Hart

Benjamin Hart, distinguished professor emeritus, received the Leo K. Bustad Companion Animal Veterinarian of the Year Award during the opening ceremony of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s convention last month in Chicago.

The association, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, co-sponsors the Bustad award, named after a former dean of Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and a co-founder and past president of Pet Partners (formerly the Delta Society).

The award recognizes a veterinarian’s work in preserving and protecting human-animal relationships, through practice, community service, teaching or research.

“Ben’s passion for his research and dedication to his patients and clients shines through with this award,” said Michael Lairmore, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine.

Hart, who joined the school in 1964, has long emphasized the connection between companion animal behavior and the human-animal bond — and the importance of resolving problem behaviors, or preventing them, to support that bond.

As an emeritus in the vet school’s Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Cell Behavior, he maintains an active research, writing and teaching schedule. In a study that came out in February, he looked at the effects of early neutering of golden retrievers — and found that it played a role in the risk of developing certain cancers and joint diseases. Examining the health records of 759 dogs, he found a doubling of hip dysplasia among male dogs neutered before 1 year of age.

“The study results indicate that dog owners and service-dog trainers should carefully consider when to have their dogs neutered,” he said in a news release.

Hart is a founding diplomate and past president of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, and has mentored many of its other diplomates. He is a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society.

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A targeted fundraising campaign paid off with a silver award for UC Davis as an institution and golden support for students for generations to come.

UC Davis earned its silver in the 2013 Circle of Excellence Awards Program of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, or CASE. The gold for scholarships, fellowships and other awards is from the UC Davis Foundation Matching Fund for Student Support, announced in December 2012. 

The UC Davis Foundation Board of Trustees and UC Davis administrators established the fund with $1.04 million in donations, which were then used to provide $25,000 matches for each gift of $25,000 or more. The foundation also provided $1,000 in near-term student support (rather than waiting a minimum of a year, as is typical, for new endowments to generate earnings income).

The fundraising effort not only beat its target but doubled it, yielding nearly $4 million (including all of the matching fund money) — enough to create about 40 endowed awards for students. And, as a result, The Campaign for UC Davis hit and exceeded its target of $120 million in student support (part of the campaign’s overall goal of $1 billion from 100,000 donors by the end of 2014).

The CASE entry credited Bruce Edwards, chair of the foundation board, with creating the fund, and described its development and promotion as a universitywide, collaborative effort, involving the foundation and the Office of Development, the Office of Strategic Communications (formerly University Communications), Ceremonies and Special Events, and the ASUCD.

Read more.

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Hema Yoganarasimhan, assistant professor of management in the Graduate School of Management, has earned the Frank M. Bass Dissertation Paper Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, or INFORMS, for her marketing paper, “Cloak or Flaunt? The Fashion Dilemma.”

Yoganarasimhan earned her doctorate in marketing at Yale in 2009 and joined the GSM faculty the same year.

By developing the paper from her Ph.D. thesis, and by having the paper published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, she became eligible for the Bass award, which recognizes the best such thesis-based paper from any of the INFORMS-sponsored journals. The award is named after a pioneer in the development of the modern business school and the field of marketing science.

Yoganarasimhan’s paper was a finalist for another INFORMS award, for best marketing paper of the year.

“Cloak or Flaunt? The Fashion Dilemma,” in the January-February 2012 edition of Marketing Science, examines the dichotomy of fashion communications. Some companies are secretive; this preserves a product’s signaling value (signal of good taste and access to information) but reduces the number of product-related social interactions. Other companies flaunt their products; this cuts the signaling value but boosts the number of social interactions.

“Given these trade-offs, we derive the conditions under which cloaking occurs,” the paper’s abstract reads. “We also show that, in equilibrium, the most tasteful product endogenously emerges as the fashion hit or ‘it’ product.”

Yoganarasimhan is the second GSM faculty member to win the Bass award, following Prasad Naik, professor, who received it in 1998.

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Edwin Lewis, professor and vice chair of the Department of Entomology and Nematology, has been named editor-in-chief of the Biological Control. He has been a member of the journal’s editorial board since 2002 and an editor since 2009.

A UC Davis faculty member since 2004, Lewis also serves as a subject editor of the Journal of Nematology and as the North American editor of Biopesticides International.

The journal Biological Control promotes the science of “biological control” — defined by the journal as “an environmentally sound and effective means of reducing or mitigating pests and pest effects through the use of natural enemies” — by publishing original research, and reviews of research and theory.

The journal encompasses biological control of viral, microbial, nematode, insect, mite, weed and vertebrate pests in agriculture, aquatic, forest, natural resource, stored product and urban environments.

“Basically, the journal covers the management of any populations of unwanted organisms through the use of parasites, predators and pathogens,” Lewis said.

He is a member of the Entomological Society of America, the Society of Invertebrate Pathology and the Society of Nematologists. 

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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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