The University of California, Davis, will have dozens of new opportunities for early-career faculty members across a broad reach of academic disciplines to receive funding for their research, thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Hellman Fellows Fund.

The fund will provide $300,000 per year over five years to UC Davis to create individual faculty fellowships in a range of disciplines. Fellowships will range from $3,000 to $50,000 per individual and will be awarded by the university to faculty members who show great promise in their scholarship and have modest means to support their research.

"The Hellman Fellows program is designed to enable innovation and exploration by our universities' most promising future academic leaders,” said Susan Hirsch, officer, Hellman Fellows Fund. “Time and again we hear that the funding comes at a critical juncture for junior faculty to position their research careers for long-term success.“

The Hellman Fellows Program was established in 1994 by the Hellman family of San Francisco. It began when family members, who were junior faculty themselves, observed that young faculty were well-funded when first hired, but often faced challenges after their start-up funding was exhausted and before they were truly competitive for most external funding opportunities. The family began the fund to assist promising young faculty at this early point in their careers.

This recent grant is the second that UC Davis has received from the foundation; the first was received in 2008. Since the inception of the program at UC Davis, 75 young faculty have received Hellman Fellowships.

“The Hellman fellowships have been instrumental in helping our early-career faculty enhance their scholarship as they work towards tenure,” said Maureen Stanton, vice provost of academic affairs. “I’ve spoken with many of UC Davis’ fellows, and they feel that the Hellman award was a real contributing factor to their progress towards tenure.”

Heidi Ballard, an associate professor in the School of Education, received a fellowship in 2010 for a collaborative research project on farming practices that promote migratory bird habitats.

“Not only did the Hellman Fellowship allow me to explore a research question that was truly interdisciplinary, which makes it much less likely to receive funding from traditional funding organizations,” she said, “but the project resulted in greater collaboration between two disparate stakeholders — conservation scientists and grain growers in the Central Valley.”

Marc Facciotti, an associate professor in biomedical engineering, received a Hellman Fellowship in 2012 to study protein-DNA interactions at the single-cell level.

“The Hellman Fellowship is allowing me to try a new approach and technology that is too untested to receive funding from traditional sources,” said Facciotti, whose research may ultimately lead to new diagnostic tools for medicine and synthetic biology. “The preliminary data and new collaborators I’ve generated as a result will position me well in the tenure application process.”

Grants from the Hellman Fellows Program count toward UC Davis’ first comprehensive fundraising campaign, The Campaign for UC Davis, which seeks to inspire 100,000 donors to give $1 billion to the university by the end of 2014.

About the Hellman Fellows Program

The Hellman Fellows Program was started in 1994 by Warren and Chris Hellman and their children. The program is now active at 14 institutions: the 10 campuses of the University of California and four programs with private institutions. Over the years, the Hellman Fellows Program has supported more than 1,000 junior faculty members, who are now chairs and heads of departments, recipients of prestigious awards and tenured faculty with long track records of successful research.