Nakia C. Best is an assistant professor in the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing. Dr. Best advocates for all K-12 students to have daily access to a school nurse. Her research provides valuable insights on how school nurses and the services they provide improve student health and education outcomes.
Tom Boellstorff is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, former Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist (flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association), and series editor for Princeton University Press’s “Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology.”
Among their publications are the books Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press); Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press) and Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie® (MIT Press)
Ty Christoff-Tempesta is an Assistant Professor and Samueli Faculty Development Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UCI. His lab investigates how novel molecular designs can emerge unusual properties in organic materials to address outstanding challenges in sustainability and health, including plastics waste, water treatment, and climate change.
Vy Dong is a Chancellor’s Professor at UC Irvine where she leads a research team in organic synthesis, with applications spanning from green chemistry to cancer immunotherapy. Her lab specializes in the design and synthesis of molecular architectures that can ultimately impact the discovery of medicines, sustainable materials, and alternative fuels.
Vy is passionate about interdisciplinary collaborations and finding innovative ways to teach and mentor the next generation of scientists.
Paola Guerrero-Rosada is an Assistant Professor in Educational Policy at the University of California, Irvine. She studies the active ingredients of high-quality early education through an equity lens, focusing on scalable quality improvement and expansion programs.
Dr. Guerrero-Rosada aims to build community research partnerships with childcare and education providers, school districts, and policymakers. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology from Universidad del Valle and Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia) and a Ph.D. in Education and Psychology from the University of Michigan. She currently leads one of the first experimental quality improvement interventions in Puerto Rican elementary public schools.
Keri Hurley is a Health Sciences Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy Practice within the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UCI. She is a board-certified ambulatory care pharmacist and chair of the Immunization Coalition of Los Angeles County.
Her research focuses on leveraging real-world evidence and the role of pharmacists to address health disparities and improve public health and patient care through innovative clinical services, medication management strategies, and vaccination programs.
Kristen Renwick Monroe is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. Working at the intersection of ethics, politics and psychology, Monroe is best known for her award-winning trilogy on altruism and moral choice: The Heart of Altruism (1996); The Hand of Compassion: Moral Choice during the Holocaust (2004); and Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide (2012).
A Darkling Plain: Stories of Conflict and Humanity during War (2016) asks how people keep their humanity during war, and When Conscience Calls: Moral Courage in Times of Confusion and Despair (2023) asks what drives moral courage. Monroe uses narrative analysis to explore the moral psychology, finding that how we think about others determines how we treat them. Her latest book is Politics, Principle and Standing up to Donald Trump: Moral Courage in the Republican Party (2024) While at the Newkirk Center, Monroe will coordinate a project on how we can foster better communication across political divides.
Asli Sezen-Barrie is the Stacey Nicholas Endowed Chair of Environmental and Climate Change Education and Associate Professor at UC Irvine’s School of Education. As faculty advisor for the Environmental and Climate Change Literacy Projects (ECCLPs), she works justice-oriented partnerships across California’s UC-CSU systems to improve climate change education.
A former NSF program director, she led science teacher education and climate justice initiatives at the national level. Dr. Sezen-Barrie’s research emphasizes equitable, transdisciplinary practices in science education, addressing complex challenges like wildfires and ocean acidification. She is the Editor of the upcoming Handbook of Climate Change Research in Transdisciplinary Education.
António Tomás is currently an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. Before joining the University of California Irvine, he taught in Uganda (Makerere University) and South Africa (University of Cape Town, University of Stellenbosch, and the University of Johannesburg).
He writes in both English and Portuguese and is the author, among other titles, of a biography of the African nationalist Amílcar Cabral (O Fazedor de Utopias, in Portuguese; The Reluctant Nationalist, in English), and a study on the city of Luanda (In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda). He is currently working on a book on warfare in Southern Africa, tentatively called The Cartographic War.
Ari Ezra Waldman is Professor of Law and, by courtesy, Professor of Sociology at UCI. Ari’s research is at the intersection of technology, law, and inequality, with particular focus on privacy, information technologies, and the ways in which data-extractive practices impact queer communities.
One of his books, Industry Unbound, is the product of several years of research inside technology companies observing how organizations translate law into practice. More recently, his scholarship has addressed disproportionate censorship of queer content online, the use of binary gender in automated decision-making systems used by governments, and the role of technology expertise in policymaking, among other topics. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.
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