As a professor of history and UC Davis associate dean for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor teaches and coaches them through both common challenges, like how to connect with a faculty advisor, and very thorny ones that don’t always have clear solutions.

Jessie Murray, L&S Orange Cluster chief administrative officer, is finding new ways to both support students and take the sting out of budget uncertainty and cuts. For her work, Murray received the 2025 Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award for Exceptional University Management. 

Academic freedom is at the foundation of one of the most powerful and fundamental ideas about universities. Learn about how academic freedom has contributed to broad benefits in society and UC Davis faculty working to expand that freedom for the benefit of all.

Brett Snyder, a professor and chair of the MFA program in design at UC Davis, is both a teacher and an active practitioner whose work helps to reimagine spaces people know intimately while also collaboratively discovering what’s possible.

Traci Parker, an associate professor of history, is working to fill out what we know about the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the U.S., and in the process is building deeper connections to the past.

Academic advisor Colin Goulding recently led a cross-campus effort so new transfers could plan their classes before fall registration closed. For this work, UC Davis honored Goulding with this year’s Outstanding Campus Collaborator Academic Advising Award.

Marianne Page, a professor of economics, co-founded the UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research in 2010. Today, the center creates a wealth of research and outreach opportunities for its network of faculty affiliates and graduate students across the social sciences at UC Davis and beyond.

Emily Marwedel is a service desk analyst with L&S IT. In 2018, she and colleagues at UC Davis Health co-founded Womxn in Tech at UC Davis, a group dedicated to ensuring that issues surrounding women in technology are reviewed and discussed with a focus on making continuous improvements towards equity.