our whole body and tells us when to move and how to move and pull away from heat and that kind of stuff. These are actually muscle cells that make up the muscles of our body and these are cells that line the brain they are actually called coroplexus cells and I'm not an expert in this area but I'm told that if you think of the brain like an engine, these cells make the oil that keeps the brain healthy. And then these cells are cells that line the nerves you can think of nerves like the wires in your home there's a metal bit that's the wire and then there's an insulation sheet around the outside that makes the wire work better and those cells make the lining of the nerves and those are very important for certain diseases of the brain and spinal cord. And so, theoretically we can turn these embryonic stem cells into every cell type present in our body and because we can make stem cells on an industrial scale we can now make massive numbers of cells for any part of our body and that then provides a repair kit for our entire body both for people that are healthy that maybe get sunburned or cut themselves or for someone with a disease or a disorder and that's an incredible advance that has come about in the last 12, 15 years and because of that we can imagine that these cells will have an enormous impact on the treatment of human diseases because almost for any disease you want to think of stem cells could have a role in new treatments for that disease Alzheimer's, blindness, cancer hunting disease, muscular dystrophy almost any disease that we are working on now we can think of a new treatment using stem cell derived treatments. So, I'll tell you now why we think those cells will revolutionize the treatment of human disease and it's for three reasons one of which you've probably heard a lot about the idea of cell transplantation but two other reasons why I think that will be very important the way that embryonic stem cells make the cells of our body mimics the process that happens during normal development during embryonic and fetal life and then in infants and teenagers it's exactly the same process that just happens in a lab and so now, for the first time we can mimic the development of our own species in the lab in the past scientists have used mice frogs, rats, flies and those are fantastic models that have taught us a lot about development but they are mice, rats, frogs, flies and so some of the things we learn don't apply to humans and I'll tell you why that's important in a little bit and I'll show you an example of why we think this is important the second thing that having these stem cells allows us to do is to develop better, safer drugs right now the major pharmaceutical companies when they're testing a drug to see if it's safe they were tested on mice and rats and sometimes on human cancer cells human cancer cells aren't the same as most of us they're an anomaly and mice and rats aren't the same as us so now we have an inexhaustible supply of every cell type present in our body we can begin to understand why a drug affects one cell type and not another, why it might affect the cell in you and not in me and I'll show you an example of that and then finally the last thing and the thing that has received the most hype in the press is the idea that if you can make every cell type present in human body you can use it for cell therapy to replace those lost in disease or injury and again I'll show you an example of that so let's deal with the first thing studying human development how it can go wrong so it's a little bit difficult in this room because it's so bright to see these images but I think you can tell this this image on the left is an image of stem cells growing in a petri dish and we've stained them with a dye that stains the stem cells with a red color so you can probably see there are a few little red ones and those are little colonies of about a hundred stem cells and with a colleague we found that if we added a particular protein to those cultures we could get them to grow a lot better it's just like adding fertilizer to the roses honestly so we added a growth factor to the protein and you can see a lot more colonies of red cells so this protein really stimulates the growth of the stem cell and we can plot that on the graph don't worry there's no test and the green bar shows when you grow the stem cells in the presence of the protein the fertilizer the red bar shows what happens over time when you grow the cells in the absence of the protein so the protein really stimulates the growth of the stem cell because the stem cells come from the early embryo we wondered is this protein also important in the early embryo so this is what we did while we were at Johns Hopkins this is the embryo it has a little portion of it that's called the NSL mass and that's where the stem cells come from this is so small you couldn't see it except under a microscope and it's about a hundred cells in size and we can put it into culture to make stem cells and when we looked to see if the protein bound to the stem cells we found here this is a little colony of stem cells where the protein binds to the stem cells so we asked is that true in the embryo as well and you can see at the top part of the embryo in the NSL mass where the stem cells come from the protein binds there too in a normal human embryo so what was true in the stem cells turns out to reflect what happens normally in the human developing embryo and that has important implications for understanding some of the causes of human infertility how to grow embryos in IVF clinics and how to treat some of the causes of human disease that's one example of how we can now use stem cells to inform about normal human development and in the last few years people have used stem cells to look at other aspects of human disease and injury and in the last few years people have used stem cells to understand some of the causes of autism the genetic underpinning of autism schizophrenia a hundred disease and a form of early infant death called spina musculaturgy and so what we think will happen now is by using stem cells that can