Astrophysicist Lars Bildsten has earned the Joseph Sullivant Medal. A prestigious honor for alumni and current faculty awarded once every five years, it recognizes extraordinary scholarly achievement.

In a new book published by MIT Press, UCSB global studies associate professor Javiera Barandiarán explores the history and future of mining lithium, a crucial element in the production of electric vehicle batteries.

For her work on multilingual Central Asian youth navigating transnational belonging, Munira Kairat has been selected as a 2026 National Academy of Education Spencer Dissertation Fellow, one of the most prestigious awards for emerging scholars.

A UCSB report found that 60–65% of residents support phasing out oil and gas operations in Santa Barbara County. The study by the 2035 Initiative and Community Labor Center also examines industry workforce demographics and alternative job creation.

Elizabeth Pérez, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies received the River Heron Editors' Prize for her poem "Independence Night,” which draws from her father’s true story of immigrating from post-revolutionary Cuba.

Diane Fujino, a professor of Asian American studies, is featured in the new PBS documentary “Of the People: Women in the Civil Right Movement,” discussing her research and writing about the life of American civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama.

For April Autism Acceptance Month, the Koegel Autism Center at UCSB’s Gevirtz Graduate School of Education donated children’s books to schools in Santa Barbara and Goleta to help foster understanding, empathy and inclusion among young students.

Divyakant Agrawal, a distinguished professor of computer science, was named the recipient of the 2026 ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a top service award of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data.

Sreenivasa Rao Jammalamadaka, a distinguished professor of statistics, was awarded the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Indian Statistical Association, an honor conferred once every two years.

Undergraduate students Isaac Kantor (physics and astronomy), Amelie L'Etoile-Goga (life sciences), Eirini Schoinas (computer science and engineering) and Mark Zakharyan (physics and astronomy) won prestigious Goldwater Scholarships for 2026-2027.

Competing against 487 institutions, a team of UCSB undergrads placed 14th in the Mathematical Association of America’s 86th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. CCS math major Xiaohan Zhang ’29 placed 15th overall out of 4,329 students.

Communication professor Norah Dunbar received a grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study how trust develops in teams and how it influences performance. The project will develop AI tools to help better measure these complex team processes.