The College of Letters and Science at UC Davis has launched a committee that will advise the college leadership on targeted efforts and priorities to support diversity, equity and inclusion related to faculty, staff and students.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that there is an association between how songs sound and their place in our emotional lives. Sourcing songs from across the globe, Manvir Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, and his fellow researchers found that people from different types of societies can successfully identify a song’s type by how it sounds, regardless of the language of its words.
From pocketed headphones to carelessly packed garden hoses, knots find ways to manifest. Even our DNA molecules get tied in knots too. Professor Mariel Vazquez applies her training in mathematics to fundamental questions about DNA structure and functionality.
As a college freshman, Mya Ajanel’s dreams of a veterinary degree were nearly derailed by chemistry. “I barely passed the first quarter, so I definitely had fear of just finishing the general chemistry series,” she said. “I remember crying and thinking I’m not going to be a vet, it’s too hard.”
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.”
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.
Two faculty members in the Department of History in the College of Letters and Science — Lorena Oropeza and Rachel Jean-Baptiste — have taken new leadership roles in advancing diversity, equity and inclusion at UC Davis.
William Jackson, distinguished professor emeritus of chemistry in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, will receive the National Science Board's (NSB) 2021 Public Service Award.
Historian Oropeza also selected by Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities for Leadership Academy.
History professor Lorena Oropeza is having a leadership moment. On Thursday (Aug. 20), the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities named Oropeza as one of 26 fellows in the second cohort of its Leadership Academy/La Academia de Liderazgo. The same day, the UC Davis Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion announced her appointment as the interim associate vice chancellor for academic diversity.
Assistant professor of statistics Jairo Fúquene Patiño has been recognized as a 2020 CAMPOS faculty scholar by the UC Davis Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science, or CAMPOS. The center focuses on building diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
His research focuses on Bayesian approaches, which involve applying probability to statistical analysis of data-driven problems in public health and medicine, environmental data, and survey sampling data, among others.
