First Year Experience and Transfer Year Experience courses will be taught by 12 instructors from 9 different departments. Our instructors are committed to student learning, engagement, and sucess. Get to know them below.
We also work with a team of 6 graduate teaching assistants. Meet them here.
Revelle College | REV 1
Paul K.L. Yu is the Provost of Revelle College and committed to student success through Revelle's vibrant center of cross-disciplinary collaboration and undergraduate academic explorations as well as mentoring program. He joined the UCSD faculty in 1983 and is the William S.C. Chang endowed chair and Distinguished Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He teaches courses in solid-state electronics, photonics, and nanotechnology, and has devoted himself to solid-state and semiconductor device and component research for optical communications. He participates in the Photonics Society of Chinese-Americans and is a Fellow of IEEE, AAAS, Optical Society of America, and SPIE. Provost Yu was 2012-2013 President of the IEEE Electron Devices Society where he serves as a Distinguished Lecturer. He received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1983
John Muir College | MUIR 1
John Moore (Professor, Linguistics, Provost, John Muir College) received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1991 from UC Santa Cruz. Much of his research has been in the areas of theoretical syntax, lexical semantics, and Spanish linguistics. His current research includes work on the syntax of objects in Moro (a Kordofanian language from central Sudan), Spanish, as spoken in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, and Heritage Languages. Moore has served as department chair, departmental diversity representative, on the Muir College Executive Committee, and on the Academic Senate Committee on Academic Personnel (chair in 2012-13). He began as provost of John Muir College in September 2013. Outside academia, Moore is known as a flamenco guitarist, having played semi-professionally for over 40 years. He has led undergraduates in a Global Seminar study abroad program in Cádiz, Spain, on several occasions, where he taught courses on Spanish dialectology and flamenco.
Thurgood Marshall College | TMC 1
Mark is an Associate Teaching Professor and Head of Undergraduate Design in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UCSD. He received a Bachelors Degree in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland and has an M.F.A. in Theatre from UCSD. He works professionally as a set designer for theatre and has designed for numerous professional theatre companies across the country including San Diego Repertory Theatre, TheatreWorks, CA, Firefly: Theatre and Films, Cape Repertory Theatre Company, Creede Repertory Theatre, Playhouse on the Square, and Circuit Playhouse. Design credits this past year include ”Outside Mullingar”, “Billy Elliot”, “Buyer and Cellar”, and “American Idiot”. He is the recipient of several design nominations and four Ostrander Awards for excellence in set design.
Sixth College | SXTH 1
Nicholas Christenfeld was educated at Harvard and Columbia where he earned, or at least received, a B.A. and a PhD in psychology. He then became, and plans to remain, a professor of psychology at UC San Diego. There he studies an array of topics broadly, if perhaps unhelpfully, described as the social psychology of everyday life. His research has addressed such questions as why a baseball season is ten times as long as a football season, how people choose which box of Cheerios to take from the supermarket shelf, whether babies resemble their parents, and dogs their masters, if story spoilers actually spoil stories, which gender is funnier, when during the month one is likely to die, and whether visiting New York City would make that outcome more likely, who says “um,” whether music does soothe the savage breast, why it might be hard to tickle oneself, if men are more prone jealousy, and why one’s heart would be grateful if one made more friends.
Revelle College | REV 2
Stefan Tanaka is a historian who has worked on modern Japan. His earlier work focused on the ways that history, pasts, and time were configured to define Japan's world and itself. Recently that inquiry has shifted to history as a technology of communication. This shift to history as media opens an inquiry into different ways that historical knowledge, categories, and practices are both tied to particular literary systems and might change in the digital age.
John Muir College | MUIR 2
Carrie Wastal, PhD, is the Director of the Muir College Writing Program at UC, San Diego. In her capacity as director, she has direct responsibility for training and supervising Graduate Student Teaching Assistants, developing curriculum for program courses and for program policies. Professional and faculty examples include: developing the Workshop for Putting Diversity Training into Practice, establishing the John Muir Excellence in Writing Award for Muir Writing students; developing courses examining disability, diversity, and stereotypical identities assigned to youth as it relates to social and institutional issues. At the invitation of campus undergraduate programs and organizations, she speaks to student groups about opportunities for learning in their college and at the university.
Thurgood Marshall College | TMC 2
Dr. Leslie Carver is the Provost for Thurgood Marshall College. She is passionate about TMC's mission of promoting cultural responsiveness, social equality, and civic justice. She is also a professor in the UCSD Psychology Department and Human Development Program, as well as the DN Lab’s director. Dr. Carver’s dissertation work on infant memory was one of the first studies to directly link brain and behavior in early infancy. Her current research includes projects on infant memory, social referencing, and face processing and social development in children with autism.
Earl Warren College | WARR 2
Emily Roxworthy is the Provost of Earl Warren College and has been faculty in the Department of Theatre and Dance since 2004. She is also affiliate faculty in the Department of Ethnic Studies and in the Critical Gender Studies Program. Provost Roxworthy previously served as Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity & Equity with broad responsibility to promote equity, excellence, and diversity within faculty ranks. Her college appointment is in Warren, where she has served on the College's Writing Advisory Committee and Executive Committee of the Faculty. Provost Roxworthy is an active and accomplished scholar and teacher, working at the intersection of theatre history and performance studies, with particular interests in interculturalism, Asian/Asian American theatre, digital media, and role playing. She is the author of the award-winning book The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II, as well as numerous scholarly articles on the Japanese American internment and other topics.
Eleanor Roosevelt College | ERC 2
Ivan Evans is the Provost of Eleanor Roosevelt College. He received his B.A. (Honours) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at the University of the Western Cape and UCLA before joining the Department of Sociology at UCSD. In addition to articles on South Africa, he has published Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa (1997) andCultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killing in South Africa and the American South (2008). He teaches courses on change in modern South Africa; race and ethnicity; political sociology; violence and society; social movements; and environmental sociology. Professor Evan's current research focuses on global climate change and the politics of water management in southern Africa.
Sixth College | SXTH 2
Robert "Skip" Pomeroy is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and is past Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Diversity Committee. He is active in 2 research centers: CAICE the Center for Aerosols Impact on the Chemistry of the Environment and FF21, Food and Fuel for the 21st Century. CAICE researches the impact aerosols have on climate relevant properties and in FF21 he investigates the emission of Volatile Organic Compounds, VOCs, from algae to identify when production algae crops are undergoing predation. He mentors several undergraduates in renewable fuels and biopolymers from algae and sustainable sources. He is the UC San Diego Faculty Climate Action Champion and conducts student and teacher workshops on biofuels and climate change. He teaches Instrumental Analysis and Environmental Chemistry and mentors a group of High school students from Castle Park High School in the South Bay region of San Diego.