mirror the normal development of our own species we'll get a fundamentally better understanding of how we develop and how that sometimes goes wrong in diseases by Alzheimer's autism and a hundred disease Parkinson's multiple sclerosis so an insight into the development of ourselves that we've never had before so let's go on to developing better safer drugs this is a list and I'm sure I can't even see so I don't know it's a list of Wikipedia of drugs that have been withdrawn from the market and I'm sure you're all familiar you've watched the acne news there are always drugs being pulled from the market as I said most drug companies begin to test drugs on human cancer cell lines which are the same as us they're different from ourselves because they have genetic changes they test them on mice and they test them on rats and sometimes that data is good and sometimes it doesn't reflect what happens in us and so there's always a drug that's pulled from the market the top drug that people in this audience will know about is Ptolemat which was put on the market and withdrawn because of the infection that only on bald figures the second drug is called LSD but who's familiar with that only one person put their hand up anyway it was marketed as a psychiatric cure and then was taken off the market because it was used recreationally but all of these drugs were put on the market and then pulled because they had an adverse reaction and as I say the reason is probably because of the way it was tested and one of the things that has also become apparent is that some drugs are fine on one group of people that have adverse effects in a different population group there was a drug pulled recently because in African Americans it had an effect on the heart that wasn't seen in the white population and so it had to be pulled for the African American population and how can we understand that if we were studying the drugs in rats or mice just no way about finding that information and then the example I told you about for limonite dramatic effect on the unborn fetus in terms of limb development where infants are born with severely deformed limbs so it was pulled from the market but more recently it's been found that the limonite is very useful for treating certain types of cancer multiple myeloma so the drug was pulled but actually had very useful uses in a different type of disease so how can we understand that so I'll tell you an example of how we can do that and this is a little bit double the C here because of the light but the idea is if you can make every cell type in the body you can test drugs on those absolutely normal human cells and this is an example of that from a colleague Brian Cummings he looked at neural stem cells and the effect of a common immunosuppressive drug that's used in transplant patients and when he added that drug to those cells they didn't produce many neurons and that's shown because the green stain is actually the neurons, the brain cells that conduct signals around their body but when he added the drug lots of little green dots as the cells are pushed to make neuronal stem cells so this drug he can now understand how it works on those cell types and theoretically he can test from hundreds of thousands of months and do it for every cell type present in the human body and the way we do that is similar to growing cells in incubators like this instead of a petri dish that is one well we use these plates that are called 96-well plates that have in each plate 96-level culture dishes so we can grow the cells in industrial scale put them into those dishes and then strain drugs on them so in an incubator this size it probably is a little bit smaller than this podium we can grow them in these plates and at one fell swoop screen 28,000 drugs to see their effect and the consequence of that is that we can begin to understand how the drugs affect every cell type present in our body and because we can make cells from different individuals we can begin to understand how drugs affect the black population different from the Asian population different from the white population so to get a fundamentally better understanding of what drugs do their adverse reactions and how they can help some people about this so finally, I'll tell you about the use of stem cells with cell therapy the thing that really has seen the most attention of the press this is the idea if we were having a particularly slow day and we didn't think our brain was working a little top up I have to tell you that some of the data coming out of the labs here suggests that this actually really might work so I'm going to show you some data that is using animals I should tell you that all of the work we do here at UCI and in the labs around the country is regulated by the federal government and the state government we can't do experiments that will hurt the animals or in unnecessary numbers but in order to get to the point where we're going to use things in humans, we have to go through the step otherwise there's no way of getting them so in this particular experiment Eileen Anderson and Brian Cummings mimic the effect of a spinal cord injury and in a spinal cord injury often happens in a road traffic accident the column of bone that surrounds your spinal cord gets damaged and the spinal cord gets bruised and that interrupts the flow of the information from your brain to your extremities and it also interrupts the information that goes from your extremities back to your brain you know if you touch something hot you automatically pull your hand away and that's because there's a signal from your finger to your brain saying there's something hot you know I should pull away and that makes the information go in both ways in this particular case the mouse received a bruise to its spinal cord a fairly moderate bruise that mimics the effects of many injuries in humans and one thing you should know is every time a mouse runs every time it puts its front cord forward it will also move its hind cord there's a 1 to 1 ratio so if you watch this animal you will see that in this particular case this is an animal that was