The Davis Advantage
UC Davis has a culture of collaboration that fosters cross-disciplinary training of graduate students. Part of this arose from the decision made during the early years of Graduate Studies on campus that some programs would be better served by group-based rather than departmentally-based programs. The Graduate Group in Pharmacology and Toxicology is a case in point. We draw greater than 80 faculty from many departments in the Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine and from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. The ability to involve faculty from a range of disciplinary foci offers students in the program a wide range of options for tailoring dissertation research to their interests. The other major advantage is that courses are team taught by faculty with long standing interests and expertise in areas where they are teaching.
What is special about UC Davis?
- UC Davis is the third largest campus in the UC system and the only campus to have a medical school, a veterinary school, and a law school.
- The campus has a long-standing history of excellent training in biological sciences, graduating more Ph.D’s in this area per year than any other school in the country.
- We are 14th in the nation in terms of competitive, extramural grant funding.
- We have the largest of the seven regional primate research centers in the country and one of two repositories in the country for knockout and transgenic mice.
- State of the art Core Facilities for mass spectrometry, NMR, gene expression profiling, proteomics, metabolomics, and for structural biology means that the latest tools are available to address research questions.
- Faculty within the Pharmacology and Toxicology Graduate Group are currently Principal Investigators on several large program projects and highly competitive centers that provide evidence of the quality of the faculty. Because these all require interdisciplinary collaboration, it shows that the faculty work well together. This offers a substantial advantage for students to conduct a collaborative project that involves several subdisciplies in pharmacology and toxicology.
- Students are not restricted to the techniques and approaches available in the laboratory of your Major Professor (faculty member responsible for guiding a graduate student through final completion of the Ph.D.). Students are encouraged to seek opportunities that promote cross disciplinary training.
- The program has a small number of highly qualified, highly committed students making the overall faculty-to-student ratio approximately 1:1. This means that students have excellent access to their mentors and that education is a high priority for the faculty.
The City of Davis
Davis is an ideal place to live and is a great place to be a graduate student. Known for its small town atmosphere, it is situated 12 miles from Sacramento, 75 miles from San Francisco (and the ocean) and approximately a 2 hr drive to Lake Tahoe and world class skiing and hiking. Davis is environmentally conscious-recycling, waste minimization, solar generation of electricity and use of electric cars are all part of the culture of this small town.
Davis is a bike friendly community where this form of transportation is used by the majority of students and many faculty. For some, cycling is a serious sport. Here Professor Jason Eiserich smokes the competition in a local criterium.
Outside magazine recently chose Davis as one of the Top 10 best towns in America.
City of Davis
The Davis Farmers Market
The Davis Bike Club