A Brilliant Education
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Chancellor’s Fellows, a donor-supported program that gives faculty the freedom to pursue their research dreams—and take students with them on the grand adventure.
Chancellor’s Fellows awards, conferred upon outstanding midcareer faculty, provide $25,000 in unrestricted funding, meaning support for research that is exploratory or groundbreaking in nature—precisely the kind of research that grants don’t typically fund.
Just ask Professor Wolf-Dietrich Heyer, whose early work with the BRCA2 protein, a central suppressor of breast and ovarian tumors, is paving the future of cancer therapies.
“Funding for scientific research relies on preliminary data, but how can you finance the studies that give you such results, in particular when the project is risky and ambitious?” said Heyer, who is now chair of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and co-leader of the Molecular Oncology Program at the UC Davis Health Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Along the way, Heyer, like many Chancellor’s Fellows, has trained numerous students who went on to become experts in their field.
And it’s not just graduate students who benefit. The Chancellor’s Fellows program enhances undergraduate education in countless ways. One notable example: “The Design of Coffee,” which students have voted the best general education class on campus, was created by Chancellor’s Fellows William Ristenpart and Tonya Kuhl, chemical engineers who teach the course to some 1,500 students each year.
Yes, it’s popular, and it’s about coffee—but don’t mistake it for an easy A. “Hands-on coffee experiments demonstrate key engineering principles including material balances, chemical kinetics, mass transfer, fluid mechanics, conservation of energy, and colloidal phenomena,” the syllabus says.
Ristenpart’s other passion involves understanding the movement of aerosols—particles small enough to travel through air—including how aerosols can spread disease. He recently made headlines with findings that normal speech by individuals who are asymptomatic but infected with coronavirus may produce enough aerosolized particles to transmit the infection.
Both his coffee work and airborne disease research were kickstarted by funding from the Chancellor’s Fellows award, said Ristenpart: “Without that support, neither thing would have happened—nor would I have gone on to receive several million dollars in external support. So a little bit of Chancellor’s Fellows funding went a long way!”
The Chancellor’s Fellows program is supported by the Parents Fund and the Annual Fund, in recognition of the tremendous value it holds for faculty and students alike. You can learn more about other Fellows in this Dateline story and video honoring the Chancellor’s Fellows 20th anniversary.
For more information about how parent giving makes a difference in students’ lives, contact Cari DuBois-Wright, Associate Director of Development in Parent Giving, at caduboiswright@ucdavis.edu, (530) 754-0768. You can also visit our Parents Fund website here as well as learn more about our Family Fellows.