injured and received an injection of just fluid that mimics the stem cell so it drags its hind limb every time it moves its front cord it doesn't always move its back cord you'll see this again in slow motion so it moves its front cord but it sometimes drags its hind limb and that's because the signal was going from the brain to the hind limb impaired so that is dragging its hind limb there and this is an animal that received the same injury but then received injections of stem cells either side of the injury site for injections of stem cells and these are using neural stem cells the cells that can repair the brain and spinal cord so these are what we call adult stem cells and we don't compress the button on that can you tell the difference? it's incredible this animal isn't perfect it's not like a mass that never received an injury but it's pretty good most of the time when it moves its front limb it moves its hind limb it's a really visible demonstration of the power that stem cells have to repair diseases and injury and I should tell you this is for spinal cord injury spinal cord injury actually is much more problem because of road traffic accidents in this country that people believe it's not just someone riding a horse that falls off but in road traffic accidents a lot of spinal cord injuries and it's the major cause of injury to our troops in the battlefield because of explosive devices spinal cord injuries and traumatic brain injury so it's a very important health problem so we're fortunate here at UCI that two of the groups here were the first in the world to develop new treatments using stem cells for spinal cord injuries one for acute spinal cord injury that's someone that was an injured relative recently and the other for chronic spinal cord injury but for patients that were injured some while ago and Hans Kirsten using embryonic stem cells developed treatment that went to clinical trial for acute spinal cord injury and Aynan Anderson and Brad Cummins using neural stem cells developed treatment for chronic spinal cord injury that is in clinical trial right now and the results of that trial are beginning to come out and the results are remarkable patients that couldn't feel anything below the injury which is about this level for some of the patients now have sensation down to the top of their legs so really exciting results and this first trial is just a safety trial to see if the cells are safe so to get data on what the cells are doing and this first trial is really remarkable it places UCI at the forefront of this field right now we're living in the world and that's exciting for the rest of us because we have a ringside seat at the first trials and that means that for other things that we're working on we can learn from those trials and maybe do it better for other things and I should tell you that because of that there are groups here who are very exciting working on Alzheimer's disease there's a much bigger societal impact than spinal pain injury but also for diabetes, heart disease very strong group working on that multiple sclerosis and renaissance pigmentosa and renaissance pigmentosa might be of interest to this group not to say you're old by the way but renaissance pigmentosa is a genetic disorder where people go blind and Henry Klassen and the Gamper but our institute has developed a method for treating renaissance pigmentosa and the exciting thing about that is if that works that same treatment will also be applicable to age-related macular degeneration which my own father has so a very exciting development that could go beyond that one particular genetic disorder so I've told you about three different uses of stem cells and it's because of those three different things the ability now for the first time to understand the development of our own species in new and really exciting ways together with the sequencing of the human genome the time is really ripe to understand how we develop and what the risks are to the unborn child and how development can go wrong developing better safer drugs and using stem cells to develop entirely new treatments for disease there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease and for the first time we have stem cell-based treatments that could affect the outcome of those diseases which is incredibly exciting so I'll tell you a little bit about what we've achieved the University of California one of its goals is to have an impact in the community and all of us here at the University when we invent something called intellectual property that can then be used to form companies or be licensed by companies to generate revenue and so that's one of the things that's really important here is that we see the local biotech industry with ideas to form new companies in creative jobs we train a lot of the researchers to work it out again and work at the companies here they need a skilled workforce and that's done here at the University we also spend a lot of time enabling our colleagues particularly at Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach they don't necessarily have the same types of facilities that we have here their students come here they spend periods of time training here and then often we'll go often into graduate school we find they're terrific students because they're really hungry they don't have the resources necessary up here when they come here they work really, really hard so we're really excited about that we also spend a lot of time with high school students because we believe we don't have all the answers it may be one of those high school students that gets into science that comes up with an idea that will finally be tripled for a disease science has a long time before often it gets to treatment and so we really need to encourage those people to stand science and we think that one of the reasons why it's important is that jobs in science are high tech jobs and in this particular case we're leading the world not just in UCI but in California, United States and if we don't do this we'll lose the jobs to China and India and so for our own kids my own son is an American he wants