Awards & Laurels

CBS Students Among 2021 Recipients of Prestigious Global Fellowship

Five students from the College of Biological Sciences have been selected for a prestigious global fellowship program that focuses on social impact projects, an achievement that was first announced by UC Davis Global Affairs earlier this fall.

The Millennium Fellowship is a highly selective semester-long global leadership development program run by United Nations Academic Impact and the Millennium Campus Network. Fellows convene to learn from and challenge each other, both at their home campuses and with peers at other institutions.

UC Davis Ecologist Awarded Packard Fellowship

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.

Assistant Professor Gerald Quon Receives NIH New Innovator Award

Gerald Quon, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Genome Center, has received a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award will support the development of a computational framework for characterizing how genetic variants associated with the risk of psychiatric diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder work at the at the cellular level.

$1 Million Keck Foundation Grant Backs Research to "Build a Brain"

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.

Assistant Professor James Letts Wins Department of Energy Early Career Award

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.

CBS Undergraduates Win Big in This Year’s Lang Prize

All three of the Science, Engineering and Math winners at this year’s Norma J. Lang Prize for Undergraduate Information Research are College of Biological Sciences students. Barry Nguyen, a biochemistry and molecular biology major, won first-place, and the second- and third-place winners, Katherine Hand and La Rissa Vasquez respectively, are neurobiology, physiology and behavior majors.