Leadership

In August 2020, Michael V. Drake, M.D., became the 21st president of the University of California’s system of 10 campuses, six academic health centers, three nationally affiliated labs, more than 290,000 students and 230,000 faculty and staff. President Drake also holds faculty appointments at the UCSF School of Medicine as a professor of ophthalmology and at the UC Riverside School of Medicine as a professor of medicine.

President Drake served as the 15th president of The Ohio State University (OSU) from 2014 through June 2020. Prior to his six years at OSU, his entire academic career had been at the University of California, including nine years as chancellor of UC Irvine (2005–2014) and five years as UC systemwide vice president for health affairs (2000–2005).

President Drake received his A.B. from Stanford University and his M.D. and residency training from UCSF. He subsequently spent more than 25 years on the faculty of the UCSF School of Medicine, ultimately as the Steven P. Shearing Professor of Ophthalmology and senior associate dean.

During more than two decades of national leadership in higher education, Dr. Drake has served as president of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society and has chaired the boards of the Association of Academic Health Centers (AAHC), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). He currently serves as Chair of the Board of the Commonwealth Fund, a century-old organization that works to achieve a health care system with better access, improved quality and greater efficiency for the benefit of society’s most vulnerable populations.

President Drake has published numerous articles and co-authored six books. He has received dozens of awards for teaching, public service, mentoring and research, as well as five honorary degrees. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Under President Drake’s leadership, the University of California has expanded its strong commitment to access, affordability and academic excellence, all while weathering the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to this global crisis, President Drake instituted critical public health protections for UC students, staff and faculty, including strong mask and vaccine mandates, which kept infection and fatality rates across the UC system dramatically lower than in surrounding communities.

During this period, the university also continued to grow its enrollment, increase student diversity, and enhance student support and affordability. In July 2021, the president proposed, and the UC Board of Regents approved, a multiyear Tuition Stability Plan that helps students and families budget for a UC education by keeping tuition stable and predictable and providing new financial aid resources. In early 2022, President Drake also committed to creating a path to a debt-free UC education for students by significantly expanding need-based financial aid offerings. This included the launch in spring 2022 of the UC Native American Opportunity Plan, which ensures that in-state systemwide tuition and student services fees are fully covered for California students who are enrolled in federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes. At the same time, the university admitted a record number of California first-year students for the fall of 2022, with an increase in the number of underrepresented students.

Under President Drake’s leadership, the university also achieved greater state funding stability. A five-year funding compact established with California Gov. Gavin Newsom will enable the university to make critical long-term investments in its students, faculty, research and infrastructure. The 2022-23 state budget included $185 million to advance UC’s impactful work in addressing the global challenges of climate change — a top priority for the president and the university.

President Drake has been a strong advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging efforts at the university. In particular, he championed an effort to reimagine campus safety and policing at the University of California, leading to a clear set of guiding principles including community and service-driven safety, holistic and inclusive response models, improved data collection and transparency, and clear accountability and independent oversight.

President Drake’s interests outside higher education and health sciences include art and music. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Broad Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Brenda. They have two adult sons and four grandchildren.

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law.

Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He also has taught at DePaul College of Law and UCLA Law School. He teaches Constitutional Law, First Amendment Law, Federal Courts, Criminal Procedure, and Appellate Litigation.

He is the author of ten books, including The Case Against the Supreme Court, published by Viking in 2014, and two books published by Yale University Press in 2017, Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable and Free Speech on Campus (with Howard Gillman). He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He writes a weekly column for the Sacramento Bee, monthly columns for the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States.

Education
B.S., Northwestern University (1975)
J.D., Harvard Law School (1978)

Howard Gillman became the sixth chancellor of the University of California, Irvine in September 2014. He is an award-winning scholar and teacher with an expertise in the American Constitution and the Supreme Court, and holds faculty appointments in the School of Law, the Department of Political Science, the Department of History, and the Department of Criminology, Law and Society.

Under Chancellor Gillman’s leadership, UCI has accelerated its ascendency among globally preeminent research universities. It has been ranked in the top 10 of all public universities in the nation by U.S. News & World Report; furthered its national leadership in sustainability; solidified its status as a “first choice” school for undergraduates by receiving more than 133,000 freshman and transfer applications for fall 2021; received special recognition for advancing student success and promoting social mobility; fostered regional economic development through UCI Beall Applied Innovation; and expanded its capacity to improve lives in our region and around the world.

