Around 170,000 years ago, the Yellowstone Caldera — a supervolcano — produced a series of small eruptions in frequent pulses lasting roughly 100,000 years. Remnants from those eruptions can be found on the Earth’s surface today as volcanic rock. And those rocks contain critical clues about the interior of the supervolcano.
Magali Billen, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, seeks to unravel the forces that drive plate tectonics from hundreds of kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface.
Estella Atekwana, dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Davis, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced April 24.
The Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement (PSE) is pleased to announce seven graduate students have been awarded Public Scholars for the Future fellowships. The scholars include three L&S graduate students.
Thirteen faculty members from the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis were recently awarded Revitalization Research Program Grants. Intended to support faculty whose research programs have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the college-funded grants support the continuation or completion of stalled, high-priority projects. The selected faculty members represent the breadth of research conducted at the College of Letters and Science.
Get Informed and Inspired With New Books by Campus Authors
You don't have to be a student at UC Davis to learn from these professors. Their knowledge about the Earth and its environment is woven throughout these new books, including two from College of Letters and Science faculty, that came out in 2023 or are about to be published. From oceans, fire and evolution to transportation and sustainability, these books inspire action on the world’s most pressing environmental issues.
Paleontologists are getting a glimpse at life over a billion years in the past based on chemical traces in ancient rocks and the genetics of living animals. Research published Dec. 1 in Nature Communications combines geology and genetics, showing how changes in the early Earth prompted a shift in how animals eat.
As dean of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, the largest college on campus that more than 14,000 undergraduate students call home, Estella Atekwana envisions the college as a bridge that helps students make their dreams a reality while being a powerhouse for interdisciplinary research.
A fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America, geochemist Kari Cooper, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, won the American Geophysical Union’s Norman L. Bowen Award, which honors a mid-career or senior scientist for outstanding contributions to the fields of petrology, volcanology and geochemistry.
An international research team led by a UC Davis alum has created a new method to reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which went missing over the Indian Ocean with 239 passengers onboard.
