Academic Affairs Vice Provost Maureen Stanton has announced UC Davis’ ninth annual class of Hellman Fellows, 12 assistant professors recognized for their potential to achieve great scholarly distinction.

Individual awards for the 2015 fellows range from $12,000 to $44,000 — a total of $293,492. The San Francisco-based Hellman Fellows Program provides the money to support assistant professors' research and other creative scholarly activities, and to assist thfaculty members in making progress toward tenure.

Here are the 2015 Hellman Fellows, their academic units and fellowship subjects:

• Kevin Gee, School of  Education — The education of abused and neglected children: Understanding the effects of Head Start participation
• Cassandra Hart, School of Education — Which teachers fare best under class size increases?
• Brian Johnson, Department of Entomology and Nematology — Genetic mechanisms underlying the evolution of novelty
• Helen Koo, Department of Design — Development of fabric-based wearable monitoring systems for autism spectrum disorders
• Siwei Liu, Department of Human Ecology — Making sense of self-tracking data: A comparison of sample-based and individual-based statistics
• Brett Milligan, Landscape Architecture Program, Department of Human Ecology — DredgeFest California: Bay-delta earthworks
• Jessica Bissett Perea, Department of Native American Studies — Last frontier audiorealism: Music, media and the politics of indigenous modernity in Alaska, 1959-present
• Margaret Ronda, Department of English — Remainders: Poetry at nature’s end
• Shu Shen, Department of Economics — Selective instrumental variable regression
• Danielle Stolzenberg, Department of Psychology — Epigenetic mechanisms of infant neglect
• Chunjie Zhang, German Program — 1. Scientific internationalism and new-Confucian cosmopolitanism: Approaches toward the global in Chinese and European modernisms, and, 2. Travel experience in the age of digital media
• Nicolas Zwyns, Department of Anthropology — Human response to climate change during the late Pleistocene in Northern Mongolia

‘We are in capable hands’

Stanton

“Each year, the originality and potential impact of the work being done by our UC Davis Hellman Fellows is both thrilling and humbling,” Vice Provost Stanton said. “I am assured that as we strive toward being the University of the 21st Century, we are in the capable hands of an outstanding new generation of faculty.

“We are also extremely grateful that the Hellman Fellows Program continues its visionary work to support early-career scholars.”

The selection process gives preference to faculty members with outstanding research proposals but who may have only modest means to support such research and have never received other young investigator awards. 

The Hellman Fellows Program is active at 14 institutions: the 10 campuses of the University of California and four private institutions.  

The program began at UC Davis in 2008 with funding for five years of fellowships. The Hellman Fellows Program renewed in the amount of $1.5 million for another five years: 2013-17.

UC Davis’ Hellman Fellows, 2008-15

Follow Dateline UC Davis on Twitter.