The Community Development Graduate Group Faculty includes members from a multitude of campus departments, including Human Ecology, School of Education, Statistics, Sociology, and various Ethnic Studies programs. Such a diverse collection of faculty allows students a great degree of flexibility in designing a program of study related to their particular interests.
Faculty Contact Information
Click on any faculty member to go to a related web site.
| Name | Department | Areas of Interest |
|---|---|---|
| Heidi Ballard | School of Education | Environmental Education; Citizen science; Participatory Action Research; In-service and preservice teacher learning; Science Education; Secondary Education; Service-learning. |
| Catherine Brinkley | Community and Regional Development | Dr. Brinkley's research is focused on public health outcomes around the food-energy-waste nexus. She uses qualitative methods along with social network mapping and spatial analytics to understand farm-to-city services such as food supply and waste-to-energy. She is particularly interested in how these networks impact neighborhood socio-economics and greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to support sustainable land-use planning around environmental justice. |
| David Campbell | Human Ecology | Public policy and community governance; citizenship and civic engagement; non-profit and faith-related organizations; program evaluation. |
| David de la Pena | Human Ecology | Participatory urbanism, design activism, sustainable cities, processes of community design, landscape architecture, public space, urban agriculture, architecture, comparative urban research. |
| Adela De La Torre | Chicana/o Studies | Health care access and finance issues that affect the Latino community as well as Border health issues, education and occupational location of Hispanics |
| Natalia Deeb-Sossa | Chicana/o Studies | Borderlands, in-betweenness and instability, sites of boundary-making and fragmentation, but also resistance and continual reconstruction. Construction and enforcement of social membership. Contestation by immigrants of inequalities they face in their daily life. Farmworker mothers' activism, cultural citizenship and advocacy for educational and health rights. |
| Jesse Drew | TechnoCultural Studies | Theory and practice of alternative and community media, particularly electronic media, including practices such as blogging, Low Power FM Radio, social computer networking, cable/satellite television, peer-to-peer computing, and on-line activism. |
| Patsy Eubanks Owens | Human Ecology | Environments of children and adolescents, community participation. |
| Gail Feenstra | (SAREP) | Conducting applied and evaluative research that strengthens community development efforts and coordinating education and outreach to community-based groups to build their capacity and leadership skills. |
| Yvette Flores | Chicana/o Studies | Intimate partner violence among Mexicans on both sides of the border. |
| Ryan E. Galt | Human Ecology | People-environment geography, cultural and political ecology, agricultural and environmental governance, political economy of sustainable agriculture, cartographic design. |
| Liza Grandia | Native American Studies | Indigenous community development; corporate trade and globalization; foreign aid and empire; political ecology, biodiversity conservation, and environmental justice; land grabbing, agrarian change and rural development. Countries of interest: Guatemala and Belize. |
| Luis E. Guarnizo | Human Ecology | Economic Sociology, transnational migration, immigrant entrepreneurs, comparative international development, citizenship. |
| Clare Gupta | Human Ecology | Translational and interdisciplinary research, alternative food networks and community food systems, food politics and agro-food movements (e.g. local food, food sovereignty) , and community-based resource management. |
| Susan Handy | Environmental Science and Policy | Relationships between transportation and land use, including the impact of land use on travel behavior and the impact of transportation investments on land development patterns. In addition, my work is directed towards strategies for enhancing accessibility and reducing automobile dependence, including land use policies and telecommunications services. |
| Shermain Hardesty | Agricultural and Resource Economics | Economics of local food marketing, agritourism, values-based supply chains, cooperatives and other collaborative structures, specialty foods marketing, and food safety regulations. |
| Bruce Haynes | Sociology | Bruce D. Haynes is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, and an authority on race, ethnicity, and urban communities. A former Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, he is the author of Red Lines Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (Yale University Press, 2001) and coeditor of The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies (2012). He is currently writing a book about black Jews in America. |
| Paul Heckman | School of Education | Curriculum theory and change, Educational Ecology of communities, Educational Leadership, School, curriculum and community change, School culture: change and cognition. |
| Robin Hill | Art, Art History | Public art, She believes art is about tuning in to the frequency of daily life and seeing things as they truly are. "Ideas are encountered, rather than gotten. |
| Carlos Jackson | Chicana/o Studies | A visual artist and writer, and Director of Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, a community art center in Woodland, Ca. He is currently working on a book surveying the history of the Chicana/o Art Movement. |
