HIP, launched in 2014, annually awards funding to support additional faculty hiring that either transcends the traditional boundaries between our colleges, schools, and/or departments or extends their range into critical new areas. By providing this funding, the program helps to ensure that the most-promising and creative faculty come to UC Davis, and that all of the university’s academic programs are able to benefit from multidisciplinary work of high value.
UC Davis has joined the American Talent Initiative (ATI), a consortium of public and private colleges and universities with the highest national graduation rates that aims to increase access and promote academic success for lower-income students across the United States. The initiative intends to distill the best practices that top universities like UC Davis employ, and to share these successful approaches through publications and participant meetings to create and disseminate a new, national model for achieving these goals.
UC Davis is continuously striving to better itself across a broad range of parameters, from student success and faculty recognition to sponsored research and private philanthropy. Our achievement with respect to these and other “quality metrics” is of interest to a wide range of constituencies, including prospective students, donors, and accrediting agencies.
This work group is charged to address the following questions, among others:
• How can we accelerate or initiate efforts that will improve the quality metrics we care most about?
Bioinformatics training and services in support of faculty research across the campus can provide a competitive advantage for securing funding in a broad range of fields and endeavors: these include the One Health Initiative, global food security, precision medicine, and plant breeding, among others. But ongoing changes in the type and scale of biological data sets require ever more sophisticated technologies, algorithms, and software for effective analysis.
This work group is charged with determining how best to increase the impact of UC Davis on research and education in the field of data sciences. The 2013 report of the "Big Data Implementation Committee" (which can be accessed in the Archive of Past Provost-Led Initiatives below) proposed the creation of a Data Science Institute (DSI), which is now being organized under the leadership of Professor Duncan Temple-Lang and University Librarian MacKenzie Smith.
If UC Davis is to continue to be a leader in STEM research and education over the coming decades, it is critical that we maintain a physical infrastructure that is commensurate with this role. A key element in this effort will be the construction of the Chemistry Discovery Complex, the largest capital project that the university has undertaken. We anticipate that the complex will require seven years to complete and cost over $400 million.
