Panelists
Robert J. Birgeneau became the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, on Sept. 22, 2004. An internationally distinguished physicist, he is a leader in higher education and is well known for his commitment to diversity and equity in the academic community.
Before coming to Berkeley, Birgeneau served four years as president of the University of Toronto. He previously was dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent 25 years on the faculty. He is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, has received many awards for teaching and research, and is one of the most cited physicists in the world for his work on the fundamental properties of materials.
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France A. Córdova assumed her duties as the seventh chancellor of the University of California, Riverside on July 1, 2002. Prior to joining UC Riverside, Córdova, a nationally recognized astrophysicist, served as professor of physics and Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Santa Barbara. Before joining UC Santa Barbara in 1996 she was Chief Scientist at NASA from 1993 to 1996, serving as the primary scientific advisor to the NASA administrator and the principal interface between NASA headquarters and the broader scientific community. Córdova headed the department of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University from 1989 to 1993. She was a member of the staff of the Space Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1979 to 1989, where she also served as Deputy Group Leader.
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Michael Drake became the fifth chancellor of the University of California, Irvine on July 1, 2005. Previously, he served as University of California vice president for health affairs, overseeing education and research activities at UC’s 15 health sciences schools, including medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, public health, optometry and veterinary medicine. In that capacity, he also oversaw the UC Special Research Programs, including tobacco-related disease research, breast cancer research and HIV/AIDS research; the California/Mexico Health Initiative and the California Health Benefits Review Program.
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Robert C. Dynes, a physicist and an expert on semiconductors and superconductors, is the 18th president of the University of California, assuming those responsibilities on Oct. 2, 2003. Since 1996, he had served as chancellor of UC’s San Diego campus. Dynes came to UC San Diego in 1990 after a 22-year career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he served as department head of semiconductor and material physics research and director of chemical physics research. His numerous scientific honors include the 1990 Fritz London Award in Low Temperature Physics and his 2001 election to the Council of the National Academy of Sciences, a society to which he was elected in 1989.
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Christopher Edley, Jr. joined Boalt Hall as dean and professor of law in 2004 after 23 years as a professor at Harvard Law School. He earned a law degree and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard, where he served as an editor and officer of the Harvard Law Review. Edley's academic work is primarily in the areas of civil rights and administrative law. He has also taught federalism, budget policy, Defense Department procurement law, national security law, and environmental law. Edley was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, a renowned multidisciplinary research and policy think tank focused on issues of racial justice. His publications include Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action, Race and American Values and Administrative Law: Rethinking Judicial Control of Bureaucracy.
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Saul Geiser is Director of Research and Evaluation for admissions and outreach at the Office of the President of the University of California, and also serves as research staff to the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), the UC faculty committee charged with formulating admissions policy. Dr. Geiser received his Ph.D. in sociology at UC Berkeley and taught there before joining UC Office of the President in 1981. Dr. Geiser’s research has contributed to the development of a number of UC admissions policies, including UC’s new policy on Eligibility in the Local Context, which makes eligible the top four percent of graduates from each high school in California. Dr. Geiser was also one of the principal authors of the UC Outreach Task Force Report, New Directions in Outreach, developed following the elimination of affirmative action in UC admissions in 1995. In addition to admissions research, Dr. Geiser is responsible for statewide evaluation of UC’s outreach programs to disadvantaged students and schools in California.
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Willard Hom is the Director for the Research & Planning Unit of the System Office, California Community Colleges, in Sacramento, California. Along with directing a staff of researchers, he actively follows and conducts research on a variety of issues in higher education. These include topics such as transfer, institutional peer grouping, enrollment prediction/planning models, and student enrollment choice.
Before joining the Chancellor’s Office in 1999, he performed research for two other California state agencies, the Department of Health Services and the Employment Development Department.
He received his M.B.A. from California State University, Sacramento and his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis. He maintains an interest in statistical methods; survey research, customer satisfaction; strategic planning; forecasting; and distance education. He has also served as a part-time instructor for the College of Continuing Education at California State University, Sacramento. With a wife and two sons, he stays very busy outside of the office as well.
