Research

Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering Priya Shah, Ph.D. '11, is deciphering the behavior of the Zika virus on animal cells to delve into the possibilities for mitigating the sickness in humans.  

For the first time on a commercial scale, researchers from UC Davis have controlled the redox potential during a wine fermentation, an important step in making winemaking more efficient and reproducible and paving the way for a new generation of experiments in viticulture, microbiology and fermentation. 

For UC Davis Chemical Engineering Professor Greg Miller, a new course began with a single sip.  While tasting whiskey with friends, he noted an unusual peppery flavor and became curious how it was produced. The more he looked, the more he realized that there wasn’t an easy answer, as most whiskey distillers rely on tried-and-true recipes instead of science.  

UC Davis Chemical Engineering Professor and Coffee Center director Bill Ristenpart sat down with WOSU Public Media in Columbus, Ohio to talk about chemical engineering and coffee.

Reporting in the journal Nature, researchers including Distinguished Professor Bruce Gates showed that platinum atoms could be confined on small cerium-oxide islands within a porous material to catalyze reactions without sticking to each other, which has been a major stumbling block for their use.

This fall, UC Davis will begin construction of the UC Davis Coffee Center, creating the world’s first academic research center focused on coffee. The building will house office and teaching space, labs, a roastery and more as part of an effort to transform the way people think about and understand the beverage.

Professor William Ristenpart sits down with the Coffee 101 Podcast to discuss the efforts that are being made to engineer a better cup of coffee at the UC Davis Coffee Center and beyond.

With a new $3.97M project, Chemical Engineering Distinguished Professor Karen McDonald and her team of collaborators will explore the viability of a range of biomanufacturing technologies to produce antigens for rapid COVID-19 serological test kits.

Blood and cerebrospinal fluid flow are important transport processes in the brain that occur mostly in capillaries with a diameter of 5-8 micrometers, the smallest blood vessel in the brain. To microfluidic researchers like Chemical Engineering Associate Professor Jiandi Wan, this is an opportunity to play a significant role in discovering how the brain works.