Tom Lin, a UC Davis doctoral student in English, has won the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. At 25, Lin is the youngest writer to ever win the award.
College students are often told undergraduate research will give them an edge in the job market. But the steps involved in finding a project can seem daunting. UC Davis makes the process easier with courses that open doors to meaningful research for all students.
A team of UC Davis students has placed first overall in the First Nations Launch competition sponsored by NASA and the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium.
An aspiring policymaker intent on addressing inequities in education and a documentary filmmaker are the recipients of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science’s top prizes for graduating seniors.
When UC Davis design major Matthew Kwong began looking online for places to get tested for COVID-19, he found little and bad information.
He figured if finding a testing site was difficult for a tech-savvy 20-year-old, for others — especially vulnerable and elderly populations — it would be nearly impossible. So, he spent months creating an interactive COVID-19 testing site map.
In an election year with record turnout among young voters, 22-year-old Hipolito Angel Cerros took civic engagement a step beyond most of his peers. Cerros, a science and technology studies (STS) major at UC Davis, won a seat on the city council in his hometown of Lindsay, in California’s Central Valley.
“I couldn’t sit idly by and watch events unfold around me,” Cerros said. “I wanted to make an impact.”
Each year, the UC Davis College of Letters and Science names two graduating seniors as the Herbert A. Young Award and Leon H. Mayhew Memorial Award recipients in recognition of outstanding academic achievement, community service and extracurricular involvement in the college. The college honors and celebrates the incredible leadership that both these students have shown our academic community.
An English major — who aims to use fiction to address climate change and help its refugees — will be honored as the top graduating senior at the University of California, Davis, during its online graduation celebration Friday, June 12. Jumana Esau is being awarded the University Medal, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate studies, outstanding community service, and the promise of future scholarship and contributions to society.
Undergraduate research provides students with skills that employers value, including critical thinking, collaboration and communication. One way students practice those skills is participating in the annual Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities Conference.
Held in January 2020, the UC Davis hackathon brought together more than 600 of the most talented students in California to develop apps that address the world's most pressing social issues.
Getting research experience as an undergraduate student doesn’t have to mean working in a laboratory. Instead of days spent transferring fluids from one tube to another, math major Tracy Camacho explored matroids, complex mathematical objects with many different uses.
Ellen Caminiti had a speech impediment as a child, was painfully shy when she started at UC Davis, wandered in her studies and was dismissed for poor academic performance. But the 24-year-old will stand center stage to share her journey and message of encouragement with more than 800 fellow graduates and thousands of guests at the fall commencement at 10 a.m. on Saturday in the Pavilion at the ARC.
Students from any major on campus can engage in undergraduate research in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science. As a senior, Cole Williams pursued his interests in genetics with a project in the lab of Brenna Henn, associate professor of anthropology. Williams, a genetics and genomics major in the College of Biological Sciences, designed an algorithm capable of handling diverse population and complex family genealogies in human genomic datasets.
Psychology and biological sciences senior Wenzhe Li rotated through two labs at UC Davis before finding her research passion: cytoplasmic dynein, a motor protein used for intracellular transport. Li conducts research in the lab of Richard McKenney, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. She was awarded the Ronald and Lydia Baskin Research Award, given to a graduating senior for excellence in research in the biological sciences.
