Volunteer leadership is helping to ensure the longevity of the venerable C.N. Gorman Museum and its smooth transition to a new home on campus. Longtime arts champions Bill and Nancy Roe recently pledged $250,000 toward its expansion.
Ronald Whitney-Whyte (B.S., design, ’75) has made a planned gift of $1 million to the College to support undergraduates majoring in design. Whitney-Whyte’s gift will establish two endowed funds, one to provide students with supplies and the other to support scholarships for junior and senior design majors.
With the United States taking its place as a global power after World War I, scholars began exploring questions that would develop into a discipline known as American studies in the 1930s. Over the next several decades, American studies programs were created across the United States, including in 1969 at UC Davis. The program, a department in the College of Letters and Science since 2016, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It is the only Department of American Studies in the University of California system.
Seven assistant professors in the College of Letters and Science have been named to UC Davis’ newest class of Hellman Fellows. The Hellman Fellows Fund provides grants to more than 100 junior faculty members annually at all 10 UCs and four private institutions. The fellowships of up to $50,000 are intended to give early-career faculty extra support for their research.
When George “Ron” Mangun led a campuswide effort to launch the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain in 2002, he declared, “This is the most exciting time in mind and brain research in human history.” In an interview, Mangun talks about becoming the center's director for a second time and the even greater potential for mind and brain breakthroughs today.
Kathryn Olmsted, a UC Davis history professor, wrote an essay for Robert Arneson exhibition catalog in New York. Robert Arneson/The Anti-War Works: 1982-1986 is on view at the George Adams Gallery in Manhattan through Oct. 26.
About 200 million years ago, much of the life on Earth was wiped out in the end-Triassic mass extinction. The catastrophe may have been caused by climate change related to massive volcanic eruptions.
UC Davis anthropologist Jeffrey Kahn’s book on Haitian boat migration to the United States is the co-winner of the 2019 Avant Garde Book Prize from the Haitian Studies Association. The award selection committee called Kahn’s book, "Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire" (Chicago University Press, 2019) a “timely and important contribution” to the field.
Craig Tracy, distinguished professor of mathematics, and Professor Harold Widom of UC Santa Cruz will receive the 2020 Steele Prize for Seminal Contributions to Research from the American Mathematical Society.
New measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe, led by astronomers at the University of California, Davis, add to a growing mystery: Estimates of a fundamental constant made with different methods keep giving different results.
A breakthrough by UC Davis mathematicians could help scientists get three or four times the performance from supercomputers used to model protein folding, turbulence and other complex atomic scale problems.
The UC Davis College of Letters and Science has established a new prize to recognize and support faculty whose research, teaching, and service exemplifies the transformational intellectual and human value of the liberal arts and sciences. For 2019-20, the prize will include a privately funded award of $10,000.
