News

UC Davis has received a $1.8 million grant to create a robust pre-med pathway for rural college students. It’s the university’s latest initiative to boost the number of primary care physicians in underserved parts of Northern California.

Beth Rose Middleton Manning recalls being elated watching the Eklutna River in Alaska flowing freely after a dam was removed. The University of California, Davis, 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.

UC Davis Health has launched a new initiative to improve the organ transplantation system throughout California and work toward equity in organ donation. The initiative is called “Pluralist,” which stands for “patient centered precision digital health education.” Pluralist hopes to increase the availability of donor organs and access to life-saving surgery regardless of a patient’s socioeconomic standing. It will achieve this by developing scalable health education interventions that will be delivered by culturally competent health care providers.

Keysight Technologies, Inc. is committed to building a better planet and supports the next generation of engineers. Keysight Technologies, Inc. contributed to lab upgrades. The upgrades include construction, audio and visual equipment and acquisition of state-of- the-art test and measurement instrumentation for 32 work benches.

More than $1 million in new awards from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the UC Davis Department of Native American Studies are strengthening Indigenous ancestral languages and contemporary art. The Native American Language Center received $800,000 to work with tribes in California on language teaching and research, and the C.N. Gorman Museum received $250,000 for general operating support.

With $1.75 million in support from the Koret Foundation of San Francisco, the [BioLuanch] program is in its second year of developing a four-year progression of courses, experiential learning and one-on-one advising. The program is a collaboration of the Internship and Career Center, or ICC, and the college and part of the campus’s broader Aggie Launch initiative for career exploration and preparation.

UC Davis Health is partnering with Pfizer on two new clinical trials to test the COVID-19 booster vaccine in healthy adults. At its Sacramento clinic, UC Davis is  recruiting double-vaccinated participants to assess the efficacy of different strength booster doses and test heart muscle protein levels after a booster shot.

For the first time in university history, the W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded two research teams at the University of California, Davis, with $1 million each in the same award cycle. One will study where chemical reactions occur in deep regions of the brain to improve the treatments for brain disorders; the other will create new technology for communications and medicine that operates at wavelengths that are not currently utilized.

Thanks to a $247,000 in funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute’s (PCORI) Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards Program, the MIND Institute is building a network of partnerships with self-advocates, families and community organizations. It will serve as a foundation to make clinical practices, research and systems of care more inclusive and accessible.  

During a friendly design competition, held on February 15, undergraduate engineering student teams gathered to build Corsi-Rosenthal air filters. The build event received financial support from Texas Instruments and UC Davis’ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Engineering and Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC Davis, Ralph Aldredge, received a Course & Program Grant from the VentureWell Foundation. The grant will support targeted outreach to introduce underrepresented undergraduate students to entrepreneurship at the Student Startup Center.

UC Davis Health has launched a Cloud Innovation Center (CIC), powered by Amazon Web Services, making the renowned academic medical center one of America's leaders in digital medicine. UC Davis Health is the first academic medical center in the world to launch a CIC with Amazon Web Services. Focused on digital health equity, the UC Davis Health CIC will allow clinicians, patients, developers, and students to exchange ideas, as well as design and prototype solutions focused on making digital health more equitable and accessible worldwide. 

The UC Davis School of Medicine has successfully pursued new funding opportunities to provide research funds to early-career biomedical researchers working on clinical research projects and facing extra-professional demands of caregiving increased by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and its funding partner – the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the School of Medicine has received a $500,000 award that will support 10 faculty members.

The SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity, or MOSAC, is excited to announce two separate naming partnerships with UC Davis Health and the University of California, Davis. These agreements give UC Davis Health naming rights to MOSAC’s current Health Headlines and future Health Gallery, and UC Davis will name the Digital Dome Theater.

University of California, Davis, evolutionary biologist Rachael Bay has been awarded a 2021 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The fellowship offers Bay, assistant professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, College of Biological Sciences, an opportunity to advance her work on the role of human action on evolutionary trajectories of species.