Meet the Cohort

Public Scholarship Faculty Fellows Cohort 2022-2023

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Piri Ackerman-Barger

Piri Ackerman-Barger is associate dean for health equity, diversity and inclusion and a clinical professor at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. She is also the director of faculty development for education and teaching and co-director for the Interprofessional Teaching Scholars Program. As associate dean, Ackerman-Barger leads the school’s efforts to create a diverse and welcoming setting in which to learn, work and collaborate. Ackerman-Barger’s academic interests relate to health equity and social justice. Over her career, Ackerman-Barger has combined her expertise in nursing and education to advance inclusive learning environments, education equity and workforce diversity. She is a national consultant and speaker on strategies to help underserved and under-represented groups in health professions thrive academically.
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Greg Downs

Greg Downs is a professor of history and the author of three monographs on slavery, emancipation and Reconstruction in the United States, as well as a prize-winning book of short stories. With a colleague at Northwestern University, he led historians' efforts to create the first national park site devoted to Reconstruction and emancipation, writing the first theme study for the park system, helping assemble the first handbook for the park, lobbying Congress, working with local leaders, and assembling a collective of leading historians to endorse the effort. In January 2017, President Obama created the national park at Beaufort, S.C., and Downs helped lead historians' support for the creation of the National Park Service's now-existing Reconstruction network. He co-edits the Journal of the Civil War Era. Currently he is working with the City of Sacramento on the city's innovative municipal reparations project, and completing a book on the enslaved rebel Nat Turner as a religious prophet.
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Katie Graf Estes

Katie Graf Estes is an associate professor of psychology and is affiliated with the Center for Mind and Brain. She received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2007, and joined the UC Davis Department of Psychology the same year. As director of the Language Learning Lab, she investigates early language development in bilingual and monolingual children. She is investigating the learning mechanisms that infants bring to learning and how the structure of the environment, such as caregivers' speech and actions, support language development. 
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Theanne Griffith

Theanne Griffith is an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Membrane Biology. Her research investigates how our nervous system encodes bodily sensations, such as proprioception and pain. Griffith received her undergraduate degree in neuroscience and Spanish from Smith College and earned her doctorate in neuroscience from Northwestern University. In addition to her work as a scientist, Dr. Griffith is an award-winning children's book author. She writes the science adventure chapter book series, The Magnificent Makers (Random House Children's Books). She also co-writes the non-fiction science series, Ada Twist, Scientist: The Why Files (Abrams), which accompanies the Netflix series of the same name. She is passionate about promoting diversity in science as well as inclusive representation in children's media.
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Andy Jones

Andy Jones is a poet, continuing lecturer for the University Writing Program, and the academic associate director of academic technology services at UC Davis. Andy has taught writing, creative writing and literature classes at UC Davis since 1990, and since 2000 he has hosted Dr. Andy's Poetry and Technology Hour on radio station KDVS. Jones also coordinates and hosts the twice-monthly Poetry Night Reading Series at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis. The author of three books of poetry, with more on the way, he has given poetry readings throughout California and as far away as Washington, D.C., and Nara, Japan. A weekly columnist for the Davis Enterprise, he has discussed poetic, professional and personal topics on Sacramento Public Radio, the BBC World Service and The Oprah Winfrey Show. In addition to writing and literature classes, Jones has taught first-year seminars on jazz and literature, Buddhism and film, practical antiracism and poetry marketing. Having served two terms as Davis poet laureate, he is now the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis.
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Heghnar Watenpaugh

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is a professor in the Department of Art and Art History. She teaches courses on the visual cultures of the Middle East, as well as on cultural heritage and human rights. Her first book on the architecture of Aleppo received a book award for urban history from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her second book, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice (Stanford University Press, 2019), is the only book to win awards from both the Society for Armenian Studies and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Watenpaugh is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. Her public-facing writing on issues of cultural rights has appeared in Newsweek and The Los Angeles Times and was featured in a BBC series about cultural heritage destroyed during the Syrian conflict.

2021-2022 Cohort


2020-2021 Cohort