Erica Kohl-Arenas, faculty director of the UC Davis-based Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and an associate professor of American studies, has received a Freedom Scholars Initiative award of $250,000. She is one of only 12 winners of the new award given by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation.
In the first research of its kind, a new UC Davis study suggests that for the most part, people formulate goals consistent with their personality traits — and an individual’s goals are related to how their personality subsequently changes over time.
The Creative Writing Program of the UC Davis Department of English is expanding its reading series with online and in-person readings by visiting writers, creative writing Master of Fine Arts candidates, lecturers in the Creative Writing Program, and projects created in collaboration with art and music students.
After two decades of volunteer work with cancer charities, Will Ellis (B.A., communication and Italian, ’04) wasn’t about to let the cascading crises of 2020 derail him. Despite pandemic restrictions on in-person events, Ellis raised more than $103,000 in 10 weeks for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) Greater Bay Area Chapter to win its “Man of the Year” title.
New studies of a rare type of meteorite show that material from close to the sun reached the outer solar system even as the planet Jupiter cleared a gap in the disk of dust and gas from which the planets formed. The results, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, add to an emerging understanding of how our solar system formed and how planets form around other stars.
Two UC Davis historians have received funding from the National Park Service to address the educational gap in U.S. women’s history and role in the nation’s national parks. Professors Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa Materson will craft 80 biographies of women involved in national parks in the western region of the United States, and, in a longer article, connect those women’s lives to the ongoing struggle for voting rights.
Two alumni scholars who use digital media to help Indigenous communities recover their history and ancestral language have been selected by the American Council of Learned Societies as inaugural Emerging Voices Fellows.
Historian Oropeza also selected by Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities for Leadership Academy.
History professor Lorena Oropeza is having a leadership moment. On Thursday (Aug. 20), the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities named Oropeza as one of 26 fellows in the second cohort of its Leadership Academy/La Academia de Liderazgo. The same day, the UC Davis Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion announced her appointment as the interim associate vice chancellor for academic diversity.
Some 240 million years ago, a dolphin-like ichthyosaur ripped to pieces and swallowed another marine reptile only a little smaller than itself. Then it almost immediately died and was fossilized, preserving the first evidence of megapredation, or a large animal preying on another large animal. The fossil, discovered in 2010 in southwestern China, is described in a paper published Aug. 20 in the journal iScience.
