English major Jumana Esau ’20 has won a prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship that will fully fund her Master of Philosophy in Criticism and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where she will examine the intersection of climate fiction and human rights.

Research by a UC Davis communication professor and colleagues finds that research shows that people who support President Donald Trump have lower trust in societal institutions, when compared with supporters of leading Democratic candidates Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.

Marianne Page, professor of economics and director of the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis, has been appointed to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new Council of Economic Advisors.

The first encyclopedia to merge global history and LGBTQ history into one resource, edited by UC Davis historian Howard Chiang, was named the best reference source of 2019. The landmark "Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History" won the 2020 Dartmouth Medal, presented by the American Library Association.

Aaron French, a doctoral student in religious studies, recently wrote a piece for The Conversation about "The Mandela Effect," the collective misremembering of common events or details, and a recent movie that gave the phenomenon widespread attention. He writes here about how the effect is connected to studies, research and writing.

With California Sen. Kamala Harris out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, UC Davis communication professor Magdalena Wojcieszak and colleagues investigated who her supporters are likely to vote for.

Despite the ongoing threat of misinformation spreading online, UC Davis cognitive scientist Seth Frey still believes in the promise of the internet as a force for political and economic empowerment. The National Science Foundation recently awarded Frey and colleagues at three other universities a $460,000 grant to study how groups create and enforce self-rule in a wide array of domains, including Frey’s focus: Reddit forums (called subreddits) and video games.

Social media are a powerful tool to spread information — and misinformation — about health issues such as vaccines and cancer prevention. How does bad information spread online, and what is the best way to stop it? That is a topic being studied by Assistant Professor Jingwen Zhang and her students in the UC Davis Department of Communication.

The choices we make in large group settings, such as in online forums and social media, might seem fairly automatic. But our decision-making process is more complicated than we know. So, researchers at the University of Washington and UC Davis have been working to understand what’s behind that seemingly intuitive process. The research has discovered that in large groups of essentially anonymous members, people make choices based on a model of the “mind of the group” and an evolving simulation of how a choice will affect that theorized mind.

Why are people often only fleetingly happy about positive events, but persistently upset about negative events like setbacks? Alison Ledgerwood, behavioral scientist, professor of psychology and chancellor’s fellow at UC Davis, has conducted extensive research to understand this.