Political scientist Edmond Costantini traced his keen interest in politics and current events to a decade he spent as a youth delivering newspapers in Manhattan in New York, where his customers included future President Dwight D. Eisenhower and activist Eugene Debs. Costantini, who died Jan. 10 in Davis at age 89, would later become a sought-after news source himself for his expertise on California elections and politics.
A year ago on Jan. 6, supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. What is the historical context of the attack and what does it mean for the future of the nation? Four UC Davis historians will discuss the insurrection and its implications for the midterm congressional elections at an online forum on Tuesday, Jan. 11, from 3:10 to 4:30 p.m. PST.
Undocumented pregnant immigrant mothers and their newborn children often experience health difficulties because of the looming threat and fear of deportation. UC Davis sociologists looked at DACA’s positive impact on birth outcomes among a portion of Mexican-immigrant women in the United States. “We found that DACA was associated with improvements in the rates of low birth weight and very low birth weight, birth weight in grams, and gestational age among infants born to Mexican-immigrant mothers," they write in a new policy brief released by the UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research.
The Tibetan Plateau has long been considered one of the last places to be populated by people in their migration around the globe. A new paper by archaeologists at UC Davis highlights that our extinct cousins, the Denisovans, reached the “roof of the world” about 160,000 years ago — 120,000 years earlier than previous estimates for our species — and even contributed to our adaptation to high altitude.
Christopher K. Tong (Ph.D., comparative literature, ’14) was recently awarded an early career fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Program in China Studies.
Connections that UC Davis scholars built across campus and continents have led to a $298,000 National Science Foundation award to engage with Inuit fermenters in Greenland and support them in identifying the challenges and opportunities for creating a resurgence in Inuit fermented foods. Their research is part of “Navigating the New Arctic,” one of NSF's 10 Big Ideas.
When you're "in the zone" — experiencing flow — what is your brain doing? In a study of 140 video game players, a UC Davis assistant professor of communication and cognitive science found that flow involves energy-efficient networking of brain regions.
Language is an intricate tool of expression, and UC Davis linguistics doctoral candidate Peter Torres has unraveled some of its complexities by analyzing doctor-patient conversations about opioid use and addiction.
As a recipient of a Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellows scholarship, UC Davis professor Sunaina Maira planned to explore how former President Donald Trump’s travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries impacted Arab American communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then COVID-19 hit, requiring Maira to shift approach.
Research by UC Davis linguistics professor Robert Bayley and colleagues on Black American Sign Language is now a Linguistics Society of America award winner. Bayley shares the society’s 2022 Linguistics, Language and the Public Award.
Tamara Swaab, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Psychology and at the Center for Mind and Brain, was recently named a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science for her contributions to the understanding of human language and cognition.
The American Public Health Association recently presented Jingwen Zhang, a UC Davis assistant professor of communication, with its 2021 Ayman El-Mohandes Young Professional Public Health Innovation Award. One of the association’s top awards, it recognizes a public health professional, age 40 or younger, who is using an innovative solution to address a complex public health issue.
This month’s guest on Chancellor Gary S. May’s Face to Face program is researching a topic of particular interest to the chancellor: the kind of place where he grew up. Orly Clerge, a UC Davis assistant professor of sociology, is studying how suburbs change when Black residents “infuse their identity, their politics, their economic rationales into the overall structure of these places.”
Very young children learn words at a tremendous rate. Now researchers at the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis have for the first time seen how specific brain regions activate as 2-year-olds remember newly learned words — while the children were sleeping. The work is published Oct. 19 in Current Biology.
The UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research recently received a $353,421 federal grant to launch a program to help up-and-coming poverty scholars get their careers off to a strong start. The Early Career Mentoring Institute, which will run for one week each spring of 2022, 2024 and 2026, aims to nurture a diversity of scholars studying poverty and social mobility.
