The John Muir Institute of the Environment at University of California, Davis, announced the selection of the 2019 Muir Institute Fellows during its annual open house on October 1 at The Barn.

Launched in 2017, the program recognizes exemplary UC Davis faculty and staff whose career and research epitomizes the mission of the Muir Institute: Discover. Research. Solve. Each recipient receives $5,000 to help seed their research.

Welcome to the start of a new school year. As students and faculty return to campus, we are preparing for a busy year of academics and transition. Fall is a season of change, and one big change we’ll see this year is in how we do business. After many years of planning, preparation and training, we are in the midst of transitioning to UC Path, a system-wide solution to modernize how we deliver payroll, benefits and personnel services.

The University of California, Davis, is investing $4 million over three years to launch four new research centers that align campus strengths with unique opportunities for global impact. The UC Davis Office of Research initiative is designed to promote new, sustainable, inter- and multidisciplinary research activity that responds to society’s greatest challenges and needs. 

Chancellor Gary S. May issued the following statement today (Aug. 29):

Margery Magill, a UC Davis alumna, was killed in a random act of violence in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday evening. The entire UC Davis community mourns with Margery’s family and friends.

Pam Ronald, a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology, has a vivid memory from the day she arrived in Sweden in 1984 to begin a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Uppsala University.

“I was a young student who had just landed at the Stockholm airport, wondering how I was going to recognize my host, Professor Nils Fries,” Ronald said. “My anxiety vanished when I saw a kind-looking man waving a stick with a Boletus edulis stuck on the end of it.”

DAVIS--Distinguished professor Bruce Hammock of the University of California, Davis, has received a $6 million, eight-year “Outstanding Investigator” federal grant for his innovative and visionary environmental health research. 

Dr. John E. Boynton, a UC Davis alumnus, retired Duke University professor and renowned expert on photosynthesis, has bequeathed a generous gift from his estate to establish a fellowship in honor of his mentor, tomato geneticist Charles M. Rick, Jr. 

Boynton passed away last summer at the age of 80 in Silver City, New Mexico, where he lived in retirement.

After providing 29 years of service, UC Cooperative Extension Specialist and Associate Agricultural Experiment Station Dean Dave Campbell retires July 1. Long-time colleague Rose Hayden-Smith asked Dave to reflect on his career and offer advice for those rising in the academic ranks.

Postdoctoral scholar María Florencia Ercoli, a researcher in the laboratory of plant pathology professor Pamela Ronald, has been named to the 2019 class of Pew Latin American Fellows in Biomedical Sciences. Her research focuses on the strategies infectious bacteria use to invade plant hosts.

DAVIS, Calif. — Innovators at the University of California, Davis, are receiving financial support to advance their research and technologies toward commercialization.