A multimedia artist elevating the experiences of Black Americans during the Great Migration, a mathematician exploring alternative methods to study singularities, and a philosopher unraveling the concepts of blame and self-blame have been named the 2025 Dean’s Faculty Fellows for the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
“Our Dean’s Faculty Fellows represent the promising future of our early career faculty and their research,” said Estella Atekwana, dean of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. “In a time when the value of academic research is being questioned, it’s not only critical to showcase the value of research to the public but to lead by example by supporting our researchers internally. This financial support will help move the needle on important research that will impact society for the greater good.”
The three-year 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.
Learn about the winning faculty and their research below:
Lishan AZ
Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Digital Media
A multimedia artist, AZ works in immersive installation, interactive media, photography and film. The fellowship will support AZ’s continuing work on Eugene’s Cove, a multimedia installation about the Chicago race riot of 1919.
“I am grateful to the dean’s office for their support,” said AZ. “The award will go a long way toward making this project possible.”
Unlike traditional historical education and exhibition, Eugene’s Cove is designed as an interactive experience, with participants invited to engage with historical materials as they progress through the narrative. It’s part of a series of three immersive hands-on experiences that explore the Great Migration, a period when millions of rural African Americans moved to urban centers to escape racial violence and seek economic opportunity in the twentieth century.
AZ’s work has been exhibited around the country at institutions such as the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, IndieCade in Los Angeles, Antenna Gallery in New Orleans, and Games for Change in New York City. She was previously a UC Davis Hellman Fellow.
Laura Starkston
Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics
A mathematician working at the intersection of symplectic geometry, low-dimensional topology, algebraic geometry and singularity theory, Starkston will use the Dean’s Faculty Fellowship to conduct at least two research projects related to studying the mathematics underlying singularities through the lens of symplectic geometry. Additionally, Starkston will use the funds to help supervise three Ph.D. projects from her students.
“Symplectic geometry was designed to encode Hamilton’s equations of motion relating position and momentum,” Starkston explained. But “today, symplectic geometry has developed significantly beyond its origins in Hamiltonian mechanics and has deep connections to high energy physics and mirror symmetry.”
Starkston’s research has been featured in mathematics’ top journals, including Selecta Mathematica, Geometry & Topology, Compsitio Mathematica, Journal of Topology and the Journal of Symplectic Geometry, among others. She’s the recipient of numerous National Science Foundation research awards, and was previously an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and UC Davis Hellman Fellow.
“It is an honor to be selected as a Dean's Faculty Fellow,” Starkston said. “Working with 4-dimensional spaces and singularities with hidden structures can be very abstract and challenging because we cannot quite visualize the spaces we are working with even though we use a lot of diagrams and visuals of slices and pieces to get precise tools. For me that is what makes it fun, and any students who find that intriguing and exciting should definitely think about being a math major.”
Hannah Tierney
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Tierney’s research explores notions of free will, moral responsibility and personal identity. The fellowship will support her book project Blame Yourself Better: A Self-Help Guide to Self-Blame and related scholarly work on the concept of blame.
“I’m honored to receive this fellowship, and to be included in such an impressive group of scholars.” Tierney said. “I’m very grateful to the Dean’s Office, the L&S Research Support Committee and the Philosophy Department for providing me with the opportunity to develop my book project and further my research.”
According to Tierney, Blame Yourself Better: A Self-Help Guide to Self-Blame will explore three key questions: What is self-blame? What are the norms that govern self-blaming practices? And what can the nature and ethics of self-blame tell us about blameworthiness and forgiveness?
“This book project has several unique features,” Tierney said. “First, it identifies an important and overlooked aspect of self-blame: when done well, self-blame moves us to make amends to those we’ve wronged. Second, it addresses questions at both the theoretical and practical level, for it not only offers an account of what self-blame is, it also explores how to improve our self-blaming practices and what these improvements can do for individuals.”
In addition to supporting Tierney’s completion of Blame Yourself Better, the fellowship will support her travels to conferences and workshops to further develop her research.
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