Department interactions

Chung-Pei Ma

As the pace of discoveries quickens and as we move up the academic ladder, the demands on our time and the responsibilities of our faculty role also change. I have mentored and collaborated with other faculty members, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, and high school students. I look forward to sharing these experiences with my faculty colleagues and also learning from them.

Matthew Welch

When I started at Berkeley my mentoring relationships were mainly informal and my mentors were junior faculty friends in my department as well as senior faculty with whom I shared research interests. However, I now see that new faculty can benefit from a broader spectrum of mentoring and advising relationships.

Sanjay Kumar

I have been on the Berkeley faculty since 2005 and currently direct QB3-Berkeley. I chaired the Department of Bioengineering from 2019-22, where I oversaw multiple successful faculty/staff recruitment and retention cases and wrote many Chair's letters for merit, tenure, and promotion. In addition to formally mentoring junior faculty in my department, I have served on a number of department and campus ad hoc committees and written >50 external tenure and promotion letters. I look forward to drawing upon all of these experiences as I advise my faculty colleagues.

Lok Siu

Experience matters, but listening is paramount when it comes to mentoring. As a woman of color and a first generation scholar, I have more than 20 years of experience navigating complex institutions like UC Berkeley and the academy, more generally. I bring my own insights, but I am most interested in helping colleagues define their goals, develop strategies, build community, and achieve a sense of belonging and fulfillment.

Noah Whiteman

I am thrilled to be on the faculty in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California. Because of my personal history, I am interested in encouraging those from all backgrounds to join and enrich the scientific enterprise with their perspectives--this includes, of course, those with liberal and conservative political perspectives, those who hold religious views and those who do not, those from big cities or those from rural areas. I am a first-generation college student. I was the first openly gay faculty member in my department at the University of Arizona and I am also the first in my new department at the University of California, Berkeley. I have found academia to be an oasis: at each university where I have worked I came to believe that I belonged there. I look forward to the day when none of us is judged by non-merit based criteria, where none of us has to talk about rising above societal perceptions of income, ethnicity, religion, physical traits, accents, sexual orientation or gender, political opinions and where human diversity is embraced in all of its forms, at all levels in our society and in every place. Until that day comes, we need to talk about it.

Serena Chen

I have served as a primary mentor for graduate students for nearly 25 years. These graduate students have come from very diverse backgrounds, with equally diverse current circumstances, and a broad range of strengths, interests, and career goals. Over the years, I have also mentored and regularly offered advice to junior (and sometimes) senior colleagues. My approach to mentoring/advising is direct and pragmatic, but also compassionate.