Quick Summary
- Chancellor’s achievement awards for 6 students, staff and faculty
- “Making a real difference” in health care, science, law, education
- Chancellor: The recipients exemplify the Principles of Community
UC Davis recently presented the 2022 Chancellor’s Achievement Awards for Diversity and Community, honoring an undergraduate student and a graduate student, a postdoctoral fellow, and three staff and faculty members.
“These are the leaders and change agents making a real difference in moving UC Davis toward a more diverse and inclusive campus community,” Mikael Villalobos, interim associate vice chancellor for campus community relations, said in his prepared remarks for the awards presentation May 3 at the Chancellor’s Residence.
Chancellor Gary S. May said in his prepared remarks: “These awards speak to me deeply on a personal and professional level as I’ve dedicated much of my career toward enhancing our diversity in higher education and in the workplace.
“The award winners we recognize today remind me of how much talent, tenacity and commitment to diversity we find all across UC Davis and our region.”
There is more work to be done, he said, adding this note of caution: “There remain opposing forces that constantly push against our efforts to integrate diversity, equity and inclusion in all we do.”
All the more reason to present the Chancellor’s Achievement Awards for Diversity and Community, to uplift and highlight those among us who, in the chancellor’s words, “do the great work of exemplifying our .”
He then turned the program over to Renetta Garrison Tull, vice chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, who introduced each recipient by noting their achievements in building diversity and community. Those introductions are summarized below:
Undergraduate: Thu Pham ’21, Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry and molecular biology, College of Biological Sciences — Pham has developed a strong passion for health care equity, the result of her work with the UC Davis student-run Paul Hom Asian Clinic, offering medical services to underserved and uninsured Asian populations; and an internship with the Vietnamese Cancer Awareness, Research and Education Society, or VN CARES. She helps low-income, uninsured and undocumented patients obtain free medications and medical devices used for chronic condition management, acquiring these critical resources through several major projects launched under Pham’s leadership — saving the underserved patients more than $500,000. Her ultimate mission is to reduce health care disparities through drug development. To continue working toward that, she will attend UC San Francisco to pursue a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences and pharmacogenomics, starting in September.
Graduate Student: Rebecca “Becca” Litman of the Graduate School of Management, a health care communicator and project manager for Blue Shield of Ƶ, who is in her final year of study for an MBA with a concentration in strategy and organizational behavior — During the 2020-21 academic year, Litman served as the student representative on the GSM’s Faculty Committee on Diversity, where she prioritized projects that promote inclusion and encourage underrepresented minority, or URM, candidates to pursue their education at the GSM. She researched how to best expand the academic pipeline and spearheaded a creative proposal for deferred admission into the MBA program for UC Davis URM undergraduate seniors. And she was a leader in the GSM’s Action for Diversity initiative’s 21-Week Anti-Racism Challenge, which focused on understanding and rejecting anti-Black racism.