Sameer Iyer, an associate professor of mathematics at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, recently received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program to advance his theoretical work on two enigmatic aspects of the Navier-Stokes equations: the boundary layer between an object and a fluid, and the large time dynamics of a fluid’s flow.
Òscar Jordà has been named a Fellow of the Econometric Society for his innovative method of analyzing dynamic systems and his contributions to the field of economics across his career.
Maceo Montoya’s latest release, Imaginative Possibilities: Conversations with Twenty-First-Century Latinx Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), co-authored with poet Javier O. Huerta, has won an American Book Award. Professor Montoya is a writer and visual artist teaching in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies, the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program, all in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Using a global network of telescopes, astronomers have detected the lowest-mass dark object yet found in the universe. The work is described in two papers published Oct. 9 in Nature Astronomy and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
On Tuesday, Nov. 4, Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Adam Riess will give a free public lecture titled “The Surprising Expansion History of the Universe.” The lecture will start at 7 p.m. with a reception before the lecture at 6 p.m. The event is being hosted by the College of Letters and Science and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Every day faculty and students from the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis are highlighted in the news media, having their research featured and commenting on the most pressing issues facing the world. Check out some of these news media highlights from August 2025.
From early Japanese folklore and Dante’s Inferno to post-Soviet film and modern-day scapegoating in the U.S., humanity has long grappled with its fears through storytelling as well as violence. This collection of books traverses these themes, diving deep and analyzing the way these anxieties manifest in our behavior, political decisions and the creative works we produce.
In a first-of-its-kind study appearing in Nature Communications, an interdisciplinary team from the university’s Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics (IPN) dosed mouse mothers with psilocybin and found that the drug amplified anxiety and depressive-like symptoms associated with perinatal mood disorders — mental health conditions that can arise during or after pregnancy.
Two projects at the University of California, Davis, that use artificial intelligence to design and engineer proteins for industrial and health applications have been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The grants are part of a $32 million investment in AI and protein engineering by the NSF Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships.
Jenny Kaminer has been named director of the Davis Humanities Institute (DHI). Over the past two years, Kaminer, a professor of Russian, has chaired the DHI Visioning Committee, leading a collaborative effort to reimagine and revitalize the institute.
