A Graduate Academic Certificate (GAC) program is a structured sequence of courses and requirements that focus on a specialty or area of expertise not offered by a regular graduate degree program. GACs are administered by a UC Davis instructional unit (professional school, department, graduate group or a designated emphasis program), and are an additional sequence of training and expertise for graduate students.

GACs consist of a minimum of 12 units of graduate level instruction, and are recognized by transcript notation and an official certificate issued by UC Davis with the gold seal of the University of California. A list of GACs can be found on this page. Contact the GAC program for more information on participating.

Air Quality and Health

Program Contact: Kate Shasky, Land, Air and Water Resources
(530) 754-9646, aah@ucdavis.edu

The GAC in Air Quality and Health is designed to give students knowledge of air quality issues via three key components:

1. An intensive course that introduces students to California’s air quality problems and gives them some experience working in multi-disciplinary teams;
2. Breadth courses on topics such as pollutant emissions, atmospheric processes, and environmental and health effects; and
3. A two-quarter capstone course where students team up with a mentor from government, industry, or a community-based organization to research a real air quality problem and make recommendations to solve it.

Conservation Management

Program Contact: Matthew Muir, Environmental Science and Policy
(530) 752-6751, mjswarner@ucdavis.edu

The GAC in Conservation Management provides students with the opportunity to undergo rigorous training in order to demonstrate marketable skills for students desiring a career in conservation management and to take courses in conservation decision-making using the state-of-the-art software currently being developed by leading conservation organizations (e.g., Miradi and Ecosystem Based Management Tools). Students will establish a research program in collaboration with a conservation organization and partner with them to answer a research question of management relevant to their institution and their mission.

Second Language Acquisition

Program Contact: Dr. Robert Bayley, Chair of Linguistics
(530) 752-3209, rjbayley@ucdavis.edu

The GAC in Second Language Acquisition provides students with both a theoretical and practical knowledge of language acquisition. Choosing the GAC in SLA gives graduate students the opportunity to integrate theory with the methods they use in the classroom and to move beyond being a well-trained teacher, to understanding curricular choices in language education. Similar to the DE in Second Language Acquisition, the only difference in the GAC is that there are no requirements related to a student's dissertation.