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News

 

  • The work of 12 early-career faculty members will get a boost as this year’s class of Hellman Fellows. They will receive grants ranging from $16,000 to $49,000, for a total of $330,000 awarded. Their work covers a wide range of topics, from the educational experiences of Venezuelan immigrants to a wireless device that monitors for seizures. The fellowship is a UC-wide program, having been started by San Francisco philanthropists Chris and Warren Hellman to bolster the work of faculty members who were just a few years into their careers — often enough time to exhaust their initial funding but not long enough to garner a significant amount of external funding. Anya Brown, Center for Population Biology faculty member in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, was named as an inductee 2024-2025.
  • Annual Faculty Awards Celebrate Excellence in Education and Innovation...  Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, Center for Population Biology faculty member in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, and Marina Ellefson, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, receive 2024 UC Davis College of Biological Sciences faculty awards...  The college announced the recipients of the 2024 CBS Faculty Teaching and Research Awards.

  • Karolina Zabinski, Center for Population Biology graduate affiliate student and Lead Mentor for the Marine and Coastal Science (MCS) Major during the 2023-24 academic year, has done a lot with her time at UC Davis. Starting her PhD in 2020 and advancing to candidacy in 2023, she has taken on classwork, fieldwork and labwork. But mentorship was an entirely new adventure. Embracing the role of Lead Mentor has meant listening in new ways, guiding others as she was learning, and bridging the gap between undergraduates and their identities and futures as scientists.

  • Center for Population Biology graduate affiliate student, Jon Aguinaga, has been recognized for positive impact, and influence in training young scientists... Each year the College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis recognizes the importance of mentorship in the continued growth of both the undergraduate and graduate communities by awarding CBS Dean’s Mentorship Awards to graduate students. Funded by contributions to the CBS Dean’s Circle, the awards are open by faculty nomination to graduate students who have played a significant role in the growth and development of the younger generation of scientists.  
  • The Academic Senate and Federation have presented their top academic honors for 2024, and the faculty recipients are being showcased not just for their expertise, but also for their teaching, mentorship and public service. Center for Population Biology faculty member, Louie Yang, received a Distinguished Teaching Award – Undergraduate Teaching.  More information is available here as well.

  • The UC Davis College of Biological Sciences champions Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) through the Graduate Student DEIJ Leader Fellowship program. Among the 2023-2024 academic year distinguished recipients of the DEIJ Leader Fellowship are Center for Population Biology graduate affiliate students Darien Satterfield and Tracie Hayes.

  • Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, a professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology and a Center for Population Biology faculty member at the University of California, Davis, has been awarded the prestigious National Academy of Science Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences for 2024. Ross-Ibarra was awarded the prize in recognition of his “pioneering studies on the evolutionary genetics of maize, a key crop species for global food production.”
  • A Mixed Origin Made Maize Successful:  Maize (corn) is one of the world's most important staple crops and has great cultural significance for Indigenous peoples in the Americas. New work by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, a Center for Population Biology graduate group faculty member at UC Davis, and international colleagues shows how maize was domesticated from two wild varieties.
  • Renowned Marine Ecologist Jay Stachowicz Wins Teaching Prize:  Jay Stachowicz, a professor of evolution and ecology and a Center for Population Biology faculty member who studies the biodiversity and resilience of coastal ecosystems, has been named the 37th recipient of the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. The prize, which recognizes exceptional teaching and scholarship, is among the largest of its kind in the country.
  • Beds of eelgrass (Zostera marina) form an important habitat in coastal regions throughout the northern hemisphere, crucial to many fish and other species and storing vast amounts of carbon. A new study published July 20 in Nature Plants shows that eelgrass spread around the world much more recently than previously thought, just under a quarter-million years ago. The results have implications for how eelgrass could be affected by a changing climate.  An international team, including Professors Jay Stachowicz and Jonathan Eisen at the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology and UC Davis Genome Center, reconstructed the history of eelgrass based on DNA sequences of the plant from around the world. The project was coordinated by Thorsten Reusch, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany.
  • Peter Wainwright, a Distinguished Professor, Center for Population Biology faculty member, and Chair of the Department of Evolution and Ecology, has been honored with the 2023 Joseph S. Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award in Ichthyology. Conferred by the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH), the award recognizes exceptional contributions to the realm of fish biology and aquatic ecosystems.

 

  • In the College of Biological Sciences, principles of diversity, equity and inclusion are guiding principles. As such, an array of special DEI-related programs led by graduate students, including Danielle De La Pascua, and Jeffrey Groh from the Population Biology Graduate group and the Center for Population Biology, each of whom was awarded a Graduate DEIJ Leader Fellowship for the 2022-23 academic year, culminated in an open house event highlighting their achievements from 1:00-3:00pm on June 8, in Walker Hall.  Read the full story here.

 

  • Elena Suglia, a soon-to-graduate Ph.D. candidate in the Population Biology Graduate Group and a Center for Population Biology graduate student affiliate, has spent her time at Davis tackling the “inextricably intertwined issues” of environmental protection, environmental justice, and equity.

