Individual and group awards are taking center stage in this week’s Laurels column in Dateline UC Davis. Read on for more information.

Georgia Tech College of Engineering Hall of Fame

Chancellor Gary S. May was inducted into the Georgia Tech College of Engineering Hall of Fame earlier this month. May, an alum of the university and the college’s former dean, was honored at its Alumni Awards Induction Ceremony in Atlanta.

“My years at Georgia Tech defined so much of my life,” May said at the ceremony, according to Georgia Tech. “It’s really impossible to reduce to mere words the impact that this institution has had on me.” 

May was one of 11 alumni inducted into the college’s hall of fame. He earned an undergraduate degree from Georgia Tech in 1985, and served as dean of engineering from 2011-2017. The university gave him an honorary doctorate in 2021.

National Science Foundation CAREER Award

Computer science assistant professor Slobodan Mitrović has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development, or NSF CAREER Award, which recognizes early-career faculty who demonstrate the potential to act as academic role models in research and education by performing innovative research at the forefront of their field and through their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. 

Mitrović's research focuses on algorithmic graph theory and designing efficient algorithms when memory resources are limited. The award will support a project addressing the time and efficiency problem of a computational communication issue. 

— Jessica Heath 

Read more on the College of Engineering website

Kathryn Olmsted Elected Fellow of Society of American Historians

AERA President-Elect

Maisha Winn, the Chancellor’s Leadership Professor in the School of Education, has been voted president-elect of the American Educational Research Association. Winn joins its council in 2024–2025 as president-elect, and her presidency will begin at the conclusion of the association’s 2025 annual meeting.

Winn co-founded and co-directs the Transformative Justice in Education Center at UC Davis. A former elementary and high school English teacher, Winn examines the intersections of language, literacy and youth culture. She specifically looks at how nondominant communities have engineered teaching and learning communities at the contours of and adjacent to school settings.

Read more on the American Educational Research Association website.

UC Davis Researchers Awarded Aggie Climate Action for Equity Grants to Lead Innovations for Climate Change Solutions

Public Impact Grants

The Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement has announced the recipients of the 2024 Public Impact Research Initiative Grants, continuing its commitment to supporting research that creates meaningful community impacts.

This year’s nine funded projects exemplify the breadth and depth of public scholarship, ranging from efforts to mitigate wildfire risks in Maui; citizen science and environmental justice; advancing healthcare accessibility; and documenting stories of indigenous peoples and immigrants. Awardees were selected from 26 applicants across UC Davis.

“Representing a diverse range of disciplines and approaches, these projects are bound by a common goal — to catalyze change for the greater good,” said Michael Rios, vice provost for public scholarship.