As the fruit trees bloom, seeds sprout and gardens fill with flowers, the UC Davis Humanities Institute will delve into the rich cultural landscape of California in the next few months with its year-long public initiative, “CULTIVATION: Food, Farming, and Heritage in the Sacramento Valley and Beyond.” The upcoming events are focused on Asian and South Asian contributions.
Caden Williams is among 413 college students nationwide selected from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants to receive the prestigious STEM scholarship, which was established by Congress in 1986 to honor the late U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater. The award provides up to $7,500 for college expenses. This is the sixth consecutive year that a UC Davis student has been named a Goldwater Scholar.
After a full day of teaching, research and meetings, Annaliese Franz dons a brown cotton jacket and indigo pants, cinches her black belt into a tight knot and, bowing, steps barefoot onto the wooden floor of a karate dojo near campus.
Social media connects people and amplifies different aspects of humanity in good and bad ways. But the effects of social media appear neither universally good nor bad, but rather present an oscillating, dynamic system that can be divisive but also uniting, a new UC Davis study suggests.
To glimpse the earliest days of the cosmos, astronomers like UC Davis Associate Professor Tucker Jones rely not only on the magnification of telescopes, but also on powerful natural magnification from our cosmic neighbors in the form of gravitational lenses. For Jones, identifying these gravitational lenses is a first step to understanding the origin of the cosmos.
From addressing racial disparities to restoring forests, five newly funded public engagement projects in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis will help communities in California and around the world shape their future.
UC Davis is hosting two internationally acclaimed artists who will give public talks, screen films and work directly with students in May. Lynn Hershman Leeson and Shimon Attie are presented by The Manetti Shrem California Studio in the Department of Art and Art History, housed in the College of Letters and Science. The California Studio is part of UC Davis art studio and underwritten by a gift from Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem.
Lucy Corin, a UC Davis Department of English professor of creative writing, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She plans to use the fellowship to work on her next novel, tentatively titled Les and Rae. She is one of eight fiction writers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship this year.
“(The book) is about a couple who respond to current cultural pressures differently — one joins an underground gun group and one sneaks away into the woods at the edge of their neighborhood,” she said.
Eleven faculty members from the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis were recently awarded Revitalization Research Program Grants. Intended to support faculty whose research programs have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the college-funded grants support the continuation or completion of stalled, high-priority projects.
About 30 scholars, including many UC Davis graduate and undergraduate students, will present research at a two-day Department of Spanish and Portuguese colloquium titled “Digital Landscapes: Paths to Reparative Justice in a Technological World.” The 16th annual Samuel G. Armistead Colloquium in Latin American and Peninsular Languages, Literature and Cultures will delve into the relationship among the humanities, technological resources and social justice. The hybrid event, mostly in Spanish, takes place April 6 and 7 in person with virtual options.
Beneath the concrete world discernible to our senses is a world of building blocks. A world of molecules, and beneath that, atoms. The organization of these individual parts dictates the properties of materials. In Professor of Chemistry Davide Donadio's lab, Frank Cerasoli, a postdoctoral researcher, uses computer simulations to model materials at the molecular level, with the hope of discovering new materials that can advance our technologies.
This article highlights and summarizes a policy brief written by Marianne Bitler, professor of economics at UC Davis, about Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Some previous studies have found that food insecurity and food-bank utilization increased when children age out of WIC eligibility, while others have found no such effects. In a study, Bitler and colleagues explored the spillover effects of child WIC participation on other family members’ food consumption, biomarkers, and food security.
Three College of Letters and Science graduate students will test their research communication prowess at the upcoming 2023 UC Davis Grad Slam. Created and organized by Graduate Studies, the competition provides 10 graduate students the opportunity to present a three-minute pitch about their research. The competition will be held at the UC Davis Graduate Center on April 6 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Mark your calendars because the R. Bryan Miller Symposium returns this April for its first in-person event since 2020. Featuring a stellar lineup of high-profile speakers and leading-edge researchers in chemical biology, organic, medicinal and pharmaceutical chemistry, the 23rd annual symposium creates a pipeline between academia and industry, allowing students to network, present their research and learn skills pivotal to their future professional careers. The free event is scheduled for April 13 and 14 at the UC Davis Conference Center.
Melinda Guzman, Cathy Rodriguez Aguirre and Lydia Ramirez attended UC Davis at different times, pursued different majors in the College of Letters and Science, and followed different paths to successful careers in law, business advocacy and banking. Their paths converged at various times, most recently with a shared honor: each was named to The Sacramento Bee’s inaugural list of Top 25 Latino Change Makers for leading positive transformations in their communities.