Graduate

Computer Science Ph.D. student Rajvardhan Oak stumbled upon an underground market for fake Amazon reviews by accident while scrolling through Facebook. Seedy scam networks are using social media to organize campaigns that influence product ratings. They’re a headache for shoppers—and tough to crack down on.

Children in Maripá de Minas don’t think of pursuing a higher education, likely because they don’t know what opportunities await them in Brazil or beyond. Isabella Loureiro Muller Costa, a third year Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis and Brazil native, plans to show these students what their future could entail with her outreach efforts.

A new study from UC Davis suggests that AI recommendation algorithms on sites like YouTube and Tik Tok can play a role in political radicalization. If the algorithm sees that a user is watching a lot of biased political videos, the researchers found that it can trap them in a “loop effect,” recommending similarly biased and potentially more extreme content on their homepage and sidebar.

Matt McNulty, Ph.D. ’22 is this year’s recipient of the UC Davis Graduate Studies Allen G. Marr Prize for dissertation excellence. McNulty is a cutting-edge researcher in plant molecular farming and a founder of the emerging field of space systems bioengineering with a passion for helping others.

The UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering recently received a $3 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to create a new graduate-level training program that stands to transform the field of neuroengineering.

Materials Science and Engineering Ph.D. candidate Pallavi Sambre is taking the first steps toward engineering lifelike artificial materials that reconstitute a cell’s ability to change their membrane shape to move from one part of the body to another.

In five years in the chemical engineering graduate program at UC Davis, Dr. Jovana Veselinović conducted groundbreaking interdisciplinary work on using nanoporous gold to detect biomarkers of disease while falling in love with Davis. She is this year’s recipient of the College of Engineering’s Zuhair A. Munir Award for best doctoral dissertation.

Meghna Srivastava is this year’s recipient of the of the College of Engineering’s Jeffery C. Gibeling Master’s Thesis Excellence Award, which recognizes the M.S. student who has submitted the best master's thesis. Srivastava earned her M.S. in materials science and engineering under the mentorship of Associate Professor Marina Leite.

Davis-based Storx Technologies has developed a noninvasive device that accurately determines a baby’s well-being in the womb — and helps doctors decide whether the baby can be delivered naturally, avoiding an unnecessary cesarian section. The innovation was developed in electrical and computer engineering professor Soheil Ghiasi’s UC Davis lab after Ghiasi’s wife experienced a C-section.

Biological Systems Engineering Ph.D. student Alice Dien is the first engineer and first non-native English speaker to win UC Davis Grad Slam with her award-winning presentation "Cooling Down with the New Hot Air: The Future of Drying in Agriculture." She will compete for the top prize against winners from the other nine UC campuses on May 6.