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 Program Associate for the Center and is responsible for supporting programming and outreach efforts.

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.

Alex Edgar serves as the Student Intern for the Center and is responsible for supporting programming and outreach efforts. Alex first became involved with the Center as a part of the 2022 class of VOICE Grant Recipients. As part of VOICE, he led Votechella, a civic engagement music festival at UC Berkeley that garnered thousands of attendees, registered hundreds of students to vote, and helped elevate civic education materials.

He is a second-year at UC Berkeley studying Political Behavior with minors in Public Policy, Political Economy, and Education. As Director of the ASUC Vote Coalition, he successfully spearheaded a fight to secure an on-campus polling location in 2022 and acquired over $70,000 in grants for civic programming. He also coordinates civic engagement efforts for over 280,000 students across all nine undergraduate UC campuses for the UC Student Association. In recognition of his civic work and strong student voice, Alex was the 2023 recipient of the John Lewis Youth Leadership Award by the California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, published in Forbes, featured in CBS News Bay Area, and has spoken about voting rights and civic education across the country.

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.

Ashley Chan is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Davis. She is a second-year studying Political Science and a member of UC Davis’ University Honors Program. At UC Davis, Chan is a nonvoting, ex-officio member of the Associated Students of UC Davis (ASUCD) Senate, serving as the Chairperson of the Gender and Sexuality Commission (GASC). She also sits on the University of California Office of the President (UCOP)’s Systemwide Title IX Student Advisory Board as the undergraduate representative for UC Davis.

In her free time, Chan enjoys volunteering and holds multiple leadership positions in her volunteer work. Chan is the Clinic Manager for Imani Legal Clinic, an undergraduate-student-run legal clinic focused on serving the Black and Hispanic communities in Sacramento. She is also the Policy Director of Aggie House, 501(c)(3) nonprofit transitional housing shelter for UC Davis students run and staffed by undergraduate volunteers.

Prior to attending law school, Chan plans to take a gap year following her graduation in Spring 2023. While Chan is excited to continue learning more about different fields of law, she is particularly passionate about the prosecution of sex crimes and human trafficking cases; she is also interested in exploring civil rights law, constitutional law, and employment law. She is honored to serve on the National Advisory Board and hopes to use her lived experience as a student to ensure student speech and expression are being continuously protected.

Valeria Dominguez is a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside, studying Higher Education Administration and Policy. Influenced by her identities as a first-generation immigrant Latina, Valeria’s work, advocacy, and scholarship focus on equity and social justice. Her dissertation is on the strengths and impacts that Women of Color have on higher education boards of trustees. Valeria’s scholarship has influenced her involvement in UC governance and passion for university service. She was the Academic Affairs Officer for UCR’s School of Education (2019-2020), the Vice-President of the UCR’s Graduate Student Association (2020-2021), and now serves as the President of UCR’s Graduate Student Association and as the Treasurer for the UC Graduate and Professional Council. These roles have granted her the opportunity to meet with CA Legislators, the UC Board of Regents, the UC President, the UC Office of the President, and community partners to advocate on behalf of graduate and undergraduate students. Dominguez received her M.Ed. in Higher Education Administration and Policy and B.A. in Sociology Law and Society at the University of California, Riverside. This year she was awarded the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education Gardner Fellowship and the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement VOICE Fellowship.

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."

Jessica Herrera-Flanigan is currently a Partner at Monument Advocacy, bipartisan firm that offers government relations, public affairs, strategic and crisis communications, and digital services.

She was formerly Vice President, Public Policy & Philanthropy, Americas at Twitter. She joined Twitter in March 2020. Before Twitter, she was President of the Univision Foundation, which focused on using independent journalism and digital storytelling to advance Univision’s philanthropic priorities in education, the arts, and health. She was also Executive Vice President for Government and Corporate Affairs at Univision from 2015 to 2020. She’s also worked for Monument Policy Group, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. House of Representatives, and in private practice. She graduated from Yale University and received her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dr. Nancy Thomas directs the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education (IDHE) at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life, 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.

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.

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.

An early focus of this work was on the relevance of paradigms and periphrasis for theory construction within a view of grammar referred to as Realization-based Lexicalism (Blevins 2001). In collaboration with J. P. Blevins and Rob Malouf this research on word-based morphology has broadened into explorations of morphology as a complex adaptive system (following research in Ecological Developmental Biology (Gilbert and Epers 2009, Bateson and Gluckman 2011, Gissis and Jablonka 2011)).

Ackerman utilizse information-theoretic measures to study cross-linguistic paradigm organization in terms of implicational relations among related wordforms. Related work is being done by Gregory Stump, Rafael Finkel and Andrew Wedel. He is presently exploring how experimental research can be be applied to learnability issues bearing on word-based based morphology. Many of these strands of research are synthesized in a recent book with Irina Nikolaeva http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/nikolaeva/ (see below).

Over the past few years Ackerman has been working on the description and theoretical analysis of an underdocumented Kordofanian language, Moro, spoken in Sudan. This is collaborative work with his co-PI Sharon Rose and several graduate and undergraduate students under the auspices of an NSF grant (BCS-0745973). This research can be seen at http://moro.ucsd.edu/. Ackerman has also developed a correspondence-based mapping theory with John Moore and is presently extending this model to the Moro morphology-syntax interface.

