Graduate Student Success

A new study calls for better understanding of fertilizer prices faced by African smallholder farmers. Scientists use spatial price prediction models to estimate local prices that might be more relevant than the national average.

RJ Taggueg's parents came to the U.S. from the Phillipines when he was seven years old. Now he is pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology at UC Davis with a focus on the undocumented Filipinx population. 

Third-year mechanical and aerospace engineering Ph.D. student Dane Sterbentz is a recipient of the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration’s Laboratory Residency Graduate Fellowship (DOE NNSA LRGF). Sterbentz, part of professor J.P. Delplanque’s research group, is one of just four doctoral students across the country to receive the fellowship.

Graduate students have a new advocate in Graduate Studies. Slande Erole, a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science graduate program, will serve as Graduate Student Assistant to the Dean of Graduate Studies and to the Chancellor (GSADC) for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Brittani Orona is one of twenty environmental scholars chosen as 2019 recipients of the Switzer Environmental Fellowship, a program of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation. 

Hannah Stafford, a Ph.D. student in environmental engineering and a part-time researcher with the Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and the Economy, is set to appear on 'Jeopardy!" on July 9.

Integrative Genetics and Genomics Ph.D. student Marwa Zafarullah is among the members of the UC Davis community who has been recognized as an Aggie Hero.

Ph.D. candidate Rebecca Hogue has been awarded a prestigious Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2019-20. The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship is a national competition awarded to 65 graduate students in the humanities and social sciences across the United States for a one-year term to support their last year of Ph.D. dissertation writing. The title of Rebecca’s dissertation is “Archipelagos of Resistance: Anti-Nuclear Writing of Oceania, 1975-2018.”

On April 6, the University of California, Davis hosted the California Forums for Diversity in Graduate Education. The forums help promote a positive campus climate and social justice in higher education for advanced undergraduates and master’s candidates who belong to groups that are currently underrepresented in doctoral-level programs. During this day-long event, Davis hosted 1,400 prospective doctoral students from all over Northern California that included 28 workshops and panels and 200 graduate school recruiting tables.

In the hunt for therapeutics to treat mood disorders, UC Davis researchers have turned to compounds found in psychedelics. Neuroscience Ph.D. student Lindsay Cameron is on the forefront of this research. Her research with the Olson Lab has shown that microsdosing rats with DMT can positively affect their mood and anxiety

Plant Biology Ph.D. Student Katherine Murphy studies terpenes, molecules that plants use to survive as immobile organisms. Murphy's research concerns medicinal terpenes found in corn. She wants to find out if these corn molecules could help bolster other crops’ defenses

Hannah Waterhouse is a graduate student in the Soils and Biogeochemistry graduate program at the University of California, Davis.

The doctoral program in music composition and theory has been around for nearly a quarter of a century, but in recent years has garnered much more attention. Because the program is in composition and theory, it opens doors for a wider range of career options, especially in academia.

Plant Biology graduate student Katie Murphy has been named the UC 2019 Grad Slam champion. UC Grad Slam is an annual contest in which master’s and Ph.D. students across UC campuses – in disciplines ranging from hard sciences to humanities – compete to sum up their research for a general audience. 

UC Grad Slam is an annual contest in which master’s and Ph.D. students across UC campuses – in disciplines ranging from hard sciences to humanities – compete to sum up their research for a general audience. Students present the significance and fundamental points of their work at UC Davis in a clear, direct and interesting manner.  Nahrain Rasho is a graduate student in the Political Science Ph.D. program.