Attention unpublished Aggie alumni novelists! After a yearlong hiatus, the Maurice Prize for Fiction is back — and bigger than ever before. The $10,000 award, doubled in size this year, recognizes the best book-length prose fiction written by a UC Davis graduate who has not yet published or been accepted for publication by the contest deadline. Manuscript submissions are being accepted through July 15 for the 2022 contest.
To uncover something new, first you must look far into the past. That’s what the producers of the IMAX film Secrets of the Universe did, explaining how physics professor Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez’s hunt for answers about what happened moments after the dawn of time is built upon scientific discoveries of the past.
Assistant professor Jesús Velázquez, a material chemist in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, is one of 18 faculty in the U.S. selected as Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars for 2022. These faculty are within the first five years of their academic careers, have each created an outstanding independent body of scholarship and are deeply committed to education. Each Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar receives an unrestricted research grant of $100,000.
Three faculty members from the University of California, Davis, have been elected as members of the National Academy of Sciences. They are among 120 new members and 30 international members announced by the academy May 3.
Sudipta Sen, a professor of history and Middle East/South Asian studies, was recently awarded a Sir Williams Jones Memorial Medal from the Asiatic Society of India for his influential work on the history of South Asia. Sen is a historian of the late Mughal and early British India and the British Empire, and of the environment.
Two UC Davis College of Letters and Science students will travel to Morocco and Brazil this summer for intensive foreign language and cultural studies as part of a U.S. Department of State program. Charles Sills, a history doctoral student, and Carlie Whiteman, an undergraduate communication major, are among five UC Davis students selected by the State Department as 2022 Critical Language Scholars.
The UC Davis Academic Senate and Academic Federation recently announced their annual awards given to members for exceptional research, teaching and mentoring, and public service. Three faculty members in the College of Letters and Science have been recognized.
The first three recipients of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science Dean’s Faculty Fellowships will give talks about the research they have been conducting with support from the fellowship. All talks are online and begin at 4 p.m. on April 5, 19 and May 17.
UC Davis College of Letters and Science graduate programs in psychology, statistics and earth science rank in the top 20 in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2023 Best Graduate Schools rankings.
Two faculty members in the College of Letters and Science have been awarded fellowships from the UC Davis Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement to develop new undergraduate courses focused on human rights.
The UC Davis Cal Aggie Alumni Association named Debby Stegura (B.A., mass communications and political science, ’79) as the recipient of its 2022 Aggie Service Award on March 8. Stegura is a longtime community leader and University of California and Aggie advocate.
Sarah Stewart, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Davis, will discuss planetary collisions and the discovery of a new type of astronomical object at a public lecture supported by the Winston Ko Professorship in Science Leadership. Stewart’s presentation will be “A New Creation Story for the Earth and Moon.”
Energy economics studies at UC Davis recently received an investment in its future with a power industry group’s creation of a graduate student fellowship. The Western Power Trading Forum (WPTF), a Sacramento-based association that advocates for competitive market rules in Western states, funded the fellowship for five years to help cultivate the next generation of energy thought leaders.
Chemistry professor Louise Berben is the lead principal investigator for one of five University of California research projects recently awarded nearly $19 million in grants by the UC National Laboratory Fees Research Program.
Three faculty from the UC Davis College of Letters and Science are among 564 newly elected Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Professor Davide Donadio, Department of Chemistry, Professor Fernanda Ferreira, Department of Psychology, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus John Gunion, Department of Physics and Astronomy.
