Seven early career faculty members at UC Davis are being recognized with awards from the university and the UC Office of the President that highlight their research and creative exploration.

Benjamin Hurrell, assistant professor of nutrition and immunology in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, has been named this year’s recipient of the UC Davis Early Career Faculty Award for Creativity and Innovation. The award comes with a $40,000 prize. 

Separately, the UC Office of the President named six UC Davis faculty members recipients of its Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Award, which includes a $50,000 prize:

• Alex Fauer, assistant professor in the Family Caregiving Institute, Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing
• Hyoyoung Jeong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, College of Engineering
• Imtiyaz Khanday, assistant professor of plant sciences, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
• Tina Law, assistant professor of sociology, College of Letters and Science
• Xiaosa Xu, assistant professor of plant biology, College of Biological Sciences
• Jie Zheng, assistant professor, Departments of Neurological Surgery (School of Medicine) and Biomedical Engineering (College of Engineering)

The UC Davis Early Career Faculty Award for Creativity and Innovation was established in 2016 to promote and support exploration, creativity and advances in research by UC Davis faculty. It is intended to encourage early career faculty to develop their own intellectual pursuits; one award is given to a non-tenured, ladder rank assistant professor each year. 

This is the first year of the UCOP Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Awards, which seek to advance the university’s commitment to the scholarship and creative activity of early career faculty across all 10 UC campuses.

The application process for both awards was combined, and nominations were submitted by deans.

The recipients and their projects

The impact on nutrition on the development of asthma

Benjamin Hurrell will use the funding to investigate the immune mechanisms that lead to asthma. His research examines how nutrition influences immune responses in the airway microenvironment and contributes to lung inflammation. He said that while much is known about asthma as a disease, less is understood about its underlying immunological causes and how diet may modulate disease development.

“This project is designed to evaluate the effects of dietary nutrients, such as sodium and iron, on the lung microenvironment and allergen-driven inflammation,” he wrote in his application for the award. “This award will enable crucial milestones in establishing an innovative research program that bridges immunology and nutrition.”

Hurrell joined UC Davis in 2025 and was previously a postdoctoral fellow and faculty member at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles.

More thorough follow-up care for older cancer survivors

The largest — and fastest growing — group of cancer survivors is those who are 65 and older, and Alex Fauer plans to analyze whether patients who received an intervention to tailor age-appropriate cancer care in a previous study had fewer long-term hospital stays, emergency room visits and healthcare costs.  He wrote in his application that he plans to link and analyze data from a study of 605 people published in 2021 and information from the California Cancer Registry at UC Davis.

“Clinical oncology has long called for tailored interventions for older adult cancer patients and caregivers,” Fauer wrote. “While [geriatric assessment] has consistently demonstrated benefits in reducing treatment toxicity and improving quality of life, its potential influence on survival remains largely unexplored.”

His project is titled, “Survival Outcomes and Cost-Effectiveness of a Geriatric Assessment-Guided Model of Supportive Care for Older Adults with Cancer.”

Fauer joined UC Davis in 2022, after completing a National Clinician Scholars Program postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA.

Epilepsy care for kids

Hyoyoung Jeong, an expert in autonomous wireless electronics, will focus on creating a device that detects and mitigates seizures in children with pediatric epilepsy. He plans to combine a biodegradable, wireless device implanted inside the skull paired with an “electronic tattoo” — a device attached to the skin. The tattoo would detect seizures and power the implant to deliver pulses to the brain.

“Current epilepsy technologies are largely designed for adults and are not suitable for pediatric patients due to anatomical mismatch, infection risks from transdermal electrodes, repeated surgeries, and device failure caused by growth-related strain,” he wrote. “These limitations create a critical gap in care during the early developmental years.”

The implant would be designed to dissolve into biocompatible byproducts when triggered by an external electromagnet or other device once the child is old enough for a permanent form of treatment.

Jeong noted that epilepsy is the most prevalent — and comes with the most severe consequences — in infants and children.

