UC Davis received two awards — one gold and one silver — in UC’s annual recognition program for innovation in information technology around the university system.

The UC Information Technology Leadership Council sponsors the awards program, begun in 2000 and named in memory of Larry L. Sautter, who, at the time of his death in 1999, served as UC Riverside’s associate vice chancellor for Computing and Communications.

The Sautter awards recognize projects that make university operations more effective and efficient to better serve faculty, staff, students and patients.

This year’s awards — three gold, two silver and five honorable mention — were presented Aug. 5 at the UC Computing Services Conference in San Francisco.

Here are the UC Davis recipients:

• Gold — Information and Educational Technology, for a project titled “Building a Service-Oriented Culture at UC Davis,” referring to the development and implementation of the IT Service Management program, concurrent with the launch of the ServiceNow platform.

IT Service Management is described as a multipronged initiative aimed at improving customer service and increasing efficiency through a virtual support service desk, self-service tools, standardized information and user-friendly resources. Among its many features, customers need to remember just one email address to get IT help (compared with the previous 70 email addresses available), and customers can track the status of their requests online.

“The core project team’s long-term vision, to become a premier IT service management provider, drove its short-term goals and continues to drive its achievements,” the team wrote in its application for the awards competition. “Within a year, the team took the disparate pieces of an unorganized service management offering and put them together in a way that is cohesive, recognizable, customer-focused and has ultimately started them on the path to improve the way that IT services are delivered at UC Davis.”

“The team’s innovation in information technology is their approach to IT service management. They determined early on that customer experience must be considered every step of the way, and consequently, they developed an approach to guide them that focuses ‘outside-in’ rather than the traditional ‘inside-out.’”

• Silver — Information Technology Services, which develops and support applications for systemwide use, with a goal of improved safety in research, on behalf of UC Davis Safety Services and the UC system’s chief risk officer.

The silver Sautter award recognizes the unit’s “Environmental Health and Safety Enterprise Risk Management Technology,” comprising six applications:

• Chemical Inventory System/Chemical and Biological Information System (CIS/CBIS)
• Core Services
• Laboratory Hazard Assessment Tool (LHAT)
• Occupational Health Surveillance System (OHSS)
• Safety Inspection Tool (SIT)
• WASTe: Waste Accumulation Storage Tracking electronically

Read the UC news release and see all the award winners here, along with the project teams' applications for the awards competition. Team members are listed on the applications.

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The California State Bar recently announced that it will present its 2014 Education Pipeline Award to UC Davis’ King Hall Outreach Program, or KHOP.

The award, recognizing legal education programs that train and support students to become interested in the judicial system and careers in law, is due to be presented Sept. 13 during the State Bar’s annual meeting, being held this year in San Diego.

Established in 2001, KHOP is a unique program that helps first-generation college students and economically disadvantaged students prepare for the law school admissions process.

In addition to providing mentoring and prelaw advising during the school year, the program takes eligible college juniors and seniors through summer sessions in which they learn writing, analytical and logical reasoning skills, and study techniques for taking the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, in addition to exploring career paths available to law school graduates.  

To date, 158 students have successfully completed the two-year program, and 183 students have completed at least one year. Of KHOP program alumni, 99 percent have graduated from four-year institutions, and 41 percent are enrolled or have graduated from a law program.

“KHOP has been a vital component of UC Davis School of Law’s efforts to increase diversity in legal education and the legal profession, and the King Hall community can take pride in knowing that KHOP makes a real difference in the lives of the program participants,” said Kristen Mercado, assistant dean of Admissions and Financial Aid.

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Kathy Keatley Garvey, writer and photographer in the Department of Entomology and Nematology, has "buzzed" in for another top photo award, this time for her image of an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 bees on a man’s head, covering everything but his face.

This marked the second time in three years that Garvey took the gold for best feature photo in the Critique and Awards Program run by the Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Life and Human Sciences.

She won gold in 2012 for a photo of a bee immediately after it stung a man’s arm — with the image showing the bee pulling away, its abdominal tissue stretching between the sting and the bee.

The award-winning photo for 2014 is from an after-hours “bee bearding” event at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility. In the picture, you see a "bee beard" on Jakub Gabka, a visiting scientist from Poland — but, really, he ended up with a "bee helmet" on his head!

Garvey also won a gold award this year for writing on the Web, for “Thankful for Insects,” her Thanksgiving Day post on her Bug Squad blog, hosted on  UC Agriculture and Natural Resources’ website.

She won a bronze award for best series of photos, also on her Bug Squad blog.

ANR’s Davis-based Communication Services and Information Technology team picked up three ACE awards:

Gold — For educational package in the category of distance learning and educational design, “Introduction to Forest Management,” an online course produced by Steve Heindl, Ray Lucas and Marissa Stein for a UC Berkeley Cooperative Extension specialist.

Silver — For promotional production, electronic media (video), “UC Cooperative Extension: 100 Years and Counting,” produced by multimedia staff in the UC Office of the President, with direction from Pam Kan-Rice and Cynthia Kintigh in the Davis ANR office. Kan-Rice is the assistant director, News and Information Outreach; and Kintigh is the marketing director.

Silver — For technical publication in the publishing category, Grape Pest Management (third edition). The project team comprised Steve Barnett and Hazel White, editors, and Will Suckow and Robin Walton, designers, all from Communication Services and Information Technology; and Larry J. Bettiga, Cooperative Extension viticulture adviser, Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties, technical editor. The team received a bronze award for the same publication in the 2014 PubWest Book Design Awards competition.

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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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