Twenty years after then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a now-famous statement distinguishing "known knowns," "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns, a UC Davis economist is developing a logic for analyzing the most unpredictable category — the “unknown unknowns.”

Suad Joseph, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, is among a cohort of three interdisciplinary teams awarded $45,000 each from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to advance public understanding of global religions. The new award builds on an ongoing UC Davis project on Muslim women and the media, as well as a New York Times media project, both led by Joseph. “Decolonizing the Representation of Muslim Women in the Media: Training Next Generation Journalists” is an extension of Joseph's 25 years as general editor of "Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures."

A five-year, National Institutes of Health-funded study that revealed new insights into teen bullying, dating violence and substance use is getting a sequel — this time looking at long-term impacts of racism.

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.

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.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Iowa State University have received a $700,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to discover and synthesize new crystalline materials called clathrates with outstanding properties for renewable energy applications, including thermoelectric energy conversion.

Faculty in the College of Letters and Science will provide students with global learning experiences and work on campus goals such as ending hunger and eradicating inequalities through grants from UC Davis Global Affairs.

Students from around the United States will receive education and training in nuclear science at UC Davis thanks to a $25 million grant to the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium (NSSC). UC Davis is one of 11 universities in the consortium, which is led by UC Berkeley.

The UC Office of the President recently awarded around $19 million total for Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) in agriculture, the coronavirus, humanities and culture, state policy on social and economic issues, and the Electron-Ion Collider.