His project is titled, “Establishing Growth-Accommodating, Biodegradable Neuromodulation Systems for Children with Epilepsy.”

Jeong joined UC Davis in 2022 after a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University.

More efficient potato propagation

Imtiyaz Khanday was part of the research team that developed rice plants capable of reproducing clonally through seed. He is now working to extend this technology to potato, where it could eventually enable growers to use small, disease-free botanical seeds instead of bulky seed tubers, which are expensive to produce, transport and store, and can carry disease.

The project uses gene editing to develop synthetic apomixis, a process that allows plants to produce clonal seeds without genetic reshuffling through sexual reproduction. In potato, this approach could allow true potato seeds, or TPS, to faithfully preserve elite genotypes while enabling disease-free seed-based propagation.

“Potato is the world’s most important tuber crop and ranks fourth globally in human caloric intake,” Khanday wrote. “Propagation of potatoes through clonal TPS could revolutionize potato cultivation.”

His project is titled “Engineering Synthetic Apomixis for Clonal Seed Propagation in Potato.”

Khanday joined UC Davis in 2014 as a postdoctoral scholar, then worked as an assistant project scientist at the university before becoming an assistant professor in 2021.

How do people form opinions on AI?

For her project, sociologist Tina Law plans to analyze a database of more than 50,000 YouTube videos about AI to better understand how Americans learn about the topic. She hopes her work will clarify what information on AI is publicly available and identify ways to increase Americans’ ability to have a say about how AI is influencing their lives.

“This project will help to inform research, policy and grantmaking priorities by providing new insights about how the public engages with AI, and to improve understanding of the contemporary dynamics of expertise and the growing role of social media platforms in inequality and democratic (dis)engagement,” Law wrote.

Law built a database of more than 50,000 videos about AI with help from the UC Davis DataLab and the YouTube Researcher Program, and will seek to analyze them to answer four questions:

1. What information about AI is available on YouTube?
2. Who are viewed as AI “experts”?
3. How is AI explained?
4. How do users interact with AI experts?

Law joined UC Davis in 2024 after spending time as a postdoctoral scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Her project is titled “Understanding Public Engagement with AI: A Computational Text and Image Analysis of YouTube Videos.” Read more about it in “Study of YouTube Videos to Lay Foundation for Increasing Public AI Governance.” 

Understanding the evolution of the maize ear

Plant biologist Xiaosa Xu plans to use his award to investigate how maize ear architecture changed during domestication from its wild ancestor, teosinte.

Maize is one of the world’s most productive cereal crops. Its ear changed dramatically during domestication from teosinte, but the biological processes underlying those changes remain poorly understood.

“This project will advance our understanding of how maize ear development and architecture evolved during domestication,” Xu said. “In the longer term, this knowledge may provide a foundation for research on agriculturally important traits.”

The project will use complementary approaches to investigate the biological basis of variation in maize ear architecture.

The project is titled, “Resolving the Cellular Basis of Maize Ear Domestication to Enhance Yield Potential.”

Xu joined UC Davis in 2023 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

The midbrain’s role in memory

Biomedical engineer Jie Zheng plans to focus on learning more about the way the midbrain, or the topmost part of the brainstem, contributes to our ability to form and retrieve memories.

Zheng writes that she will focus on the specific part of the midbrain called the substantia nigra, which plays a large role in the release of dopamine. Her project will use deep brain stimulation surgery to implant special probes that can record hundreds of neurons at once, then conducting memory tasks involving video clips.

“We focus on ‘event boundaries’ — transitions between sequential events, such as finishing one chapter of a book and starting another — where the brain naturally reorganizes and stabilizes memory,” Zheng wrote in her application.

The project will also explore how electrical stimulation of the midbrain region changes memory outcomes.

The project “will generate critical insights into midbrain contributions to memory — a domain where human studies remain scarce — while establishing a technical platform for research previously considered infeasible,” she wrote.

Her project is titled “Cellular Precision Neural Interfaces for Midbrain Modulation and Memory Enhancement.”

Zheng joined UC Davis in 2024 after a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School.