Criteria

Promising tenure track applicants with doctorate awarded by the start of the appointment on 9/1/09

Award

$40,000 for 2009-20010 academic year, plus benefits

Due Date

November 7, 2008

Administered by

Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity & Inclusion

The Program: The Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Academic Diversity provides postdoctoral fellowships, research opportunities, mentoring and guidance in preparation for academic career advancement. The goal of the program is to help develop young scholars committed to careers in university research and teaching, and dedicated to fostering an inclusive academic environment. The program currently solicits applications from individuals committed to careers in university research and teaching, and whose life experience, research or employment background will contribute significantly to academic diversity and excellence at the Berkeley campus.

These contributions may include public service addressing the needs of our increasingly diverse society, efforts to advance equitable access to higher education for women and minorities, or research focusing on underserved populations or understanding issues of racial or gender inequalities. The program is seeking applicants with the potential to bring to their academic careers the critical perspective that comes from their non-traditional educational background or understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education.

Awards and Tenure:Awards and Tenure: Awards will be made to applicants who show promise for tenure-track appointments on the Berkeley campus. The Fellowship will be for one academic year, in residence in the Bay Area. A renewal of the fellowship for an additional year may be granted upon demonstration of academic productivity and participation in the program events.

Stipend: $40,000 for the 2009-2010 academic year (11 months plus one month vacation). Funds are available each year for supplies and expenses ($500) and research-related expenses ($3,000).

Eligibility: Applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents at the time of application and must receive a doctorate by the start of the appointment on September 1, 2009.

Application Process: Please submit the following materials:

• Curriculum Vitae
• Statement of proposed research (one to five pages, you must indicate only one preferred department affiliation and faculty sponsor, a UC Berkeley faculty member, other than your PhD dissertation advisor)
• A letter from the faculty sponsor (the sponsor should indicate how the candidate fits into the department's long-term strategic and diversification plans, as well as how they will be supported in career advancement). The faculty sponsor should contact vcei@berkeley.edu for more information on the department responsibilities.
• A select dissertation chapter
• Three letters of reference (one letter must be from the dissertation advisor; all should be printed on the recommender's letterhead)
• Sample publications (if applicable)

APPLY ONLINE
All documents must be submitted as PDF files. Access our online application.

OR

APPLY VIA US MAIL
Send application materials to:

Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity & Inclusion
200 California Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-1500

We encourage applicants to use our online application process. Applications must be completed online or postmarked by November 7, 2008.

Awards will be announced in March. Inquiries regarding the program may be directed to (510) 643-6566 or kadkinson@berkeley.edu.

Douglas Densmore

Dr. Douglas Densmore received his Bachelors of Science in Engineering (Computer Engineering) from the University of Michigan (2001) and Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering (2004) from the University of California at Berkeley. His master’s thesis entitled, "Platform Based Reconfigurable Architecture Exploration via Boolean Constraints", demonstrated how Boolean Satisfiability could be used to produce configurations for programmable hardware. Dr. Densmore went on to receive his PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in May 2007. His dissertation, "A Design Flow for the Development, Characterization, and Refinement of System Level Architecture Services", explored how electronic system level design methodologies can be abstract and modular while at the same time remaining accurate and efficient.

Dr. Densmore’s research area is in the development of System Level Design methodologies for electronic systems; specifically architecture modeling and refinement verification. His background and interests are in Computer Architecture, Logic Synthesis, and Digital Logic Design. Dr. Densmore’s industry experience includes four+ summers with Intel Corporation where he was involved in pre-silicon design efforts regarding chipset development, post-silicon validation of the Pentium 4 microprocessor, and chipset software validation. He has also worked as a researcher at Cypress Semiconductor and Xilinx Research Labs. Dr. Densmore is currently a member of the Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC) and the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (CHESS) at UC Berkeley. He has published works regarding a method of successive refinement verification of electronic systems, taxonomies of EDA design tools, and algebraic frameworks for the manipulation of functional design descriptions to expose computational parallelism. In addition, Dr. Densmore has a US patent pending regarding data characterization of programmable devices.

In addition to his significant research and academic accomplishments, Dr. Densmore has demonstrated great dedication to minority and community outreach. He has been integral in SUPERB—the summer program that brings minority students to UC Berkeley to carry out research in Science and Engineering. Dr. Densmore has also organized Science Fairs and mentoring for two Oakland high schools serving underrepresented and underprivileged students.

Bethany Lyles Goldblum

Dr. Bethany Lyles Goldblum completed her doctoral degree with perfect marks in the Department of Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Absolute and Relative Surrogate Measurements of the ²³⁶U(n,f) Cross Section as a Probe of Angular Momentum Effects" investigated the limitations of the Surrogate Method, a technique for indirect determination of neutron-induced reaction cross sections on radioactive nuclei. Dr. Goldblum’s research interests are in the area of applied nuclear physics, with current emphasis on nuclear data needs for homeland security and Generation IV nuclear energy systems as well as nuclear forensics applications. She maintains active collaborations with researchers in the Physical Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Nuclear Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Physics at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Dr. Goldblum has received numerous fellowships and grants including the American Association of University Women Selected Professions Dissertation Fellowship, the Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Fellowship and the Department of Energy Nuclear Engineering Fellowship, among others. As a National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Grant Recipient, she traveled to Canberra, Australia to collaborate with researchers in the Department of Nuclear Physics at the Australian National University. She is the coauthor of several nuclear physics publications and has served as a teaching assistant to undergraduates in nuclear physics, radiation detection and nuclear instrumentation.

