Four members of the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences are recipients of 2021 Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. Two undergraduate students, a faculty member and a postdoctoral researcher were among those honored by UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May at the virtual awards ceremony.

Rishi Sharma’s passion for community service can be traced back to his parents. While growing up in Dubai, Sharma watched his parents, who are both doctors, hone their expertise in the medical field. According to Sharma, as his parents advanced in their careers, they never forgot about the people around them.

“As they moved up the ladder, they used more of their experience to invest in the community,” said Sharma, a biochemistry and molecular biology major in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences. 

Aldrin Gomes, a professor in the Departments of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, and Physiology and Membrane Biology, can still recall the reality he faced when he came to the United States to conduct postdoctoral research. Growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, Gomes was accustomed to the cultural diversity of the island. But shortly after stepping on American soil, he started experiencing things he didn’t understand.

A team of scientists from UC Davis and Rice University are starting small as they begin to figure out how to build an artificial brain from the bottom up.

Celina Juliano, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Jacob Robinson of Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering have won a $1 million Keck Foundation grant to advance the team’s synthetic neurobiology effort to define the connections between neurons and muscles that drive programmed behaviors in living animals.

Three UC Davis researchers, including Assistant Professor James Letts, will receive funding from the Early Career Research Program of the U.S. Department of Energy. They are among 83 researchers at U.S. universities and national laboratories funded by the program this year. The awards are of $150,000 for summer salary and research expenses each year and are intended to last for five years.

Two University of California, Davis, juniors are among the winners of the nation’s premier undergraduate award of its type in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.

Two professors and an alumnus from the Center for Population Biology were among those elected to the National Academy of Sciences, as announced on Monday, April 26. “This is a thrill for the UC Davis community,” said Chancellor Gary May, who lauded the achievement of this year’s electees as one of the highest honors in the scientific community.

Jodi Nunnari, a distinguished professor and chair in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is one of four UC Davis professors who have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and others, the academy honors excellence and includes leaders from every field of human endeavor including scientists, artists, performers, poets and political leaders.

Lindsay Cameron, a neuroscience Ph.D. student, was among this year's 13 recipients of the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. 

Michael Savageau, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in the College of Biological Sciences, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering has been named the recipient of the 2021 Akira Okubo Prize.