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).

David Naguib Pellow is the Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies at UCSB and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project (GEJP). GEJP is a force for encouraging and launching a range of efforts on and off-campus, that link research, teaching, service, and action for environmental justice. it brings together faculty, students, activists, and artists, amongst others, to develop and exchange their new ideas, questions and communications  about struggles for equity, human rights, and ecological sustainability in communities in the U.S. and around the world. Most recently, in light of the environmental and climate threats faced by incarcerated populations, David has led a team of students to document these threats as well as the resistances of incarcerated peoples seeking to transform their conditions of confinement and promote abolition.

Dr. Sowon S Park (Dept. of English) began her academic life as a Modernist and still works in the global history and literature of the early 20^th century. Her other speciality is Neurocognitive Literary Criticism and she runs the Unconscious Memory Network (2014-), an interdisciplinary research group that examines the human mind.

Before coming to UCSB, she held faculty posts at Ewha (South Korea), and at Cambridge and Oxford Universities (UK). Outside of academia, she has worked intermittently as TV presenter (Arirang), newspaper journalist (Hankyore) and interpreter (Olympic Committee). 

Douglas McCauley, professor of ocean science at UCSB, serves as the Director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative - an applied ocean research center based at the campus’s Marine Science Institute, which houses UCSB’s Clean Currents Coalition (CCC). CCC is a global network of 8 teams in 8 countries working to turn off the tap of plastic pollution from rivers to the ocean. Each team is piloting creative technologies to capture and remove plastic waste from rivers before it reaches the ocean by involving local communities and collecting data on the captured plastic in order to influence public and private sector policies encourage behavior change so that one day, there won't be plastic in rivers to remove.

Francesco Bullo is a professor of Mechanical Engineering and member of the Center for Control, Dyanamical Systems, and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on modeling, dynamics and control of multi-agent network systems, with applications to robotic coordination, energy systems, and social networks. Francesco is a frequent keynote presenter at conferences worldwide, including a June 2017 plenary presentation at the 3rd Indian Control Conference, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India.  An award-winning mentor and teacher, Professor Bullo's laboratory has a track record  of welcoming  and nurturing  young scientists from around the world, since he joined UCSB in 2004.

I am collaborating, with producer and writer Marisa Venegas, on a feature-length documentary titled Mapping Alzheimer's: A Journey of Friendship and Discovery. The film follows neuroscientists Drs. Kenneth Kosik and Francisco Lopera, who forge a unique collaboration and embark on a more-than-30-year quest to study a community in Colombia where early onset Alzheimer’s is widespread in the hopes of coming up with a treatment. It’s a surprising story of cross-cultural collaboration, memory and colonial legacy, wrapped into a battle against a devastating, deadly disease