Justin Valliere & Jennifer Funk look at trade-offs most plants make in allocating resources and find that really successful weeds “escape” from these rules. A framework for better weed management & spotting future problems.
Valerie Eviner's lab has won the 2026 Lab Safety Award Grand Prize, bringing with it a $6,000 award from UC Davis Safety Services and the Office of Research.
Travis Parker & team created a genetic “family tree” for beans to help breeders find traits that will keep this staple crop producing despite the challenges growers face. They also confirmed beans’ earliest Mesoamerican domestication in Jalisco, Mexico.
Jorge Dubcovsky, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis, has been named the 2026 World Agriculture Prize Laureate.
Ashley Pearce is trying to help rice farmers decrease fertilizer or increase yield by testing different levels of nitrogen on different varieties in different conditions.
Astrid Volder and Rachel Noon are collecting all kinds of data from both young and mature almond rootstocks to build a model for below-ground management. Their work is getting international attention.
Randi Famula, lab manager of the UC Davis Strawberry Breeding Program, earned campus-wide recognition for her high standards in running the facility overseen by breeding program Director Mitchell Feldmann.
Nazmin Akter is testing lower night-time temperatures to harden tomato seedlings ahead of transplanting them into farm fields. She's a Ph.D. student in Laura Cammarisano's Controlled Environment Agriculture Lab.
Maeli Melotto attended a United Nations event in China charting a framework for sustainable agri-food systems. Her work on pathogen-resistant lettuce and its soil microbiome won two USDA grants of nearly $1.5 million.
Doctoral student Marco Castaneda Martinez won the inaugural Betsey Landis Award from the California Native Plant Society, including a $1,500 grant, for research on purple needlegrass, California's state grass.
Students in the Brummer and Potter labs are looking at plant genetics and wild relatives to find and develop alfalfa cultivars that produce even when water is scarce and increase overall yield.
Louise Ferguson and colleagues in Spain discussed their research on ways to collect pollen from pistachio trees and how to apply it most efficiently for artificial pollination.
UC Davis hosted the first-ever Strawberry Nursery Congress, an international event for nursery operators, University of California researchers and growers, with the aim of strengthening partnerships.
Kent Bradford’s population-based threshold model says data that falls on either side of the statistical average, or mean, is not "noise" at all, but rather offers a goldmine of scientific insight.