Elizabeth Beaumont is Associate Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and the prior Director of the interdisciplinary Legal Studies program. Her research and teaching center around issues of constitutionalism, citizenship, and democracy, as well as civic engagement and education. She is the author of The Civic Constitution: Civic Visions and Struggles in the Path Toward Constitutional Democracy (Oxford University Press), which examines the roles of several groups and social movements in shaping American constitutional development, including expressive and associative rights and the scope of citizenship.

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.

Ash Bhagwat is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law and the Boochever and Bird Endowed Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality at the University of California, Davis School of Law, where he teaches Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, and Economic Regulation. Prior to joining the Davis faculty in 2011, Professor Bhagwat was a member of the faculty at the UC Hastings College of the Law for seventeen years. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit, and Justice Anthony Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court. Professor Bhagwat is the author of Our Democratic First Amendment, published by the Cambridge University Press as well as numerous other books and articles on a wide variety of legal subjects, with a particular focus on the First Amendment. Professor Bhagwat is a member of the American Law Institute.

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.

Professor Richard L. Hasen is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles and is Co-Director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, writing as well in the areas of legislation and statutory interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading casebooks in election law and remedies.

From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law Institute in 2009 and serves as Reporter (with Professor Douglas Laycock) on the ALI’s law reform project: Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies.

Andrea Hasenstaub is an Associate Professor of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at the University of California San Francisco, and an investigator in the UCSF Center for Integrative Neuroscience and the Coleman Memorial Laboratory. Dr. Hasenstaub earned her B.S. in mathematics and engineering from the California Institute of Technology, M.Phil in biological anthropology from Cambridge, and PhD in neuroscience from Yale University. After completing a Crick-Jacobs Junior Fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Dr. Hasenstaub joined UCSF as a faculty member in 2012.

Dr. Hasenstaub’s lab focuses on the cell-type basis of circuitry and plasticity in the auditory cortex, particularly the mechanisms by which the cortex can rapidly adjust its processing to adapt to changes in the sensory environment or cognitive demands. Her laboratory combines electrophysiological measurements of activity in mouse or human cortical neurons with modeling of their interactions and optical, genetic, and pharmacological manipulations. This work provides the basic biomedical insights that will drive the next generation of clinical therapies for specifically auditory disorders such as tinnitus or hyperacusis, as well as for general neurodevelopmental or neuroplastic disorders such as schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. Dr. Hasenstaub also has a long-standing interest in issues surrounding undergraduate academic preparation and selection, and coauthored the 2020 Senate report endorsing the continued use of standardized tests at UC.

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.

Sean L. Malloy is a Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) at the University of California, Merced. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Cornell University Press, 2008) and Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2017). His current research project is a comparative study of the way in which American universities grappled with divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980 and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction) movement in response to the Israeli occupation of Palestine from 2005 to the present.

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.

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.

Hendry Ton, M.D., M.S., is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Equity, Diversity and
Inclusion at UC Davis Health and a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. He
served as the Director of Education at the UC Davis Center for Reducing Health Disparities
where he led the development of a training program to help health care leaders make
culturally transformational changes at academic, county, and state health organizations. He
is also the founding medical director of the Transcultural Wellness Center of Asian Pacific
Community Counseling; a community clinic that specializes in serving the mental health
needs of Sacramento’s diverse Asian and Pacific Islander communities.
Dr. Ton presents nationally on the topics of diversity, equity, inclusion, education,
professionalism, culturally responsive health care, and system change. His areas of
interests include diversity, equity, and inclusion, professionalism, cultural psychiatry,
humanistic psychology, medical student education, and faculty development.

France Winddance Twine is a Professor of Sociology, an ethnographer, a feminist race theorist and a documentary filmmaker., whose research focuses on multiple dimensions of inequality. Twine's research has depth and breadth. Her research interests include girlhood, racism and anti-racism, sociology of the body, assisted reproductive technologies, and occupational discrimination. Her empirical research is theoretically grounded in European social theory, North American critical race theory, and feminist race studies. Twine's research provide case studies that provide a nuanced analysis of the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender inequality on both sides of the Atlantic. Twine has conducted extensive field research on both sides of the Atlantic including: Brazil, Britain, and the United States. The concept of racial literacy is one of Twine's major theoretical contributions. In her earlier research on British interracial families, Twine examined how white English and Irish women developed racial literacy as they negotiated and conceptualized racism (and anti-racism) as members of interracial families and as the parents of children fathered by Black men. This reseaerch was published in a A White Side of Black Britain: interrracial intimacy and racial literacy (2010).

In 2007, Twine was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and the Gender Institute. In 2008-09, Twine was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is the author and editor of 10 books and has more than 72 publicaitions including single authored books, journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, essays and reviews. Her recent publications include Geographies of Privilege (2013, with B. Gardener)

Twine's recent publications include "Technology's Invisible Women: Black Geek Girls in Silicon Valley and the Failure of Diversity Initiatives", in International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1: (2018a): 58-79 and

"Making and Breaking Families - reading queer reproduction, stratified reproduction and reproductive justice together", in Reproducive Biomedicine and Society Online (2018b), vol. 7: 112-130, with Marcin Smietana and Charis Thompson.

Twine is currently writing a a series of articles and a book on race, gender and power in Silicon Valley.

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).

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.

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 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.

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.