UC Riverside’s Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology department is one of the recipients of the University of California Advancing Faculty Diversity Program awards for the 2023-24 academic year. The program provides support to increase UC’s faculty diversity efforts. Eight grants, totaling about $2.6 million, were awarded. The Advancing Faculty...

Eight UC Riverside faculty members have been awarded prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Awards to support research in areas ranging from sustainability to mental health outcomes of young Latinas. The awards support early career faculty who demonstrate the potential to serve as academic role models and advance their organization’s...

Seven UC Riverside faculty members are recipients of the prestigious Fulbright fellowship and will be traveling to locations such as Australia and Vietnam to teach and conduct research. The selected faculty members are Mark Alber, David Biggs, Sherine Hafez, Kimberley Lakes, Kurt Schwabe, Christina Schwenkel, and Jacqueline Shea Murphy. They are...

Francisco Zaera, a UCR distinguished professor of chemistry, has received a $500,000 grant from the United States Department of Energy, or DOE, to research the optimization of catalytic processes through environmentally friendly alternatives. Zaera is a physical chemist specializing in catalysts, which are used in a variety of industrial processes...

A team of UC Riverside doctoral students researching honey bee health won an honorable mention in the Wilbur-Ellis Innovation Awards. Sponsored by Wilbur-Wllis, an agricultural company, the competition invited student teams from U.S. colleges and universities to propose better approaches for providing food for a growing global population. UCR’s...

Barry Barish, a distinguished professor of physics at UC Riverside, has been conferred an honorary doctorate by the Universitat de València for his work in experimental physics and discovery of gravitational waves. The recognition is the highest honor given by the university, which is one of the oldest in Spain and considered one of the country’s...

Cell biologist Manuela Martins-Green and parasitologist Adler Dillman are this year’s recipients of UC Riverside’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement. The award is presented every spring to faculty members with a distinguished record of fostering undergraduate research or creative activity. The...

UC Riverside Professor and Endowed Presidential Chair in Urban Entomology Chow-Yang Lee has been presented with the 2022 Distinguished Achievement Award in Urban Entomology in recognition of his contributions to the field. Considered the highest recognition urban entomologists can receive in the field, Lee was presented the award on May 16 in Salt...

Two UC Riverside students have won Donald A. Strauss Foundation awards in recognition of student engagement with public service. The students, Ankita Ahluwalia and Thaniya Shankar, each applied with a public service project that they will carry out during their junior or senior year. The awards come with $15,000 grants that aim to sustain their...

The Center for Conservation Biology at UC Riverside is among eight recipients of Coachella Valley Mountains Conservancy's new Climate Resilience and Community Access grant program. The $400,000 grant will aid efforts to study climate resilience and improve the capacity to respond to climate change and outdoor equity. The project, titled “The Desert...

UC Riverside’s Chris Cosma, a doctoral student studying evolution, ecology, and organismal biology, is one of the winners of the 2022 Ecological Society of America awards. The organization recognizes outstanding contributions to ecology in new discoveries, teaching, sustainability, diversity, and lifelong commitment to the profession. Cosma is the...

For her research excellence and science leadership, Karine Le Roch, the director of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vector Biology and a professor of molecular, cell and systems biology at UC Riverside, has been awarded the 2021 IIGB Natasha V. Raikhel Award in Research Innovation and Science Leadership. Le Roch has broad expertise in drug...

UC Riverside is the lead institution of a grant from the Department of Energy, or DOE, to use machine learning techniques to optimize the design of the ATHENA detector, one of the proposed experiments for the future Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC. The research team, which includes members from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence...

K enneth Barish, a professor of physics and astronomy, has received a three-year renewal grant of more than $1 million from the Department of Energy, or DOE, to support the activities of the Nucleon Spin Physics Group at UC Riverside. Physicists have made significant theoretical and experimental progress in understanding where the total spin of the...

J onathan Richardson, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, has received a grant of $480,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop advanced instrumentation for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, based at sites in Louisiana and Washington. Completed in 2002, LIGO detects gravitational waves —...

Earlier this year, Viji Santhakumar, an associate professor of molecular, cell and systems biology, received funding from the National Institute of Neurological Disaster and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, to further pursue research on moderate concussive brain injury. Now three scientists in her lab have received federal...

M ing-Feng Ho, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has received a three-year fellowship from Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology, or FINESST, which supports research projects designed and performed by graduate students. Ho is one of 21 students to receive the prestigious fellowship out of...

Graduate student Esther Omaiye has received a UC President's Dissertation-Year Fellowship award for the 2021-22 academic year. The fellowship will support her research on the analytical and toxicological evaluations of electronic cigarettes and their constituents, including chemical elements and flavor chemicals. Omaiye, who expects to graduate...

Four UC Riverside students took top prizes in the third-annual EcoSlam on April 22, in which competitors shared research regarding ecology and conservation in “lighting talk” rounds. The event, sponsored by the Center for Conservation Biology, was created as a way to share research across multiple departments. This year marked the first time...

K enneth N. Barish, a professor of physics and astronomy, is a key member of an international team of more than 400 scientists that prepared a report on the Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC, a particle accelerator that will be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, along with a detector for capturing electron-ion collisions. Barish, who...