News

Darrielle Williams Receives a Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarship

Congratulations to Darrielle Williams, a Ph.D. student in Integrative Pathobiology at the University of California, Davis, working under the mentorship of Dr. Karen Shapiro. Darrielle was recently awarded a Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarship through the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.

UC Davis Researchers Join $6M Statewide Effort to Conserve California Coast

Funded by the California Ocean Protection Council (OPC), California Sea Grant will administer more than $6 million to nine research and restoration projects to inform the state’s goal of conserving thirty percent of its lands and coastal waters by 2030. Among them are four projects involving researchers at the University of California, Davis, working in the coastal and marine sciences.

What Makes Seagrass Survive? Look to the Microbes

On her first day of graduate school, Karolina Zabinski rose at 4:00am. She spent the day on the muddy shores of Tomales Bay, collecting eelgrass for a survey of aquatic plant diseases. These ribbon-like seagrasses are common along the California coast and form knee-high meadows that undulate in the water.

Survival of the Most Cooperative

Rarotonga, the largest island in the archipelago of the Cook Islands, is protected by a coral reef that forms a barricade around the kidney-shaped dollop of terra firma moored in the middle of the South Pacific. If that reef were to die off or disappear—as reefs are, globally, at a disheartening rate—it would spell catastrophe for Rarotonga’s more than 10,000 inhabitants. That partly explains how Anya Brown came to be a regular at a hardware store on the island.