Chemistry graduate student Cocoro Nagasaka works at the interface of environmental and energy sciences. And now he’s continuing his research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL, through the prestigious U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research program.

When her ovarian tumor symptoms were misdiagnosed, UC Davis researcher Elizabeth Neumann trusted her instincts and it changed the course of her work. Now, she’s using advanced imaging and mass spectrometry to improve early detection of ovarian cancer, while also speaking out about the challenges women face in healthcare.

While almost the complete inverse of astronomy and cosmology, fields concerned with the largest objects in our universe, particle physics aims to answer similar questions but from a different vantage. Matthew Citron discusses how particle physicists like himself use particle accelerators to search for dark matter.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have made a surprising discovery about a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away: It isn’t rotating. That’s something only seen in the most massive, mature galaxies that are closer to us in space and time, said Ben Forrest, a research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Davis, and first author on the paper published May 4 in Nature Astronomy. 

At the April Davis Science Café, environmental toxicologist Andrew Whitehead explored not only how our actions as a species affect ourselves, but also how they impact the innumerable species we share the Earth with. 

At the April Astronomy on Tap event, Professor Daniel Cebra, the chair of the UC Davis Department of Physics and Astronomy, discusses how space agencies such as NASA contend with cosmic radiation when it comes to space travel and how his work as a high-energy nuclear physicist can help address these hazards.

Inside a room on the fourth floor of the Chemistry Annex, a mechanical leviathan helps UC Davis scientists unravel the mysteries of chemical biology. Developed by Bruker Scientific with the assistance of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Elizabeth Neumann, the timsTOF fleX system enables the high-throughput chemical analysis of single organelles to whole body systems. Check out five of our favorite images from the Neumann Lab!

At the March 2026 Davis Science Café, protein biochemist Sascha Nicklisch discussed how some toxicants, like DDT, sneak past the body's molecular bouncers. Nicklisch's functional research is elucidating exactly how these harmful chemicals bypass our cell’s defense system.

The discovery of room-temperature superconductors would open a huge range of applications and new technologies. There are no physical laws that rule out such materials, according to a recent perspectives article by a group of scientists including Warren Pickett, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of physics and astronomy at UC Davis.

At the most recent Astronomy on Tap event at Sudwerk Brewing, Professor Tucker Jones, Department of Physics and Astronomy, describes how the James Webb Space Telescope is being used to pinpoint the cosmic dawn, an early period in the universe’s history when the first stars and galaxies formed.