News Articles

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.

A new study by UC Davis researchers confirms the low likelihood that SARS-CoV-2 contamination on hospital surfaces is infectious. The study, published June 24 in PLOS ONE, is the original report on recovering near-complete SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences directly from surface swabs. 

The University of California, Davis, today named the recipients of the 2021 Chancellor’s Innovation Awards. The awards recognize faculty, project teams and community partners for their work, dedication and success in improving the lives of others and addressing the needs of our global society through innovative solutions. David E.

The deep ocean is home to many strange looking fish and other animals. A new study shows that the cold, dark depths of the ocean contain a wider variety of body shapes for fish than shallower waters. That supports the idea that the deep ocean is a hotspot of evolution for fishes.

It may not have been their first choice, but new graduates were thankful to walk across a stage and celebrate commencement with family members last week.

“I just felt grateful that we get to have anything in person,” Nicole Johnston, a human development and psychology double major, said as she waited in a line on Hutchison Field to participate in the 8 a.m. processional for undergraduates. “After a long and trying last year of college, I feel grateful that the university was able to put this on.”

When first-generation student Nicole Rabaud was pursuing her Ph.D. in agricultural and environmental chemistry at UC Davis she felt “really lost.”

Rabaud was born and raised in Hong Kong to parents of French and French-Vietnamese descent whose education never progressed beyond high school. Despite her parents' lack of university education, Rabaud excelled at school from elementary school through college. When she got to graduate school at UC Davis, however, things changed. 

When Madeline Bright was young, she was told she asked a lot of questions.

Today that same curiosity is leading her toward a career in medical research where she hopes to find life-saving answers.

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.

In April of this year the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) announced their flagship study including high-quality, near error-free, and near complete reference genome assemblies for 16 species representing six major lineages of vertebrates, including mammals, reptiles, monotremes, amphibians and fish.