Year in Review

Message From Vice Provost and Dean Jean-Pierre Delplanque

2025 was a momentous year. The year brought real challenges with ongoing pressures across higher education. At the same time, the work of our graduate education community made it clear how far our impact reaches — and why our charge matters more than ever.

In 2025 Graduate Studies kicked off our 100 years of graduate education in Davis celebration. Since the first 12 graduate students enrolled in the fall of 1925, our UC Davis graduate education community has grown to nearly 7,000 graduate students and 1,000 postdoctoral scholars working across more than 100 programs, with over 80,000 graduate alumni from around the world.

This community continues to advance meaningful research, creative work, and scholarship that addresses pressing questions and contributes to knowledge well beyond our campus. Electrical and computer engineering doctoral student, Peggy Zhu, is tackling AI literacy to equip researchers with more effective tools for addressing our increasingly complex health problems. Yara Khatib, a doctoral candidate in pharmacology and toxicology and our 2025 UC Davis Grad Slam champion, is investigating how psychedelic-like drugs can lead to improved treatments for mental and neurological disorders. And Emily Tonnos, an M.F.A. student in design, is featuring her installation Embodiment this year at the UC Davis Design Museum, which explores the intersection of exhibition, theatrical and narrative design to create an immersive, multisensory journey through human emotion, personal struggle and growth.  

From AI to psychedelics, from design to dark matter, from medieval texts to cancer proteins — these and every other effort reflect our community’s depth of talent and the results of strong faculty and staff mentorship. And because this collaboration and commitment to learning and discovery extends well beyond the classroom, it is more important than ever to showcase — publicly — how this work transforms our world.

Last March, we were proud to host U.S. Congressional and Senate staffers in Walker Hall to highlight such research and the value of investing in it. The staffers toured some of our UC Davis labs in the College of Biological Sciences, they witnessed Khatib’s prize-winning Grad Slam presentation, and they met with our graduate students, all while learning more about the intersection between UC Davis research and national policy. By working together, researchers and advocates can create the solutions that matter. This commitment to a shared purpose continues to drive Graduate Studies as we step forward into 2026.

There is so much opportunity to forge new discoveries, expand access to graduate education, and continue building a global future defined by innovation, creativity, inclusion and public good. Whether we are reimagining our GradPathways Institute to provide more cohesive support across mentoring and professional development, celebrating our graduating students at Commencement, or hosting coffee-bagel-donut day at Walker Hall, Graduate Studies stands proudly on the roots of 100 years seeded by a basic ideal that advanced learning changes the world.