Ronald Whitney-Whyte (B.S., design, ’75) has made a planned gift of $1 million to the College to support undergraduates majoring in design. Whitney-Whyte’s gift will establish two endowed funds, one to provide students with supplies and the other to support scholarships for junior and senior design majors.
In June 2019, we caught up with seven soon-to-be graduates (now our newest alumni) to ask them about what they love most about UC Davis and how well their time in and out of the classroom prepared them for their next chapter. Here are their answers.
Published in 1969, the Slant Step Book celebrated a thrift store find that became, and remains, a part of UC Davis art department lore. The Slant Step is a green linoleum-covered plywood stool with a slanted – and seemingly nonfunctional – step that has inspired artists for decades.
Ben Wang began his fight for prisoners’ rights as a UC Davis student. Nearly 20 years later, he’s still at it. Wang (B.A., Asian American studies, ’04) is co-director of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that assists Asians and Pacific Islanders in U.S. prisons.
Jonathan Helm got his first taste of psychology research during his second year as a UC Davis undergraduate. After earning three UC Davis psychology degrees, Helm is now an assistant professor of quantitative psychology at San Diego State University. He recently collaborated with one of his former UC Davis professors on a study that found growing up in impoverished urban neighborhoods more than doubles your chances of developing a psychosis-spectrum disorder by middle adulthood. We asked him some questions about his journey from student to faculty researcher:
Following graduation, Austin Ray (B.S., applied mathematics, ’13) founded an education finance policy nonprofit, EdBuild. The nonprofit helped governors and legislators make sure more money went to public schools serving low-income students. Ray is now returning to school to earn an MBA at Duke University.
Christopher Markus (M.A., English, ’96) was co-writer, with Stephen McFeely (M.A. English,’96), of the just-released movie "Avengers: Endgame.” The two met at UC Davis in the creative writing program. They've written scripts for the "Captain America" films, the "Chronicles of Narnia" movie franchise, and won an Emmy for their screenplay of HBO movie, "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers."
There are many ways philanthropy has inspired, transformed, energized, led and advanced UC Davis. During the month of May, UC Davis celebrates “By Philanthropy,” a special initiative to demonstrate how philanthropic gifts have touched thousands of people and aspects of life at UC Davis and helped the university solve some of the greatest challenges of our time.
On this page, we share some of the ways the generosity of our alumni and friends have strengthened the College of Letters and Science's goal
Rene Olivas (B.A., anthropology, '97) is a special agent with the fraud detection office in the U.S. Office of Inspector General, Department of Justice. Last year, Olivas won the Inspector General’s Award for Fraud Prevention and completed an investigation of a former Department of Justice trial attorney accused of stealing and attempting to sell sensitive, sealed court documents. In November he received a Law Enforcement Award from the U.S.
