Chancellor's Fellows Awards
The Chancellor’s Fellows Program honors outstanding faculty members early in their careers. Honorees each receive a one-time award of $25,000 to be used for research, teaching or service activities. Chancellor’s Fellows awards are supported by private contributions to the UC Davis Annual Fund, Parents Fund and Davis Chancellor's Club Fund.
Chancellor’s Fellows Award Recipients
2023-2024 Fellows
Brittany Dugger
Associate Professor – Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, School of Medicine
Brittany Dugger's research focuses on understanding diversity within neurodegenerative diseases and the development of innovative tools for deeper analysis of the human brain. Her works bridge the fields of machine learning and computer engineering, data science and social determinants of health. She is the foremost expert in digital neuropathology. Her laboratory’s research, in collaboration with institutions across the country, sparked a new wave of science, leading to advancements on a national level. She has produced high-impact publications that contribute to our understanding of neuropathologies. In addition to running her laboratory, Dugger leads neuropathology programs for numerous National Institutes of Health-funded studies and centers at UC Davis.
Gozde Goncu-Berk
Associate Professor – Department of Design, College of Letters and Science
Gozde Goncu-Berk explores electronic textiles and wearable technologies, including new material and digital fabrication possibilities. She aims to facilitate design for a variety of underserved populations such as people suffering from chronic diseases, the elderly and children. Recently, she was named a Dean’s Faculty Fellow for her research developing and testing an electronic, textile-based, real-time bladder monitoring device that can be worn as an unobtrusive undergarment.
Tucker Jones
Associate Professor – Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Letters and Science
Tucker Jones is an observational astronomer and expert on the formation and evolution of galaxies. His research harnesses gravitational lensing, which magnifies the apparent size and brightness of distant galaxies seen in the early universe, allowing sensitive measurements that are otherwise impossible with current technology.
Celina Juliano
Associate Professor – Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, College of Biological Sciences
Celina Juliano uses the freshwater invertebrate Hydra vulgaris, which has astonishing regenerative capabilities, as an animal model to study stem cell biology, aging and regeneration. Her current research investigates the cellular mechanisms of whole-body regeneration with the long-term goal of translating findings from regenerative animals like Hydra to humans.
Frances Moore
Associate Professor – Department of Environmental Science and Policy, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
Frances Moore works at the intersection of environmental economics and climate science. Her research seeks to advance our understanding of the economic costs of climate change. This includes investigations into natural capital, climate adaptation costs, human behavior and the social cost of carbon. Between 2022 and 2023, Moore served a rotating term as a senior economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, which provides economic policy recommendations to the president of the United States.
Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe
Professor – Criminal Law, Procedures and Ethics, School of Law
Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe is a former New Orleans public defender whose research focuses on how the design of the criminal process affects the ability of institutional attorneys to manage overwhelming caseloads and comply with ethical requirements. As one of the nation’s leading scholars on topics pertaining to public defenders, Joe is also an expert on voir dire, or jury selection. Her voir dire class is one of the law school’s most popular. A UC Davis faculty member since 2016, Joe has been selected twice by students to be commencement faculty speaker.
Cindy Rubio González
Associate Professor – Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering
Cindy Rubio González researches software accuracy and performance to design and build tools that help software developers write reliable and efficient programs. With projects like BugSwarm, an ever-growing dataset of reproducible real-world software failures and fixes, her work focuses on the automated creation of large-scale datasets to evaluate software tools and facilitate the use of machine learning to solve software engineering tasks. Rubio is the recipient of several notable awards, including the Department of Energy’s Office of Science Early Career Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Facebook Testing and Verification Research Award.
Georgia Zellou
Associate Professor – Department of Linguistics, College of Letters and Sciences
Georgia Zellou conducts innovative research on phonetic variation, speech perception and laboratory phonology. Recently, she’s examined the influence of interactions with voice artificial intelligence on human language. She compares the degree of linguistic alignment of children and adults with voice AI during human-device interaction and examines whether the nature of language alignment occurs along similar social dimensions as it does in human-human interactions.
Angela Zivkovic
Associate Professor – Department of Nutrition, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
Angela Zivkovic leads research about personalizing diet and lifestyle to improve health and prevent disease. Zivkovic has made a significant impact in the field by developing new analytical tools to determine the compositions of high-density lipoprotein, or HDL. Her work currently focused on the functional biology of HDL, which is leading to the development of a new series of biomarkers to indicate the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.