Advisory Boards & Leadership

In August 2020, Michael V. Drake, M.D. became the 21st president of UC’s world-renowned system of 10 campuses, five medical centers, three nationally affiliated labs, more than 280,000 students and 230,000 faculty and staff.

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

Drake received his A.B. from Stanford University and his residency, M.D., and fellowship in ophthalmology from UCSF. He subsequently spent more than two decades on the faculty of the UCSF School of Medicine, including as the Steven P. Shearing Professor of Ophthalmology.

Under his leadership, Drake greatly enhanced UC Irvine’s reputation as a premier university. UC Irvine rose to join the top 10 public universities in U.S. News & World Report’s annual list and was ranked by Times Higher Education as the No. 1 university in the U.S. under 50 years old. During his tenure at the campus, the four-year graduation rate increased by more than 18 percent, while undergraduate enrollment and diversity significantly increased. In addition, Drake oversaw the establishment of new schools of law and education as well as programs in public health, nursing and pharmacy.

Drake has published numerous articles and co-authored six books. He served as a reviewer for several medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science and the American Journal of Ophthalmology. Drake is a member of several national scientific and scholarly societies, and has received various awards for teaching, public service, mentoring and research. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the UCSF School of Medicine’s Clinical Teaching Award, the Hogan Award for Laboratory Research, the Chancellor’s Award for Public Service, the Martin Luther King Jr. Award for University Service, the UC Irvine Medal, and the University of California Presidential Medal in recognition of his exemplary service to the University.

Drake’s extensive public service experience includes various roles for the American Medical Association, the National Eye Institute, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and multiple commissions on health in the state of California. He is a former chair of the board of directors of the Association of American Universities and currently serves as a member of the board of directors for the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. He is also the chair of the board of governors of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a member of the American Talent Initiative Steering Committee, and a member of the board of directors of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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 117,000 freshman and transfer applications for fall 2010; 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. Formed by the UC Office of the President, the Center explores how the fundamental democratic and academic principles of free speech and civic engagement should enrich the discovery and transmission of knowledge in America’s colleges and universities. In this role, Deutchman oversees a multidisciplinary national fellowship program and works across all 10 UC campuses to study and shape national discourse about free speech.

Before joining the Center, Deutchman served as Western States Civil Rights Counsel and National Campus Counsel for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a non-profit organization that has been a leader in combating bigotry, prejudice and anti-Semitism for over a century. As National Campus Counsel, Ms. Deutchman focused on emerging trends and challenges pertaining to free expression at colleges and universities. She trained campus stakeholders – including administrators and law enforcement – on how to safeguard free speech at universities while simultaneously maintaining a safe and inclusive campus climate.

Deutchman teaches a course on contemporary free exercise issues at UCLA School of Law.

She earned her Juris Doctor from University of Southern California Law Center, where she graduated Order of the Coif. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of 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.

Dr. Harvey Brody, DDS, M.Ed, is a Clinical Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, and a Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University. He has authored 45 articles, been a featured speaker at national and international meetings, and received numerous honors and awards. These include a Congressional commendation from the 104th United States Congress, the Martin Luther King award for faculty at UCSF, and the 2013 UCSF Gold Medal of Honor Award from the School of Dentistry.

Dr. Brody has served as a health policy fellow with Senator Dianne Feinstein, a senior policy advisor for the Assistant Secretary of Health and an advisor on education and health issues to the University of California Office of the President. He has directed hospital and university based residency programs for 30 years and has been the principal investigator on local, state and federal grants. Dr. Brody established the UCSF Post Baccalaureate Program for the School of Dentistry; he was the director of that program for five years, and currently serves as consultant to the program, based at SFSU. He has also served as the president of several national educational organizations.

Dr. Brody is currently the Vice President of the Alumni Associations of the University of California. He serves as an Alumni Regent for one year commencing July 1, 2016.

Ms. Vijaya Gadde, Esq., has been Legal, Policy and Safety Lead of Twitter, Inc., since 2018. Ms. Gadde manages Twitter's corporate and international legal work. She was General Counsel and Secretary of Twitter, Inc. since August 2013 until 2018 and its Director of Communications since October 2015 until 2018. She served as the Legal Director for corporate and international issues at Twitter, Inc. from July 2011 to August 2013. She handled corporate and international legal work for the social network. She has worked with Macgillivray for more than a decade and before joining Twitter, she served as a Senior Director and Associate General Counsel at Juniper Networks, from October 2010 to July 2011. From October 2000 to April 2010, she was an Attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C. While at WSGR, She acted as counsel to the New York Stock Exchange’s Proxy Working Group and Committee on Corporate Governance. Ms. Gadde holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law.