A native of Southern California, Chancellor Gillman grew up in North Hollywood and was a first-generation college student. He earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in political science at UCLA.

Michelle N. Deutchman is the inaugural executive director of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement (Center). In this role, she oversees the Center’s operations, programming and research including its multidisciplinary national fellowship program. Deutchman facilitates workshops for staff, students, administrators and law enforcement on First Amendment principles and how to safeguard free speech at universities while simultaneously maintaining a safe and inclusive campus climate. Her work to study and shape the national discourse on expression and engagement touches all 10 UC campuses as well as higher education institutions across the county.

Before joining the Center, Deutchman served for 14 years as western states civil rights counsel and national campus counsel for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a non-profit organization that combats bigotry, prejudice and anti-Semitism. As national campus counsel, she focused on emerging trends and challenges pertaining to free expression at colleges and universities. Her work included drafting state and federal legislative testimony and creating training modules for use with ADL’s award-winning anti-bias education program.

During her tenure at ADL, Deutchman also developed subject matter expertise on hate crime laws and how to respond to bias-motivated incidents effectively. She received certification from the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training and educated thousands of local, state and federal law enforcement about the First Amendment and hate crime legislation.

From 2014-2018, Deutchman taught a law seminar at UCLA School of Law that she designed, Sword or Shield: Contemporary Free Exercise Issues.

Deutchman earned her Juris Doctor from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, where she graduated Order of the Coif. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.

Brenda Pitcher is the Executive Assistant at the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. Brenda provides executive-level assistance to the Executive Director and performs essential responsibilities throughout the organization. As the primary administrative contact at the Center, Brenda plays a key role in the areas of meeting and travel planning, research fund guidelines, coordination of campus activities, national conference planning and processing applications for various positions and funding opportunities for the Center's fellows and advisory boards, students and other visitors and collaborators.

Brenda has an extensive background working with executives and their associates. Prior to joining the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement in 2018, Brenda performed key executive support roles in the private sector and aerospace industry. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Southwestern College in Wichita, Kansas. Brenda is an avid cyclist and also enjoys the variety of other outdoor activities and adventures available year-round in the mild climate of Orange County, California.

Melanie Ziment serves as the Communications and Program Associate for the Center and is responsible for supporting programming and outreach efforts and overseeing the Center's VOICE Initiative.

Ziment first became involved with the Center as a part of the inaugural class of VOICE Grant Recipients in 2020. As part of VOICE, she co-founded the opinion podcast Hot Off The Pod, which sought to create a space where students, faculty and local leaders could engage in open dialogue about issues impacting college students at UCSB.

She is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara earning Bachelor of Arts degrees in Communication and English. During her time at UCSB, she served as the Opinion Editor and later the Managing Editor of the Daily Nexus, UCSB’s student-run weekly newspaper.

Kristen Gonzalez is the Program Coordinator at the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is responsible for supporting the Center’s website and social media presence across multiple platforms, as well as managing the Center’s book club.

Kristen is a marketing and communications professional with expertise in digital strategy, content development, and campaign management. She has a diverse background spanning the healthcare, nonprofit, and educational sectors, where she has successfully led marketing initiatives that drive engagement and growth.

Kristen holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from California State University San Bernardino and a Master of Arts in Communication Management with an emphasis in Marketing Communication from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Breana Guadalupe Figueroa Perez is the Student Intern at the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. Breana is a fifth year undergraduate student at UC Irvine. She is majoring in Criminology and Chicano/Latino studies.

Chief Margo Bennett carries over 35 years of law enforcement experience. She spent 13 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and investigated white collar & reactive crimes. Assigned to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., Chief Bennett developed an expertise in the training field in the areas of Interview & Interrogation, Contemporary Issues in Law Enforcement, Violence in the Workplace, Hostage Negotiations, and various other fields of study. Chief Bennett holds a Master’s Degree in Counseling and Educational Psychology. Chief Bennett has been at the University of California Berkeley since 2002 and was appointed the UCPD Berkeley Chief in April 2013.

As a Gen Z activist and equity champion, Alex Edgar approaches systems of higher education, workforce, and government with the intent of elevating and activating youth voices and engagement in order to build a society that is more responsive to the needs of his generation. He is a senior studying political behavior and public policy at UC Berkeley where he serves as the External Affairs Vice President of the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC). In recognition of his civic work, Alex was a 2022 recipient of the John Lewis Youth Leadership Award by the National Association of Secretaries of State and 2023 California Young Steward Leader Award from California Forward. He has traveled the country speaking about the importance of increased advocacy and funding for intentional youth engagement, particularly in support of their voting and civil rights. He has also been published in Forbes, featured in CBS News Bay Area, and provides civic engagement consulting for nonprofits, foundations, and college campuses.