| Susan Kaiser | Textiles and Clothing | Fashion theory and feminist epistemologies, Youth style and cultural anxiety, Cultural studies approach to appearance style and identity, focusing on intersections among gender, race and ethnicity. |
| David Kyle | Sociology | International migration, development and globalization. |
| William B. Lacy | Human Ecology | Sociology of science, organization and structure of agricultural research and extension (U.S. and international), social psychology of education and outreach, international research and higher education policy and practices. |
| Jonathan London | Human Ecology | Environmental justice, Environmental/ natural resource policy, Community and youth participation, Political ecology, Rural development, Social movements. |
| Jeff Loux | Land Use and Natural Resources/ UC Davis Extension | Water resources policy and management, sustainable communities and the various interests and stakeholders who care about natural resource and land use policy. |
| Mark Lubell | Environmental Science and Policy | Watershed management, environmental activism, and agricultural best management practices. |
| Beth Rose Middleton | Native American Studies | Native American community/ economic development; political ecology; Federal Indian law; Native American natural resource policy; qualitative GIS; indigenous geography; Afro-indigeneity; intergenerational trauma and healing; Native public health; participatory research; rural environmental justice; multi cultural dimensions of conservation, land use, and planning |
| Brett Milligan | Human Ecology | Infrastructural studies and socio-technical systems; scenario planning; industrial ecology and radically altered environments; Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta; rewilding; dredge landscapes and maritime infrastructure; spatial modeling and geomatics, including the application of drones (UAVs) and photogrammetry; theory of landscape change |
| N. Claire Napawan | Human Ecology | In light of economic, social, and environmental changes within urban environments, Professor Napawan has an interest in investigating the roles in which public landscapes might adapt to provide ever-increasing productive and infrastructural programs to the global city. This includes investigation of the emerging role of urban agriculture in American cities to address a range of contemporary urban issues. |
| Bettina Ng'weno | African American and African Studies | Urban and rural communities with a particular focus on space, citizenship and justice in Latin America and more recently in the Indian Ocean region |
| Deb Niemeier | Civil and Environmental Engineering | Sustainable development; GHG emissions in complex systems; air quality-transportation; environmental justice; governance structures and environmentalism; prioritization of transportation infrastructure; relationship between land use and travel |
| Dennis Pendleton | UC Davis Extension | Natural resources policy, planning and administration; environmental assessment; simulation/optimization modeling of ecological systems. |
| Carolyn Penny | Common Ground, UC Davis Extension | Conflict resolution, issue-framing, meeting design, facilitation of multi-stakeholder decision making, organizational planning, mediation, facilitation of public engagement processes, training, and analysis and writing. |
| Michael Rios | Human Ecology | Research interests center on the assessment of public policy, professional practice, and citizen participation in the planning and design of the built environment. The aim of this collective work is to understand how institutions, practitioners, and citizens develop capacities for collective action, praxis, and meaningful participation as members of political communities. |
| Sheryl-Ann Simpson | Human Ecology | Immigration and social/political participation, health and environment, critical GIS and spatial analysis, comparative urban studies. |
| Julie Sze | American Studies | Her research is at the intersection of interdisciplinary fields: American studies, environmental, urban and ethnic studies. She focuses on race, class, gender and environment, environmental justice movement, urban environmentalism and environmental health. |
| Bernadette Tarallo | Human Ecology | Economic development; transnational immigration; labor process studies; and, social inequities in the community. |
| Tom Tomich | Environmental Science and Policy | Agricultural sustainability, sustainable food systems, sustainability metrics and indicators, sustainability science. |
| Mark Van Horn | PSTC/SF | Organic soil management, particularly cover cropping, compost use and composting: and, organic education, including experiential field-based learning. |
| M. Anne Visser | Human Ecology | The informal economy; non-standard work arrangements; low wage labor; governance; social and economic integration, equity, and equality |
| Karen Watson-Gegeo | School of Education | Classroom discourse; Education in Developing Countries; Ethnography and Ethnographic research; Language Acquisition; Language development and socialization; Literacy and Language policy; Organizational structure/effectiveness; Pidgin/creole languages; Sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. |
| Steve Wheeler | Human Ecology | Sustainable development; urban design; city and regional planning; land use; climate change. |
| Diane Wolf | Sociology | Gender and development, family/households, fieldwork, Southeast Asia, immigration. |
| Susy Zepeda | Chicana/o Studies | Chicana/Latina Feminisms, Social Justice, Genders and Sexualities, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, U.S. Women of Color Feminism, LGBTQ and Queer of Color Studies, Chicana/o Cultural Studies, Transnational Visual Culture, Oral History, Archival Research, Collaborative Methodologies. |