Biographies
Michael R. Hill, Associate Professor - Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering
I arrived at UC Davis in the Fall of 1996 to pursue teaching and research in Mechanical Design. I have an active research program in the areas of fatigue and fracture of materials, with a special emphasis in the influence of manufacturing-induced stresses (residual stresses) on structural performance. My research is carried out in close collaboration with a range of industry and government partners. I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in experimental methods and in mechanical design, where students learn to create new systems, select materials of construction, and design parts to sustain service loading. I married Jeanine in 1992, and we were blessed with twin boys in 1998. The first year or two with twins was a crazy and exhausting time, and I took the time to be fully involved in the boys early years. UC Davis policies that support work-life balance for Faculty allowed me to delay my academic review schedule by one full year. (Even though I was initially told “male faculty aren’t eligible,” I quickly learned that those policies apply to all faculty who have or adopt a child.). I am proud that UC Davis has taken steps to support young faculty and that we recognize how challenging it is to balance an academic career with family life, and I am glad to carry this message to my colleagues. |
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Phil Kass, Professor and Chair - Department of Population Health and Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine
My research interests include determinants of health and disease in companion animal populations, non-experimental inference and epidemiologic theory and analysis. I first came to UC Davis as an undergraduate in 1976. After two years here, I went on the Education Abroad Program to Stirling University in Scotland for a year. When I got back I started as a student in the School of Veterinary Medicine, obtaining my DVM degree in 1983 and MPVM degree in 1984. After a year and a half of private practice, I decided to return to UC Davis to pursue my MS in statistics in 1988 and my PhD in epidemiology (then called comparative pathology) in 1990. I spent my last year of my PhD doing a concurrent post-doc in environmental epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health. I then joined the faculty of the School of Veterinary Medicine in 1990. I’ve also been a multiple-time visiting professor at the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine in Israel. I’ve been married to my wife, Claire, for almost 10 years, and have three children. Of my two from a previous marriage, Lauren is 19 and a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara majoring in classics, and Alex is 17 and a senior at Davis Senior High School. Our youngest son, Holden, is in the 3rd grade Spanish Immersion Program at Cesar Chavez Elementary School. We enjoy our canine companions, Huw – an 11 year old Border Collie, and Moxie – a 1 year old Yorkshire Terrier. Recently we’ve begun raising chickens as well. The Faculty Work Life program began after I became a full professor, so I wasn’t in a position to take advantage of its opportunities. Nevertheless, I strongly support its existence for a number of reasons. For one thing, about 80% of the vet school’s graduating class is women, but the gender distribution of our faculty hasn’t come close to catching up. We need to do everything we can to make academic careers much more appealing to the next generation of veterinarians – a generation that will predominantly be female. And on another level, the idea that young faculty should have to choose between family and career is antediluvian to me. It’s a moral issue: the University should be doing everything possible to encourage faculty to achieve their academic potential while not forcing them to sacrifice their personal and family lives as well. I see the Work Life program as the first – but not the last – step in moving toward a more enlightened policy towards a family-friendly academic life. |
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Karen McDonald, Professor - Chemical Engineering & Materials Science, Associate Dean - College of Engineering
When I joined the faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science in 1985 I had a one year old son, Colin, who was born while I was a graduate student and my husband was doing a postdoc. My second son, Bryan, was born at the beginning of my second summer at UC Davis. Starting an academic career straight out of graduate school with two small children and commuting an hour each day (we live in Fairfield) was quite challenging but I appreciated all of the support I got from my department and the campus. It was a critical time in my career and I extended the tenure clock one year which allowed me the time I needed to prepare a solid dossier and get tenure. My kids are now grown and my husband and I celebrated our 25th anniversary last year. Colin graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering from UC Davis, married Jenna McKnight (also a UC Davis alumnus) last year and is working in LA, and Bryan is a Structural Engineering student at UC San Diego. I’m pleased to serve as a faculty advisor for work-life, and hope that I can serve as a resource and help other faculty navigate those critical periods in their careers and family lives. |
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Lisa Pruitt, Professor - School of Law
I came to UC Davis in 1999, following several years practicing law in Europe. I have been a Professor in the School of Law since 2004. I write about and teach Feminist Legal Theory and torts and I recently created a course called Law and Rural Livelihoods. It relates to my recent scholarly work, which interrogates the legal relevance of the rural/urban axis and the difference that rural settings make to the application of law in our increasingly urban nation. Recent publications bring together my interests in gender and rurality to theorize their intersection in relation to law. I met and married my partner after coming to UC Davis. He has teenage children, so we formed a blended family, with the teenagers living with us half of the time. Our son was born in 2004, just before I was officially granted tenure. Our family enjoys travel and a wide range of outdoor activities. While our four-year-old cannot quite keep up with us in terms of the full range of outdoor adventures that we enjoy, we are expecting him soon to surpass us in ability, if not enthusiasm. I waited to have a child until tenure was “in the bag.” That meant less pressure to write in the immediate wake of my son’s birth. Even so, the semester of active duty, modified service that I took was indispensable in terms of having sufficient time to bond with him and to shift the routines of our blended family to accommodate everyone’s needs. I wanted to get my writing back on track as soon as was feasible after my son arrived, so I had taken on a project with a deadline that fell when my son was about 4 months old. Meeting that deadline required added child care for several weeks, but it also meant that I did not have a long period in which I was not engaged with my scholarly work. For me, that was a good decision. The work-life program was not well publicized when my son was born, so I was not informed that a semester of leave was available in addition to the semester of active duty, modified service. Had I known about it, I would definitely have taken advantage of that additional semester because it would have given me more time to focus on writing and parenting, without the added pressures to teach and serve that professors are normally juggling. I agreed to be a faculty advisor because I wanted to help publicize the program to my colleagues. |