Hannah-Beth Jackson is a former California State Senator and Assemblywoman, practicing attorney and public affairs consultant.

The Huffington Post identified her as one of 11 women in the Unites States “Blazing new trails” in American politics and The New York Times described her as “the state senator shifting California’s workplace culture.” Hannah-Beth is the author of the California Fair Pay Act, the author of the first law in the nation to required publicly held corporations to include women on their board of directors and authored the nation’s first "affirmative consent" standard for college campuses. As chair of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, she led the fight to protect the First Amendment and the right of free speech on college campuses. She is a recipient of California Women Lawyer’s Fay Stender Award, presented annually to an attorney committed to "affecting positive change in the representation of women, disadvantage groups and unpopular causes, and whose courage, zest for life and demonstrated ability to effect change as a single individual make her a role model for women attorneys."

Mehra Marzbani is an actor, writer, and advocate who centers collaborative, diverse storytelling in her work. She is currently an intern at the nonprofit Arts for LA, where she focuses on uplifting California's creative economy through educational outreach to students, digital equity/media literacy policy, and artist civic engagement. Formerly, she served as a Cultural Diplomacy intern in the U.S. Department of State, where she focused primarily on using the arts as a conduit for empathy and acceptance. She plans to graduate with a degree in Public Affairs from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Renee Navarro, PharmD, MD, the inaugural vice chancellor for the Office of Diversity and outreach at UCSF, leads by modeling strength and empathy. She has moved the campus and health system--an organization that comprises more than 35,000 individuals--in a new direction, one that is boldly inclusive, equitable, and explicitly anti-racism.

Starting with a small office of 4 in 2010, and with a tenfold increase during a decade, she has successfully and strategically grown this unit in size and scope to represent key areas related to compliance, education, outreach, climate and the diversification of students, faculty and staff. Indeed in 2020, a decade into the establishment of the Office of Diversity and Outreach, she started to lead a UCSF-wide anti-racism initiative, a far-reaching and comprehensive program to dismantle systemic racism at UCSF. She describes this work as “the strategic disruption of the status quo”.

Dr. Navarro holds a PharmD from the University of the Pacific and a MD from the University of California, San Francisco. She is a Professor of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care.

Dr. Navarro’s work and that of the office are recognized in the UC system and nationally. She is the immediate past chair of the AAMC’s Group on Diversity and Inclusion and the inaugural chair for the AAMC’s Group on Women in Medicine and Science.

Under her leadership, the Office of Diversity and Outreach has significantly advanced diversity and inclusion within the campus community and was twice awarded the Health Professions Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award Insight into Diversity Magazine (2016, 2019).

Amidst a very busy schedule, Dr. Navarro still finds time to give back to the community. In 2019, the National Medical Fellowships (NMF) Bay Area honored her with a “Champions of Health Award” for her on-going mentoring to students of color and her work to expand the medical field to underrepresented communities.

In 2021 she was named by SF Business Times in the 100 most influential women in the Bay Area.

A long-standing leader, Mayor Willie Brown designated June 18, 2003 J Renee Navarro Day in San Francisco.

Dr. Ben-Porath studies schools and colleges as democratic institutions. She received her doctorate in political philosophy from Tel Aviv University in 2000. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University in 2001-2004.

Dr. Ben-Porath has been teaching at Penn GSE since 2004. She is an associate member of the political science department and the philosophy department at Penn. She served as a special assistant to the university president, and as chair of the faculty advisory board to Penn Press, and as executive committee member of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. In 2010 she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, in 2012-2013 she was affiliated with the Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University, and in 2020-2021 she was a fellow in residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.

Margaret Talev is the founding Kramer Director of Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship, in Washington, DC, and senior contributor at Axios, where she previously was managing editor. She appears regularly on CNN, BBC, Sirius XM, NPR and other outlets. She has covered or directed coverage of the White House, U.S. elections, Congress; and local, breaking and politics news in California and Florida.

She is a past president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and the Washington Press Club Foundation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a professor of practice at the Newhouse School of Public Communications and an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and she serves on the Board of Visitors for the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park, her alma mater.

