In December 2018, Distinguished Professor Venkatesan Sundaresan and his colleagues published in Nature a method that allowed them to produce clonal seeds directly from plants, bypassing the sexual reproduction process. Replicating this process in the lab could prove vital to providing the world’s farmers with high-yielding, disease-resistant or climate-resistant food crops.

For nearly two decades, Professor Julin Maloof has shined a light on biological knowledge for UC Davis students, introducing computational methods to the life sciences curriculum. For his dedication to his students, Maloof received the 2018-2019 Faculty Teaching Award.

As an adolescent, H. Michael Shepard was enamored with biology. The interest didn’t feel like a choice; it felt like a compulsion. In September, Shepard and his colleagues received the 2019 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for the groundbreaking foundational research that led to the creation of Herceptin.

UC Davis researchers have been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the first part of a project to develop a novel approach to deliver genome editing machinery to genes responsible for a rare form of familial cancer.

UC Davis alumnus H. Michael Shepard last Friday (Sept. 20) received one of the 2019 Lasker Awards, widely considered America’s top biomedical research prizes.

Thanks to a roughly 5-year, $850,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation, Assistant Professor Gerald Quon will develop next-generation computational tools that will allow researchers to better understand and analyze single-cell genomic data.

Two student groups at UC Davis have each won competitive $5000 awards through the VentureWell Foundation’s Stage 1 E-Team program. These awards help early-stage innovators create ventures and provide training that helps students explore ways to bring their solutions to market.

For his outstanding research and service, Cole Williams, who graduated this month, was named the 2019 College of Biological Sciences Undergraduate of the Year.

In Richard McKenney’s lab, Wenzhe Li studies the motor protein cytoplasmic dynein. Aided by her interest in psychology, Li aims to link cellular and molecular biology processes to mind and behavior. For her work, she was awarded the Ronald and Lydia Baskin Research Award.

For her outstanding research activities and scholarship, Joleen Cheah was awarded the College of Biological Sciences Medal. She was also recently awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research and the University Honors Program’s Research and Innovation Award.