The ADVANCE Scholar Awards Program is a prestigious award program and lecture series that encourages research leadership and outreach to underserved communities and/or mentorship of underrepresented students, and highlights and celebrates the contributions that women STEM faculty at the University of California, Davis have made to their respective fields.

Please register by January 23, 2018: https://goo.gl/forms/iDfqGlYrifFjLCVj2

Welcome remarks and awards presentation

Dr. Siobhan Brady (Plant Biology and Genome Center)
Establishing Strong Roots at UC Davis: Understanding how Roots are Resilient and Training the Next Generation of Plant Biologists

Dr. Sheila David (Chemistry)
Dare to Repair: DNA Damage, Chemistry and Cancer 

Networking reception

Sheila David is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry. She received her B.A in Chemistry from Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota where she worked on metalloenzymes. As a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, she studied metal complexes as nucleic acid probes. In her independent career (at UC, Santa Cruz, University of Utah, and UC, Davis), she has worked in the area of chemical biology with an emphasis on enzymes involved in the repair of damaged DNA bases.  Her work has used innovative chemical and biological approaches to reveal functional, structure and clinical aspects of base excision repair. Dr. David has also been actively involved in mentoring at all levels, and is particular proud of the accomplishments of the many graduate, undergraduate and high school students that have worked in her laboratory.

Siobhan Brady received her PhD at the University of Toronto in 2005, and was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University from 2005 – 2008.  In 2009 she began an Assistant Professor Position and became an Associate Professor in 2015 at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Plant Biology and in the Genome Center.  In 2016 she was named as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Research Scholar. Research in the Brady lab focuses on the global regulation of gene expression and its contribution to root morphology and development in Arabidopsis thaliana, Solanum species, Sorghum bicolor and maize. She is passionate about mentoring and education, and is a PI of an NSF-Research Coordination Network which focuses on defining the future of research using the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, as well as efforts to increase the numbers of under-represented minorities in plant biology.