Awards & Laurels

University of California, Davis, evolutionary biologist Rachael Bay has been awarded a 2021 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The fellowship offers Bay, assistant professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, College of Biological Sciences, an opportunity to advance her work on the role of human action on evolutionary trajectories of species.

Gerald Quon, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Genome Center, has received a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award will support the development of a computational framework for characterizing how genetic variants associated with the risk of psychiatric diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder work at the at the cellular level.

Four members of the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences are recipients of 2021 Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. Two undergraduate students, a faculty member and a postdoctoral researcher were among those honored by UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May at the virtual awards ceremony.

A team of scientists from UC Davis and Rice University are starting small as they begin to figure out how to build an artificial brain from the bottom up.

Celina Juliano, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Jacob Robinson of Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering have won a $1 million Keck Foundation grant to advance the team’s synthetic neurobiology effort to define the connections between neurons and muscles that drive programmed behaviors in living animals.

When Madeline Bright was young, she was told she asked a lot of questions.

Today that same curiosity is leading her toward a career in medical research where she hopes to find life-saving answers.

Three UC Davis researchers, including Assistant Professor James Letts, will receive funding from the Early Career Research Program of the U.S. Department of Energy. They are among 83 researchers at U.S. universities and national laboratories funded by the program this year. The awards are of $150,000 for summer salary and research expenses each year and are intended to last for five years.

All three of the Science, Engineering and Math winners at this year’s Norma J. Lang Prize for Undergraduate Information Research are College of Biological Sciences students. Barry Nguyen, a biochemistry and molecular biology major, won first-place, and the second- and third-place winners, Katherine Hand and La Rissa Vasquez respectively, are neurobiology, physiology and behavior majors.

Two University of California, Davis, juniors are among the winners of the nation’s premier undergraduate award of its type in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.

Two professors and an alumnus from the Center for Population Biology were among those elected to the National Academy of Sciences, as announced on Monday, April 26. “This is a thrill for the UC Davis community,” said Chancellor Gary May, who lauded the achievement of this year’s electees as one of the highest honors in the scientific community.

Jodi Nunnari, a distinguished professor and chair in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is one of four UC Davis professors who have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and others, the academy honors excellence and includes leaders from every field of human endeavor including scientists, artists, performers, poets and political leaders.