About

Jennifer A Gonzalez is a Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz, affiliated with the divisions of Arts, History of Consciousness, Latin American/Latinx Studies, and Feminist Studies. She teaches annual seminars at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her research and publications focus on contemporary art, with an emphasis on installation art, digital art, and activist art, particularly exploring the strategic use of space—exhibition, public, and virtual—by artists and cultural institutions. She is interested in the representation of the human body in relation to discourses of race and gender, and her work examines the politics of speech, voice, and migration in contemporary art. Gonzalez has authored books including 'Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art,' which was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, and a second book on artist Pepón Osorio. She is also the chief editor of 'Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology,' recognized as one of the top art books of the decade by ArtNews. Her teaching encompasses contemporary art in the U.S. and Europe, the history of museums, activist art since 1960, the history of photography, and theories of representation, feminist, abolitionist, and critical race theory.

Research topics

• Data Mining
• Computer Science
• Genetics
• Biology
• Computational biology
• World Wide Web
• Bioinformatics
• Human–computer interaction

Selected publications

• The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2026 update

  Nucleic Acids Research · 2025-11-18 · 45 citations

  articleOpen access

  Now in its 25th year of operation, the UCSC Genome Browser (https://genome.ucsc.edu) provides a central location for researchers around the world to display and compare annotations on assembled genomes. Highlighted updates include a positional heatmap display, used to show data on functional consequences of mutation from MaveDB; QuickLift, a tool to copy annotation data seen on one assembly for display on another related assembly; and HubSpace, an initiative to simplify the process of creating and using track hubs by providing each user account with dedicated storage on UCSC's infrastructure.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2025 update

  Nucleic Acids Research · 2024-10-26 · 557 citations

  articleOpen access

  The UCSC Genome Browser (https://genome.ucsc.edu) is a widely utilized web-based tool for visualization and analysis of genomic data, encompassing over 4000 assemblies from diverse organisms. Since its release in 2001, it has become an essential resource for genomics and bioinformatics research. Annotation data available on Genome Browser includes both internally created and maintained tracks as well as custom tracks and track hubs provided by the research community. This last year's updates include over 25 new annotation tracks such as the gnomAD 4.1 track on the human GRCh38/hg38 assembly, the addition of three new public hubs, and significant expansions to the Genome Archive[GenArk) system for interacting with the enormous variety of assemblies. We have also made improvements to our interface, including updates to the browser graphic page, such as a new popup dialog feature that now displays item details without requiring navigation away from the main Genome Browser page. GenePred tracks have been upgraded with right-click options for zooming and precise navigation, along with enhanced mouseOver functions. Additional improvements include a new grouping feature for track hubs and hub description info links. A new tutorial focusing on Clinical Genetics has also been added to the UCSC Genome Browser.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• GenArk: towards a million UCSC genome browsers

  Genome biology · 2023-10-02 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access

  Interactive graphical genome browsers are essential tools in genomics, but they do not contain all the recent genome assemblies. We create Genome Archive (GenArk) collection of UCSC Genome Browsers from NCBI assemblies. Built on our established track hub system, this enables fast visualization of annotations. Assemblies come with gene models, repeat masks, BLAT, and in silico PCR. Users can add annotations via track hubs and custom tracks. We can bulk-import third-party resources, demonstrated with TOGA and Ensembl gene models for hundreds of assemblies.Three thousand two hundred sixty-nine GenArk assemblies are listed at https://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/hubs/ and can be searched for on the Genome Browser gateway page.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• GenArk: Towards a million UCSC Genome Browsers

  Research Square · 2023-04-03 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2024 update

  Nucleic Acids Research · 2023-11-11 · 354 citations

  articleOpen access

  The UCSC Genome Browser (https://genome.ucsc.edu) is a web-based genomic visualization and analysis tool that serves data to over 7,000 distinct users per day worldwide. It provides annotation data on thousands of genome assemblies, ranging from human to SARS-CoV2. This year, we have introduced new data from the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium and on viral genomes including SARS-CoV2. We have added 1,200 new genomes to our GenArk genome system, increasing the overall diversity of our genomic representation. We have added support for nine new user-contributed track hubs to our public hub system. Additionally, we have released 29 new tracks on the human genome and 11 new tracks on the mouse genome. Collectively, these new features expand both the breadth and depth of the genomic knowledge that we share publicly with users worldwide.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2023 update

  Nucleic Acids Research · 2022 · 664 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Data Mining
  • Biology

