NASA Jet Propulsion Lab lead engineer Adam Steltzner, who became a highly visible presence during last year's Mars Curiosity Rover mission, will give a presentation at 4 p.m. Tuesday, May 21, in UC Davis' 1065 Kemper Hall. His talk is titled: "The Right Kind of Crazy: Risk, Reason and Engineering Curiosity to the Surface of Mars." Admission is free.

A graduate of UC Davis, Steltzner led the innovative Entry, Descent and Landing team that guided Curiosity to its successful touchdown inside Mars' massive Gale Crater on Aug. 5.

Steltzner and his team — at one point, almost 2,000 people — devised the rocket-powered "sky crane," which hovered over the planet's surface and gently lowered Curiosity on a cable... Read More

Longtime Yolo County educators and UC Davis alumni Sandi Redenbach and Ken Gelatt are the 2013 winners of the Charles J. Soderquist Award, an honor bestowed by the university in recognition of exceptional volunteer leadership and philanthropy benefiting the campus community.

Created in 2005 by the UC Davis Foundation, the award honors the late Charles “Charlie” Soderquist — a UC Davis alumnus, management professor, and well-known Sacramento-area entrepreneur and philanthropist... Read More

Junior high and high school students and their teachers from throughout the Sacramento region will gather tonight for dinner and inspiration for future careers at a “Dinner with a Scientist” event at the Twin Rivers Unified School District offices in North Highlands.

The keynote speaker will be immunologist James Hildreth, dean of the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences, who will discuss his journey to becoming a scientist.

That journey started at Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in chemistry in 1979. He then went to Oxford University in England as a Rhodes scholar, where he earned a doctorate in immunology in 1982. In 1987, he earned a medical degree at Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine in Baltimore... Read More