British citizenship but those are the types of jobs we want them to have and we create the opportunity for that and the other thing and why I always enjoy coming to talk to groups is we feel as a public research university we have an obligation to explain what we do to the people that provide some of the funding for us I'm curious do all of you think that UCI is entirely funded by the tax credits of California? because the university gets less than 8% of its revenue from the California tax pair the rest of the money we generate through grants and foundations national institutes of health 92% that comes from outside of here but because of that a lot of that is public funding we have an obligation to explain the work to the people that fund us what do we want to achieve we really want to keep this all going but as I said we don't think we have all the answers so we're always looking for new talent and in the last two years we recruited five new faculty members one from MIT one from Stanford one from University of Pennsylvania one actually from UCI that tells you something that guy was competitive with people from MIT and Stanford and we're always looking for the resources to recruit those people and we always want to improve our educational and research capacity we want to be competitive with other places so we're always looking to do that Orange County also has very large minority populations one of the ethical issues in stumps of research is some of the research will only really impact the white population so one of the other things we want to do is make sure that when we're doing this work we do work that can be useful to the minority populations there's a large Asian population here there's a large Asian population the work needs to be if we're funded by the public we need to be generally applicable to all of the public and we can do that in part because of other great centers on this campus the only National Cancer Institute designated for an orange county the chair family cancer center the largest systems biology center on the west coast in terms of developing drugs drugs are chemicals we have a fantastic chemistry department here a Nobel Prize winning chemistry and in terms of developing new treatments for human disease other fantastic centers like the Jasmine diabetes center and the UCI mind center that works on Alzheimer's disease so we're fortunate that we have fantastic colleagues that really allow us to do a lot of this work so I'd like to end by showing you a little short video that really encapsulates what we're about and I think also kind of tells you about some of the people that we do this for some of the people that really inspire us often we have patients and their families come to the center and they say oh it's fantastic what you're doing but honestly they're some of the most inspirational people and one of them is a colleague here at UCI Frances Sardonia she works in the business school she married her child with sweetheart and had three kids and then found out he had a hundred more disease and he then died of hundred disease it's absolutely incurable and then found out her three children have it as well and last year she lost her youngest daughter but she comes to the center two other kids are dying now but she comes to the center and she's the most inspirational person and that's why we do it so we can all do something about this to support some sort of research one of the things you already done actually by coming here is to learn about some sort of research and there are a lot of myths out there a lot of things that are true about some sort of research you might not agree with everything we do at least we can try and explain it to you and you can try and understand it I'm pleased that you all did that the other thing that is very useful for us is for you to advocate for some sort of research tell your friends what's going on here tell them the excitement we have about it write to your local representatives and tell them and then the other thing that you can do is support the work we have great researchers here that are always looking for money to support new ideas and we'd love to have you do that as well and we were very fortunate in the last few months in that Sue Milgros who began the center with a $10 million gift challenged us recently to give you $4 million if you match it and that allows us to build out the top floor of the center to create more research space to accelerate the pace of research to develop new treatments for disease so that's an incredible thing by the end of this month we're going to have to tell them whether we match that and for every dollar that we raise they will double that effectively by giving us another dollar often the war on disease is just like a battle the more people you have in the field the more likely you have to succeed and so this is what this will do for us it will allow us to create the space to be able to put people in the trenches of the war on disease we have outstanding faculty and resources here and we believe in this particular field and I'm sure you would find that with other people on the Irvine campus will change the world by transforming this practice through themselves so I'd like to end by acknowledging the colleagues I talked about their work as I went through I worked at the National Cancer Institute which is a fantastic organization I worked at Johns Hopkins which they will tell you they're the best in the world I've never had better colleagues than I have here at UCF


LGBTQ Pride means for me a sort of white corporate structure of gay ink and so I have tried to find a different way to celebrate Pride and that is to just be with chosen family and to be with folks who are resisting the ways in which the norms of society tell us how to be as queer folk. None of the categories really work for me, you know, the L, the G, the B, the T and so I think in many ways Pride has been very much a sort of gay Pride and I want to lean into what is a queer Pride and so I'm always thinking about what that is and how to make that happen and it's largely happening in a community of difference.