Dr. Nancy Thomas serves as the Senior Advisor to the President for Democracy Initiatives and the Executive Director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education (IDHE) at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). IDHE is the nation’s leading applied research center on student political learning and participation in democracy. Her work and scholarship center on higher education’s democratic mission, college student political learning and participation in democracy, campus climates for democratic learning, inclusion, and engagement, and dialogue, free speech, inclusion, and academic freedom. She also designed and oversees the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, NSLVE (“n-solve”), a study of student voter participation involving nearly 1,200 U.S. colleges and universities nationwide. She is the author or editor of multiple book chapters, papers, articles, and collections on higher education’s role in democracy, including the monograph, Educating for Deliberative Democracy. Dr. Thomas holds a law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law and a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. For thirty years, he has been a professor at the University of California – Los Angeles School of Law, where he has taught First Amendment law, copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and firearms regulation policy.

Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (7th ed., 2020) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed., 2016), as well as more than one hundred law review articles. He is a member of the American Law Institute and of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog. His work has been cited in more three hundred court opinions, including ten Supreme Court cases, as well as over five thousand academic articles. He has also filed briefs (mostly amicus briefs) in more than 150 cases and has argued in over thirty-five appellate cases in state and federal courts throughout the country. He hosts Free Speech Unmuted – a video podcast series sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

Before coming to UCLA, Volokh clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the US Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Volokh worked for twelve years as a computer programmer. He graduated from UCLA with a BS in math-computer science and has written many articles on computer software. Volokh was born in the Soviet Union; his family emigrated to the United States when he was seven years old.

Mark G. Yudof, who served as the 19th president of the University of California from 2008 through 2013, is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Yudof previously served as chancellor of the University of Texas System and as president of the four-campus University of Minnesota. Before that, he served as dean of the law school at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 to 1994, and as the University's executive vice president and provost from 1994 to 1997.

President Emeritus Yudof is a recognized authority on constitutional law, freedom of expression and education law. He is the author of When Government Speaks and co-author of five editions of Educational Policy and the Law. A Philadelphia native, he earned both LL.B. and B.A. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion awarded him an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

Alexis Atsilvsgi is a passionate Cherokee and Chicana activist in Higher Education, having served on multiple boards during the entirety of her college career. First as a Board Member on the California Community College’s Board of Governors and next as the 2020-22 Student Regent for the University of California Board of Regents. Alexis graduated from UC Berkeley with BA’s in geography and political science and researched “Understanding the spatial imagination of rural California and the implications of physical place in access to higher education for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC)”. She has worked for Education Trust-West, the California Community Colleges, and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, facilitating partnerships with California tribal communities.

Vikram Amar returned to UC Davis as a Distinguished Professor of Law in 2023 after serving as the dean and the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign College of Law since 2015. Directly before that he was a Professor and the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at King Hall, from 2008 to 2015. Amar has also taught law at Berkeley School of Law, Hastings College of Law and UCLA School of Law.

Amar is one of the most eminent and frequently cited authorities in constitutional law, federal courts, and civil procedure. He has produced several books and more than 60 articles in leading law reviews. He is a co-author (along with Akhil Reed Amar) of the upcoming revised multi-volume Treatise on Constitutional Law (West Publishing Co.) pioneered by Ron Rotunda and John Nowak. He is also a co-author (along with Jonathan Varat and Evan Caminker) of Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials (Foundation Press, 16th ed. 2021), a co-author on multiple volumes of the Wright & Miller Federal Practice and Procedure Treatise (West Publishing), and a co-author (along with John Oakley) of a one-volume treatise on American Civil Procedure (Kluwer, 2008). He writes a biweekly column on constitutional matters for Justia.com, for several years wrote a monthly column on legal education for abovethelaw.com, is a frequent commentator on local and national radio and TV, and has penned dozens of op-ed pieces for major newspapers and magazines.

A strong proponent of public and professional engagement, Amar is an elected member of the American Law Institute and has served as a consultant for, among others, the National Association of Attorneys General, the United States Department of Justice, the California Attorney General’s Office, the ACLU of Southern California, and the Center for Civic Education. For one year he chaired the Civil Procedure Section of the Association of American Law Schools.

Amar earned his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and his juris doctor from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal. He then clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court before joining Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where he handled a variety of complex civil and white-collar criminal matters. It appears that Professor Amar was the first person of South Asian heritage to clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court, and was the first American-born person of Indian descent to serve as a dean of a major American law school. Follow Dean Amar’s bi-weekly column on Justia.com and read archived posts from his FindLaw.com column.

