Awards

Brian Gaylord, a professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, part of the College of Biological Sciences, has been awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award for outstanding undergraduate teaching. An enthusiastic and passionate lecturer, Professor Gaylord creates a learning environment that supports students tackling difficult topics, together. He emphasizes critical thinking and understanding processes over memorization, and he engages students in effective and thought-provoking ways.

Congratulations to Genece Grisby, a UC Davis Marine and Coastal Science undergraduate major, who is one of the recipients of a 2023 Aquarium of the Pacific African American Scholarship.

Congratulations to Dr. Rachael Bay, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at University of California, Davis, who was recently selected by Popular Science as one of “The Brilliant 10: The top up-and-coming minds in science”. 

Bay developed an approach that could help make specific predictions about how at-risk species might evolve over the coming decades. “Injecting evolution into conservation questions is really quite novel,” she says.

Sentiments of gratitude for commitment and personalized attention to graduate students were among the testimonials spoken about this year’s winners of Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award winners.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Andrew Whitehead, a professor in the Department of Environmental Toxicology at the University of California Davis, who was among the 30 faculty members who won the 2022 award.

Students from 2021's BIS 124 (Coastal Marine Research) class won first and third prize, plus two honorable mentions, in the 2022 Research Rockstars Undergrad Slam Video Contest. Congratulations to Su Chung and Yessica Gonzalez for winning first prize, Michaela Lai and Nicole Cox for winning third prize, and Tena Dhayalan, Adri Penix, Jacquie Rajerison, and May Schulz for their honorable mentions.

Watch the winning videos

Stress can test our limits to the utmost and, sometimes, it can push us to become more resilient than ever before. From the Bodega Marine Laboratory to the oyster flats of Tomales Bay, exploring how stress builds resilience has been at the heart of Priya Shukla’s research for the last several years. She is compiling a doctoral dissertation focused on how we might teach some species to tolerate warmer waters and in essence, “climate-proof” them against shifting temperatures.

Public Scholarship and Engagement is proud to announce the inaugural cohort of UC Davis graduate students who were accepted into the competitive Public Scholars for the Future fellowship. This program, which launched in spring 2022 in partnership with UC Davis Graduate Studies, is designed to support doctoral students in developing community-engaged research with non-university partners.

CMSI Affiliates Hollis Jones (Ecology), Andrea Odell (Ecology), and Meghan Zulian (Earth and Planetary Sciences) are among the 11 doctoral candidates chosen.

Congratulations to Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute affiliates Jacqueline Rajerison, a recent UC Davis graduate in the Marine and Coastal Science major, and Sam Walkes, a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Group in Ecology, who were both awarded 2022 Aquarium of the Pacific African American Scholarships.

Congratulations to CMSI Affiliates Dr. Jay Stachowicz, Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, and Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson, Professor of Medicine & Epidemiology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine for being elected 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows.

Dr. Rachael Bay, a Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute affiliate and faculty member in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology, has been named a member of the 2021 Class of Packard Fellows!