Campus Stories and Press Releases

17 Researchers Win COVID-19 Seed Grants

UC Davis researchers have a role in nine of the 25 COVID-19-related projects that recently received seed grants averaging about $50,000 from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, a systemwide UC initiative headquartered at Berkeley.

Here are the projects with UC Davis researchers, 17 in all, listed with colleagues from other campuses. The projects are divided by award category.

UC Davis Health leaders: Smart testing, not mass testing, the best path out of the COVID-19 pandemic

Testing everyone in all locations every day for SARS-CoV-2 is impractical, if not impossible.

Instead, administering “accurate, complete and rapid” tests to strictly defined groups is the best path forward through the COVID-19 pandemic, write David Lubarsky, vice chancellor of human health sciences and UC Davis Health CEO; and Brad Pollock, chair of the department of public health sciences and associate dean of public health sciences at UC Davis School of Medicine.

Live Programs June 3 and 4 Will Focus on COVID-19 Vaccines and Testing

UC Davis continues its public outreach on the coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic with two livestreamed programs the first week of June, featuring experts from the university and around the country discussing the progress being made in testing for and vaccinating against the disease.

The first program, focusing primarily on vaccines, is scheduled for Wednesday (June 3), as the third symposium in a public awareness series organized by Distinguished Professor Walter Leal of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Panel Cuts Through COVID-19 Confusion

UC Davis leaders and researchers gathered virtually May 14 to answer the public’s questions about COVID-19, ranging from the safety of homemade masks to whether children or pets could transmit the virus.

Distinguished Professor Walter Leal brought the panel together for his second COVID-19 Public Awareness Symposium. It featured straight talk from experts about many areas that have been shrouded in confusion and conflicting information.

UC Davis LIVE: Treating COVID-19

In the second edition of UC Davis LIVE: COVID-19, two UC Davis clinicians will talk about and take questions on the new treatments for COVID-19 being tested at UC Davis Health and other hospitals, including the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir — used to treat UC Davis’ first patient of the pandemic in March — and using plasma from people who have recovered from the novel coronavirus to treat patients.