As the university celebrates its historic 100th birthday, we at the college are looking back and looking forward.
From achievements and new discoveries in science, mathematics, social sciences and cultural studies, and humanities
and arts, we have gathered a number of exciting stories to share with you. Looking back at the incredible stories
that our faculty, students, alumni and staff have told, we felt there were endless stories to share with you.
And here is where you come in. Please share your story with us. How has UC Davis impacted your life? How are you impacting others, thanks to your experiences at UC Davis? What do you remember best about UC Davis and the College of Letters and Science?
Tell us your story!
Here, listed in alphabetical order, are just a few of the stories about the College of Letters and Science – from its history to its current students and faculty, to looking forward to the next 100 years. Browse through these stories and tell us your own!
1939-1945 World War II
1944 G.I. Bill
Congress allotted money for education and housing. Between 1946-48, half of the 2 million U.S. college students were veterans.
1945 – 65 Baby Boom Generation
Huge increase of babies in the U.S., affec...
In 1987, when I was an undergraduate student, I was asked to read a paper by Jean Bourgain and Vitali Milman about the volumes of high-dimensional convex shapes. This was my senior thesis project at Harvard, which is something like a masters' thesis....
Sarah Pia Anderson visited UCDavis as an Artist – in – Residence, on the Granada Program in 1989 and 1993. In 1995 she accepted an invitation to join the permanent faculty of the Theatre and Dance department. In 1997, internationally renowned playwri...
In one of the farewell parties I attended in Bordeaux after living there for two years as director of the Education Abroad Program of the University of Californaia, I made my last faux pas in France. Asked what I would miss most after my return to D...
1906- The Centennial Record of 1968 reports that 779 acres of land were purchased for $104,250 for use as the campus site for the University Farm at Davis. Martin Sparks sold 730 acres, the core of the campus, for $91,309, Oren Wright sold a 17-acre...
In the fall of 1981, UCD’s Professor Andreas Albrecht was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, finishing up his course work and getting ready to start research. His was especially interested in the field of “theoretical particle ph...
Founded by Professor Kudlick and several others in 2005, the Disability History Association (DHA) is an international group of scholars devoted to challenging current understandings of disability and disabled people in today’s world.
Typically, ...
In the late 1990’s the physics and cosmology communities were shaken by stunning evidence that the expansion of the universe is speeding up.
Something mysterious (dubbed “dark energy”) is accelerating the cosmic expansion, even though everyone ...
The Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) is an ambitious international project to drill into and study geothermal systems in Iceland. The IDDP represents a challenging step forward in the worldwide development of geothermal energy by assessing the p...
In the 1970's, faculty in the department of "environmental design," as it was then known, were asked to design and construction of outdoor adventure play environment for mentally and physically disabled children.
At the request of Dr. David Ragsd...
Ever since the mid 70’s the top quark was a missing piece of the elementary particle physics puzzle. The discovery of the charm quark in 1974 and the bottom quark in 1978 had indicated that symmetries in the universe additionally required the existe...
UC Davis' exchange program with Globe Education at Shakespeare's Globe gives our faculty and students access to extensive educational resources dedicated to the experience and international understanding of Shakespeare in performance. UC Davis is the...
Lori Lubin, Associate Professor of Physics, is the principal investigator of the Observations of Redshift Evolution in Large Scale Environments (ORELSE) Survey. ORELSE is one of the first comprehensive surveys of large-scale environments around very ...
UC Davis geoscientists are making virtual field trips to the depths of the Earth, to remote locations of the planet, and into the interior of rocks and minerals, and as a result of a collaborative facility established with a grant from the W.M. Keck ...
Tom Cahill analyzed air samples from the smoldering collapse pile at Ground Zero and found them to contain “alarmingly high levels of dangerous fine particles produced by burning computers, insulation, asbestos, air-conditioning systems, fiberglass ...
When the Department of Theatre & Dance (initially called Department of Dramatic Art) was established in 1961, performances were being held in a converted cafeteria in East Hall. The scene shop was in the hall kitchen, and paint and props were stored...
Dr. Goodman, along with Dr. Michael Lawler (Director, Center for Human Services at UC Davis Extension) and Dr. Nikki Baumrind, founded the UC Davis Center for Public Policy Research (CPPR).
With the support of the California Department of Social ...
After his appointment in 1970, design professor Dolph Gotelli noticed that there wasn't a venue for displaying design-related material. From 1970-1974, he searched the campus for available exhibition space and found limited opportunities for temporar...
