Awards

Five UC Davis faculty members, including David Rizzo from CA&ES, were selected to speak at the undergraduate commencements at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento June 12-14.

The UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, or CA&ES, is celebrating two outstanding graduate students recognized for their research, leadership and service in advancing regenerative agriculture, wildlife ecology and conservation and environmental sustainability.

Four faculty from the University of California, Davis, have been elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, class of 2025. They are among nearly 500 scientists, engineers and other innovators that the society recognized this year for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.

Here are the new fellows, with their fellowship citations: 

Department of Entomology and Nematology, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Doctoral student Cassidy Cooper is the first recipient of a fellowship supporting conservation research at the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Funded by an endowment honoring a late UC Davis alum who loved wildlife, the fellowship supports her research on how temperature affects native fish in California.

Two researchers at the University of California, Davis have been awarded a VinFuture Prize in recognition of their work developing self-cloning crops, a breakthrough for sustainable agriculture. 

Five faculty members have been selected for a 2025 Chancellor’s Fellowship recognizing their work to, in the words of the organizers, “foster a learning environment where all students can develop the skills to be successful.”

Chancellor Gary S. May told recipients he was proud to highlight their “commitment to reducing opportunity gaps for underrepresented students and/or students from underserved communities.”

The recipients, as named by Chancellor Gary S. May and the Academic Senate, are:

Zhenglin Zhang, a March graduate known as a gifted researcher dedicated to agricultural sustainability, is the winner of the 2025 Kinsella Memorial Prize.

Zhang, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, earned his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. at University of California, Davis, where he researched rice crops and how erratic weather and fallowed fields affected methane emissions and nitrogen cycling. He studied in the lab of Bruce Linquist, a Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences.

Four researchers with the UC Davis Department of Nutrition are being recognized for their contributions to advancing nutrition science and health.

To understand Alan Hastings’ theoretical ecology research at UC Davis, sometimes it can be helpful to start by thinking about counting fish.

That’s how the distinguished professor emeritus of environmental science and policy recalled once describing his work to an immigration official in Canada while on his way to a conference.

Maci Mueller, who earned her doctoral and master’s degrees in animal biology at UC Davis, is the winner of the 2024 Kinsella Memorial Prize for her leadership and work developing novel breeding technologies for cattle.

Mueller graduated in 2023 and is now an assistant professor at Kansas State University where she focuses on animal genomics and biotechnology.