Physics professor Robert Svoboda is a 2016 laureate in the Breakthrough Prize competition founded by, among others, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergei Brin.

Svoboda shares in the Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics, given to five international teams. All of them investigated neutrino oscillation, showing that two long-held ideas of the Standard Model of particle physics were incorrect.

Svoboda worked on two teams: KamLAND and Super-Kamiokande, or Super K. He met his future wife, Juilien Hsu, when they participated in the building of the Super-Kamiokande detector in the 1990s. (Hsu is a medical physicist at Kaiser Permanente cancer treatment facilities in Roseville and Rancho Cordova.)

The $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is being shared by 1,377 physicists (all the members of all the teams). Svoboda receives a double share, as a member of two teams; his wife receives a single share.

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Physics professor Nemanja Kaloper and Tony Padilla of the University of Nottingham earned second place for their paper in the 2015 Buchalter Cosmology Prize competition.

“Sequestering the Standard Model Vacuum Energy,” published in Physical Review Letters, details the researchers’ novel cosmological collapse mechanism, which predicts a finite universe and includes an explanation of dark energy.

The award announcement, and a $5,000 prize, came during the  annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The Buchalter prize, created by entrepreneur Ari Buchalter in 2014, rewards new ideas or discoveries that have the potential to produce breakthroughs in our understanding of the origin, structure and evolution of the universe.

Read more about Kaloper's research.

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UC Davis has been recognized for the fourth year in a row as an employer that creates and implements successful work-life programs and policies. The recognition comes in the form of a Work-Life Seal of Distinction from World at Work, a nonprofit organization focused on human resources and compensation.

World at Work this year bestowed 116 Work-Life Seals of Distinction, honoring employers for their “approach to employee engagement and their commitment to the well-being of their work force.”

The seal of distinction, established in 2012, measures the overall strength of an organization’s work-life portfolio and success in creating positive work environments. Applicants are evaluated on their programs, policies and practices dealing with such work-life issues as caring for caring for dependents, paid and unpaid time off, health and wellness, and community involvement.

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Melissa Bain, chief of the clinical behavior service at the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, is the 2016 Bustad Companion Animal Veterinarian of the Year, as announced during the American Veterinary Medical Association’s recent Veterinary Leadership Conference in Chicago.

The award recognizes Bain’s careerlong efforts to enhance the human-animal bond through research on companion-animal behavior problems, enrichments for shelter animals and how different training methods affect dog behavior.

Bain is board-certified in both veterinary behavior and animal welfare, and serves as the director of professional-student clinical education in the School of Veterinary Medicine. She is a past president of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists and the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior.

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Lucy Corin, professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program, recently received a $25,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was one of 37 fiction and creative nonfiction writers selected for the awards from 1,700 applicants.

“To write in a way that tries so hard to be unafraid, and be recognized by this organization is very moving to me, and I’m incredibly grateful,” Corin said. “The NEA provides the one way our government directly supports individual writers in their artistic work.”

Corin is the author of two short story collections, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament, and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Her work has appeared in the American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Conjunctions and Tin House Magazine, and in anthologies such as New American Stories.

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Michal Kurlaender, associate professor in the School of Education, is among 200 scholars deemed to contribute the most influence on educational policy and practice, as determined by the American Enterprise Institute in its 2016 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings.

The honor reflects both Kurlaender’s large body of work in students’ educational pathways and her heavy impact on public discourse last year. Her expertise lies within education policy and evaluation, particularly practices that address existing socioeconomic inequality at various stages of educational attainment.

Education Week published the rankings on Jan. 6.

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Dateline UC Davis welcomes news of faculty and staff awards, for publication in Laurels. Send information to dateline@ucdavis.edu.

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