Academic Affairs Vice Provost Phil Kass announced the 2017 UC Davis Hellman Fellows: 15 assistant professors who have been awarded a total of $294,300 in research support.
“Altruistic vision inspired the Hellman family to start this program more than 20 years ago, and it has endured through the Hellman Fellows Fund,” Kass said, “enhancing the trajectories of our early-career faculty of whom we are so proud.”
The San Francisco family provided the first Hellman fellowships in 1994 at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley in support of early-career faculty research. The fellows program has expanded to all 10 UCs (it’s the only privately funded, systemwide program) and to four private institutions — supporting more than 100 junior faculty members annually.
HELLMAN FELLOW SPOTLIGHT
Hellman fellowships are awarded through a competitive selection process on each campus. Preference is given to faculty members who exhibit the potential for great academic distinction, but who have garnered only modest support and have not received other young investigator awards.
UC Davis has distributed $2.75 million in funding over the last 10 years. “Not only do the Hellman funds help support the success of the fellows, but our graduate students — our future faculty — reap the rewards as well.”
In the 2017-18 funding cycle, the campus awarded fellowships of $5,000 to $43,000 to the following faculty members, in support of 14 projects (also listed). Links are provided to project descriptions, if available on the Hellman Fellows website.
- Marcela Cuellar, School of Education, “Examining the Baccalaureate Origins of Latina/o Doctorate Recipients and Their Pathway Into the Professoriate”
- Tudor Dimofte, Department of Mathematics, “Vortices and Geometric Representation Theory”
- Davide Donadio, Department of Chemistry, “Molecular Characterization of Ice Surfaces as Catalyst of Ozone Depletion Reactions”
- Alexander LeBaron Forrest, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, “Epishelf Lakes: A Key to Understanding Ice Shelf Collapse?”
- Christopher Hare and Adrienne Hosek (joint proposal), Department of Political Science, “Bridging the Pond: Measuring Policy Preferences in Western Democracies”
- Adam Jacob, Department of Mathematics, “The Yang-Mills Equations and Geometry”
- Jeffrey Kahn, Department of Anthropology, “Geographic Information Systems/Network Analysis Methods Training”
- Yong Jae Lee, Department of Computer Science, “Automated Decoding of Pain in the Horse”
- David McCourt, Department of Sociology, “American Hegemony and the Rise of China: 1945 to the Present”
- Cindy Rubio Gonzalez, Department of Computer Science, “A Large-Scale Study of Bugs in Numerical Software”
- Christina Rulli, Department of Philosophy, “Moral Options, Motives and Complicity”
- Ameer Taha, Department of Food Science and Technology, “A New Lipid Signaling Pathway That Facilitates Brain Repair”
- Jacinda Townsend, Department of English, “Kif: A Novel”
- Georgia Zellou, Department of Linguistics, “Tracing Speaker-Specific Phonetic Variation During Spoken-Word Comprehension”