Dr. Estee Beck serves as a director of the Merritt Writing Program and an associate professor in the Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies department at the University of California Merced. A scholar of digital surveillance, privacy, and algorithmic rhetoric, she has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections in rhetoric and composition. She is the co-editor of Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillance within and beyond the Classroom (University Press of Colorado). Her research and advocacy intersect with broader questions about the ethics of free speech in digital and academic spaces. As an administrator, Beck leads initiatives to create equitable and inclusive writing instruction, particularly for first-generation and multilingual students. She has served on national committees for digital ethics, writing studies, and academic labor, working to advance engagement with technology’s role in higher education and civic life. She earned her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing from Bowling Green State University.

Steven Brint is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside and Director of the Colleges & Universities 2000 Project. He is a faculty associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley and the Stanford University Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. His studies of higher education have been funded for a quarter century by the National Science Foundation and four philanthropic foundations. He is the author of five and editor of three books and has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. He has also written for The American Prospect, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post, among other publications. His most recent book, Two Cheers for Higher Education, won honorable mention for the American Sociological Association’s Pierre Bourdieu Award, was co-recipient of the Emory Elliott Book Prize, and was named one of the top 10 books on higher education for 2019 by Forbes. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Sociological Research Association. A native of Albuquerque, NM, Steven Brint received his BA with highest honors from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.

Michael M. Chemers is Professor and Chair of the Department of Performance, Play & Design at the University of California Santa Cruz. His scholarship focuses on “the dramaturgy of empathy,” the study of the efficacy of performance culture to expand compassion and critical thought. He is also the founding Director of the UCSC Center for Monster Studies, an interdisciplinary research hub that brings together scholars from across the UCs and the world to share their research on the role of cultural monsters in politics, art, and science at an annual conference in Santa Cruz. He is co-author, with Michael Sell, of Systemic Dramaturgy: A Handbook for the Digital Age (Southern Illinois University 2022). He is also the author of The Monster in Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness (Routledge 2018) and the co-editor of three volumes on monsters in performance. He is also author of the field-defining Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy (Southern Illinois University 2010, 2nd edition 2023). He has also worked extensively with legendary American playwright Luis Valdez, co-publishing three books. Michael was the Founding Director of the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Production Dramaturgy Program at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama from 2007-12 and has been the director of dramaturgy at UCSC since 2012.

Jennifer A. González is a professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a faculty member in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. Her research engages political and theoretical discourses and their intersection with critical race scholarship on contemporary art. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the University of California Office of the President, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published in Diacritics, Camera Obscura, Bomb, Open Space, Art Journal, Aztlán the Journal of the Archives of American Art and in numerous exhibition catalogs including Jimmy Durham: At the Center of the World (2017). Her first book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Her second book focused on the MacArthur-award-winning artist Pepón Osorio (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She is the chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019) which was included in the top art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020. She sits on the board of the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and has been asked to serve as a reviewer for numerous awards including the Herb Alpert Award in the visual arts, the Andy Warhol writer grants, the US Latinx Art Forum artist fellowships, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Smithsonian institution.

Dr. Özge Hacıfazlıoğlu is currently an adjunct professor in the Leadership Programs at the Berkeley School of Education. She holds a doctorate in Educational Administration and completed her postdoctoral education at Arizona State University. She serves as a faculty member in BSE’s Leaders for Equity and Democracy (LEAD) EdD program, with a focus on the intersection of system leadership and higher education. Prior to joining BSE, Dr. Hacıfazlıoğlu held various higher academic leadership positions in Türkiye while conducting research across diverse higher education contexts. Her research and teaching focus on issues of equity and inquiry-based approaches to cultivating leaders in educational settings. She has been involved in projects aimed at improving the lives of migrant children and their families in marginalized communities worldwide. The international arena has long been a focus of her commitment to applying her expertise and network connections to support schools, universities, and communities. She served as the outreach coordinator on the Executive Committee of the International Study Association of Teachers and Teaching, the Vice President of the Turkish Green Crescent Society, and the Presidential International Visiting Scholar at Wheelock College. She is currently engaged in practice-oriented projects that create “international communities of practice” to explore equity-centered educational opportunities, while actively developing leaders in graduate programs.

