CARTA (Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny) was established at UC San Diego in 2008 as a forum for academics throughout the world to explore questions of human origins through transdisciplinary collaborations. These collaborations mostly spring from CARTA’s symposia, which bring together an international cadre of eminent scientists from diverse fields to address specific topics pertaining to human origins.
The symposia are held three times per year and the location rotates between the Salk Institute, UCSD Campus and UCSD Medical School. They are free and open to the public and their popularity continues to grow. Attendance, which is made up of faculty and students from a number of colleges and universities in our area, as well as the public at large, ranges from 300-800. Recently, a live webcast was added to enable worldwide access to the talks. Viewers have tuned in from as far away as Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Mexico, UK, and South America.
All CARTA symposia are video recorded by UCSD-TV, broadcast on the UCSD-TV channel, and then archived on various websites (CARTA, UCSD-TV, iTunes, YouTube). Viewership of these videos is escalating as more videos come online and as awareness of CARTA increases. In just 4 years, the number of downloads of CARTA videos and audio podcasts has topped 10 million, with recent “hits” topping half a million per month. To see a list of CARTA's symposia, both past and future, please visit CARTA's website at http://carta.anthropogeny.org.
