Nina Forest, who graduated in June 2020, is headed toward graduate studies and a future career in the U.S. Foreign Service with the support from a Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship

Although this year has brought unprecedented challenges, Global Affairs remains proud to welcome the world to UC Davis and connect UC Davis with the world, albeit virtually at the moment. As we leave 2020 behind, we celebrate the Global Affairs news and announcements featured this year with this top 20 of 2020.

A recent UC Davis College of Letters and Science graduate has been awarded a prestigious Marshall Scholarship, a decades-old British government program that pays for American students to pursue advanced degrees at British universities. Valencia Scott (B.A., anthropology and international relations, ’20) will pursue a doctorate in criminology at the University of Oxford, where she will focus her studies on the criminalization of Black immigrants. She is planning a career in international human rights law.

Two UC Davis students have been awarded prestigious Marshall Scholarships in a decades-old British government program that pays for American students to pursue advanced degrees at British universities.

The University of California, Davis, has been named as the only university to earn the 2020 Platinum Institutional Award for Global Learning, Research and Engagement from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, or APLU. As the highest honor from APLU’s Commission on International Initiatives, the award recognizes UC Davis’ institutional achievement in developing and implementing comprehensive and inclusive strategies across global learning, research and engagement.

In recognition of its extraordinary global learning, research, and engagement efforts, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today named the University of California, Davis the Platinum Award level winner of the 2020 Institutional Award for Global Learning, Research & Engagement. The Platinum Award is APLU’s highest-level award granted to a member institution in recognition of inclusive and comprehensive efforts to internationalize their campus.

Pamela Ronald, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis, and with the UC Davis Genome Center, has been named a 2020 World Agriculture Prize laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences, or GCHERA. She becomes the first woman whose work is recognized by the award.

UC Davis has been named a finalist for two PIEoneer Awards, which celebrate innovation and achievement across all components of international education, by The PIE News, a leading independent media company for a global community of professionals. For the 2020 awards, UC Davis has been selected as a finalist of the Progressive Education Delivery Award and the Sustainability International Impact Award.

For the second time in the past three years, UC Davis has been recognized as a top producer of Gilman Scholars for the 2018–19 academic year—with the university producing the third highest number of Gilman Scholars, at 51, among all U.S. universities with over 15,000 undergraduates.

UC Davis is the lead institution on a global classroom pilot project, partnering with Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China to create a framework for teaching the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using a global classroom model that has been developed and utilized by Tecnológico de Monterrey and will be enhanced by UC Davis and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.