Foundations

Siobhan Brady, a professor in the Department of Plant Biology and Genome Center at the University of California, Davis, has been selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. The prestigious Investigator program, which Brady describes as “life changing,” will provide her with roughly $9 million in research support over a seven-year term, with the option to renew.

The UC Davis MIND Institute’s Sarah Bayoumi has been awarded an Autism Science Foundation fellowship to study the challenges that many autistic individuals experience at mealtimes. The post-undergraduate fellowship will fund Bayoumi’s research for two years.

Neuroblastoma is the leading cause of cancer death in children under the age of five. Thanks to an award from The Hartwell Foundation, UC Davis pediatric surgeon Erin Brown will develop a stem cell treatment to target this difficult-to-treat disease.

Enrollment in Doctor of Philosophy nursing programs across the nation is down more than 3% in the last year... A new $3 million investment from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation aims to reverse that downward trend. It offers to lower the cost for students in the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Nursing Science and Health-Care Leadership program at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded UC Davis Health a three-year, $3 million grant. The prestigious award will fund research into the causes, complexities, and potential solutions to gun violence in disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities.

The Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH) at UC Davis announces a nearly $500,000 grant from The Rockefeller Foundation. With support from The Rockefeller Foundation, IIFH, the North American Center of Excellence for the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI), will leverage newly developed tools from the PTFI and robust life cycle analysis to comprehensively define how agricultural practices (e.g., conventional vs. regenerative) impact the molecular composition of foods, and further, people’s health and well-being.

A dozen early-career faculty members at UC Davis have been named to this year’s Hellman Fellowship, a program to help propel their work to the next level.

Christina Harvey, a University of California, Davis, researcher studying how bird flight can be used to improve aircraft design, has been awarded a 2023 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, or FFAR, named UC Davis Assistant Professor Alessandro Ossola among its 10 recipients of the 2022 New Innovator in Food & Agriculture Research Award. The award provides early-career scientists with funding to conduct audacious food and agriculture research without the pressure of securing additional funding.

Two UC Davis School of Medicine faculty members are among ten scientists selected to receive the 2022 Individual Biomedical Research Awards from The Hartwell Foundation. The Hartwell competition funds early-stage, innovative and cutting-edge biomedical research to benefit children in the United States.