A template for a Markdown/Pandoc template for a UC Davis PhD dissertation or Masters' thesis. Unlike other templates I've seen, this one should not require any dependencies beyond a typical TeX installation plus Pandoc, and it does not require any TeX commands at the command line. Apart from a few TeX formatting commands inside the .md file, you should be able to write everything in pure Markdown.

On my machine, you can compile the template to a complete PDF file with the following pandoc command:

pandoc -o dissertation.pdf --bibliography=bib.bib --csl=citation-style.csl -V geometry:margin=1in -V linestretch=2 -V fontsize=12pt dissertation.md

Feel free to use the template for any purpose, but I cannot provide any support for it. Also, although my dissertation did pass inspection using this template, I cannot guarantee that it will meet all of the requirements for you (especially because Grad Studies could change the requirements in the future)

All of the fields in dissertation.md that you need to fill in should be marked with {{double braces}}. You can see what the template looks like using dissertation.pdf.