Liza Grandia, associate professor in the Department of Native American Studies and an internationally acclaimed public scholar, was barely drinking age when she stopped the World Bank and an international oil company from building a pipeline through the rural regions of Guatemala. The lesson Grandia learned then — that one is never too young to become engaged in public scholarship — is something that she emphasizes to her students at UC Davis.
Chemist Justin Siegel is one of two UC Davis faculty members elected to the National Academy of Inventors’ 2022 class of fellows. Siegel's work in computational enzyme engineering is focused on discovering catalysts that improve health and environmental outcomes. He holds more than 100 global patents and has co-founded eight startups in the last 10 years.
As an economics major with a passion for fashion, Jae Allen conceived a plan to help people declutter their closets and to keep unwanted outfits out of landfills. Before graduating last June, Allen found his way to the UC Davis Student Startup Center, where campus and business mentors helped him flesh out his business plan. As the center’s first entrepreneur-in-residence, he is preparing to launch his company, Ouros.
Beth Rose Middleton Manning recalls being elated watching the Eklutna River in Alaska flowing freely after a dam was removed. The UC Davis Department of Native American studies professor had a similar feeling upon learning she received a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship for her research on dam removal and land restoration. She is one of 28 scholars, journalists and authors awarded the fellowship, which carries a $200,000 stipend.
Political scientist Edmond Costantini traced his keen interest in politics and current events to a decade he spent as a youth delivering newspapers in Manhattan in New York, where his customers included future President Dwight D. Eisenhower and activist Eugene Debs. Costantini, who died Jan. 10 in Davis at age 89, would later become a sought-after news source himself for his expertise on California elections and politics.
Christopher K. Tong (Ph.D., comparative literature, ’14) was recently awarded an early career fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Program in China Studies.
Tom Turrentine (M.A. ’91, Ph.D. ’94, anthropology), the founding director of the UC Davis Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center and a longtime researcher in the Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS), died unexpectedly on June 2.
Work to restore the natural flow of Alameda Creek into the San Francisco Bay involving two design department faculty is moving forward with $31.4 million from the State of California.
Excitement for a biodegradable diaper designed by UC Davis students just keeps growing, like the bacterial cellulose the diaper is made from.
The student group, dubbed Team Sorbit, was motivated to create the diaper by data showing about 4 million tons of disposable diapers end up in landfills, and the plastic and tree-pulp derived cellulose used in most diapers isn’t environmentally friendly.
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a fellowship this week to English professor Liz Miller to support her work on a book about industrial mining and its effects on 19th- and early 20th-century literature. The $60,000 award, announced Dec. 12, will enable Miller to spend the 2019 calendar year writing Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, 1830s-1930s.