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Michal Kurlaender is an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of California-Davis. Her research interests include access to post-secondary schooling for underrepresented populations; K-12 school desegregation and integration, and bringing innovative quantitative methods to bear on issues of education policy. Kurlaender has published widely in top academic journals in the fields of education and sociology and has received research grants from institutions including the Spencer Foundation and the American Educational Research Association. She received an Ed.D. in Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in June 2005.
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María Ledesma is a doctoral candidate pursuing a Ph.D in education at UCLA. She received her bachelor's degree in English from UC Berkeley and her master's degree in education from Harvard University. Ms. Ledesma has worked as an undergraduate admissions reader and outreach coordinator for the Early Academic Outreach Program at UC Berkeley; she was also the graduate student representative for the UC Faculty Committee on the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) in 2004-05. In addition to her graduate work, María was appointed in July 2005 by The Regents to serve as the 2006-2007 student Regent. She is the first Latina to hold this post.
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Goodwin Liu's primary areas of expertise are constitutional law, education policy, civil rights, and the Supreme Court. His latest work in progress, "Education, Equality, and National Citizenship," seeks to anchor a federal legislative duty to remedy educational inadequacy and inequality in the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause.
Liu is the author of "The Parted Paths of School Desegregation and School Finance Litigation," forthcoming in Law & Inequality (2005); "School Choice to Achieve Desegregation" in Fordham Law Review (2005) (with William L. Taylor); "Brown, Bollinger, and Beyond" in Howard Law Journal’s 2004 volume commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education; "Separation Anxiety: Congress, the Courts, and the Constitution" in Georgetown Law Journal (2003) (with Hillary Rodham Clinton); and "The Causation Fallacy: Bakke and the Basic Arithmetic of Selective Admissions" in Michigan Law Review (2002). With Christopher Edley, he is co-director of a multi-year, multi-disciplinary project called "Rethinking Rodriguez: Education as a Fundamental Right" in Boalt's newly launched Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute for Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity.
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Roslyn Mickelson is a professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, Urban Education, and Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has been Visiting Professor of Education and Sociology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (1994), and Visiting Scholar at Stanford University School of Education (1998-1999). Her research focuses upon the political economy of schooling and school reform, particularly the relationships among race, ethnicity, gender, class, and educational processes and outcomes. With support from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, she is currently investigating how post-unitary resegregation in the Charlottte-Mecklenburg Schools affects educational equity and academic achievement for all students. Her recent work includes, Children on the Streets of the Americas: Globalization, Homelessness, and Education in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, was published by Routledge/Falmer in 2000.
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Karen Miksch received her Juris Doctorate (J.D.) from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in 1989. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota, she was a civil rights attorney for six years and lectured nationally about access policy.
Her research focuses on the law of higher education. Specifically, she is interested in access to higher education from a legal and policy perspective. Her work looks at the transition to college and the legal gatekeepers that make access and retention difficult for students who traditionally have not had access to higher education in the U.S.
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Josipa Roksa is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Curry School of Education. Born and raised in Croatia, Professor Roksa received her Ph.D. from New York University (NYU) in 2006 and a B.A., summa cum laude, from Mount Holyoke College in 2000.
Professor Roksa’s research encompasses a wide range of issues concerning social inequality, with a specific focus on educational stratification. She has conducted a diverse set of research projects, addressing questions such as: Does vocational focus of community colleges hinder students’ educational attainment? How does privatization and differentiation of higher education shape access to educational opportunities for students from less privileged social backgrounds? Do female-dominated majors earn the same rewards in public and private sectors? In collaboration with colleagues, she has considered questions relating to affirmative action in selective college admissions, trends in educational stratification over time, expansion of community colleges, marital sorting, corporate philanthropy to education, and court rulings in school discipline cases.
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Susan A. Wilbur is the director of undergraduate admissions for the University of California system.
During her previous work as the director of admissions and relations with schools at UC Irvine, has run an exemplary admissions program at the campus during a time of substantial growth and increasing selectivity. During her tenure at UC Irvine, the total number of freshman and community college transfer applications increased from 19,758 to 37,288.
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