Faculty from the UC Davis School of Medicine and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences have received seed funding from the UC Office of the President to launch research projects aimed at mitigating the impact of COVID-19.

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.

(SACRAMENTO) — Summer is coming and COVID-19 restrictions are easing. That means people are changing what they do both indoors and outdoors, raising new questions about staying safe.

Two UC Davis infectious disease experts explained what is changing. Both had the same strong warning.

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.

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.

Scientists from the University of California, Davis are conducting a survey to learn about the impacts of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak that began early in 2020.

(SACRAMENTO) — COVID-19 research and clinical trials throughout UC Davis have a quiet and crucial backbone that is hard to describe – even for the directors of this center providing the support.

Computer scientists at the University of California, Davis, have developed a web-based contact-tracing application. The app, We-Care, allows users to check in at specific locations and notifies them if someone reporting themselves as positive for COVID-19 checks in at the same location within a certain  time window.

By Noah Pflueger-Peters

With new seed grants from the UC Davis Office of Research’s COVID-19 Research Accelerator Funding Track (CRAFT), three teams of UC Davis engineers are applying their expertise toward the pandemic response to help people become safer, healthier and better-tested.

(SACRAMENTO) — Richard Levenson, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UC Davis Health, received a $25,000 COVID Catalyst award to evaluate the effectiveness of a variant of the compound chitosan in blocking infection by the novel coronavirus.