UC Research Grants Support Collaborative Faculty Projects
The UC Office of the President has awarded more than $9 million in grants to 16 collaborative research projects across the system. UC Davis College of Letters and Science researchers lead two of the projects and will participate in three others.
The grants led by Letters and Science faculty are:
UC Network on Child Health, Poverty and Public Policy — Marianne Page, professor of economics at UC Davis, will lead a team of experts from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and UCSF to shift from fragmented, discipline-specific approaches of studying childhood disparities to a multidisciplinary, comprehensive examination of the issue. The project goal is to understand how health and nutrition programs affect the health and development of disadvantaged children, as well as build relationships with policymakers. ($150,000)
The California Magnetic Resonance eXploration Initiative — The goal of this project is to develop a unique facility using magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study all the atoms in the Periodic Table. Current technology can only be used for about half the known elements. The new facility would enable unprecedented studies of atoms in living things, in natural materials and in technology, with potential for breakthrough discoveries in biology, physics, chemistry and materials science. The main activity of the project will be to hold meetings of researchers and conduct experiments at UC Santa Barbara. Professor David Britt, UC Davis Department of Chemistry, is a co-principal investigator with colleagues from UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara, which leads the project. ($270,000)
Other grants involving Letters and Science researchers:
Human Conditions: UC Humanities Initiative — This grant renews the UC Humanities Initiative, which supports innovative individual scholarship, collaborative research and public engagement activities in the humanities across all 10 campuses. The initiative will address how rapid changes in technology, the environment, politics, demographics and socioeconomics are impacting people. The initiative is led by Tyrus Miller, dean of the School of Humanities at UC Irvine, and includes Elizabeth Spiller, dean of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, and the other UC deans of humanities. ($1.9 million)
PlaceMakers: UC Place-Based Art + Design — Placemaking makes use of the inherent creativity of people and institutions to revitalize communities through art and design. This collaboration will identify place-based research that is reinventing spaces of higher education, foster collaborations and expand such initiatives across the UC system. The project is led by Kim Yasuda at UC Santa Barbara, with UC Davis’ Glenda Drew and Brett Snyder, professor and associate professor of design, respectively; and colleagues at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. ($270,000)
The Science of Dense Gluon Matter — This collaboration, led by UC Berkeley, will design detectors for the Electron-Ion Collider, a new particle accelerator proposed for the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The EIC is the only major particle accelerator currently planned in the United States. The group aims to use the EIC to study particles called gluons, which hold together other subatomic particles within atomic nuclei. UC Davis investigators are professors Manuel Calderon de la Barca Sanchez and Daniel Cebra of the Department of Physics. The project also includes researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside and will collaborate with the Berkeley, Los Alamos and Livermore national laboratories. ($265,000)
More information on the 2018 awards to UC Davis.
— Dateline News Staff