Associate Professor in Human Ecology, Community and Regional Development
Director, Center for Regional Change

With a doctorate in city and regional planning, a veterinary medical degree, and a master’s degree in virology, Brinkley’s research focuses on health and design. She is a former Fulbright Scholar, Watson Fellow, and National Science Foundation Career Award winner. She has published on topics such as healthy food systems, local government planning and decision-making, and sustainable development. Brinkley currently serves as director of the Center for Regional Change, which partners with local governments and nonprofits for engaged scholarship that centers social equity. Her work is used internationally by the United National Food Agriculture Organization and by local communities to guide plans and policies. 

Professor and Chair of Art History

Burnett is the founder and director of UC Davis’s Global Tea Institute for the Study of Tea Culture and Science. The Global Tea Institute came about because of her interests in Ming Dynasty teapots and tea culture, and her engagement with the larger tea community. In her research, she asks, What is culture? How is it formed? Burnett’s publications include Dimensions of Originality: Essays on Seventeenth-Century Chinese Art Theory and Criticism and Shaping Chinese Art History: Pang Yuanji and His Painting Collection. One of her current research projects investigates the spread of tea culture from China into Southeast Asia before 1700, when steeped tea became the norm.

Assistant Professor of Spanish
Director of the Heritage Spanish Program

Carando’s research involves the study of diverse Spanish speakers immersed in an English context, looking at the unique ways that bilinguals use their two languages and how one may influence the other. Her current project explores the idea of a bilingual writing center as a valuable academic tool supporting language and writing instruction, as well as a template for institutions interested in developing culturally-responsive resources to promote language-minoritized students’ retention and success.

Assistant Professor of Neuro-Ophthalmology

Dr. Liu is a neuro-ophthalmologist who provides expert care for children and adults with neurological conditions that affect vision. She is also a clinician scientist who conducts clinical studies in the areas of: 1) pseudotumor cerebri syndrome in children and adults, a condition involves obesity and vision, 2) giant cell arteritis, a blinding rheumatologic disease in the elderly, and 3) visual and cognitive sequelae in brain tumor survivors. During her fellowship, she plans to use social media to educate the general public about these conditions and encourage individual participation in clinical studies. 

Associate Professor of English

Martín specializes in Chicanx and Latinx Studies. She is the author of Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture (Rutgers, 2013), and has published both critical essays and hybrid creative-critical pieces. Her current book project, Fake Chicanx: Identity, Authenticity and Refusal, explores the idea that it is counterproductive and ultimately impossible to identify a unified, cohesive Chicanx identity. It argues that the range of conversations, practices and feelings that people use to reject, refuse, or challenge representations of “authentic” Chicanx identities are, in fact, the very things that constitute the continually evolving and complex identities of Chicanx people. She plans to work on a project that explores the tension between the intersections and distances between Latinx communities and university spaces, with a particular interest in how Chicanx/Latinx students engage with and produce poetry, life-writing, and art as both integral to and outside of their home communities and institutional spaces.

Executive Director, Center for Community and Citizen Science

The Center for Community and Citizen Science is a research center at the UC Davis School of Education that studies, and builds capacity for, public participation in scientific research. Meyer’s collaborative work spans environmental topics such as climate change, marine protected areas, and watershed restoration, and includes many kinds of partners, such as museums, schools, Tribes, community-based non-profits, and government agencies. In addition to community and citizen science, his research and writing have focused on the role of science in environmental decision making, science funding, the role of public values in our science system, boundary organizations, and co-production of science for decision making.

Assistant Professor of Education

Rusoja’s interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of Latinx/Chicanx studies, critical education/critical literacy studies, and university-community/research-practice partnerships. As a Latina immigrant and activist-scholar, she employs participatory and critical community-based qualitative research methodologies to understand the immigrant rights organizing of Latinx immigrant youth, adults, families, and communities. Her research illuminates the fundamental role that communal education, critical literacy, and critical research practice play in the intergenerational political mobilization of Latinx immigrants. Relatedly, her work aims to explore how critical qualitative research methodologies, including community-based, participatory and practitioner research, can be tools for resisting colonial logics within grassroots communities, as well as within community-based research and university-community partnerships, including those related to school-community relationships. Her scholarly work has been published in Research in the Teaching of English, AERA Open, the Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, and in Literacy Research: Theory, Method and Practice, among others.

Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Saeidi focuses on creating teaching activities and materials that foster students' learning. His key responsibilities include teaching the materials senior design class, where students engage in solving real-world problems in collaboration with industry partners. Often the significance of scientists' achievements and innovations remains underappreciated when communicated as dry facts. In this program, Amir aims to bridge this gap by writing about six topics in engineering and how they were developed in time. Each chapter introduces the scientists and engineers involved, the underlying theories, how the scientific method was used, and the successes and failures. Example technologies will be used to explain the concepts and their applications in each chapter.

Piri Ackerman-Barger is associate dean for health equity, diversity and inclusion and a clinical professor at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. She is also the director of faculty development for education and teaching and co-director for the Interprofessional Teaching Scholars Program. As associate dean, Ackerman-Barger leads the school’s efforts to create a diverse and welcoming setting in which to learn, work and collaborate. Ackerman-Barger’s academic interests relate to health equity and social justice. Over her career, Ackerman-Barger has combined her expertise in nursing and education to advance inclusive learning environments, education equity and workforce diversity. She is a national consultant and speaker on strategies to help underserved and under-represented groups in health professions thrive academically.

Greg Downs is a professor of history and the author of three monographs on slavery, emancipation and Reconstruction in the United States, as well as a prize-winning book of short stories. With a colleague at Northwestern University, he led historians' efforts to create the first national park site devoted to Reconstruction and emancipation, writing the first theme study for the park system, helping assemble the first handbook for the park, lobbying Congress, working with local leaders, and assembling a collective of leading historians to endorse the effort. In January 2017, President Obama created the national park at Beaufort, S.C., and Downs helped lead historians' support for the creation of the National Park Service's now-existing Reconstruction network. He co-edits the Journal of the Civil War Era. Currently he is working with the City of Sacramento on the city's innovative municipal reparations project, and completing a book on the enslaved rebel Nat Turner as a religious prophet.

Katie Graf Estes is an associate professor of psychology and is affiliated with the Center for Mind and Brain. She received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2007, and joined the UC Davis Department of Psychology the same year. As director of the Language Learning Lab, she investigates early language development in bilingual and monolingual children. She is investigating the learning mechanisms that infants bring to learning and how the structure of the environment, such as caregivers' speech and actions, support language development. 

Theanne Griffith is an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Membrane Biology. Her research investigates how our nervous system encodes bodily sensations, such as proprioception and pain. Griffith received her undergraduate degree in neuroscience and Spanish from Smith College and earned her doctorate in neuroscience from Northwestern University. In addition to her work as a scientist, Dr. Griffith is an award-winning children's book author. She writes the science adventure chapter book series, The Magnificent Makers (Random House Children's Books). She also co-writes the non-fiction science series, Ada Twist, Scientist: The Why Files (Abrams), which accompanies the Netflix series of the same name. She is passionate about promoting diversity in science as well as inclusive representation in children's media.

Andy Jones is a poet, continuing lecturer for the University Writing Program, and the academic associate director of academic technology services at UC Davis. Andy has taught writing, creative writing and literature classes at UC Davis since 1990, and since 2000 he has hosted Dr. Andy's Poetry and Technology Hour on radio station KDVS. Jones also coordinates and hosts the twice-monthly Poetry Night Reading Series at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis. The author of three books of poetry, with more on the way, he has given poetry readings throughout California and as far away as Washington, D.C., and Nara, Japan. A weekly columnist for the Davis Enterprise, he has discussed poetic, professional and personal topics on Sacramento Public Radio, the BBC World Service and The Oprah Winfrey Show. In addition to writing and literature classes, Jones has taught first-year seminars on jazz and literature, Buddhism and film, practical antiracism and poetry marketing. Having served two terms as Davis poet laureate, he is now the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis.

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is a professor in the Department of Art and Art History. She teaches courses on the visual cultures of the Middle East, as well as on cultural heritage and human rights. Her first book on the architecture of Aleppo received a book award for urban history from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her second book, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice (Stanford University Press, 2019), is the only book to win awards from both the Society for Armenian Studies and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Watenpaugh is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. Her public-facing writing on issues of cultural rights has appeared in Newsweek and The Los Angeles Times and was featured in a BBC series about cultural heritage destroyed during the Syrian conflict.

