Awards

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded a grant of $1 million to the University of California, Davis, to use software, data and personal networking among faculty and staff professionals to create a more inclusive educational environment engaged in ongoing improvement.

Jennifer Choi received a Committee on Research Large Grant for her project titled, “Shedding light on undergraduates’ unsatisfactory problem solving performance in STEM: The role of knowledge structure, knowledge retention, and misconceptions.” Dr. Choi will be collaborating on the project with Ozcan Gulacar (Chemistry) and Marina Crowder (Molecular and Cellular Biology). 

Katherine Ferrara has received a 5-year NIH R01 for her project, “Image-guided ultrasound therapy and drug delivery in pancreatic cancer.” 

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an aggressive and invasive cancer, with a median survival of 6 months and a 5-year survival rate of 6%. Although recent advances have been made in the understanding of PDAC development, effective therapies are lacking.

Vivek Srinivasan, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, received a 5 year R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) to develop, validate, and apply new optical microscope technology for the study of subcortical pathology, non-invasively, in the living mouse brain.

Laura Marcu and Kent Leach have each received $1.8 million Tools and Technology Awards from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. The Tools and Technologies Awards are intended to create and test novel tools and technologies, to improve existing ones, and to help resolve bottlenecks that are impairing progress for the field.

Andrew Wong, a graduate student in the Ferrara lab, received the Nadine Barrie Smith Award from the International Society of Therapeutic Ultrasound in April for his presentation at the meeting in Las Vegas.