An author blending fact and fiction in her second novel, an anthropologist studying the origins of rituals and pilgrimages, and a mathematician investigating the complexity of large datasets have been named the 2026 Dean’s Faculty Fellows for the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
The three-year Dean’s Faculty Fellowships are part of the College of Letters and Science Faculty Investment Initiative to support early faculty research excellence and development. The fellowships provide each award-winning faculty member with $7,500 per year for a total of $22,500.
Scroll on to learn about the winning faculty and their research projects below:
Zinzi Clemmons
Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing
In a project that blends the genres of fiction and nonfiction, Clemmons will use the Dean’s Faculty Fellowship to complete the draft of her second novel and third book Heaven. The book follows a modern-day narrator who uncovers evidence of a Black utopian-agrarian society that once existed near her home.
“Heaven is centered on a Black and multicultural homesteading community in nearby Guinda, just 40 miles northeast of Davis in Yolo County,” said Clemmons. “The community was founded by Green Berry Logan, whose mother was a slave and whose father was white, in the wake of U.S. Reconstruction. Nicknamed ‘The Hill,’ ‘The Heaven,’ and ‘Summit,’ Guinda earned a reputation as a refuge for Black Americans.”
According to Clemmons, the novel, which will be informed by historical research and interviews with local community members, poses questions such as: What defines our notion of utopia regarding race? How can such a utopia be achieved in a society marred by racial injustice? And how does integration figure into our ideal of racial harmony?
“With the Dean’s Faculty Fellowship, I will continue my archival work, conduct interviews and site visits to Guinda, and write,” Clemmons said.
Clemmons is the author of the forthcoming Freedom: Essays (Viking 2026) and the novel What We Lose (Viking 2017). What We Lose was named “Debut Novel of the Year” by Vogue, and received praise from the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, and The New Yorker. It was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize.
Clemmons’ work on Heaven is also supported by a UC Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship.
Cristina Moya
Associate Professor of Anthropology
How does a social institution such as a religious pilgrimage arise? This is the question Moya aims to unravel with the funding from the Dean’s Faculty Fellowship.
“History cannot be told without an accounting of humans’ capacities for creating new economic, political and ideological realities; and our ability to adapt to current challenges hinges on an accurate understanding of the processes involved in these changes,” Moya said. “However, it is difficult to arrive at causal understandings of these mechanisms without being able to observe the origins of new phenomena.”
Moya has found a way around that problem. For more than 10 years, she’s documented and studied a new pilgrimage emerging in the Peruvian Altiplano. Every August, at a site called Nuestro Señor de Pucara, thousands gather to honor an image of Jesus that appeared on the side of a rock face, among other figures important to Andean traditions, including a toad and eagle.
“This pilgrimage adoption project allows us to examine how individual decision-making allows the spread or rejection of one new institution,” Moya said. “However, much cultural change is better captured as group-level, rather than individual-level, change.”
Moya will address this research ripple by studying community-level decision-making when it comes to vicuña hunting for wool shearing, a widespread but not ubiquitous practice in the Peruvian Altiplano.
“Each year communities must decide whether to develop new infrastructure and social institutions to capture, shear and sell the wild vicuñas’ wool,” Moya said. “This provides an appropriate ethnographic context to examine how cooperative institutions develop, change and are abandoned or maintained through time.”
Alexander Wein
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
In the modern world of machine learning, where dizzying amounts of variables can exist in a single dataset, the best algorithms are needed to successfully identify signals and patterns in the noise. Such algorithms need to be computationally and statistically efficient, being practical in runtime and comprehensive in their analyses.
“This requires a rigorous mathematical proof verifying that the proposed method is guaranteed to succeed and that no other method can perform better in terms of computation time or quantity of data used,” said Wein, who will use his Dean’s Faculty Fellowship to conduct two projects that address this issue.
In the first project, Wein will continue his research on a framework of algorithms called approximate message passing, or AMP.
“AMP is useful because it runs fast and can be constructed systematically for a wide range of different problems” but “an important question is to understand when AMP is optimal and when a different method is needed,” Wein said.
Wein’s work aims to identify the statistical tasks that the AMP recipe is best optimized for.
In his second project, Wein will continue his work to improve the algorithms underlying a data analysis tool called tensor decomposition.
“A motivating example is the image reconstruction task in cryo-electron microscopy, which is the task of reconstructing a three-dimensional object from many noisy, two-dimensional images taken from different unknown angles,” Wein said. “In forthcoming work with my Ph.D. student Tait Weicht, we consider some variations of this problem and give the first known algorithms with provable guarantees.”
Wein was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2023 for his research at the mathematical foundations of data science. In 2024, his research was further supported by a grant from the prestigious National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program.
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