The state Board of Food and Agriculture is scheduled to convene at UC Davis next week for a meeting that will focus in part on the World Food Center and  next-generation ag careers, with the latter topic to include a presentation by the dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences..

This will be the board’s regular monthly meeting: Tuesday (May 6) in the AGR Room at the Buehler Alumni Center. The meeting, open to the public, is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. and run until about 3 p.m., with a half-hour break at noon.

The agenda (times are tentative) includes welcoming remarks by Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi at 10:15 a.m., and the World Food Center presentation at 10:30, by Roger Beachy and Josette Lewis, the director and assistant director, respectively.

Dean Hellene Dillard of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences is on the agenda at 12:30 p.m. to address “Developing the Next Generation of Ag Careers.” This will lead into two panel discussions, one on the industry perspective (1 p.m.), the other on the youth perspective (2 p.m.).

Youth participants will include Aggie Ambassadors, from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; Cal Poly Agricultural Ambassadors and the California Farm Academy.

The meeting is scheduled to wrap up with the board’s other business and public comment starting at 2:45 p.m.

Blood drive nets 1,088 pints; marrow effort continues

Five bloodmobiles on one side of the Quad, five on the other, for two days last week. That’s a lot of bloodmobile for a lot of blood: nearly 1,100 pints!

“Once again, UC Davis students, staff and community members came through for patients in need,” said Felicia Roper of Sacramento-based BloodSource.

The two-day results: 1,424 people registered, 1,088 pints collected (not all registrants complete the process, for a variety of reasons). Roper said the blood drive brought in 490 new donors.

Fifty-eight people signed up for the Be the Match marrow registry, hoping to provide a lifesaving donation for someone like Chao Wei Yu, a UC Davis postdoctoral scholar with acute myeloid leukemia.

Another marrow drive is under way today and Wednesday (April 29-30) at UC Davis, under the auspices of the Asian American Donor Program. Hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. both days at two locations: outside the Coffee House (Memorial Union) and the Silo. All donors welcome, but the program ackowledges that the best match for Yu is likely to be another person of Asian descent (Yu is Taiwanese).

'Structural inequality' is next book project theme

The Campus Community Book Project theme is always a year ahead of itself, to allow plenty of time to review the nominated books. That’s why we’re talking now about the newly announced book project theme for 2015-16: “structural inequality.”

The Campus Council on Community and Diversity approved the theme last week and invited nominations.

“The topic can be summed up as a condition where one group of people are attributed unequal status or impacted negatively in relation to other group(s) of people in system(s),” said Mikael Villalobos, who coordinates the book project for the Office of Campus Community Relations.

“In particular, we’re looking for books that also consider systems (education, health care, employment, judicial/criminal, immigration, government, voting access, etc.) in the inequality, such as ‘structural inequality in education’ or ‘structural inequality in the judicial system’ or ‘structural inequality in health care access.’”

The deadline for nominations is July 11, by email to Villalobos.

Other criteria, for all book project selections:

• Compelling and thought-provoking to engage us in dialogue about contemporary controversial issues and to raise questions that have many possible answers.
• Well-written, accessible and engaging to a general audience.
• Short enough to be read within the time frame usually allotted for coursework.
• Provocative and intriguing to as many members of the community as possible, to invite diverse participation and integration into discussion groups and courses across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
• In print in paperback, and affordable (book must be available in paperback by spring of the year before the project, or, in this case, by the spring of 2015).
• Written by someone who is still living and an engaging public speaker, available to give an author’s talk during the span of the project
• The author is a guest to the campus.

The 2014-15 book project followed the same process, starting the theme choice: “disability-disability issues.” The selected book is Thinking in Pictures, by Temple Grandin, a university professor with autism. Read more about the 2014-15 book.

Follow Dateline UC Davis on Twitter.