Professors Wendell Potter and Lawrence Coleman conceived, developed, and institutionalized at UC Davis an introductory physics course for students majoring in biological sciences and similar majors that radically breaks from the large traditional le...
Tom Cahill, with a team of students, beginning in 1970 developed methods to collect aerosol samples suitable for analysis by use of MeV proton beams from the Crocker cyclotron. These techniques were applied first to urban problems, assisting in the i...
A magnetic resonance based method to non–invasively and non–destructively screen full, intact bottles of wine for oxidation contaminants was developed in 2002.
Without the need to open the bottle, the method can determine whether or not wine in ...
In 2006 UC Davis signed an Agreement of Cooperation with Shanghai Theatre Academy to develop an educational and research exchange. The program provides unique educational opportunities for students at both institutions. During the summer of 2006, Th...
In the period 1964 to 1966 the Physics Department had the responsibility of building the 76-inch cyclotron now operating at Crocker Nuclear Laboratory (CNL) here at UCD.
Physics faculty involved were Paul Brady, James Draper, Neal Peek, and John...
Forecasting when a major earthquake will erupt within a window of two to three years could be possible, based on mathematical studies by researchers at UC Davis, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Boston University and the University of Western Ontari...
It was the summer of 1968. I had just return from a tour of duty in Vietnam. My brother Efren had gotten an “early out” from the Army to attend college and had also finished his tour in Vietnam. Over the years we had both gotten our AA degrees. W...
In 1965, I found myself at the gradually stirring University of California Davis campus, employed to work as a researcher/lecturer with the Institute for Governmental Affairs. My former wife, and hijo numero uno – number one son, was recently arriv...
The UC Davis English Department has been home to numerous colorful faculty members, including two famous poets, Karl Shapiro, winner of the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes and Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, in the 1960s and 70s, and late...
For roughly 20 years, the best measurements of the
neutron-proton interaction made around the world predicted that a deuteron possessing its well-known properties, eg, a nonspherical shape and charge distribution [ an electric quadrupole moment], co...
Robert (Bob) Matthews (1926 – 2006) was the first environmental geologist in the Department of Geology and for many years, he was the sole faculty member in the department’s environmental geology program. His research and teaching interests included ...
In 2002 husband and wife team, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Tim Caro began to work with villagers of a small village in Western Tanzania, where they both conduct longterm research in conservation biology and anthropology.
With the help of UC Dav...
This story starts in Chicago, moves to the edge of the observable Universe and finally ends up at UC Davis. It is a tale of serendipitous discovery – the discovery of the unexpected and unsought.
I was a second year graduate student at the Univ...
Sideshow Physical Theatre is a resident performing company of the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts and the resident professional company in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC Davis. It is devoted to the exploration of ...
Source was the most important international publication to chronicle experimental music during the late-1960s and early-1970s. Its eleven issues included scores, essays, interviews and recordings of cutting-edge composers, musicians and intermedia ar...
UC Davis has partnered with Paul Taylor Dance Company to create the only Paul Taylor Dance Intensive outside of New York City. Taught by current and former Taylor dancers, the Paul Taylor West Coast Dance Intensive is a comprehensive two-week residen...
Professor of psychology Gail Goodman was the lead author of an amicus brief presented to the U.S. Supreme Court concerning balancing defendants’ rights to face-to-face confrontation and child victims’ needs for protection when testifying at trial. At...
UC Davis has a strong group of three physics faculty, Professors Charles S. Fadley, Shirley Chiang, and Xiangdong Zhu, who use specialized equipment to study the properties of solid surfaces in order to understand novel materials which have technolog...
In the 2006-2007 academic year the UC Davis Department of Chemistry inaugurated a new undergraduate major program, the Bachelor of Science in Chemistry with a Designated Emphasis in Pharmaceutical Chemistry. This program, begun with the strong suppo...
Many metals enter a superconducting state at low temperature, allowing them to carry electricity without loss of power and display a number of weird properties that are of intense interest to researchers and potentially for applications. This vanish...
The UC Davis Granada Artists-in-Residence program is unique in American university theatre, bringing prominent theatre artists — directors, playwrights, choreographers, or filmmakers — to Davis each academic quarter to teach and create a work for pub...
Jeff Mount, the Roy J. Shlemon Chair in Applied Geosciences, carries out research on the geomorphic response of lowland river systems to changes in land use/land cover and the links between hydrogeomorphology and riverine ecology.
His work emphas...
The transition from an ice age to an ice-free planet 300 million years ago was highly unstable, marked by dips and rises in carbon dioxide, extreme swings in climate and drastic effects on tropical vegetation, according to a study published in the jo...
UC Davis Centennial