Hello, I'm Chaplain Zachary Goz, and I'm going to be giving you a spiritual resiliency tip today. One thing that's been really helpful for me right now is to lean on a sacred text. So what I mean by that is, rather you're religious or not, there's all different reading passages that we can have that we can lean on and read over and over and over again that speaks to us in different ways as we face different challenges. Whether that's a scripture passage or a poem or some other text that you really lean on, I encourage you to try that practice. Thank you, and I hope you stay well.


Welcome back to another Photoshop tutorial. This one going to show you how to remove this white fringe or this white edge and you get this a lot when you remove Subjects from images that have a white background or very very commonly if you're pulling out a image or a logo that's against the white background and you get this white edge around the Deletion or the the extraction part of me. That's probably the better way to put it How do you get rid of it? I'm gonna show you here's what it looks like when I've done it and again So you'll see that I've got going on here. So here we go. Let's go right into this Let's start from scratch.   So I'm gonna go click select subject right here. Then we're gonna go select and mask Okay, good stuff now You'll see here that there is some white fringy stuff coming through on the lion now Normally, you can go ahead and select this brush here Which is the refined edge brush tool and it does a pretty good job I'm just gonna go around the edges like this of getting rid of some of that white and kind of taking out that Whitey-buzzy stuff, but it's not gonna do a perfect job even if you go around the edges like this Okay, so I'm just gonna do it. It's gonna do a good job, but it's not perfect There we go now the next step here is for me. I'm just gonna add a point five per pixel feather Just cuz and then I'm also gonna click on refine hair for this one only because this what this animal has here So I'm gonna click on that and it's gonna do its best job now I'm gonna click on okay, and you're gonna see here that I've got this selection made It's not perfect, but it's a selection now what you want to do. Oh jeez it missed a piece here It missed his tail. Holy smokes. I'm gonna go ahead and select the quick selection tool And I am gonna go ahead and pull out that tail. All right good So we've got a selection now I'm going to hit mask and this is the part where you see the white fringe everybody once you've done your masking You've got the white around on the back on the sides here now. We got to do some stuff So the next step is we're gonna go ahead. I'm gonna click on both of these layers watch this Oh, nope cancel it what we're looking to do and I'll just show you where it is is we're going to go to layer Matting and we want to remove the white mat Excuse me, but when we do it this way if we did it with this mask applied It will just apply to the image and not the mask So we want to right click on this and we're gonna look for we want to apply the layer mask So let's go ahead and sorry click on the mask here Apply the layer mask. Okay now we can start doing some work now What we want to do is we want to go to layer Go to matting and then go to remove white mat when we do that in that order now The white edges are gone. That's how you do it inside Photoshop. Thanks for watching ton more stuff coming up. Stay tuned


The tree I love is this copper beach and it's been there for 150 years. It's so spectacular. It's such a beautiful shape and it's always full of birds and wildlife. It's a really special tree. I don't think anyone would argue that it's the prettiest tree in the world, but it's so important to us. We'd miss it terribly if we didn't have any trees on our street. They have a huge role in boosting mental health, lowering our anxiety, and I reckon they got loads to teach us about just slowing down in our lives and feeling calmer.


