This year’s Honors and Awards ceremony was held in the multipurpose room of the Student Community Center, hosting over 100 attendees which consisted of awardees, their families and friends, advisors, and other supporting department faculty. Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph Hexter and Vice Provost - Graduate Education and Dean - Graduate Studies Jeffery C. Gibeling were also present to open the ceremony and introduce each series of awards.

​Winners of the Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Awards (OGTA) were radiant as each of their advisor professors delivered speeches commending their hard work in teaching and learning at UC Davis, and each professor included excerpts from undergraduate students’ written nominations. The winners of the 2014 OGTA are as follows:

• Lacy Baldiviez, Nutritional Biology
• Hang-Wei Hao, Economics
• Danielle Joesten, Political Science
• Erin Melcon, Statistics
• Christina D. Owens, Cultural Studies
• Dyani J. Taff, English
• Linda Yamashita, Education
• Kaveh Zamani, Civil & Environmental Engineering

Impressively, this year’s Loren D. Carlson Prize in Physiology and Max Kleiber Prize were won by the same person. Katherine D. Watson, who received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Integrative Physiology this year, claimed both prizes for best demonstrating “scholarly achievement and promise for teaching and research,” and best representing “the characteristics and high standards of scholastics and professional ethics that guided Professor Max Kleiber’s career” in his outstanding success in elucidating metabolic relationships in intact animals.” The Carlson Prize winner receives a monetary award of $3,000 (in addition to a certificate and inscription on the Carlson Prize plaque in the Carlson Library) and the Max Kleiber Prize winner receives $1,000 (in addition to a certificate and announcement of the candidate in the Graduate Commencement Program).

This year’s prestigious Allen G. Marr Prize was awarded to Lilian Chang, whose work with Professor Adam Moule has been widely cited by the scientific community. She received the Marr Prize for her superior dissertation work, titled “Polymer Solar Cells: Understanding Solvent Interactions and Morphology and Strategies for Efficiency Improvements.” The winner of the Marr Prize is awarded $500 in recognition of Allen G. Marr’s commitment to highest standards of scholarship and professional ethics, and will have her name inscribed on the Marr plaque in Graduate Studies. Lilian graduated from UC Davis in March 2013 with a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering, and currently teaches graduate thermodynamics at San Jose State University.

While all major award categories (Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Awards, the Loren D. Carlson Prize in Physiology, the John Kinsella Award, the Max Kleiber Prize, the Zuhair A. Munir Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation in Engineering, and the Allen G. Marr Prize) were announced to the winners previous to the ceremony, the two winners for the last category, Excellence in Postdoctoral Research, were declared at the end of the event. The revealing of the awardees for the last category is a tradition at Graduate Studies. This year’s winners for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research were Janhavi Sharma (Internal Medicine - Cardiology) and Matthew Szydagis (Physics). Though the ceremony’s tradition for surprise was expected by all, Matthew’s acceptance of the award was very surprising, and non-traditional. Notably, his wife attended in order to represent him while he was out-of-state for a research opportunity, but he was also there – via webcam, held up by his wife on an iPad. Needless to say, it was a fun and touching moment witnessed at the ceremony.

The winners of the John Kinsella Award and the Zuhair A. Munir Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation in Engineering, Nicholas A. Bokulich (Food Science, Biotechnology) and Taylor Woehl (Chemical Engineering), respectively, were not present, as both awardees were also committed to out-of-state work.

As a precursor to commencement, the honors and awards ceremony served as the official recognition of outstanding graduate students and their commitment to teaching, learning, and research, reminding us of the university mission for excellence in education.

For more information on the awards and award winners, view the ceremony program booklet.