  The UCSC Genome Browser (https://genome.ucsc.edu) is an omics data consolidator, graphical viewer, and general bioinformatics resource that continues to serve the community as it enters its 23rd year. This year has seen an emphasis in clinical data, with new tracks and an expanded Recommended Track Sets feature on hg38 as well as the addition of a single cell track group. SARS-CoV-2 continues to remain a focus, with regular annotation updates to the browser and continued curation of our phylogenetic sequence placing tool, hgPhyloPlace, whose tree has now reached over 12M sequences. Our GenArk resource has also grown, offering over 2500 hubs and a system for users to request any absent assemblies. We have expanded our bigBarChart display type and created new ways to visualize data via bigRmsk and dynseq display. Displaying custom annotations is now easier due to our chromAlias system which eliminates the requirement for renaming sequence names to the UCSC standard. Users involved in data generation may also be interested in our new tools and trackDb settings which facilitate the creation and display of their custom annotations.

  PublisherDOI

• Variant interpretation: UCSC Genome Browser Recommended Track Sets

  Human Mutation · 2022-01-28 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  The UCSC Genome Browser has been an important tool for genomics and clinical genetics since the sequence of the human genome was first released in 2000. As it has grown in scope to display more types of data it has also grown more complicated. The data, which are dispersed at many locations worldwide, are collected into one view on the Browser, where the graphical interface presents the data in one location. This supports the expertise of the researcher to interpret variants in the genome. Because the analysis of single nucleotide variants and copy number variants require interpretation of data at very different genomic scales, different data resources are required. We present here several Recommended Track Sets designed to facilitate the interpretation of variants in the clinic, offering quick access to datasets relevant to the appropriate scale.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2022 update

  Nucleic Acids Research · 2021 · 303 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Data Mining
  • Biology

  The UCSC Genome Browser, https://genome.ucsc.edu, is a graphical viewer for exploring genome annotations. The website provides integrated tools for visualizing, comparing, analyzing, and sharing both publicly available and user-generated genomic datasets. Data highlights this year include a collection of easily accessible public hub assemblies on new organisms, now featuring BLAT alignment and PCR capabilities, and new and updated clinical tracks (gnomAD, DECIPHER, CADD, REVEL). We introduced a new Track Sets feature and enhanced variant displays to aid in the interpretation of clinical data. We also added a tool to rapidly place new SARS-CoV-2 genomes in a global phylogenetic tree enabling researchers to view the context of emerging mutations in our SARS-CoV-2 Genome Browser. Other new software focuses on usability features, including more informative mouseover displays and new fonts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Variant Interpretation: UCSC Genome Browser Recommended Track Sets

  2021-07-05 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  The UCSC Genome Browser has been an important tool for genomics and clinical genetics since the sequence of the human genome was first released in 2000. As it has grown in scope to display more types of data it has also grown more complicated. The data, which are dispersed at many locations worldwide, are collected into one view on the Browser, where the graphical interface presents the data in one location. This supports the expertise of the researcher to interpret variants in the genome. Because the analysis of Single Nucleotide Variants (SNVs) and Copy Number Variants (CNVs) require interpretation of data at very different genomic scales, different data resources are required. We present here several Recommended Track Sets designed to facilitate the interpretation of variants in the clinic, offering quick access to datasets relevant to the appropriate scale.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2021 update

  Nucleic Acids Research · 2020 · 632 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Data Mining
  • Biology

  For more than two decades, the UCSC Genome Browser database (https://genome.ucsc.edu) has provided high-quality genomics data visualization and genome annotations to the research community. As the field of genomics grows and more data become available, new modes of display are required to accommodate new technologies. New features released this past year include a Hi-C heatmap display, a phased family trio display for VCF files, and various track visualization improvements. Striving to keep data up-to-date, new updates to gene annotations include GENCODE Genes, NCBI RefSeq Genes, and Ensembl Genes. New data tracks added for human and mouse genomes include the ENCODE registry of candidate cis-regulatory elements, promoters from the Eukaryotic Promoter Database, and NCBI RefSeq Select and Matched Annotation from NCBI and EMBL-EBI (MANE). Within weeks of learning about the outbreak of coronavirus, UCSC released a genome browser, with detailed annotation tracks, for the SARS-CoV-2 RNA reference assembly.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Haussler

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  19 shared

• Hiram Clawson

  15 shared

• Brian J. Raney

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  14 shared

• Ann S. Zweig

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  14 shared

• Jonathan D. Casper

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  13 shared

• Brian T. Lee

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  13 shared

• Anna Benet‐Pagès

  Medical Genetics Center

  13 shared

• Maximilian Haeussler

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellowship from the Ford Foundation
• Fellowship from the American Association of University Women
• Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies
• Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award