So Shopify just came out with a huge update on their platform that helps boost conversions as well as sales. Now, these are updates that are either about to go into effect or already are in effect in the Shopify platform. So these are things that we really want to start paying attention to and implementing into our stores if we haven't already. As dropshippers, we always want to make sure that we get the most out of the selling channels that we're working with and max out their features. So that way we can max out our profits. So without waiting around any longer, let's dive straight into it. Let's run that intro really quick and let's get to it. What's going on everyone? Out of DS and if you like informational videos on the dropshipping business and staying up to date with everything dropshipping, make sure to hit that subscribe button as well as ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. So one of the first things that we're going to start noticing in the dropshipping stores is actually faster loading times. So Shopify has servers pretty much around the entire world. Now they just have more. In short, more servers equals faster loading times because when somebody navigates to our website, they're actually sending a signal to a server to be able to retrieve information from our store. So if I'm in the US and I navigate to www.mystore.com, the server for that store could potentially be in Europe. So that means the signal from my computer has to travel all the way to Europe and back to my computer. Now, being online, you might be thinking, you know, it's the internet. It should be instant. Well, yes, that is the case for the most part when you have local servers. If you're sending a signal across the ocean and back, that can really delay loading times. Now, instead of a computer hitting a server in potentially a different country, it could be hitting one in a different state. In some cases, depending on where you are, loading times can potentially be sliced in half. Another important thing about faster loading times is whenever a customer has to wait maybe two or three seconds for a page to load, most of the times they're going to end up clicking off and going to a competitor's website. The faster our page loads, the more likely our customer is to actually make a purchase because they don't have to wait for anything to load. Remember that customers typically are impatient, they don't like waiting. They like fast loading times, fast shipping, pretty much fast everything. So the faster that the website loads in front of them, the more likely they are to be able to click through and make a purchase. So the next big feature update that Shopify rolled out with is the one page checkout. So now when a customer reaches your checkout page, instead of having to put in all of their shipping information and then click continue to shipping, then select in your shipping methods and then clicking again, continue to payment. Now instead of having to click through all the pages, everything should start loading automatically as you start filling everything out and scrolling down. Now at the time of this recording, I checked my store and the feature is not just there yet. So do me a huge favor, go to your checkout page and let me know if you have the one page checkout. Do you still have the option to click through the different pages or does everything load up as you fill in and scroll down? Let me know down in the comments below. I'm really curious to know who this has rolled out to, if yet to anybody at all. Speaking of the checkout page, we can now also customize it a bit more. So let's click on over here to the checkout page itself. Once your checkout page loads in the theme customization, then you can go ahead and actually start editing everything you need. You can change the colors according to your branding, add any images. For one, we can go ahead here and actually add a banner. Switch for that to load. And there we have our banner, can always change your logos. Now if you start to look all the way towards the bottom, you're going to see the different colors that you can change. For one, you can change your accents. Let's go ahead and change this to red. You can see that the color of the return to cart text changed. Then we can change the colors of our buttons. Let's make this instead of blue. Let's make like a little black, right? So that's there. Any errors we have, like let's say for example, the sold out, we can change that as well. Switch that over to a lime greens where it really stands out. Now you also have the ability and option to extend your checkout page using different apps. Different apps will of course have different uses. Most of them will be to upsell though. Some apps will ask if your purchase is a gift, while others will upsell with relevant products. And there's also apps for loyalty programs. Now another cool thing in the checkout editor using these different apps is the fact that you're going to be able to place them pretty much wherever you want. If you want one of the apps to be shown right on top of your grand total, you can go ahead and drag and drop it there. So pretty much just the same way that you're customizing your themes when you drag and drop the different sections to where you want them to be, you're going to be able to do the same thing using your checkout editor. Now another really cool feature is going to be the post purchase upsell. This is going to require a separate app, but once your customer places their order, if there's something that they forgot, or maybe there's something that could have been added onto their cart and they just missed it, they're going to have the option to purchase that and upgrade after they check out. And to make things a bit sweeter, you can even offer them a discount. Next up, we have the shop promise badge. This badge is going to appear next to items reassuring your customers that they're going to be receiving their items in a timely manner by the time that they need it. Usually this is going to pop up on items that have a shipping and delivery time of five calendar days or less. Now this badge will include an estimated delivery date as well as feature different shipping times, such as next day shipping, two day shipping or free delivery. Now in order to have the shop promise badge available, Shopify does need to deem your account eligible. If you want to check to see if your store is eligible for the shop badge, then just go ahead and check out the description down below. I'm going to have a link to the