In its first year, the UCOP Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Awards seek to advance the university’s commitment to the scholarship and creative activity of early career faculty across all 10 UC campuses. Engineering professors Hyoyoung Jeong and Jie Zheng help make up the inaugural cohort.
The Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering will be led by incoming chairs Sanjeevi Sivasankar and Vinod Narayanan, respectively.
Concrete, the second-most-used material in the world, after water, requires significant resources for its production. A study in the journal Nature Sustainability from UC Davis researchers shows that global concrete production requires far more resources than previously estimated.
University of California, Davis, researchers have received a nearly $4 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to develop the world’s first standardized method for measuring and describing the neurotoxicity of nanoplastics inhaled as part of air pollution.
UC Davis undergraduate teams captured three of four major awards in the 2025-26 CITRIS Aviation Prize, developing innovative software and simulation tools to support California’s future advanced air mobility network and electric air taxi transportation systems.
The National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development will fund the assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering’s work investigating the wing movements hawks use to conduct lateral flight maneuvers.
Professor of Biomedical Engineering Aijun Wang co-leads a $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to test a bioengineered graft infused with molecules to treat neuropathic bladders of children with spina bifida or spinal cord injuries.
As silicon-based computing approaches its limits, materials science and engineering researcher Seung Sae Hong is studying oxide membranes, an emerging material platform with unusual electronic properties that could power more energy-efficient electronics and future computing technologies.
UC Davis is pleased to announce awards totaling $1.2 million from the Bridge Funding Initiative supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation. This investment will provide resources to six high-impact basic science projects during a period when early-stage research often faces significant funding uncertainty.
