Few moments are more intense than when a first responder arrives on the scene of a crisis. Few first responses are more fraught than those involving behavioral health: crises that feature issues of mental health, substance use, or overdose.

This June at the Aggie Square Launch Space on Stockton Blvd in Sacramento, UC Davis Sociology Lecturer Elizabeth Siggins brought together the full range of working professionals who deal with crisis response to develop new and better ways to do their work by playing a very serious tabletop game.

Government and Community Relations, in collaboration with Aggie Square, co-hosted an event to expose students to a variety of careers available at UC Davis Health.

More than 60 fifth grade students from the nearby Language Academy of Sacramento school visited UC Davis Health to spend the morning learning from and interacting with staff.

Quarter at Aggie Square is an academic program offered by UC Davis for undergraduates at UC Davis Sacramento campus that consists of coursework, internships, and community engagement of up to 18 units towards graduation. Different topics are taught each academic quarter. Quarter at Aggie Square’s 2022 fall quarter Biomedical Engineering cohort won the 2023 Big Bang! Competition in spring 2023 with Square Solutions, one of their two medical innovations.

In May, more than 65 fifth-grade students from The Language Academy of Sacramento visited UC Davis Health to learn about careers in healthcare and at UC Davis Health. Hosted by the UC Davis Office of Government and Community Relations and Aggie Square, the goal of the Discovery Day event was to educate elementary students about careers available in healthcare, with a focus on engaging students who lived in neighborhoods nearby the healthcare center.

By John Marx and Paul Hastings

In 2021, faculty and staff are looking ahead, planning two new UC Davis building projects that will shape the future of research at our university. Aggie Square in Sacramento and the Grand Challenges Building in Davis will be devoted to bringing faculty and students together from multiple colleges, schools, and departments to generate new knowledge, to address the most complex challenges facing our world at this time, and to educate the next generation of researchers. 

By John Marx

Sometime in the spring of 2020, School of Medicine Dean Allison Brashear started using the term “Virtual Aggie Square” to describe the teamwork between UC Davis faculty and staff involved in COVID-19 research. That pathbreaking, cross-causeway collaboration captured the spirit of Aggie Square, since one of the project’s fundamental goals is making it easier for all of us to work across the university’s disciplines, departments and schools.