article down there. The link is going to be to the Shopify article where you can read a bit more about it there. Now, one of the really cool things about this badge is the fact that it's going to actually update based on times that people probably won't be shipping. So what I mean by that is let's take, for example, Christmas, people aren't going to be shipping on Christmas. Everything's pretty much closed that day. The Shopify badge will actually take that into account and extend it by one extra day or however many days it feels would be necessary to be able to get past this no shipping time. So if it's just one day and typically your product ships and delivers within five business days, instead of showing the 25th of February, it'll show the 26th. The next big feature update is the signed in shopping with shop. So this is going to be pretty much a single login that you're going to use for all Shopify stores. Now, in order to be able to get that single login, you are going to have to be using the shop app. Using that single login customers are going to be able to make purchases a lot quicker and the whole process is just going to be a lot more streamlined. Instead of having to put their passwords on their email every single time they go to make a purchase, whenever they reach the checkout page of any Shopify store, the shop app will prompt them to sign in, whether it be with their passwords or their past keys from their phone. So let's say you're using an iPhone and you have Face ID, you can use that same Face ID to be able to authenticate instead of using your password. Speaking of the shop app, customers are now also going to have the option to be able to follow certain stores on the shop app directly. Following stores can give them access to different discounts and store updates. Now this might be one of the coolest and potentially most useful updates that Shopify has come out with. At the time of this recording, this feature is currently not yet available but they are slowly rolling it out to everybody on their platform. Shopify is officially joining the AI revolution and they're going to be offering AI generated storefront content. Now, if you've seen our chat GPT video, you know how helpful AI can be for our dropshipping stores. It can do everything from writing product descriptions, optimizing titles and optimizing all our SEO. If you haven't seen that video, then please watch it right after you watch this video because trust me, you don't know what you're missing out on. That video, Lidan really makes everything super easy to understand. He breaks everything down so that way it's easy to start working with. And if you look through all the comments, you're going to see how many people have been finding it super useful. A lot of people have really been using this video to start learning more about AI and scaling their dropshipping businesses. AI is a huge time saver which makes this new Shopify feature an absolute gold mine. Trust me, once again, you really don't want to miss out on this. Shopify currently does have a waitlist that you can join to be able to stay up to date. But pretty much the way that this works is you're going to be inputting your title and two or three different keywords that describe the product itself. Shopify magic is going to be what Shopify calls their AI system. Now, in your Shopify admin section, you're going to be seeing a little Shopify magic icon. When you see that, that's going to mean that you now have access to their AI platform. Now, currently in my Shopify store, I don't have it on there. It has not been released to me, but Shopify has said that they've released it to certain merchants. So go ahead and check out yours, see if you can find that Shopify magic icon. And if you do, make sure to drop a comment down below, letting me know that it's on there. Play around with it and let me know what you think of it down in the comments below. Bundles are a fantastic way to be able to upsell and increase your average order value. So if you're not offering that, make sure you start offering that. Shopify is actually coming out with an app to be able to help you make bundles a lot easier. The Shopify bundles app is going to make it a lot easier for you to be able to bundle different products together and sell them at a discount. Thus increasing your average order rate and maximizing your profits. The Shopify bundles app currently is in early access. So if you want to sign up, just go ahead and check out the article that I'm going to have linked down below. Now, speaking of bundle discounts, Shopify is also going to give you the ability to bundle discount codes. Shopify is going to have their own discount apps, that are going to make it easy to be able to bundle together different discounts. So you're going to be able to offer free shipping along with a buy one get one and maybe even a 40% off. The bundle discounts are obviously all going to be set. Know that you are going to have the option to be able to bundle different discounts together. On top of that, they're also going to be offering channel specific discounts. So you can have one specific discount for Google, another one for Facebook and another one for Instagram. So Shopify has also released a translate and adapt app, which as the name implies, it helps translate. Using this new app, you're going to be able to translate all of your products into different languages. So you're going to be able to have a side by side comparison of whatever language you're choosing to translate to. Of course, you're going to be able to translate your titles, descriptions, variations, pretty much anything on your product page. This is going to be especially useful for a store that you use in multiple countries. Shopify also makes it a lot easier for you to start working with different influencers in your particular niche. So that way you can start expanding your influencer marketing. Shopify is now going to have their creator platform, which is going to be working with the Shopify Collabs app. This is going to make your influencer marketing process a lot easier. The Shopify Collabs app is going to help you manage your collaborations with different influencers and just streamline the entire process. You're going to be able to have a specific page on your website where people can go and apply to be an influencer or collaborate with you. You're also going to have the option to make affiliate links or affiliate code. And of course, on top of everything, Shopify is going to make it a lot easier for you to be able to