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.

After the pandemic shut down movie theaters and slowed business for his film company in Singapore, Christian Lee (B.A., history, ’90) co-invented a new way for fans to enjoy films on the big screen.

Kirk Colvin spent a year as U.S. Coast Guard attaché to the American Embassy during the final months of the brutal Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier regime in the 1980s. His time there informed his novel Bloodless Coup, winner of the Maurice Prize for Fiction. The $10,000 prize is awarded to UC Davis alumni and was established in 2005 by bestselling author John Lescroart in honor of his father.

As an economics major with a passion for fashion, Jae Allen conceived a plan to help people declutter their closets and to keep unwanted outfits out of landfills. Before graduating last June, Allen found his way to the UC Davis Student Startup Center, where campus and business mentors helped him flesh out his business plan. As the center’s first entrepreneur-in-residence, he is preparing to launch his company, Ouros.

Attention unpublished Aggie alumni novelists!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.

Filmmaker Joseph Patel won both an Oscar and a Grammy this spring for the documentary Summer of Soul. The UC Davis economics alumnus credits his success to campus radio station KDVS.

Two students and three alumni of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science have been awarded Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants to study and teach in other countries.

UC Davis Medals will be presented this spring to two alumni couples — Jacque and Wayne Bartholomew, and Pam Rohrich and Karl Gerdes — each pair having met as students and committing not only to each other but their alma mater. The UC Davis Medal recognizes “extraordinary contributions that embody the campus’s Vision of Excellence.” The Bartholomews and Pam Rohrich are alumni of the College of Letters and Science.

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.

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.

Three recent doctoral degree recipients in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science have been awarded American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowships.

Two alumni from the College of Letters and Science have been awarded graduate fellowships from the American Meteorological Society (AMS).

For his graduate research comparing languages around the world, Lewis Lawyer couldn’t find a single published reference book on Patwin, an endangered language once spoken in hundreds of Northern California communities, including what is now Davis. So, on his way to completing his UC Davis doctorate, Lawyer wrote one. With the release of "A Grammar of Patwin," the findings of his dissertation are now available to scholars as well as to Patwin/Wintun people working to revitalize their ancestral language.