In addition to Goldblum’s scientific pursuits, she maintains a functioning interest in nuclear energy and weapons policy. She held the National Science Foundation Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellowship, was a Project on Nuclear Issues Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a member of the United States delegation to the China-India-United States Workshop on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in Bangalore, India. Goldblum organized the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation’s 2007 Emerging Nuclear Threats Conference held in Washington, D.C. and coauthored a proposal outlining a novel means for deterring a nuclear North Korea, which was presented on Capitol Hill.

Christine Hong

After receiving her B.A. in English and specialization in Women's Studies from University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Christine Hong studied Korean at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, and taught in Katmandu, Nepal, before entering UC Berkeley's graduate program in English. Dr. Hong's doctoral work addressed the intersection of justice, race, and geopolitics in the U.S.-dominated Pacific Rim during the second half of the twentieth century. Her dissertation, Legal Fictions: Contemporary Human Rights Literature and the Pax Americana in the Pacific Rim, examined the historic relation of post-1945 human rights literature, as an extra-juridical mode of appeal, grievance, and critique, to the Pax Americana, the U.S. military "peace" that restructured the Asia Pacific following World War II. Her project is both interdisciplinary (examining the relationship between law and literature) and comparative (examining examples of U.S. and Japanese historical atrocity committed in Asia). Dr. Hong’s study has the potential to extend our understanding of the imagination of justice to the benefit of both students of literature and of the law and her study has not only a scholarly, but ethical impact on readers concerned with how culture works to respond to historical catastrophes.

Dr. Hong's postdoctorate project entitled, "The Price of Liberation: Korea, the ‘Forgotten War,’ and the Cultural Politics of Debt,” draws upon recent critical attempts to reformulate postcolonial theory along World Bank lines. This project asks how the "costs" of Korea's mid-century "liberation" from Japanese colonization and the forces of global communism during the Korean War have specifically shaped cultural accounts not only of South Korea's economic modernity—its so-called miracle and financial crisis—but also of Korean immigration to the U.S. Central to this project is the question of how different trans-Pacific locations and perspectives—Korean American, African American, South Korean, and "Hollywood"—refract the toll of U.S. involvement in Korea and how these accounts have both "thawed" and shifted since the close of the Cold War and the emergence of South Korea as a major global cultural producer.

Dr. Hong has received several teaching awards including UC Berkeley’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. She has taught a great range of students from English majors at UC Berkeley to inmates at the San Quentin state prison.

Ellen Huang

Dr. Ellen Huang’s research considers the intersections among modernity, aesthetics, and subject formation as they are related to the historiography of Chinese art and canon formation. Using textual and visual sources, her work focuses on the production and dissemination of knowledge about “china” (porcelain) from China during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-centuries. She is interested in both the material and social aspects of ceramic aesthetics and the global processes by which the boundaries of Chinese art history were formed. Within the field of East Asian Studies, her project on ceramics investigates the porosity of regional, imperial, and national constructs in the modern period. In art history, she is interested in exploring the negotiation between material and visual aspects of an art object at specific historical contexts. In the future, she hopes to apply these research interests and findings to a theoretical study of the significance of art and aesthetics in the development of histories of ornament and decoration in the non-West.

Candace Johnson

Soprano Candace Johnson received her Doctorate of Musical Arts (March 2006) in voice performance at the University of Michigan, where she studied with world-renowned opera singer Shirley Verrett.  She now holds a Chancellor's postdoctoral fellowship in the department of music at the University of California, Berkeley.  Her research analyzes the interaction of text, melody, and harmony in African-American solo song literature, with special emphasis on the works of Adolphus Hailstork. Passionate about sharing her knowledge with youth, Candace is on the voice faculty of the University's community outreach program, The Young Musician's Program.

Candace has sung the lead soprano roles in Puccini's Suor Angelica, The Medium by Menotti, and Mozart's Bastien and Bastienne. She is also a recitalist and concert artist who was a finalist in the National Leontyne Price Competition and previously held the title of Ms. Black Tennessee for two years.

Her silvery, warm lyric-coloratura voice and extraordinary interpretive skills make her the consummate singing actor who brings audiences a tangible, moving experience. Composer Adolphus Hailstork hails her performance of his works as "the best interpretation of his songs he ever encountered."  Candace will perform his works and more on a noonday concert at Hertz Hall on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006.

Listen to a couple of Candace's singing samples:

Candace Johnson Audio Sample 1 (mp3, 5.3MB streaming)

Candace Johnson Audio Sample 2 (mp3, 2.5MB streaming)

Jin Yu

Dr. Jin Yu utilizes mathematical modeling to explore the physical world and to understand the complexities of life from a computational point of view. Her dissertation work focused on modeling and simulating at an atomistic level the very basic biomolecular machineries. Employing the power of parallel supercomputer as well as joining with experimentalists, Dr. Yu investigated the underlying mechanisms that govern the sophisticated functioning of those tiny machines. She enjoyed very much the intuition one could obtain from such a microscopic level where the secrets of life might reside. As a physicist, Dr. Yu would not be content without understanding the intrinsic laws behind these phenomena. Several predictions Dr. Yu made on the structure and function of relationships of those biomolecules have already been corroborated by experiments.

In her postdoctorate research, Dr. Yu will concentrate on building theoretical models that catch the evolutionarily essential properties of various molecular motors and related cellular events. Meanwhile, she plans to work with an experimental lab to learn directly from experiments and to make sure the theoretical work is in line with the experiments. Based on insight into how the biological units are built to work through natural process, Dr. Yu expects that artificial designing of molecular machineries would be made practical in the near future.

To her credit, Dr. Yu has already published several groundbreaking and original papers involving real discoveries based on new combinations of conceptual and methodological approaches. The subjects of these papers include works on DNA and DNA protein dynamics, a molecular motor, and a membrane channel.