Shiva Ahmadi, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Art and Art History, has an upcoming exhibition of 19 paintings in “Shiva Ahmadi: Strands of Resilience” at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art Jan. 28 – May 6.
At the recent reopening of the UC Davis Gorman Museum of Native American Art, student Jada McCovey sat at a table in the redwoods next to the museum. On the table before her were finely carved bones and antlers with dark incised lines, all meticulously handcrafted by her grandfather George Blake.
In nature, organic molecules are either left- or right-handed, but synthesizing molecules with a specific handedness in a lab is hard to do. Make a drug or enzyme with the wrong “handedness” and it just won’t work. Now chemists at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis are getting closer to mimicking nature’s chemical efficiency through computational modeling and physical experimentation.
This March, Tracy C. Dyson, who graduated from the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis with a doctorate in chemistry in 1997, will travel to the ISS as a flight engineer and member of the Expedition 70/71 crew. The journey marks her third trip to space where she has seen our planet from both inside the International Space Station (ISS) and outside of it during spacewalks.
Earlier this year, a team of researchers from the UC Davis Institute for Psychedelic and Neurotherapeutics revealed in Science that psychedelics spur cortical neuron growth by activating intracellular pools of 5-HT2A receptors. This neuroplasticity combats withering dendritic spines, a characteristic of several neuropsychiatric disorders.
Focusing on the Lake Titicaca Basin in the Andes mountains, a team of anthropologists led by UC Davis anthropology graduate student Luis Flores-Blanco, found through analysis of 1,179 projectile points that the rise of archery technology dates to around 5,000 years ago.
L&S psychology major Jeevan Mann is already working to help others with his rare genetic condition that has made completing his studies a battle. He graduates this fall having also established a charitable organization and studied for a career as a medical researcher and clinician.
New research shows that a person’s ideological leaning might affect what videos YouTube’s algorithms recommend to them. For right-leaning users, video recommendations are more likely to come from channels that share political extremism, conspiracy theories and otherwise problematic content.
You don't have to be a student at UC Davis to learn from these professors. Their knowledge about Earth and its environment is woven throughout these new books, including two from College of Letters and Science faculty, that came out in 2023 or are about to be published.
As a UC Davis associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at the College of Letters and
Science, Jesús Velázquez employs his chemistry expertise to synthesize
materials useful for environmental remediation, transforming carbon dioxide-based
waste streams, and energy conversion and storage. With his sights set on transforming
the world for the better through chemistry, Velázquez, ever humble, never fails to thank
the family members and academic mentors who guided his life path. Their imprint
echoes into today, informing how he mentors and teaches.
