UC Davis is home to globally renowned visionaries in the arts and education, law and letters, engineering, and the physical and life sciences, assuring its place as one of the top public universities in the country. Click through the categories on the right to view a sampling of the many premier faculty honors received. For more faculty distinctions by discipline and related stories, visit the colleges and schools linked here.
National & International Faculty Honors
Jinyi Qi, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has received the 2024 IEEE Edward J. Hoffman Award for nuclear medicine imaging research.
Lynna Dhanani, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the College of Letters and Science, has received a one-year Fulbright Fellowship for continued study in India.
Professor Mark N. Lubell of Environmental Science and Policy in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, has received the 2024 Elinor Ostrom Career Achievement Award of the American Political Science Association (Science, Technology and Environmental Politics section).
Tyler Scott, Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, has received the 2024 Emerging Scholar Award of the American Political Science Association (Science, Technology and Environmental Politics section).
(From left to right) Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar, Distinguished Professor of Plant Pathology; Walter Leal, Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology; and Richard Michelmore, Distinguished Professor of Plant Sciences and Molecular and Cellular Biology and Founding Director Emeritus of the UC Davis Genome Center, have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences.
Estella Atekwana, Dean of the College of Letters and Science and Distinguished Professor of Geophysics, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ten UC Davis faculty have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: (top left to right) Brad Barber, Andreas Bäumler, Louise Berben, Siobhan Brady, Chen-Nee Chuah, (bottom left to right) Ozcan Gulacar, Emanual Maverakis, Luis Fernando Santana, Renée Tsolis, and Mariel Vázquez.
Distinguished Professor Carol A. Hess, an expert on the music of Spain and the Americas in the Department of Music, has received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for American Music.
George (Ron) Mangun, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neurology and Director, UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, has received a 2024-2025 University of Birmingham Distinguished Chair Fellowship through the Fulbright US Distinguished Chair Fellowship Program.
Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine and Founding Director of the Center for Reducing Health Disparities, has been named by the Sacramento Bee one of 2024'sTop 20 Latino Change Makers in the Capitol Region.
Beatriz Cortez, multi-disciplinary artist and professor of art, has been selected to participate in the pre-eminent Venice Biennale Exhibition in Venice, Italy.
Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, Professor of Evolution and Ecology in the College of Biological Sciences, has received the 2024 NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences.
Law School Dean Kevin Johnson and Amagda Pérez, JD, Lecturer, attorney with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, and Co-director of the school’s Immigration Law Clinic, have each been honored recently by the Yolo County Unity Bar. Dean Johnson received the organization’s Education Award, and Prof. Perez received its Civil Attorney Award.
Donna Shestowsky, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law and Director of the Lawyering Skills Education Program, has received two awards from the Association of American Law Schools, including the Litigation Award and the Section of the Year Award.
Kari Edison Watkins, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and faculty in the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, has been appointed to the Transit Transformation Task Force of the California State Transportation Agency.
Dan Sperling (left), Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, and colleague Giovanni Circella, Director of the 3 Revolutions Future Mobility Program and the Honda Distinguished Scholar for New Mobility Studies at the University of California, Davis, and a professor of mobility in the Department of Geography of Ghent University, have been named Co-Secretaries General of the World Conference on Transportation Research Society.
Sarah T. Stewart, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.