    In recognition of her leadership in working at the intersection of science and public policy, Suglia was awarded the 2023 Emerging Public Policy Leadership Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

  • Biocrust mapping project wins Creativity-Innovation Award...  Xiaoli Dong, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and a Center for Popoulation Biology faculty member, is putting biological soil crust on the climate change research map, a project for which she received UC Davis’ single Early Career Faculty Award for Creativity and Innovation for 2023.

 

  • Rachael Bay, an assistant professor of evolution and ecology, and a Center for Population Biology faculty member, is the latest guest on ‘Face to Face With Chancellor May.’  Rachael studies how human-caused changes to marine systems impact evolutionary trajectories, including whether certain species might survive in the future. Her conversation with Chancellor Gary S. May, posted on April 25, 2023, as a video and as a podcast, touched on her research and how she got interested in the ocean despite growing up in Montana.

 

  • Do Relatives Make Good Neighbors?... This scientific topic will be discussed by CPB faculty member, Sharon Strauss, at a spring 2023 Emeriti Lecture.  "Awed by biodiversity," Strauss, a Distinguished Professor of evolution and ecology, presented this topic at a 2019 colloquium at the Institute for Advanced Study at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.  In promotion of the event, Strauss wrote that the characteristics of species and how they interact with one another are shaped by both historical factors of past evolution as well as contemporary interactions among species.

 

  • Aquarium of the Pacific - African American Scholar Program 2023 Recipients:  For the third year in a row, a cohort of exceptional African American students were awarded scholarship funds and join a growing community of scholars engaging in various Aquarium efforts.  Award recipients were selected in part by a committee including Aquarium staff members and members of the community.  Congratulations to Khalil Russell, CPB graduate student affiliate, who was named an award recipient!

 

  • Three UC Davis faculty members are among 125 recipients of this year’s Sloan Research Fellowships, prestigious awards given by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to early-career scientific researchers seen as emerging leaders in their fields.

    The 2023 fellows, including UC Davis’ Kate L. Laskowski - a CPB faculty member, Jesús M. Velázquez and Alexander S. Wein, “represent the most promising scientific researchers working today,” the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation said in announcing its selections Feb. 15.

  • Early this year, graduate students in the Scientific Filmmaking course (ECL 290/PBG 298) shared their short films at the Ecology Film Festival, which was held at both the Bodega Bay Grange Hall and at the Veterans Memorial Theatre in Davis. The course was co-taught by Professor Eric Sanford and professional filmmaker Grant Thompson.  The course and film festivals were organized by PhD student Emily Longman, with generous support from a Bilinksi Foundation fellowship.

    The subjects of each film range from studying the impacts of global change on trees and ponds in the Sierra Nevada, to uncovering the mysteries of beetles and snails on the California coast. Together, the films highlight the breadth of research conducted by UC Davis graduate students, as well as their impressive creativity and communication skills.  Updated information and a link to the films is available here!

  • Science Storytelling Through a Camera Lens...  From Chilean tidepools to the High Sierra, 12 UC Davis graduate students traveled the world this summer in search of answers to ecology’s most pressing questions. The Ecology Film Festival, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, at Bodega Bay; and Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023, in Davis showcased graduate students who took part in UC Davis’ Scientific Filmmaking course this past fall. Read about the Ecology Film Festival and the associated UC Davis Scientific Filmmaking course here!

  • Corals Saving Corals...  Under the right living arrangement, disease-resistant corals can help “rescue” corals that are more vulnerable to disease, found a study from the University of California, Davis, that monitored a disease outbreak at a coral nursery in Little Cayman, Cayman Islands. 

    The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that when people grow corals of the same genotype — or genetic makeup — together, those corals are more vulnerable to disease than corals that grow among a mixture of genotypes. The study further found that some vulnerable corals can be “rescued” by resistant genotypes.

    “We saw that some corals were more resistant to disease just by being around other corals that were particularly resistant,” said lead author Anya Brown, an assistant professor at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, and a Center for Population Biology faculty member. “Proximity to these resistant genotypes helped buffer the susceptible corals from the effects of the disease.”

  • Hibernating Corals and the Microbiomes That Sustain Them - As winter approaches, many species of animals — from bears and squirrels to parasitic wasps and a few lucky humans — hunker down for some needed rest. The northern star coral (Astrangia poculata) also enters a hibernating state of dormancy, or quiescence, during this time. But what happens to its microbiome while it’s sleeping?

    A study led by University of California, Davis, Center for Population Biology/Population Biology Assistant Professor Anya Brown found that microbial communities shift while this coral enters dormancy, providing it an important seasonal reset. The work may carry implications for coral in warmer waters struggling with climate change and other environmental issues.

  • Center for Population Biology faculty member, Rachael Bay, was selected by Popular Science as one of "The Brilliant 10: The top up-and-coming minds in science".  There’s a phrase that rings loudly in the heads of Popular Science editors any time they bring together a new Brilliant 10 class: “They’ve only just begun.” Their annual list of early-career scientists and engineers is as much a celebration of what those honorees have already accomplished as it is a forecast for what they’ll do next. To find the brightest innovators of today, Popular Science embarked on a nationwide search, vetting hundreds of researchers across a range of institutions and disciplines.  Popular Science indicates that the collective work of this year’s class sets the stage for a healthier, safer, more efficient, and more equitable future—one that’s already taking shape today.