pay your influencers their commissions. Shopify forms is also being implemented to be able to help you capture emails a lot easier. You can add the Shopify forms app to be able to start capturing different emails by offering different incentives. So you can offer something like free shipping or 10% off your next order in exchange for their email. Really quick, this is actually what the app looks like and it's super easy to use. You can go ahead and change the display type. So you can have either a floating display. You can go ahead and select one of your discounts to be able to offer in that form. You can add a little title. Let's say get 10% off for your email. Obviously that's not what we would put, but it's a quick example. In the form, you can go ahead and just leave it like that. Stay in the know. Oh, and really quick, if you're wondering, the teaser is what it's going to look like when the form itself is closed. Once they click on it and they open it, then they're going to see the actual form itself, which is where you're going to put stay in the know or whatever you decide to put. Let's go ahead and actually just copy everything so we can see how it looks, get inspiration, new arrivals and the latest offers to your inbox. All we need is your first name and your email. Now after they hit sign me up, then you can put the success message. You're in the know. Here's your discount code or whatever it may be. Of course you have the option to be able to customize it to your brand colors or however you want it. So you can change all the colors here. Let's change the background to text. Let's make white, the accent colors. Let's make a nice little yellow. Aside from that, you also have the option to add an image. You can choose how it behaves on either a mobile or a desktop version of your website. So you can either have it show on all pages or just choose the specific pages that you want it to show on. There's different triggers that you can choose to be able to have it pop up. So as soon as they land on your page, it's going to pop up.  And another really cool feature of the Shopify forms is this right here. You have the option to show the visitors your form before they leave. So as soon as they're about to click out, if they haven't made a purchase, the form is going to pop up and give them a little incentive to stay on your page and add to check out and complete their purchase. Next up, we have more granular and specific permissions that you can give your different staff members. Now, being in the dropshipping business, we don't really have too many staff members. We don't have people on site. Maybe we'll have a few people that can help us out, but for the most part, we're actually going to be working with virtual assistants. This particular update is going to give us a lot more access and control to the things that our virtual assistants can see or have access to. Now, of course, as dropshippers, more than likely we're going to be using something like AutoDS to be able to streamline the entire dropshipping process. So within AutoDS, we actually already have the option to be able to give different permissions to different virtual assistants. So really quick, let's go on over to our dashboard on AutoDS and click on the settings on the bottom left. Once we're there, you're going to see on the top, you're going to have the users tab. Go ahead and click on that. As you can see, Frank is already one of our virtual assistants. He already has all those different privileges. From here, you can actually either add a new one or just edit Frank's. Let's just quickly go ahead and edit Frank's. So we're going to edit, and you're going to see there, you have the option for his name, his email, the password that they're going to use to sign on to the AutoDS platform and all of the different stores that they're going to have access to. You can either give them access to one store or multiple. Now, this doesn't specifically apply to only Shopify. Here you can give them access to your Amazon stores, your Shopify stores, your eBay stores, or pretty much everything. Now, right underneath that, you have all the different privileges that you can give them. So as you can see, Frank has the option to be able to view the dashboard, view and edit active product, this new products and a few others. Now, comparing it to the Shopify granular permissions, it might be a lot more convenient to actually keep using AutoDS for this because using AutoDS, as I mentioned, you can have one virtual assistant manage a bunch of different stores from one platform. That can make it a lot easier for your virtual assistant to manage all of your different stores from one place rather than having to log in, log out, log back in and just taking time away from actual work. Now, if you want a bit more information on virtual assistants and how they work with AutoDS, then just go ahead and make sure to check out this video right here. The link to it will be down below in the description. Now, last but certainly not least, we have taxes. Taxes can be something extremely hard to learn. They vary by state or by country and overall, it's just a headache.  Right under that, you're gonna have the product category and right under that, you're gonna see that that helps determine the US tax rates. Here, you always wanna make sure that you have the correct product category. If you have the wrong one, Shopify can charge the wrong taxes and at the end of the year, you can either end up owing taxes or having to pay a fee. Taxes are extremely important and trust me, you don't wanna over collect or under collect. That can really set you back and cause a few problems that is just best to avoid. So once again, always make sure you have the appropriate product category selected. So that pretty much breaks down everything that we need to know about Shopify's new updates and how it can affect our drop shipping business. Are you gonna be taking advantage of any of the things that I listed in this video? If you are, then make sure to let me know down below what you found most useful. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS bringing you all the latest information in the drop shipping world. If you found this video informational, if you found it useful, if you liked it, please make sure to hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. Also, if you did like the video and found it informational, make sure to leave a like. As always, I wish you all nothing but success in your drop shipping business and catch you all in the next video.