Awards and rankings

Ten UC Davis faculty members have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including Dina St. Clair, a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences. She was elected in the Section on Agriculture, Food, and Renewable Resources for her work on plant breeding and genetics.

Eduardo Blumwald and Jorge Dubcovsky are among 16 UC Davis researchers who have been named in the annual Highly Cited Researchers 2019 list. The list identifies scientists and social scientists who have published multiple papers ranking in the top 1 percent by citations. Both are Distinguished Professors in the Department of Plant Sciences.

Awards for UC Davis’ Hellman Fellows, Class of 2019, total $250,000. The Hellman Fellows program in its 12 years at UC Davis surpassed $3 million in total awards, given to 148 faculty. Barbara Blanco-Ulate, Department of Plant Sciences, is one of this year’s recipients.

Dave Ramos, retired walnut specialist at UC Davis Plant Sciences and UCANR received the “Outstanding Emeritus” award from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences for his research and outreach with UC and the walnut industry. He was a faculty member in the Department of Pomology, now part of the Department of Plant Science

Steve Fennimore, faculty in the Dept. of Plant Sciences, UC Davis, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to conduct research and teaching at the INIA Las Brujas horticultural field station in Uruguay as part of a project to develop sustainable weed management systems in specialty crops.

Barbara Blanco-Ulate, Asst. Professor in Plant Sciences, received a Hellman Fellowship for the research “Epigenomics of Tomato Fruit Susceptibility to Fungal Disease.” The grants are awarded to early-career faculty who show academic distinction and potential. It provides extra financial support for their early research.

Travis Parker, Plant Sciences grad student, won first place in the national NAPB Photo Contest. His photo is a variety of high-value common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) developed at UC Davis. One of his Ph.D. projects is breeding new high-value heirloom-type bean varieties for culinary quality and good field performance.

Louise Ferguson, faculty member in Plant Sciences, UC Davis, and Cooperative Extension pomology specialist for California, is the new President-elect of the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS), a professional academic society. This appointment will be followed by a year as ASHS President and a year as Chairman of the ASHS Board of Directors.

Allen Van Deynze, Seed Biotechnology Center, and Venkatesan Sundaresan, Department of Plant Biology and Department of Plant Sciences, are among six campuswide recipients of STAIR Grants for their research on food crops.

Three people in Plant Sciences received Breakthrough Technology Awards for Plant Breeding research and programs. The competitive grants advance development of publicly available cultivars bred to improve the production efficiency, yield, sustainability, resilience, healthfulness, product quality, and value of U.S. agricultural plants while increasing farmer profitability and exports.