Foundations

The Fruit and Vegetable Foundation announced a $10 million gift to the University of California, Davis School of Medicine and UC Davis Health. This gift establishes the Dr. Douglas S. L. Howard Endowed Chair in Nutrition for Transformative Healthcare and supports the development of the corresponding program. The UC Davis Nutrition for Transformative Healthcare Program will promote infrastructure, research, and outreach into Whole Food Nutritional Health with the goal of expanding the knowledge and understanding of how fruits and vegetables play an important role in supporting good health.

In a new blog post, the Heising-Simons Foundation highlights its collaboration with Professor Kevin Gee to combat chronic absenteeism in elementary schools.

The University of California, Davis today announced an expanded collaboration with the BioInnovation Institute (BII) to accelerate commercialization of discoveries in protein nutrition important to consumers around the world.

The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) is awarding a $232,728 Seeding Solutions grant to UC Davis to develop a tomato variety with resistance to branched broomrape.

Researchers from the University of California Davis may have found a way to make wheat safer for those with celiac disease and improve the overall quality of gluten-free bread.

A UC Davis physicist is among the third annual cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Associate Professor Inna Vishik, Department of Physics and Astronomy at the College of Letters and Science, joins 18 other researchers nationwide who will each receive a five-year, $1.25 million grant to pursue new research goals and explore uncharted, innovative ideas.

The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research awarded a $500,000 grant to the University of California, Davis, to meet to tap into the genetic diversity of wild carrots to breed Alternaria resistance and the ability to grow in water-deficient conditions. FFAR’s Crops of the Future Collaborative partners Bayer, Bejo Zaden, Enza Zaden, Rijk Zwaan, Takii Seed and Vilmorin Mikado are providing matching funds for a total investment of $1 million.

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.