The UCPRC turns research data into tools and practices used to improve California’s roads. Somayeh Nassiri, the center’s new director, is driven to advance the state’s leadership in pavement innovation and collaborating with transportation agencies across the nation.
Farzaneh Khorsandi, associate professor of cooperative extension in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, has been recognized for her groundbreaking work improving agricultural safety through engineering innovations, AI-driven approaches and advancements in ATV and machinery safety.
Flying taxis may have once seemed like science fiction, but UC Davis researcher Seongkyu Lee is helping make them a real-life commute option, from designing quieter vehicles to championing air mobility education.
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Seongkyu Lee will contribute to the $9 million South Korea-based center with his expertise in high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics. His group will be the first to investigate and predict mid- and high-frequency tonal and broadband noise emitted from UAM vehicles.
The UC Davis team was the top award winner at the 2024-25 CITRIS Aviation Prize competition, earning $12,000 for their innovative design of an intercampus air transportation system for UC students, faculty and staff.
The Vertical Flight Society takes off with a brand-new chapter at UC Davis. The new club, which integrates undergraduate and graduate students, explores the current technologies and possible advancements for vertical takeoff and landing aircraft like helicopters and drones.
Autonomous vehicles can struggle when confronted with unforeseen events, such as a car driving on the wrong side of the road. To address this issue, Professor Junshan Zhang is rethinking how researchers design AVs by letting the machine learning models train themselves.
A team of UC Davis undergraduate students took home $6,000 in awards from the CITRIS Aviation Prize for their project SMART UC Davis, which proposes using electrical vertical takeoff and landing aircraft as air taxis between UC campuses.
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Kari Watkins leads a project to turn the UC Davis campus into the world’s premier living-learning lab for researching bike and bus infrastructure.
Air travel now accounts for about 3% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and the sector’s emissions are rising: Global air travel more than doubled from 2004 to 2019. This is literally a first-world problem — most people on Earth fly rarely, if ever. By some estimates, the 1% of humans who fly most often are responsible for half of all air travel emissions.
