News

A team of students from the University of California, Davis, has won the global 2018 Amazon Alexa Prize and a $500,000 prize for creating a “chatbot” that can converse engagingly with humans on a range of topics such as entertainment, sports, politics, technology and fashion. 

In consultation with the Office of the President, our provost, the Academic Senate and Academic Federation are working on details about how the remaining days of the quarter will be handled. We’ll communicate about that as soon as possible.

Chancellor May and other campus leaders have heard the community’s concerns. The chancellor regrets any stress or inconvenience our previous update caused. We are all learning together. The Davis and Sacramento campuses will be closed today and classes canceled. The UC Davis hospitals, primary care clinics, Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital and Student Health and Wellness Center will remain open. The N95 masks will be available at the Memorial Union and the UC Davis Fire Department later today. The UC Davis Police and Fire departments are continuing normal operations. We will provide further updates later today.

After years of planning, UC Davis is renovating historic Walker Hall into the long-awaited Graduate Center, which will accommodate a variety of services and organizations for UC Davis graduate student and postdoctoral scholars. Members of the campus community have been taking photos and videos of the project's progress, but one UC Davis staff member has documented the transformation by putting pen and paint to paper.

For the 2018–19 academic year, 13 UC Davis students and alumni have been awarded Fulbright fellowships—the largest group of Aggies ever awarded—with the recipients’ global footprint stretching from Mexico to Malaysia, Iceland to Taiwan.

Two University of California graduate students have been selected by UC Agriculture and Natural Resources as UC Global Food Initiative (GFI) fellows for 2018-19. Graduate students Melanie Colvin at UC Berkeley and Maci Mueller at UC Davis will work with ANR academics and staff to conduct and communicate about UC research for improved food security and agricultural sustainability.

UC Davis graduate student Alex San Pablo ’18 has found a support structure at UC Davis that sustains her in uncertain times, just like the structures she hopes to build one day as a civil engineer.

Mayowa Adegboyega, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology has assumed the role of Graduate Student Assistant to the Dean of Graduate Studies and to the Chancellor (GSADC) for the 2018-2019 academic year.

UC Davis Chemistry graduate student and NIH-funded trainee of the Chemical Biology program Diedra Shorty talks about how she became a scientist and what attracted her to the field of Chemistry, even though it was her worst subject in high school.