Three staff members with the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES) are being recognized for their exceptional efforts to help incoming and current students thrive. Thanks to their tireless dedication and guidance, they have ensured a brighter future for those they serve.

Congratulations to the following recipients of the UC Davis Outstanding Advising Awards:

UC Davis Professors Joanna Chiu and Andrew Whitehead have been appointed as the new chairs of the Departments of Entomology and Nematology and Environmental Toxicology, respectively. Mary Delany has also been appointed as interim chair for the Department of Human Ecology. As the academic year gets underway, these visionary leaders are set to steer their departments toward groundbreaking research, interdisciplinary collaborations and exceptional experiences for students.

The Arboretum and Public Garden at UC Davis is about to get a fresh set of water quality data after students fanned out earlier this month along the Arboretum Waterway to measure salinity and fecal coliform levels.

The three-hour session began with a lecture, then moved to the Arboretum for sampling and back to a lab to analyze what students collected. The information will be shared with Arboretum management to help provide a glimpse into the health of the creek.

Aerosols carried in wildfire smoke plumes that are hundreds of hours old can still affect climate, according to a study out of the University of California, Davis. 

The research, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, suggests that wildfire emissions even 10 days old can affect the properties of aerosols — suspended liquid or particles that are key to cloud formation. 

Chris Vogel, a research professor in the Department of Environmental Toxicology, is a 2020 laboratory safety award winner for his oversight of a laboratory focused on environmental and molecular toxicology.

Vogel was selected for the exceptional management of his lab, which is part of the Center for Health and the Environment (CHE). The Safety Services Lab Safety Awards are endorsed by the faculty-led Chemical and Lab Safety Committee and are given to scientists in individual units throughout UC Davis.

A new method for estimating the biological sex of human remains based on reading protein sequences rather than DNA has been used to study an archaeological site in Northern California. The protein-based technique gave superior results to DNA analysis in studying 55 sets of human remains between 300 and 2,300 years old. The work is published July 17 in Scientific Reports.

Previous exposure to the pollutant DDT may contribute to the risk of diabetes among Asian Indian immigrants to the United States, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

Sixteen UC Davis researchers have been named in the annual Highly Cited Researchers 2019 list released by the Web of Science Group, which compiles statistics on scientific publishing. The list identifies scientists and social scientists who have published multiple papers ranking in the top 1 percent by citations in a particular field and year, over a 10-year period. 

Citation counts represent how often a particular paper has been cited in other scientific publications. 

UC Davis researchers included in this year’s list are:

DNA evidence has revolutionized forensic science in the past few years, cracking open cold cases and bringing both convictions and exonerations. The same techniques help archaeologists and anthropologists studying remains from ancient peoples or human ancestors. 

But DNA is a relatively fragile molecule that breaks down easily. That’s where proteomics, the new science of analyzing proteins, comes in. By reading the sequence of amino acids from fragments of protein, scientists can work backwards to infer the sequence of DNA that produced the protein.