LAURELS: Transportation Society Award, Book Prize, More

UC Davis faculty members are being honored for recent projects, long-term contributions to a field, a book and more. Read on for a look at some of the recent awards earned by university experts.

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


S.S. Steinberg Award

Dan Sperling, a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been named the 2024 recipient of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s prestigious S.S. Steinberg Award in honor of “remarkable contributions to transportation education.”

Sperling, who is the founder of the Institute of Transportation Studies, or ITS, and the Policy Institute for Energy, Environment, and Economy, conducts research and teaching transportation at UC Davis and has led ITS to global leadership in sustainable transportation. 

Senior Book Prize

A UC Davis anthropologist is the joint winner of a prestigious book award from the United States of America’s oldest professional anthropological organization. Suzana Sawyer, a professor in the Department of Anthropology, recently received the American Ethnological Society’s Senior Book Prize for her 2022 book The Small Matter of Suing Chevron (Duke University Press).

In The Small Matter of Suing ChevronSawyer chronicles the decades-long litigation process surrounding a 2011 judgment by an Ecuadorian court that held Chevron liable for $9.5 billion in damages for environmental contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon. However a handful of years later, a U.S. federal court and an international tribunal determined that the judgment was procured through fraud, delegitimizing the Ecuadorian court’s ruling and making it unenforceable. 

Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award

The Informs Information Systems Society, or ISS, has honored Assistant Professor Helen Zeng for the best Ph.D. dissertation research in 2024 for her paper, “Sound of Freedom Trilogy: Responding to the Rise in Human Sex Trafficking Facilitated by Digital Platforms.”

Zeng accepted the 2024 Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award, or NCDA, at the Informs Annual Meeting and Conference on Information Systems and Technology on Oct. 20 in Seattle, WA. The award is named in honor of two University of Arizona professors, Jay Nunamaker and Hsinchun Chen, who have made significant contributions to the field of Information Systems over the past several decades.

Informs is the largest professional association for the decision and data sciences. Its ISS seeks to foster, promote, and disseminate research on the use and impact of information technology in organizations.

Robert M. Berne Distinguished Lectureship

The American Physiological Society recently named Professor Manuel Navedo the 2025 recipient of the Robert M. Berne Distinguished Lectureship. This award is presented annually by the society’s Cardiovascular Section to an established leader in cardiovascular research.

Navedo is a professor in the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine and chair of the Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Physiology Graduate Group. He is an international thought leader with groundbreaking research on novel channel-signaling pathways in the vasculature (the circulatory system). These pathways are networks of proteins that transmit signals and initiate cellular responses.

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Cody Kitaura is the editor of Dateline UC Davis and can be reached by email or at 530-752-1932.

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