A UC Davis history doctoral candidate who blends multiple disciplines in his study of Mexico’s mining industry has been awarded a $50,000 fellowship for pathbreaking dissertation research.
Caden Williams is among 413 college students nationwide selected from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants to receive the prestigious STEM scholarship, which was established by Congress in 1986 to honor the late U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater. The award provides up to $7,500 for college expenses. This is the sixth consecutive year that a UC Davis student has been named a Goldwater Scholar.
Three College of Letters and Science graduate students will test their research communication prowess at the upcoming 2023 UC Davis Grad Slam. Created and organized by Graduate Studies, the competition provides 10 graduate students the opportunity to present a three-minute pitch about their research. The competition will be held at the UC Davis Graduate Center on April 6 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
An app founded by a UC Davis graduate student is poised to revolutionize financial investing for the socially conscious. Fennel, a mobile investing app that gives users insights into a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics, was recently named one of Fast Company’s “10 most innovative companies in personal finance of 2023.” What’s more, the company has raised roughly $8.5 million in seed funding to support its growth during its beta stages.
Ten doctoral students across many disciplines in the College of Letters and Science and two students from outside the college will present research done as UC Davis Hemispheric Institute on the Americas Summer Fellowship recipients. The fellowships allowed the students to travel to further their scholarship into diverse topics ranging from music about the Panama Canal to examining human remains for insights into drought and societal collapse in Peru.
For roughly five years, Alba Rodríguez Padilla, a doctoral student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has studied the physics and geology underlying earthquakes. Her research will help inform policymakers and engineers responsible for creating earthquake insurance policies and building new infrastructure.
Design2Data is a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that teaches students an enzyme design-build-test workflow, allowing them to contribute knowledge to an open access database. Since its launch, the course has been rolled out to 25 institutions across the nation.
There’s no word in Bao Vue’s native language for “chemistry.” The science subject is not easily expressed in Hmong vocabulary. In fact, the same can be said for the concept of “science” itself. But when Vue was 9 years old, she and her family fled their home for safety.
Today, she's a chemistry doctoral candidate in UC Davis Professor of Chemistry Jacquelyn Gervay-Hague’s lab, which is focused on developing sustainable methods to produce antiviral and anticancer agents from natural products.
In a Western world that suppresses Indigenous culture, members of the Navajo Nation actively engage in artistic cultural revival as a means to keep their history alive and to create vibrant futures. During a fellowship, Shawna Yazzie, a doctoral student in Native American studies has been looking at and learning the ongoing rug weaving practices at a Body of Water in a Sunken Area, also known as Piñon, Arizona, her family’s homeland.
Goabaone Jaqueline Ramatlapeng can vividly remember when she would go without water from domestic pipes for days. Growing up in Kopong, a rural village in Botswana, Ramatlapeng and her family faced a plight that those in surrounding villages knew as well: water scarcity. And when the water did flow, it was salty. Ramatlapeng’s research could help inform the development of sustainable water management policies in the region.
