The American Geosciences Institute, or AGI, recently announced that paleontologist Sandra J. Carlson, a Professor Emerita in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, has been named the 2026 recipient of the William B. Heroy Jr. Award for Distinguished Service to AGI. This award is given in recognition of exceptional and beneficial long-term service to the AGI.
The Regeneration Research Program is designed to help faculty fill gaps created by the current constrained funding environment. Grant awards range from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on proposed needs and budget justification.
Professor Tessa Hill has been named associate dean of research and graduate education in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. In the position, Hill will facilitate and support cross-departmental and cross-college research initiatives, oversee contracts and grants, and develop mentorship programs to cultivate research expertise and collaboration among faculty. In addition, she’ll oversee graduate students and studies in the college.
Here in the College of Letters and Science, we love all that Picnic Day has to offer, but we love what our departments are doing best! So, if you, like us, don't want to miss what L&S Aggies are planning for April 18, we wanted to make it easier by providing this guide, featuring events from across the arts and humanities as well as math and science.
In December 2025, Russian scientists published an analysis of a 67-million-year-old dinosaur fossil that was found in the Gobi Desert in 1979. The researchers examining Manipulonyx reshetovi suggested that the species specialized in egg eating, using its stubby digits and long claws to grasp and puncture eggs. A UC Davis researcher is questioning that narrative.
In a new paper appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vermeij and his research colleague Tracy Thomson catalogued the features of various mollusks in the fossil record and found that early mollusks evolved a unique physical trait once every 2 million years. That frequency began declining roughly 444 million years ago to about one new feature every 9 million years.
Geology provides a language for understanding the Earth. Stories from the planet’s past are locked in the rocks and landscape. But others are hard to reveal, hidden in troves of data. Alums Barbara Wotham and Chad Trexler launched a Geology Coding Bootcamp program to help students uncover those stories.
Claris Sunjo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Davis, working under the supervision of Professor Eliot Atekwana in the Atekwana Research Lab Group. Sunjo's research focuses on investigating carbon cycling in tropical mangrove estuaries.
By tracking swarms of very small earthquakes, seismologists are getting a new picture of the complex region where the San Andreas fault meets the Cascadia subduction zone, an area that could give rise to devastating major earthquakes.
While not nearly as prevalent or long-lived in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, increasing methane emissions are a problem for the environment. Responsible for about one-third of the Earth’s warming, methane is about 80 times more powerful in terms of global heating than carbon dioxide. Oceanographer Tessa Hill talks about what can be done to mitigate this.