Brown is a professor of genetics in the Department of Population Health within the School of Veterinary Medicine and is also affiliated with the Genome Center and the College of Biological Sciences. His primary research focus is on how to discover and reuse large biomedical data sets, with a heavy emphasis on democratizing data analysis. Titus's research, teaching and training activities rely heavily on engagement with open source and open science communities, and he is active on several social media platforms. Brown is also a leader in providing training in data-intensive biology. 

Dr. Desai is an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UC Davis Health. Her research focuses on leveraging novel data sources to discern epidemiological trends in emerging diseases and outbreaks, particularly among displaced and other vulnerable populations. Desai obtained her M.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013 and completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Washington and her infectious disease fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston. She also completed a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2019, is an Emerging Leader in Biosecurity Initiative Fellow through the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, an Emerging Leader in Infectious Diseases at the International Society for Infectious Diseases, and was recently designated as a 2021 awardee of the 40 Under 40 Leader in Health Award through the National Minority Quality Forum.

Faloona is a professor and bio-micrometeorologist in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. He earned a Ph.D. in Meteorology from the Pennsylvania State University. For four years in between, he worked as an air quality consultant with SECOR Inc. in Fort Collins, Colorado, running dispersion models and making measurements of industrial emissions. After a postdoctoral appointment with the Advanced Study Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, he joined the atmospheric science faculty at UC Davis. His research interests include the airborne investigation of vertical mixing and near-field pollutant dispersion, observational emission estimates, the meteorology of coastal fog, planetary boundary layer dynamics, biogeochemical cycling and atmosphere/ocean photochemistry. 

Ghetti is a professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Letters and Science and is also affiliated with the Center for the Mind and Brain. Ghetti received a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in 2001 from UC Davis. In 2001, she joined the National Research Council in Bologna, Italy for a research scientist position, and then in 2005 returned to UC Davis for a position in the psychology department and at the Center for Mind and Brain. Ghetti’s research program focuses on neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying the development of memory and metacognition in typically and atypically developing children, and has been continually funded by the NIH, NSF and private foundations including the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Her research has been recognized with an Early Career Award for Research Achievement by the Society for Research in Child Development (2007), a Boyd McCandless Early Career Award from the developmental psychology division of the American Psychological Association (2009), a Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions in Psychology from the American Psychological Association (2010) and a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellowship (2011).

Dr. Hauser started as an infectious disease physician and assistant professor  in the Department of Internal Medicine at UC Davis Health in August 2020 after completing a  fellowship at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Her clinical time is split between inpatient and outpatient infectious diseases consults as well as HIV primary care in the outpatient setting and infection prevention and hospital epidemiology. Hauser's clinical and research interests are in infections as they relate to climate change and environmental justice. Currently, her research has focused on infections as a consequence of wildfire and wildfire smoke exposure. 

Dr. Humphries is an associate professor in the Department of Surgery at UC Davis Health. Humphries specializes in open vascular and advanced endovascular treatment for arterial and venous disease. Her primary clinical interest is in thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) and treatment of complex peripheral artery disease. She is a leader in health outcomes research and is currently developing a telemedicine program for patients with limb ischemia. Her research in TOS has been presented nationally and serves as the foundation of advancing imaging to diagnose TOS. This has provided her the opportunity to speak on a national and international level about the use of advanced endovascular interventions in the treatment of complex aortic pathology including aortic dissection and aneurismal disease.

Kim is a professor of Asian American studies in the College of Letters and Science. Kim’s research and teaching interests include Asian American history, ethnic studies, immigration, transnationalism and diaspora, race and ethnicity and social and political movements. He is the author of numerous publications including The Quest for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and U.S. Sovereignty, 1905-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2011), which examines the implications and consequences of diasporic political activity in a U.S. setting. He also co-produced and edited Freedom Without Justice: The Prison Memoirs of Chol Soo Lee (University of Hawai'i Press, 2017), which chronicles the experiences of Chol Soo Lee, a young Korean immigrant, who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for a San Francisco Chinatown murder. As a scholar of Asian American studies and ethnic studies, Kim is committed to the production and promotion of socially relevant forms of knowledge, especially with intersectional and coalitional perspectives, to imagine new and different possibilities. 