Tamara Keith is a White House correspondent for National Public Radio and co-host of The NPR Politics Podcast. On Mondays she joins the PBS NewsHour for its weekly Politics Monday segment. Keith previously covered Congress and business for NPR and before that worked at member stations KQED, KPCC and WOSU. She got her start in journalism while in high school as an essayist for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, thanks to an effective letter-writing campaign, and after completing her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, became the youngest person to graduate from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She serves on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

John B. King Jr. is the president and CEO of The Education Trust, a national nonprofit organization that seeks to identify and close educational opportunity and achievement gaps. King served as U.S. Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. Prior to that role, King carried out the duties of Deputy Secretary, overseeing policies and programs related to P-12 education, English learners, special education, innovation, and agency operations. King joined the department following his post as New York State Education Commissioner. King began his career as a high school social studies teacher and middle school principal.

Anne Kornblut is director of new initiatives for news partnerships at Facebook, where she oversees a variety new strategies involving the news industry across the Facebook family of apps. Before joining Facebook in 2015, she spent nearly two decades in the news industry, most recently as a senior editor at the Washington Post, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for overseeing coverage of Edward Snowden in 2013. She has been a lifelong journalist and supporter of the news industry, and currently serves on the boards of three news non-profits.

Monica C. Lozano is President and Chief Executive Officer of College Futures Foundation, a California-based private foundation. College Futures partners with organizations and leaders across the state to catalyze systemic change, increase college degree completion, and close equity gaps so that educational opportunity is available to every student, regardless of skin color, zip code, or income.

Prior to joining College Futures in 2017, Lozano had a 30 year career in Hispanic media beginning in 1985 when she joined La Opinión, the country’s leading Spanish-language daily newspaper. She was named Publisher and CEO in 2004 and in 2010 became CEO and Chair of the Board of the parent company, ImpreMedia. During her career, Lozano led the successful transition of the business into a multi-media content provider of information serving the Hispanic community.

In addition to her work with College Futures Foundation, Lozano serves on a number of boards including the Weingart Foundation Board of Trustees; is co-founder and Chair of the Aspen Institute Latinos and Society program. She served for fifteen years on the Board of Regents of the University of California including two as Chair and was named one of Fortune Magazine’s 50 Most Influential Latinas in America. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Avi Oved is pursuing his J.D. at UCLA School of Law as part of the Class of 2020 and currently externs for the Honorable Dean D. Pregerson of the U.S. District Court, Central District of California. Oved serves on the Board of Directors for Associated Students UCLA, a $70 million non-profit with nearly 2,000 employees that governs UCLA’s publications and media, UCLA’s services such as its bookstores, facilities, and restaurants, and UCLA’s trademark and licensing.

Prior to graduating in 2016 from UCLA with a B.A. in Economics, Oved served a two-year term on the UC Board of Regents as the Student Regent—the sole representative of 250,000 students across the 10-campus system. As Regent, Oved established an additional student seat on the board, co-authored the UC Statement of Principles Against Intolerance—an anti-discrimination policy—and advocated for UC's disinvestment of $200 million from coal and tar sand companies, as well as $30 million from private prisons. Oved also presented a middle-income affordability initiative—performing significant data analysis that showed UC’s shrinking middle-income student population and vulnerabilities in its financial aid system.

Bret L. Stephens joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2017. His column appears Thursday and Saturday.

Mr. Stephens came to The Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial-page editor and, for 11 years, foreign affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. At The Post he oversaw the paper's news, editorial and digital operations and its international editions, and also wrote a weekly column. He has reported from around the world and interviewed scores of world leaders.

Mr. Stephens is the author of "America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder," released in November 2014. He is is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including two honorary doctorates and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was raised in Mexico City and holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago and an MSc. from the London School of Economics. He and his wife, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, a music critic for The Times, live with their three children in New York and Hamburg, Germany.

Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Mr. Stone joined the faculty in 1973, after serving as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. He later served as Dean of the Law School (1987-1994) and Provost of the University of Chicago (1994-2002).

