Psychologist Honored for Early Career Contributions

The American Psychological Association recently selected Assistant Professor Eliza Bliss-Moreau for a 2018 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology for her research on the biological underpinnings of emotion.

Science

Music Fest Gives Composers Unique Collaborative Experience

The UC Davis Department of Music’s Revision/s Festival has brought together eight emerging composers and top professional ensembles – including the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra – for a six-months-long collaboration culminating in three concerts.

Arts

Professor Emeritus Receives Two Major Awards

Internationally renowned artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, UC Davis professor emeritus, is receiving major awards from the College Art Association and the Women’s Caucus for the Arts.

Arts

Grad Slam Contest for Grad Students Open

Registration is open until January 19 for the UC Davis Grad Slam contest, in which graduate students compete to inform and entertain a general audience with three-minute talks based on their own research.

Science

Historian Wins Equity Prize

Associate Professor Lorena Oropeza received the 2017 Equity Award from the American Historical Association last week for excellence in recruiting and retaining historians from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.

Society and Culture

Events Focus on Controversy Over Confederate Monuments

The role of monuments to the Confederacy, and the recent movement to remove them, will be the core subject of two UC Davis events in January.

Society and Culture

Faculty Receive NEH Grants for Sound Studies, Islamic History Projects

UC Davis College of Letters and Science faculty members have been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for two projects: developing tools for analyzing radio plays, poetry readings, talking books and other sound recordings, and writing a history of six centuries of Islam.

Society and Culture

Doing Without Dark Energy

Mathematicians Blake Temple and Zeke Vogler at the University of California, Davis, and Joel Smoller at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, worked out solutions to General Relativity without invoking dark energy. They argue that the equations show that the Friedmann space-time is actually unstable: Any perturbation — for example if the density of matter is a bit lower than average — pushes it over into an accelerating universe.

Science

Smells Like A Cool Class

Dust off your favorite flannel and Nirvana tee. Professor Robert Newcomb of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese has found a way to bring grunge – its music and culture – to UC Davis with his class, “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Grunge and the Seattle Sound.”

Arts

Film Fest Focuses on South Asian Diversity

UC Davis will host its first South Asian Film Festival on Saturday, Jan. 20, 2018, screening four films with a broad view of South Asians around the world—one of them featuring alumnus and comedian Hasan Minhaj.

Society and Culture

New Chancellor Takes Part in Star Trek and Human Rights Talk

What does it mean to be human? UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May and the director of Humans Rights Studies, Professor Keith Watenpaugh, sat down to explore this question together through an unusual lens: “Star Trek.”

Society and Culture

Student Awarded Phi Kappa Phi Study Abroad Grant

Shengling “Wilburn” Wang, a senior majoring in communication and economics, was recently awarded a $1,000 study abroad grant from the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. Wang will use the grant for a three-week UC Davis Study Abroad seminar in Pokhara, Nepal, over the winter break.

Student News

Rarity Can Be Key to Survival, Not Just Extinction

Some species have always been rare — occurring in small densities throughout their range — throughout their evolutionary history. A perspective paper from in the journal Ecology Letters suggests that for many species, rarity is not a guarantee of impending extinction.

Science

From Solar to Spam in Art and Science Talk

Art and science rarely work alone. On Nov. 16, the UC Davis Department of Design demonstrated the integration of art and science at its quarterly presentation of LASER: Conversations in Art and Science.

Society and Culture

Four College Graduates to Receive Alumni Association Awards

Four College of Letters and Science alumni are among this year’s UC Davis Cal Aggie Alumni Association award winners—one of them, Patrick Sherwood, receiving the association’s top alumni honor. Other college honorees are Liliana Ferrer, Margaret Lapiz and Jesse Rodriguez.

Alumni News