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). 

Spencer LaVere Smith is a professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Chair of the Dynamical Neurosciences graduate program. His lab develops technology for measuring and manipulating neuronal activity with precise, individual neuron resolution, and then applies the technology in neuroscience experiments to gain insight into neural circuit function. Prof. Smith is also the Chair of the Committee on International Education. In that capacity, he works to support a free flow of academics across international borders, and ensure safe and enriching experiences for both domestic and international students and scholars.

At UCSB I teach Black Studies and participate in collective initiatives to turn the university into a global institution by fostering activist research with local grass-roots in Cali, Colombia and São Paulo, Brazil. My current research project brings together community leaders and activist researchers from both sites in a transnational effort to denounce, theorize, challenge and resist state violence. Partners in this endeavor include Mães de Maio, Asociación Casa Cultural El Chontaduro, Uneafro-Brasil, independent researchers and local universities. (Photo: Mauri Balanta)

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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