Stone is the author of many books on constitutional law, including Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century (2017); Speaking Out: Reflections of Law, Liberty and Justice (2010 & 2016); Top Secret: When Our Government Keeps Us in the Dark (2007), War and Liberty: An American Dilemma (2007), Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (2004), and Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era (Chicago 2002). He is also an editor of two leading casebooks, Constitutional Law (7th ed. 2013) and The First Amendment (5th ed. 2016). Stone is an editor of The Supreme Court Review and chief editor of a twenty-volume series, Inalienable Rights, which is being published by the Oxford University Press.

Stone was appointed by President Obama to serve on the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which evaluated the government’s foreign intelligence surveillance programs in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the America Law Institute, the National Advisory Council of the American Civil Liberties Union, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Council for Democracy and Technology. He has served as Chair of the Board of the American Constitution Society and Chair of the Board of the Chicago Children’s Choir.

Stone has also written amicus briefs for constitutional scholars in a number of Supreme Court cases, including Obergefell v. Hodges, Whole Woman’s Heath v. Hellerstadt, Lawrence v. Texas, United States v. Windsor, United States v. Stevens, and Rasul v. Bush. He was also one of the lawyers who represented President Bill Clinton in the Supreme Court in Clinton v. Jones.

George F. Will’s newspaper column has been syndicated by The Washington Post since 1974. Today it appears twice weekly in more than 400 newspapers. From 1976 to 2011 he was a contributing editor of Newsweek. In 1977 he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

This year, Mr. Will released his most recent work, The Conservative Sensibility. Mr. Will has published three other books on political theory, including Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983). Altogether eight collections of Mr. Will’s columns have been published. In 1990, Mr. Will's book, Men At Work, topped The New York Times bestseller list for two months.

In 1981, Mr. Will became a founding panel member on ABC’s “This Week” and spent over three decades there. Then followed three years of regular appearances on Fox News’ “Special Report” and “Fox News Sunday.” Mr. Will now contributes regularly to MSNBC and NBC News.

Born in Champaign, Illinois, Mr. Will earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University, where he later served as a trustee. Mr. Will was a staff member in the United States Senate from 1970 to 1972. From 1973 through 1976, he was the Washington editor of National Review. Today, Mr. Will lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

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).

BOOKS

English (authored)
- Islamic Law: Cases, Authorities, and Worldview (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp 232 (college textbook)
- Pitfalls of Scholarship: Lessons from Islamic Studies (NYC: Palgrave, 2016), pp 192
- The Fatigue of the Shari‘a (NYC: Palgrave, 2012), pp 224 (Arabic translation: Futur al-Shari‘a, by a team of translators, notably Tal‘at Faruq and Said Faris: Beirut: Arab Network for Research and Publication, 2016).
- Islam, Modernity, Violence, and Everyday Life (NYC: Palgrave, 2009), pp 224
- Structural Interrelations of Theory and Practice in Islamic Law: A Study of Six Works of Islamic Jurisprudence,
(Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp 232

English (co-edited)
- The Routledge Handbook of Islamic Law, with Khaled Abou El Fadl, UCLA (London: Routledge, 2019), pp 464

Arabic
- Review of Court Decisions in Islamic Law, A Comparative Study (Arabic = Isti’naf al-ahkam al-qada’iyya wa
naqduha fi al-tashri ‘ al-islami ma‘a al-muqarana bi-l-tashr ‘at al-wad‘iyya), Cairo, 1997, pp 388

Amy Binder is professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at UC San Diego. She studies education from political, organizational, and cultural perspectives. In 2013, she published Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, which catalogues not only the issues and ideologies that animate college-age conservatives, but also the civil and provocative styles that dominate different university campuses. Becoming Right has been widely covered in the media. Binder is at work on a new book, tentatively titled The New Era of Campus Politics: How the Right Is Winning by Playing the Long Game, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. In this project, she and co-author Jeffrey Kidder study college students spanning the left, right, and center on four public university campuses in the two years after Donald Trump was elected president. One of the book’s chapters will cover students’ ideas about speech and how those ideas are informed by campus culture, the media, and outside organizations. Lengthy interview excerpts from the project were included in a major report released in 2019 by PEN-America. When not studying politics and higher education, Binder researches the linkages between universities and the labor market.

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.

