Awards & Laurels

Our DNA is built of base pairs, a spiral ladder of adenines, cytosines, guanines and thymines. In this molecular dance, adenine pairs with thymine and cytosine pairs with guanine. Undergraduate researcher Madeline Bright is trying to figure out just how damage to our DNA at the molecular level leads to disease-causing mutations.

Professors Jonathan Eisen and Veronica Martínez-Cerdeño were awarded the 2019 ADVANCE Scholar Award for their work to improve gender equity in STEM through their teaching, research and service in addition to encouraging research, leadership, and outreach to underserved communities and/or mentorship of underrepresented students.

Last year, Associate Professor Siobhan Brady and her colleagues published “a core set of genes that are critical in nitrogen metabolism” in Nature. For her research, Brady was recognized with the 2018-2019 College of Biological Sciences Faculty Research Award.

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.

Senior biochemistry and molecular biology student Lynne Hagelthorn is one of the recipients of this year’s Ronald and Lydia Baskin Award, which recognizes a graduating senior for excellence in biological sciences research.

Plant Biology Ph.D. student Katie Murphy of UC Davis won today’s UC Grad Slam, judged the best at summarizing her research in three minutes or less, for a general audience. She competed against other campus Grad Slam winners — and became the first UC Davis student to take the systemwide championship.