Miroslava Chávez-García is the Faculty Director of the McNair Scholars Program and a Professor of History at UCSB who has affiliated appointments with the Departments of Feminist Studies and Chicana/o Studies and Latin American and Iberian Studies. She is the author of Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson, 2004), States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley, 2012), and most recently, her award-winning Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2018). Dr. Chávez-García served from 2016 to 2019 as Faculty Director for Graduate Diversity Initiatives, overseeing the Graduate Scholars Program, designed to retain, mentor, and matriculate first- and second-year students. She also served as a member of the UCSB Academic Senate committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. From 2013 to 2015, she served as interim Chair and Vice Chair for UCSB’s Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. While at UC Davis, her previous place of employment, she was a member of the Chicana/Latina Research Center steering committee and chaired the Chicana/o Studies Department at UC Davis. Contact: mchavezgarcia@history.ucsb.edu 

 

Veronica Lavenant Fematt is the Program Director of the McNair Scholars Program at UCSB. Prior to her current position, Dr. Fematt was the Policy and Practice Dissemination Coordinator for the Center for Evaluation and Educational Effectiveness at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). In this role, Dr. Fematt was responsible for cultivating and maintaining working relationships with multiple stakeholders across the CSU system, the California Community College (CCC) system, and the U.S. Department of Education to disseminate key policy, practice, and methodological lessons from the CSU HSI-STEM Systemwide Research Project. Before CSULB, Dr. Fematt was a Postdoctoral Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the UCSB where she developed and taught a catalogue of courses with a specialization in Education and Chicana/o Studies (e.g., Chicanas/os in Higher Education, Critical Race Theory in Chicana/o Education). Dr. Fematt received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Education with an emphasis in Educational Leadership and Organizations from the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UCSB and her B.A. in Sociology from UCLA. Her research focuses on the community college transfer experience with an emphasis on campus climate issues such as, the stigmatization of transfer students and the manifestation of transfer student microaggressions and stereotypes at selective institutions. Her most recent work focuses on the experience of Latinx students in STEM fields. Contact: vfematt@ucsb.edu

 

Angelica Hernandez 

Angelica Hernandez is the Program Coordinator of the McNair Scholars Program at UCSB. Prior to her current position, Angelica was the Program Manager at REACH, a non-profit organization, in Santa Barbara. She worked with low-income and first generation college bound students by supporting them during their transition from high school to college by providing multi-year mentorship, and experiential trips. Before working in Santa Barbara, Angelica was a ENLACE Fellow at Northeastern Illinois University, she graduated in 2016 with her Master's in Educational Leadership with a concentration in Higher Education. Prior to getting her masters she graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Sociology.  

 

Graduate Student Team

Jason Fly

Courtney Durdle is the Writing Specialist for the McNair Scholars Program. She is a Ph.D. student in the Psychological & Brain Sciences Department studying cognitive neuroscience. Her research focuses on the free recall of emotional episodic events and how that recall can affect decision-making. She hopes to apply her research to inform public policy and the legal system. She is also a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow and acts as a writing consultant for the Graduate Division to help others prepare their NSF applications. Before coming to UCSB, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Human Development, a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, and a minor in Education at UC Davis. Besides her academic work, Courtney has a long history of public service. Most recently, she founded her own graduate school application program at UCSB called Preparing Undergraduates for Graduate School (PUGS) to give underrepresented students resources to successfully enter graduate school. Contact: cadurdle@ucsb.edu 

Mary Michael

Mary Michael is a Graduate Mentor for the McNair Scholars Program. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Film and Media Studies department at UCSB. She has a B.S. in Sociology/Law and Society from the University of California, Riverside, and an M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California. Her research examines smart city projects in the Middle East, with particular focus on how migrants engage with paperless and e-governance technologies in Dubai. Her fields of study include migration and labor in the Middle East, histories of media and technology, critical data studies, and bio/necropolitics. Mary is also a self-taught media practitioner who experiments with arts praxis methodologies including 3D model building, game design, and hyperlink narrative writing. She aims to use her Ph.D. to contribute to urban planning and design research, and to open a media lab in which vulnerable communities can collaborate on building software that is designed to better serve their interests. Contact: marymichael@ucsb.edu