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Suzana Sawyer, Associate Professor of Anthropology
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and joined UC Davis in 1997. My research has examined conflicts that emerge among extractive industries, state governments, and local peoples (both indigenous and non-indigenous) in Latin America and beyond. My first book explored these dynamics in the context of indigenous mobilization in Ecuador (Crude Chronicles 2004). My second book project is tracing these concerns as they work themselves out in a 15-year-old transnational lawsuit in the US and Ecuador. An edited book project looks at these dynamics in Australia, Bolivia, Chad, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Peru with respect to questions of indigeneity and global governance. I am part of that female cohort who chose to have children later in life. Our daughter (Zoe) was born within a year after I received tenure. My partner is also a UC Davis faculty and we are grateful for the university’s faculty work/life balance program. He was able to use UCD’s Parental Leave soon after Zoe was born. And I have made use of the university’s Maternity Leave, Active Duty Modified Service, and now Associate Step IV policies. The bonding and flexibility that UCD’s work/life program has enabled have been indispensable to shaping the relationship we have with our daughter and who she is. I feel the work/life program makes a critical difference in the choices and opportunities available to academics as they juggle the demands of children and career. As university policies around work/life issues change, it’s important that advocates share their understandings and experiences of these policies not only with female and male faculty who might benefit directly from them but also with faculty who evaluate those who do. |
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Tamara Y. Swaab, Associate Professor - Dept. Of Psychology And The Center For Mind And Brain At UC Davis
Tamara Y Swaab, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The research in Dr. Swaab’s laboratory focuses on the psychological and neural mechanisms of language comprehension. This research has three related goals: (1) to understand how humans represent semantic (meaning) information; (2) to determine when and how different kinds of contextual information, including syntactic, thematic, semantic and referential information are integrated during reading and spoken language understanding; and (3) to identify the neural substrates (e.g., Inferior Frontal Gyrus – IFG) of these integration processes. Dr. Swaab’s research capitalizes on multiple research methods to gain the deepest possible understanding of the thought processes that we use to extract meaning from text and conversation. These research methods include eyetracking (collaboratively), and the recording of brain electrical activity (ERPs) and hemodynamic responses (functional magnetic resonance imaging -- fMRI), as well as a variety of other behavioral measures. Combining these methods provides a powerful approach to investigating the time course and neuroanatomical loci of language comprehension processes. Dr. Swaab has published in a wide range of journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Psychological Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Research, Cerebral Cortex). She has received funding for her work from NIMH, NSF, and McDonnell Pew. Dr. Swaab is married and has two children, Alex (6 years) and Nick (4 years). She received tenure in July of 2007, and has made grateful use of several of the features of the faculty work/life balance program, including maternity leave, Active Service Modified Duties, and extension of the Tenure Clock. |
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Diane L. Wolf, Professor of Sociology; Director of Jewish Studies Program
I have focused on gender and family dynamics throughout my career, starting in peasant households in Indonesia and resulting in a book called Factory Daughters (1992, UC Press),continuing with children of Filipino immigrants in California about which I have published articles, and then focused on Jewish children who were hidden in Gentile families during World War II in Holland (Beyond Anne Frank, 2007, UC Press). I am very interested in how memory gets produced and reproduced especially in and after contexts of trauma. This is reflected in a book I co-edited, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (2007, Duke Univ. Press). Finally, my work reflects a deep concern with methods and how we do what we do. I edited Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork (1996), and have since written about gender, globalization and methodology. I came to UC Davis in 1989 as an advanced assistant professor and have been part of a department where there are many women most of whom are feminists and outspoken colleagues. That was especially reassuring as a junior faculty member having come from my first job in a department where it was disadvantageous to be a woman and the "f" word was not to be spoken. My husband is also a UC Davis faculty member and we have one teenage son who was almost born on Highway 113 on the way to the hospital in Woodland. I am part of a generation of academic women who tended to wait for tenure before having a baby. Many of us only have one child. The work-life balance program was not operative when I had my child; in fact, quite the opposite. I ended up getting some leave because I was willing to argue my case with administrators but I could only do that because I had the security of tenure. As I watched my junior female colleagues struggle with the same issues--being told that maternity leave was a privilege not a right--I began to speak with more senior female colleagues about the need to become pro-active about these policies on our campus. We organized a petition that faculty signed and it was presented to the Chancellor who had the foresight to appoint a committee to begin looking at these issues. I co-chaired the first committee and was a member of subsequent committees that hammered out the changes that are now the Work Life Program and represented in the current family friendly policies in the APM. The work-life policies have improved tremendously and UC Davis now fares better than many if not most other universities. I hope that we can maintain this very humane approach to work and life, something that has been attractive to job candidates. |