Jaller is an associate professor and vice-chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and co-director of the Sustainable Freight Research Program at the Institute of Transportation Studies. Jaller received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in industrial engineering from Universidad del Norte in Colombia and his M.E. in transportation engineering, M.Sc. in applied mathematics, and Ph.D. in transportation engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research analyzes the societal and private impacts of transport and logistics operations, technology, and policies to develop tools to achieve a sustainable transportation system. Jaller leads research projects funded by the National Center for Sustainable Transportation, the Center for Transportation, Environment, and Community Health, and the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Centers. He also conducts projects for state and federal agencies such as the California Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Wang is an associate professor of American studies at UC Davis. Her research and teaching focus on race, immigration, music, and popular culture. She is the author of Soundtracks of Asian America (Duke University Press). She is currently working on a project which explores the life story of Elayne Jones, a 93-year-old African American timpanist who broke racial and gender barriers in the classical music field but also paid a high personal toll fighting a culture of exclusivity. Wang received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan’s Program in American Culture and her B.A. in american studies from Pomona College.

Clare Cannon is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of social and environmental inequality. Using multiple kinds of methods, her research has investigated the use of intimate partner violence in sex and gender minority communities and applied feminist theories and methods to environmental inequalities. Her research interests include health disparities, climate change and disasters, and environmental justice, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals and books. She is an assistant professor of human ecology at UC Davis. 
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David de la Peña is an associate professor of human ecology and director of the Program in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design. As a licensed architect and urban designer, his research and creative work are focused on community engagement in the design, creation and management of pubic spaces. He is particularly interested in support mechanisms for self-built and managed urban spaces, and he regularly collaborates on participatory projects in the Sacramento region as well as internationally. He has authored numerous articles and book chapters on participatory urbanism, and is co-author of the recent book Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity. He received his Master of Architecture from UT Austin, and a Master of Urban Design and Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning from UC Berkeley. 

Valerie Eviner is a professor of ecosystem management and restoration in the Department of Plant Sciences. Much of her research is in collaboration with diverse land managers to simultaneously address holes in our fundamental ecological understanding, and key challenges in ecosystem management, including: plant invasions, conservation of native plant communities, ecosystem services, restoration, and resilience of ecosystems to multiple environmental changes. She works closely with bridge organizations and government agencies to integrate the most recent scientific insights into policies affecting the environment and sustainable land management.

Milmon F. Harrison is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the experience of people of African descent in the context of the continental United States. Using qualitative and digital humanities-based approaches, his work engages questions of race, religion, public policy, socioeconomic and geographic mobility, and the telling of stories about all of the above. He is the author of the book Righteous Riches: the Word of Faith Movement in Contemporary African American Religion (Oxford), the first book-long scholarly treatment of the Prosperity Gospel Movement in the United States. His latest book project is The Sunset Limited: California Stories of the Great Black Migration, 1940s-1970s. He is an associate professor in the Department of African American and African Studies. 

Irene Joe recently completed her fourth year as a tenure-track professor at UC Davis School of Law where she teaches courses on criminal law, criminal procedure and professional responsibility. Joe writes at the intersection of all three of these areas with a special focus on how the design of the criminal process affects the ability of institutional attorneys to manage overwhelming caseloads and comply with ethical requirements. Her work has been published in a number of highly regarded journals including the UCLA Law Review, Boston University Law Review, the UC Davis Law Review and the California Law Review. Her most recent project, Structuring the Public Defenders (forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review) questions how a state decision about whether to house the provision of public defender services in the executive, judicial, or neither branch of state government affects the institution's efficacy. 

Keith David Watenpaugh is professor and founding director of Human Rights studies at UC Davis. He studies the history, theory and criticism of humanitarianism at its intersection with the practice of human rights. He is a pioneer in the field of higher education in emergencies, with a primary focus on improving refugee higher education opportunity. He serves as director of the Article 26 Backpack project, which began with support from the Ford Foundation and seeks to ensure universal academic access and mobility, especially for those displaced by war or violence. He is author most recently of the award-winning Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (California, 2015). His current work imagines a global history of humanitarianism from below, and he is finishing the book, Most Human: Storytelling, Star Trek and Human Rights.