Michael Mark Cohen is associate teaching professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. A graduate of the University of Colorado in Boulder, Dr. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. He is most recently the author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly (UMass Press, 2019). This book charts the history of conspiracy laws and conspiracy theories in the conflict between popular radical social movements, monopoly capitalism and their allies in the emergent national security state between the Haymarket bombing of 1886 and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Not incidentally, this is the era, and the conflicts, out of which modern American free speech debates emerged. He teaches classes on racial formations, social movements and popular culture in the United States since the Civil War. Professor Cohen has spoken from the Mario Savio Free Speech steps on Sproul Plaza more times than he can remember.

"The world faces many complex problems, and great universities should be part of the solution. If we want to have an immediate impact, we need to engage today’s students in action-research projects with multidisciplinary teams that confront real problems. The mission is to transform research and education into service to the world and to do so on a large scale."

Cooper joined the UCLA faculty in 1969, conducting research in market-share analysis and the measurement of marketing effectiveness. In the mid-1990s, he developed Bayesian strategic-planning methods for radically new products. In 1999, he started Strategic Data Corporation, which developed e-commerce and display-ad optimization for major web portals. Fox Interactive Media acquired SDC in 2007.

Since 2009, Cooper has developed sustainable systems for threatened ecosystems including urban centers. From 2010 through 2016, he served on the board of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and co-founded the Conservation Action Research Network. In 2017, he was invited into the Brain Trust of the Helena Group—an action-oriented think tank of global leaders focused on executing projects that improve the world. In late 2018, he published a book on systems entrepreneurship reflecting his learnings from 50 years on the UCLA faculty.

John M. Ganim is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of four books, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (1983), Chaucerian Theatricality (1990), both published by Princeton University Press and reprinted by the Princeton Legacy Press in 2014; Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (Palgrave 2005), which was translated into Arabic in 2012 by the Kalima Foundation; and Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages, coedited with Shayne Legassie (Palgrave 2013.) He has published over 60 articles and book chapters on medieval literature, as well as on how the medieval past is engaged in film, architecture and political theory. He was the 113th President of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (2015-16) and has served as President (2006-2008) of the New Chaucer Society. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2013-2014 received the Distinguished Humanist Research Award from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at UCR.

Jody Greene came to UC Santa Cruz in 1998 and has served as Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and the History of Consciousness. Her research interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature; non-dualist Western philosophy, especially the work of Spivak, Derrida, and Nancy; human rights and international law; queer studies; and the history of literary discourse and literary institutions. Her forthcoming collection, co-edited with Sharif Youssef, is The Hostile Takeover: Human Rights after Corporate Personhood. She is the recipient of the UCSC Humanities Division John Dizikes Teaching Award (2008), the Disability Resource Center Champion of Change Award (2018), and, twice, of the UCSC Academic Senate Excellence in Teaching Award (2001, 2014). In 2016 she was appointed the founding Director of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) and she now serves as UCSC’s first Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning.

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and, since 2014, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression. David’s UN reporting has addressed, among other topics, encryption and anonymity as promoters of freedom of expression, the protection of whistleblowers and journalistic sources, how Artificial Intelligence technologies implicate human rights, and the global private surveillance industry. He has conducted official missions to Japan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Mexico, Liberia and Ecuador.

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.

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 founding director and past co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press and now celebrating its 100th issue.

Her books include The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and the forthcoming Teaching Pornography. Penley is the editor or co-editor of several influential and field-changing collections including Feminism and Film Theory; Male Trouble; Technoculture; Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction; The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science, and Gender, and most recently, from The Feminist Press, The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, (trans. German and Spanish) with Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young.

Penley’s large public art projects include Primetime Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place, first commissioned by MOCA in Los Angeles in 1995 and rebooted and reimagined by Red Bull Studios in NYC in 2016 (http://redbullarts.com/newyork/exhibition/total-proof-the-gala-committee/) and Biospheria: An Environmental Opera.

She won the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Award for “DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea” and co-produced HBO’s Porn 101 with Katie Morgan, continuing her dual research focus on popular science and popular sex.

Other awards include the Kenneth Burke Society Prize for Excellence in Rhetorical Studies and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Penley is considered a founder of the media subfields of feminist film theory, porn studies, fan studies, and environmental media.

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.

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.

Eugene Volokh has taught and written about First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law since 1994. He also focuses on Internet law, Second Amendment law, tort law, criminal law, and intellectual property law. Since 2002, he has written a prominent law professor blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, which was hosted by the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017 and has been hosted at Reason Magazine since then. He is also the creator of Free Speech Rules, http://FreeSpeechRules.com, an series of videos aimed at objectively explaining First Amendment law to high school and college students.