On the first episode of "The Backdrop," a UC Davis podcast exploring the world of ideas, historian Kathryn Olmsted discusses her work studying the history and impact of conspiracy theories on American society and politics. She also offers advice on how people can avoid falling prey to them.
Professor of Mathematics Jesús De Loera has received the Farkas Prize, awarded annually to a mid-career researcher in the field of optimization by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Optimization Society.
Distinguished Professor Isabel Montañez and Professor Qing-zhu Yin of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences have been named fellows of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Carlito Lebrilla, Distinguished Professor of chemistry, is one of 11 UC Davis researchers named in the annual Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list released by the Web of Science Group.
The UC Davis Department of Statistics continues to lead in educating undergraduates, ranking third among statistics degree-granting institutions in the U.S. in 2019, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
An international team of climate scientists, including Professor Isabel Montañez at the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, suggests that researchers using numerical models to predict future climate change should include simulations of past climates in their evaluation and statement of their model performance.
The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) has received a grant of almost $1 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to fund international science exchanges on quantum matter.
When UC Davis political scientist Amber Boydstun co-founded the Women Also Know Stuff initiative in 2016, the idea went beyond amplifying the voices of her female colleagues around the world. A primary goal was to improve political science. In a major nod to the project’s success so far, the American Political Science Association recently awarded Boydstun and 11 colleagues a $25,000 grant to broaden the impact of its searchable online database of female political scientists.
LibreTexts, a free textbook project launched by UC Davis chemistry professor Delmar Larsen, has now passed a half-billion page views since it was founded in 2008 as ChemWiki.
Much of what scientists know about human learning, visual attention and memory comes from laboratory studies involving artificial tasks, like watching and recalling words or colored shapes flashed on a computer monitor. Two UC Davis research teams, with support from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, will study the development of learning in a wide range of ages — from infancy to young adulthood — in more naturalistic settings.
Jaroslav Trnka, associate professor of physics, has won the 2020 Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics from the American Physical Society (APS). Trnka is a member of the Center for Quantum Mathematics and Physics (QMAP), a joint center in the UC Davis Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Mathematics.
Information has become increasingly important in how we understand our world, from sprawling social networks to the tiniest building blocks of matter. The idea that information underlies reality has long fascinated physicist Fabio Anza, a postdoctoral fellow at the Complexity Sciences Center who researches quantum mechanics and quantum information theory.
The Department of Physics has changed its name to the Department of Physics and Astronomy to better reflect its breadth of teaching and faculty expertise.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity is curvature in the fabric of spacetime. Shockwaves can distort spacetime, causing singularities where the laws of physics appear to break down.
Now two mathematicians at UC Davis have come up with equations that remove these singularities. In doing so, they also extend a theorem called Uhlenbeck Compactness to the setting of General Relativity.