Steven Hetts, MD is Co-Chief of the Neuro Endovascular Surgery Service Line at UCSF and Chief of Interventional Neuroradiology at the UCSF Mission Bay Hospitals, where he provides endovascular surgical therapy for children and adults with stroke, cerebrovascular disease and tumors. Dr. Hetts is also Co-Director of the UCSF Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia Center of Excellence where he cares for patients with vascular malformations of the brain and other organs. As Co-Director of the Interventional Radiology Research Laboratory, Dr. Hetts develops novel medical devices and techniques. An active member of the Academic Senate, Dr. Hetts served as faculty representative to the UC Regents Health Services Committee from 2018-2020 and is Chair of the UCSF Division of the Academic Senate from 2023-2025. Dr. Hetts earned an MD from Harvard Medical School and an AB from Harvard College. He completed medical internship at Stanford and diagnostic radiology residency, diagnostic neuroradiology fellowship, and interventional neuroradiology fellowship at UCSF, where he joined the faculty in 2008.

Anne Myers Kelley is Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Merced. A product of the UC system, she earned her B.S. at UC Riverside and her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. She held tenured faculty positions at the University of Rochester and Kansas State University before coming to Merced as one of the first eight founding faculty in 2003. At Merced, she has served as a department chair as well as on many campus and systemwide Senate committees. Her research is in physical and materials chemistry and spectroscopy. She has more than 160 peer-reviewed publications and has published two editions of a graduate-level spectroscopy textbook. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Clarissa Kripke, MD, FAAFP is Clinical Professor HS of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and Director of Developmental Primary Care. She joined the UCSF faculty in 1999 and has been engaged in a variety of diversity and leadership initiatives ever since. The mission of The Office of Developmental Primary Care is to build the capacity of the healthcare system to serve transition age youth and adults with developmental disabilities. Dr. Kripke has been a leader in the disability rights community and in teaching how to apply its principals to the practice of medicine. Some of those principles include full inclusion in family and community, building on strengths rather than focusing solely on deficits, and improving participation through improving the physical and social environment. Dr. Kripke is deeply committed to the principles of liberal democracy and strongly believes that diversity of perspective and experience leads to academic excellence, innovation, and improved community outcomes.

Jennifer Lucero, MD, MA, is the Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM) and Vice Chair for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) in the Department of Anesthesiology. Her clinical expertise is in Obstetric anesthesia.

Dr. Lucero earned her master’s in General-Experimental Psychology from California State University, Northridge, and her medical degree from Yale School of Medicine. She completed dual residencies in Obstetrics & Gynecology and Anesthesiology at UCSF, followed by a Fellowship in Obstetric Anesthesiology and NIH Research Fellowship training. At UCSF, she served as the ACGME Fellowship Director of Obstetric Anesthesia and acting Division Chief of Obstetric Anesthesia.

At DGSOM-UCLA, she leads medical school admissions, financial aid/scholarship, and pathway programs. She is also co-PI of the HRSA UCLA-DGSOM Center of Excellence grant. In 2024, she completed the competitive Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine fellowship. As a first-generation to college Chicana physician, Dr. Lucero advocates for health equity and improved obstetric healthcare outcomes.

Yolanda T. Moses currently serves as Professor Emerita of Anthropology at UC Riverside and Professor of the Graduate Division. She served as Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Excellence at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Moses’ research focuses on the broad question of the origins of social inequality in complex societies through the use of comparative ethnographic and survey methods. She has explored gender and class disparities in the Caribbean, East Africa and the United States. More recently, her research has focused on issues of diversity and change in universities and colleges in the United States, India, Europe and South Africa and Australia.

In 2009, she was named an AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Fellow. She received the American Anthropology Association Franz Boas Award in 2015 for Distinguished Service to the Field of Anthropology, and lifetime Achievement awards from the Society for the Anthropology of North America (2016) and from The Association of Black Anthropologists (2017) Moses served as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Competence at the National Centre for Cultural Competence, at the University of Sydney, Sydney Australia in 2017. She is the co-Chair of the American Anthropology Association's Public Education program Race: are we so Different? see: www.understandingrace.org.

