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.
Mark Mascal, professor of chemistry in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, will spend a year in Washington, D.C., as a Jefferson Science Fellow advising the U.S. Department of State on matters of sustainability.
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.
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.
The American Physical Society has awarded the Stanford R. Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship to Jesús Velázquez, assistant professor of chemistry.
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.”
In the epic Tamil poem from the ninth century, Tiruvāymoḻi, Nammāḻvār sings of his ecstatic devotion to God. Thanks to Archana Venkatesan, UC Davis professor of religious studies and comparative literature, the poem sings in English as well. Her translation, Endless Song, has won the 2021 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize from the American Literary Translators Association.
Coordinating the emergency response to an erupting volcano is an all-hands-on-deck affair that leaves little time for extra work, such as answering boatloads of inquiries from researchers who want to collect rock samples. On the other hand, science done during eruptions provides essential data for understanding and forecasting future volcanic flare-ups.
There is an alarming shortfall of particle physicists prepared to design instruments that open pathways to Nobel Prize-winning discoveries like neutrino oscillations and the Higgs boson. To help fill the gap, the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $3.7 million to a consortium led by the University of California, Davis, to train 32 graduate students in high energy physics instrumentation.
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.
Seven faculty members in the College of Letters and Science have been named to the newest class of the UC Davis Society of Hellman Fellows.
They are among 15 assistant professors across UC Davis awarded 2021-22 Hellman Fellowships, which provide research funding to faculty members when they need it the most: early in their careers.
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.
The California Lighting Technology Center (CLTC) was recently awarded $4.2 million from the California Energy Commission to develop and demonstrate renewable energy and high-quality outdoor lighting systems in low-income communities.
