Overview of the Biotechnology Program

"Biotechnology: The Tools to Forge a Better Tomorrow"

The UC Davis Botechnology Program is a special unit of the Office of Research, established in 1986. The Program is located within the College of Biological Sciences' Dean offices in the Life Sciences Building.

The Biotechnology Program is the administrative home for the DEB (Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology) and ADP (Advanced Degree for Corporate Employees) graduate programs, NSF and NIH Biotechnology PhD Training Grants and links academia to biotechnology industries and government agencies. It provides an education source for students, teachers and community through its Summer Technical Short Courses, "Train the Trainers" workshops for teachers, and the BioTech SYSTEM (K-14 utreach consortium) and TBC (Teen Biotech Challenge) science competition.

Biotechnology Advisory Committee

A group of faculty members serve as the Biotechnology Advisory Committee (BAC). Each member is involved in an area of basic research, which utilizes modern biotechnologies.

OVCR Oversight

• Bernd Hamann – Professor of Computer Science. Professor Hamann's main research and teaching interests are scientific visualization, geometric modeling and computer graphics. He also serves as an Associate Vice Chancellor of Research, focusing on multi-disciplinary efforts.

Continuing Members
 

• Karen McDonald (Chair) - Professor of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science, in the College of Engineering. She is also the Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Engineering. In the College of Engineering. She is the co-director of the NIH Training Program in Biomolecular Technology and a member of the DEB executive committee. Her research focus is the production of pharmacologically important proteins from plant cell cultures and the development of a new protein expression system.
   

• Bruce Hammock (Former Chair) – Distinquished Professor of Entomology in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences and the Cancer Research Center in the School of Medicine, Director, NIEHS-UCD Superfund Basic Research Program and the NIH Biotechnology Training Program. He is working on genetically-engineered viral insecticides, the development of immunoassays for the detection of xenobiotics in the environment and the development of predictive models for the biodegradation, mutagenicity and carcinogenicity of epoxides. He is a member of the National Academy of Science.
   

• Kit S. Lam – Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Internal Medicine and Professor, Department of Chemistry, in the Division of Math and Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Science. Dr. Lam is a practicing medical oncologist and a laboratory researcher. His laboratory is engaged in the development and application of combinatorial library methods for basic research and drug discovery.
   

• Paul Luciw – Professor of Medical Pathology, in the School of Medicine and Associate Director - Research Programs, Center for Comparative Medicine. He uses molecular genetic approaches to investigate the regulation of viral gene expression and to elucidate mechanisms of viral pathogenesis.  

• Richard Michelmore – Professor of Genetics in Plant Sciences-Vegetable Crops, in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and Founding Director and the Novozymes Chair in Genomics in the UC Davis Genome Center in the Division of Biological Sciences. His research is focused on the comparative and functional genomics of disease resistance in plants, particularly Arabidopsis, tomato and lettuce.
   

• Martina Newell-McGloughlin – Director, UC Systemwide Biotechnology Research and Education Program (UCBREP) and Adjunct Professor of Plant Pathology, in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. She is the co-director of the NIH Training Program in Biomolecular Technology. She is the immediate past director of the UC Davis Biotechnology Program. She is an internationally recognized authority on biotechnology and its social implications. Her personal research experience has been in the areas of disease resistance in plants, scale-up stability for industrial and pharmaceutical production in microbes and microbiological mining.
   

• Fern Tablin – Professor of Anatomy, Physiology and Cellular Biology, School of Veterinary Medicine and Co-Director of the Center for Biostabilization (a collaborative effort between membrane biophysics and cell biology). Her research interests include: Role of the membrane phase transition in platelet activation; Definition of the cellular and signaling events associated with passage through the transition; and the role of membrane dynamics and microdomain in platelet activation. The research focus at the Center is the response of platelets, red blood cells, and various types of nucleated eukaryotic cells to extreme cell stress, in particular freezing and freeze-drying.




• Tilahun Yilma – Professor of Virology, Veterinary Medicine: Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology, in the School of Veterinary Medicine and Director, International Laboratory of Molecular Biology For Tropical Disease Agents (ILMB). He is studying viral diseases of livestock and is developing diagnostic kits and vaccines for viral diseases using recombinant DNA technologies. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research activities of the members of the BAC reflect the diversity of interests and expertise across the university.