Abigail Thompson is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Davis. Her research area is low-dimensional topology, the study of the mathematical properties of 2,3 and 4-dimensional spaces. She received her PhD in mathematics from Rutgers University in 1986 and joined the UC Davis faculty in 1988. She has been a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Sloan Foundation Research Fellow. She received the American Mathematical Society Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize for her work on 3-manifolds in 2003. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, where she served as a Vice-President from 2019-2022, and has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton several times. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recognized her as a Hero of Intellectual Freedom in 2020. She is a founding member and Secretary of the Association for Mathematical Research, and is a founding member and member of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

Isabel Trevino is an Associate Professor of Economics at UC San Diego. Her research interests are broadly in the areas of microeconomic theory, experimental, and behavioral economics. Her research seeks to understand how people process information in situations of uncertainty about the environment and about the beliefs and actions of others. Through experiments and behavioral theory, she is interested in furthering our understanding of how biases in information processing affect how people form beliefs, the actions they take, and aggregate outcomes with quantifiable welfare consequences, and the effect that the decision environment has on the emergence of these biases.

She has served as a voting member in the UCSD Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for the Status of Women and as a mentor for underrepresented undergraduate and graduate students in Economics, particularly women and people of color.

A Rome Prize and Berlin Prize winner, Ken Ueno is a composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar. As a vocalist, Ueno is known for inventing extended techniques and has performed his vocal concerto with major orchestras such as BMOP, the Warsaw Philharmonic, and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra. His installations have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Taipei Modern Art Museum, MUAC, and the New Vision Arts Festival. Daedalus Drones, a fence-labyrinth with a nest of flying drones, was installed and premiered at the Asia Society Hong Kong in 2021.

A professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, Ueno’s writings have been published by The Oxford Handbook, The New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, and The Drama Review (TDR).

Ackerman’s research focuses on a broad range of issues concerning the relation between lexical semantics, morphology, and syntax. He is concerned with cross-linguistic and typological matters in these domains, especially within the Uralic family. Following up on research from his book with Webelhuth Ackerman is exploring ways of revitalizing Word & Paradigm (alternatively, pattern-based inferential-realizational) models of morphology.

Ahmad Atif Ahmad is a scholar of Islamic law and legal theory. To date, he has authored five books in English, one of which appeared in Arabic translation and one in Arabic; he also co-edited an authoritative collection of essays in Islamic legal studies, and published numerous articles. Ahmad advises law firms and government entities in areas involving Islamic and Middle Eastern law, including in asylum, taxes & Title VII cases. His former doctoral advisees are now assistant and associate professors at Georgetown University, the University of Texas in Austin, Miami University of Ohio, Virginia Commonwealth University, La Moyne College, Istanbul University, Marmara University, among similar institutions. Ahmad studied Arabic and Studies and Egyptian law in his native Egypt (BA & MA, 1992 & 1997) and received his doctoral degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University (2005).

Previously, she was a research scholar for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she helped lead the Foundation's research on civic education and civic and political engagement among U.S. college students. She co-authored two books based on this research: Educating for Democracy (Wiley 2007) and Educating Citizens (Jossey-Bass 2003), which serve as resource texts for the American Democracy Project, an AASCU partnership including more than 240 state college campuses. Among other roles, she served on the Advisory Board of the New Civics Initiative at the Spencer Foundation; helped found the Puentes Initiative at UC Santa Cruz, a campus-community partnership to support the Santa Cruz immigrant community; and is co-editing a NOMOS volume on Civic Education in Polarized Times for the American Society for Legal and Political Philosophy.

Simone Chambers is Professor of Political Science at the University of California Irvine. She has written and published on such topics as deliberative democracy, referendums, constitutional politics, the public sphere, secularism, rhetoric, civility, and the work of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Her two most recent publication are “Democracy and constitutional reform: Deliberative versus populist constitutionalism” and “Truth, deliberative democracy, and the virtues of accuracy: Is fake news destroying the public sphere?” which will appear in Philosophy and Social Criticism Political Studies respectively. She is working on two book projects, The State of Contemporary Democratic Theory a critical survey of new developments in democratic theory and a book of collected essays: Deliberation and the Future of Democracy: A realistic but not realist political theory.

Suneil Koliwad, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and an investigator in the UCSF Diabetes Center. He holds the Gerold Grodsky, PhD/JAB Chair in Diabetes Research. He is also a board certified Endocrinologist, who attends on the Diabetes and Endocrinology Services at The Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Dr. Koliwad earned his PhD and MD degrees from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. After completing a Chief Residency at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, Dr. Koliwad joined UCSF to complete a clinical fellowship in Endocrinology and a research fellowship at the J. David Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. As a faculty member at UCSF, Dr. Koliwad’s lab focuses on how nutrients, inflammation, and metabolism intersect to produce common and serious diseases such as diabetes, and develops innovative ways to manipulate the impact of nutrient excess on inflammation for clinical benefit. Dr. Koliwad is also a frequent speaker on diabetes and its prevention, and on the use of precision medicine in the field of metabolic health. In this arena, his group is focused on how to tailor preventative approaches to specific populations that bear a disproportionately high risk for diabetes. He is dedicated to the notion that biomedical researchers and academic clinicians must express their civic responsibility by engaging on topics relevant to human health across the population. He is also focused on making sure that academic medical centers are bastions for safe and free expression of informed opinions on topics affecting health, the healthcare professions, and medical education.

Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history. These interests are central topics in his latest book, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish
Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018) and in his recent article
“Antisemitism on a California Campus: Perceptions and Views among Students," in Contemporary
Jewry, 2020. Professor Kopstein’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation,
the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. His popular writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The
Washington Post, and The Globe and Mail.

Susanne Lohmann is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy; Director of the Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences; and Chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Professor Lohmann received her Ph.D. in economics and political economy from Carnegie Mellon University. She was John M. Olin Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University; Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, also at Carnegie Mellon University; James and Doris McNamara Fellow at Stanford University; John M. Olin Fellow at the University of Southern California; Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Professor Lohmann is currently working on a book titled Genius of Place: Universities and the Making of the Modern Mind. Her fully online course “Diversity, Disagreement, and Democracy” employs an innovative game play pedagogy to teach civics.

Michael Mascuch is an associate professor and the current Chair of the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His research and teaching concerns the rhetorical operations of narrative discourse and photographic images. He has published a monograph and a co-edited collection, both on the history of autobiographical texts and discourses. His current research is an interpretive history of the political uses of photography in modern Cambodia, with specific reference to the epochal Khmer Rouge catastrophe of the 1970s. He is a founding editor, with Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, of the Brill academic book series, Egodocuments and History.

Dana Kay Nelkin (Ph.D. UCLA) is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and an Affiliate Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Her areas of research include moral psychology, ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of law. She is the author of Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (Oxford University Press), and a number of articles on a variety of topics, including self-deception, friendship, the lottery paradox, psychopathy, forgiveness, and praise and blame. She is also a co-editor of the The Ethics and Law of Omissions, The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility, and Forgiveness: New Essays.

Her work in moral psychology includes participation in an interdisciplinary research collaboration of philosophers and psychologists, The Moral Judgements Project, which brings together normative and descriptive enquiries about the use of moral principles such as the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing and the Doctrine of Double Effect. Other roles include membership of the advisory board of the UC San Diego Institute for Practical Ethics, and service as the North American representative to the Society of Applied Philosophy. She served as chair of the UC San Diego Committee on Academic Freedom in 2017-2018, and currently serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.

Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television and New Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura and the author of The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis.

I am an Associate Professor and Director of the Community Studies B.A. program at UC Santa Cruz, where I teach courses in political economy and urban studies. After completing an undergraduate degree in American Studies, I earned two graduate degrees in geography from UC Berkeley where I developed research and teaching expertise in urban and regional political economy. I have published extensively on economic transformations in the central Appalachian coal fields, lived for several years in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, and co-authored the book Appalachia in the Making. My other and more recent research focus is urban agriculture in the San Francisco Bay Area where I combine theory and practice by writing a book about the historical geography of community gardening in San Francisco (It’s Not Easy Being Green) and volunteer stewardship of the city’s largest community garden for the SF Recreation and Parks Department.

Parya Saberi, PharmD, MAS, MFA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco’s Division of Prevention Science. She conducts behavioral research on HIV treatment and prevention. The focus of her research is improving healthcare delivery to increase access for all and reducing health disparities among youth and young adults living with HIV. Dr. Saberi is an expert clinical consultant for the CDC/HRSA-funded National Clinician Consultation Center (NCCC) which comprises the HIV Warmline, PEPline, PrEPline, and Perinatal HIV Hotline. The mission of NCCC is promoting health equities in the United States by supporting health care professionals through evidenced-informed, person-centered clinical consultation and education.

John Villasenor is on the faculty at UCLA, where he is a professor of electrical engineering, law, public policy, and management, and the director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

John's work considers the broader impacts of key technology trends, including advances in digital communications, the increasing complexity of today’s networks and systems, and the growth of artificial intelligence. He writes frequently on these topics and on their implications with respect to cybersecurity, privacy, and law.

He has published in the Atlantic, Billboard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Scientific American, Slate, the Washington Post, and in many academic journals. He holds a BS from the University of Virginia, an MS and PhD from Stanford University, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.