VIDEO AWARD

Cooperative Extension specialist Alison Van Eenennaam shows how far animal agriculture has come in feeding a hungry world. Read the story and watch Were Those the Days, My Friend?

Three faculty members have been recognized recently for their scholarly writings:

• Samuel Sandoval Solis, assistant professor and assistant Cooperative Extension specialist in water resources, Department of Land, Air and Water Resources — He was a co-recipient of two of the three awards given annually by the American Society of Civil Engineers for papers in the society’s Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.

Sandoval

Sandoval joined the UC Davis faculty in 2011 after receiving his doctorate in environmental and water resources engineering from the University of Texas, Austin. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering and Master of Science degree in hydrology at Mexico’s Instituto Politecnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institute).

He joined Daene C. McKinney and Daniel P. Loucks in writing Sustainability Index for Water Resources Planning and Management, for which they received the Quentin Martin Best Practice-Oriented Paper Award. The paper proposes a method to systematically evaluate water management policies through the use of the Sustainability Index, which summarize the desired water supply characteristics for anthropogenic, environmental and system requirements.

Sandoval joined McKinney, Rebecca L. Teasley and Carlos Patiño Gomez in writing Groundwater Banking in the Rio Grande Basin, for which they received the Best Policy-Oriented Paper Award.

The award presentations took place May 24 in Albuquerque, N.M., during the society’s Environmental and Water Resources Institute annual specialty conference.

• Paul Griffin, professor, Graduate School of Management — He shared two awards, overall best paper and best paper in accounting, for a single paper that showed a link between short sales of a company’s stock and a subsequent decrease in returns from the company’s bonds. Griffin wrote the paper, “Price Discovery in the Corporate Bond Market: The Informational Role of Short Interest,” with Hyun Hong, assistant professor of accounting at the University of Memphis. Read the UC Davis news release.

• Afra Afsharipour, acting professor, School of Law — “Top 10 Corporate and Securities Articles of 2011,” as selected by the journal Corporate Practice Commentator, for her article, “Transforming the Allocation of Deal Risk Through Reverse Termination Fees,” published in the Vanderbilt Law Review. The top-10 list emerged from 580 published articles, ranked by teachers of corporate and securities law.

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Six UC Davis faculty members are Health Care Heroes, as designated recently by the Sacramento Business Journal for their outstanding achievements in the Sacramento region.  

The newspaper honored 17 heroes in 11 categories. Here are the UC Davis Health System honorees (with award categories in parentheses):

• Thomas Balsbaugh (educator), associate professor of family and community medicine. As the department’s residency director since 2005, he has created dynamic educational programs that foster collaboration and teamwork.

• Ralph de Vere White (lifetime achievement), urologist and cancer researcher, and director of the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is credited with leading the center’s remarkable growth in clinical care and research prominence.

• Irva Hertz-Picciotto (researcher), environmental epidemiologist, a professor of public health sciences and a researcher at the UC Davis MIND Institute. She leads two studies of autism risk and serves as the director of the Northern California Center for the National Children’s Study.

• Thomas Nesbitt (entrepreneur), professor of family and community medicine, associate vice chancellor for Strategic Technologies and Alliances, and the founding director of the Center for Health and Technology. He is credited with advancing the UC Davis Health System’s excellence in telehealth.

• Garen Wintemute (researcher), professor of emergency medicine and the founding director of the Violence Prevention Research Program. He is a pioneer and innovator in the field of injury epidemiology and the prevention of firearm violence.

• Heather Young (educator), associate vice chancellor and the founding dean of the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. She is a nationally recognized expert in gerontological nursing and rural health care.

Read more about the health system’s Health Care Heroes.

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Kathy Keatley Garvey, a senior writer in the Department of Entomology, has struck gold — again — in an international communications competition.

The Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Life and Human Sciences chose Garvey’s image of a bee sting for the 2012 gold award in feature photography, and named Garvey as the recipient of the Outstanding Professional Skill Award for Photography.

She earned another gold for best newswriting, for an article about Professor Lynn Kimsey’s discovery of the warrior wasp.

Garvey also won ACE gold writing awards in 2008, 2010 and 2011, and received the 2011 Outstanding Professional Skill Award in Writing. Also in 2011, she received a silver award for a honeybee photo.

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Philip Power, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry, recently received the American Chemical Society Award in Organometallic Chemistry.

The $5,000 prize recognizes work on the synthesis, structure and properties of organometallic compounds, which contain chemical bonds between carbon and metal atoms. The society specifically cited Power’s discovery of reactions between these compounds and small molecules such as hydrogen gas — in research that could open up new possibilities for chemical catalysis. 

The award presentation took place in San Diego, during the society’s spring meeting.

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The United Fresh Produce Association recently presented its 2012 Technical Award to Trevor Suslow, recognizing his commitment to food quality and safety.

Suslow is a Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences.

David Gombas, the produce association’s senior vice president of food safety and technology, lauded Suslow as the “go-to guy” for the produce industry, providing timely guidance on how best to meet food safety standards.

“He is best known for his fearless attitude to tackling tough in-field research questions and being able to translate that into a solution that the industry needs in order to make practical, effective improvements,” Gombas said.

The Suslow program combines lab and on-farm research related primarily to E. coli and Salmonella, in conventional and organic production systems, for the purpose of identifying opportunities for preharvest and postharvest controls, and delivery of safe food to consumers.

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Nvidia Corp. has added John Owens, associate professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to the company’s roster of Nvidia CUDA fellows. He joins 10 other fellows in the program at this time.

Nvidia established the fellows program to recognize and assist graphics researchers who are using Nvidia’s CUDA architecture.

Fellows receive the latest Nvidia graphics processing units, a travel stipend, access to company technical staff, and priority for early releases of Nvidia hardware and software.

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The UC Rangeland Watershed Program, led by UC Davis’ Mel George, recently received the 2012 Western Extension Directors’ Award of Excellence. George is retiring this month as a Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences.

The Rangeland Watershed Program is a collaboration of Cooperative Extension specialists and advisers, Agricultural Experiment Station faculty, and others.

The team has successfully identified management strategies for minimizing microbial contamination of surface and groundwater attributable to livestock production systems.

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Dateline UC Davis welcomes news of faculty and staff awards, for publication in Laurels. Send information to dateline@ucdavis.edu.

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