Four faculty, two each in CBS departments and graduate groups, are among this year’s recipients of the Academic Senate and Federation top awards. They are in a cohort of 15 academics across various disciplines throughout the university to be recognized.
The awards cite the impact these academics have had on their fields, on UC Davis students and on the broader community through public service.
A major new discovery could inspire improved treatments for cancer and genetic diseases.
Coiled within our cells are fragile threads of DNA that contain the codes of life— determining when each of our 30 trillion cells must grow, divide, sit tight — or simply die. This arrangement is precarious. Billions of times per day, our DNA is severed by stray chemical reactions. Our cells must rebuild the broken DNA without making mistakes – or the consequences can be dire.
They are experts in a parasitic amoeba, scientific history, the health effects of stress and more, and now these eight faculty members can add a new title: Chancellor’s Fellow.
The recognition is given each year to early career academics doing exemplary work, and the 2025-26 class will be recognized at a reception next week.
There are many ways to communicate with prospective romantic partners: If you are a Japanese scarab beetle, it’s a matter of distinguishing left from right. New work from U.S. and Chinese scientists, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows how these beetles use mirror-image pheromones to find a mate. The work could lead to better monitoring and control of significant agricultural pests.
Two College of Biological Sciences faculty members—Keith Baar, professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior, and Laura Bogar, assistant professor of plant biology—received a STAIR Grant and a Hellman Fellowship, respectively.
Inside our cells are tiny engines that supply the energy to sustain life. These protein machines essentially burn our food – producing CO2 and harnessing the energy that is released to sustain growth, movement and even thought.
Each year, roughly 1.6 million people worldwide are born with genetic diseases that disrupt these tiny cellular engines – making life difficult.
“Mutations in these protein complexes are really devastating, and often lethal,” says James Letts, an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology.
A new study by the University of California, Davis, shows how cells work together to avoid a sudden drop in blood sugar. Understanding these feedback loops could improve the lives of people with diabetes and help them avoid dangerous hypoglycemia.
The work was published Sept. 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When a woman becomes pregnant, the outcome of that pregnancy depends on many things — including a crucial event that happened while she was still growing inside her own mother’s womb. It depends on the quality of the egg cells that were already forming inside her fetal ovaries. The DNA-containing chromosomes in those cells must be cut, spliced and sorted perfectly. In males, the same process produces sperm in the testes but occurs only after puberty.
In a new study published in Science Advances on September 10, a team of UC Davis researchers tracked the movement of fluorescent particles inside the cells of microscopic worms, providing unprecedented insights into cellular crowding in a multicellular animal. They found that the cytoplasm inside the worms was significantly more crowded and compartmentalized than in single-celled yeast or mammalian tissue culture cells, which are more commonly used to gauge internal cellular dynamics.
The mind of a fruit fly encompasses 125,000 nerve cells, squeezed into the space of a poppy seed. At first glance, the fly brain looks nothing like a human brain. But many of the underlying neural circuits are surprisingly similar.
Fumika Hamada, a professor of neurobiology, physiology, and behavior, is using fruit flies to study a critical but oft-overlooked brain function: the regulation of our body temperature in a consistent daily rhythm.
