EVENT RECAP: College Celebrates Faculty and Staff at Fall Welcome
The College of Biological Sciences celebrated its annual Fall Welcome event last Friday, commemorating the start of a new academic year. Faculty, staff, students, friends and family gathered in the Life Sciences Courtyard for food, beverages and celebration.
In addition to celebrating the college’s achievements during the 2018-2019 academic year, the event featured the formal announcement of the winners of the Faculty Teaching Award and the Faculty Research Award, the latter of which featured two winners. This year, all three winners come from the Department of Plant Biology. You can learn more about their award-winning research and teaching by following the links below.
Helping Students Shine: Julin Maloof Receives Faculty Teaching Award
For nearly two decades, Professor Julin Maloof has shined a light on biological knowledge for UC Davis students, introducing computational methods to the life sciences curriculum. For his dedication to his students, Maloof received the 2018-2019 Faculty Teaching Award.
Getting to the Root of Food Production: Siobhan Brady Receives Faculty Research Award
Last year, Associate Professor Siobhan Brady and her colleagues published “a core set of genes that are critical in nitrogen metabolism” in Nature. The research pushes plant breeders closer to producing crop varieties that grow more with less fertilizer or use fertilizer more efficiently.
Cloning Food Crops for Higher Yields: Venkatesan Sundaresan Wins Faculty Research Award
In December 2018, Distinguished Professor Venkatesan Sundaresan and his colleagues published in Nature a method that allowed them to produce clonal seeds directly from plants, bypassing the sexual reproduction process. Replicating this process in the lab could prove vital to providing the world’s farmers with high-yielding, disease-resistant or climate-resistant food crops.
The event also featured the college’s Principles of Community awards. This year’s winners include: Connie Champagne, the director of Educational Enrichment and Outreach Programs; Professor Emeritus Charles Gasser, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Eva Jakab, the chief administrative officer for the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics; and Helen Schurke Frasier, the assistant vice provost for undergraduate education, who received the Friend of the College Award.
And finally, Mark Winey, dean of the College of Biological Sciences, was recently named as a fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). During the fall welcome, Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Jodi Nunnari, the 2018 president of the ASCB, commemorated the designation by presenting Winey with a poster that shows that Winey has been teaching since childhood. He'll be recognized with the other fellows at the society's annual meeting in December.
