Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is the Director of the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids (CPOS) and professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Professor Nguyen received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests focus on doping and charge transport in organic semiconductors, bioelectronics, and device physics of organic solar cells, ratchets, transistors, and photodetectors. Recent awards and recognition for Professor Nguyen includes the 2023 Wilhelm Exner Medal from Austria, 2023 Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, 2023 de Gennes Prize in Materials Chemistry from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and 2023 Elected Member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Yunte Huang is a Distinguished Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Transpacific Displacement (2002), Transpacific Imaginations (2008), and Chinese Whispers (2022). His creative nonfiction book, Charlie Chan (2010), won the Edgar Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His Inseparable (2018), also a finalist for the NBCC award, was named Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, NPR, and Newsweek. His new book, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History (2023), was named one of the Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times and a finalist for the NBCC Award. 

Sameer Pandya is a fiction writer and an interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies scholar. In both his fiction and scholarship, Pandya is primarily interested in the question of cultural dislocation and racial identity among South Asian Americans. He has primarily turned to the novel form not only for the aesthetic pleasures of the work, but also to explore the ways in which writing fiction allows him to explore the emotional and cultural edges that theoretical thinking on Asian American and postcolonial identity may sometimes gloss over. He is the author of the novel Members Only, a finalist for the California Book Award and an NPR Best Books of 2020, and the story collection The Blind Writer, longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His forthcoming novel will be published in 2025 by Ballantine/Random House in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. Photo: Pandya (right) with author Abraham Verghese (left).