College Honors Four Faculty as Prized Teachers

Four faculty members have received the 2023 College of Letters and Science Teaching Awards. The awards recognize outstanding teaching on the undergraduate and graduate levels, both inside and outside the classroom.

Alumni Awards Go to Three College Graduates

Three alumni of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis — an international economist, a racial justice advocate, and an assets manager dedicated to supporting research and educational excellence — are recipients of Cal Aggie Alumni Association’s 2023 Alumni Awards.

5 Honored as Chancellor’s Fellows

Five associate professors in the College of Letters and Science have been honored with an additional title: Chancellor’s Fellow. Jessica Bissett Perea (Native American studies), Rana Jaleel (gender, sexuality and women’s studies), Xiaodong Li (statistics), David Olson (chemistry) and Caitlin Patler (sociology) are among 13 faculty campuswide selected to the 2022-23 class of Chancellor’s Fellows.

Few Hourly Workers Receive Pay Required by Law for Shift Cuts

In California and seven other states, and Washington, D.C., some hourly workers, by law, have to be compensated if they report to work only to have their shift cut short. But some hourly workers may not be receiving this pay, and if they are not, it’s often on the employees to call attention to the law, according to a UC Davis study.

How Has DACA Improved Birth Outcomes Among Mexican Immigrant Mothers?

Undocumented pregnant immigrant mothers and their newborn children often experience health difficulties because of the looming threat and fear of deportation. UC Davis sociologists looked at DACA’s positive impact on birth outcomes among a portion of Mexican-immigrant women in the United States. “We found that DACA was associated with improvements in the rates of low birth weight and very low birth weight, birth weight in grams, and gestational age among infants born to Mexican-immigrant mothers," they write in a new policy brief released by the UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research.

Chancellor's 'Face to Face' Program Features Sociologist

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.”

UC Davis to Host Mentoring Institute for Early Career Poverty Researchers

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.