Announcing the 2022 ADVANCE Scholar Award Recipients

The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, through the ADVANCE Program and its Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS) is delighted to announce the 2022 ADVANCE Scholar Award recipients:

Miriam A. Nuño

Associate Professor Biostatistics, Public Health Sciences

and

Dean Tantillo

Professor, Chemistry

The ADVANCE Scholar Award program is available for mid-career and senior Academic Senate or Academic Federation faculty who advance diverse perspectives and gender equity in STEMM through their teaching, research and service. The intent of the ADVANCE Scholar Award is to encourage research, leadership, and outreach to underserved communities and/or mentorship of under-represented students, and to highlight and celebrate the contributions that STEMM faculty at UC Davis have made to their fields through outstanding scholarship and mentorship.

This year’s recipients will be honored at the ADVANCE Award Symposium next spring. Learn more about the ADVANCE Scholar Award and about the 2022 ADVANCE Symposium.

Miriam A. Nuño, Associate Professor, Biostatistics, Public Health Sciences

As a statistician, mathematical epidemiologist, and public health advocate, Nuño routinely pursues interdisciplinary collaborations in health disparities research. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, her involvement with community-based organizations and stakeholders has been instrumental in the development of solutions to reduce health disparities in racial/ethnic minorities. Nuño and her team have been involved in the widely celebrated Healthy Davis Together (HDT) community project designed to lower the burden of COVID-19 in the City of Davis and Yolo County (Health Yolo Together). She is also a part of the ÓRALE COVID-19! Program that provides testing to the most vulnerable farmworker communities and Mobilizing Organizations Via Equitable Immunizations and Testing Unified Partnerships (MOVE IT UP) to increase vaccinations in racial/ethnic minorities of Yolo and Sacramento.

For over a decade, Nuño has taught and mentored students from diverse backgrounds and underserved groups. She has been a consistent mentor for the Undergraduate Public Health Scholars Program (UPHS), in which students from disadvantaged backgrounds or historically excluded racial or ethnic minorities gain hands-on experience in public health sciences research. Her mentees have gone on to pursue graduate education, publish manuscripts, win awards at several national conferences, and be accepted into several coveted internships positions at companies such as Genentech and MedTronic. Nuño, is also directly involved in developing strategies to improve student, faculty, and staff recruitment and retention. She serves in the Vice Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence in Diversity (FED) committee, participates in the Annual Cesar Chavez Leadership Pipeline program and Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). As her current students who submitted her nomination exclaim, “we say wholeheartedly that Dr. Nuño is an inspirational and exceptional mentor who constantly goes out of her way to ensure all students feel supported and welcomed in academia.”

Dean Tantillo, Professor, Chemistry

Tantillo’s research investigates the structures and reactivity of organic molecules and is a world leader in mechanistic organic chemistry. He is also an outstanding educator, recognized by both a UC Davis Academic Senate Award for Graduate and Professional contributions in 2016 and for his efforts in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011. He has been a constant advocate, educator, and mentor to minoritized communities in STEM fields. Next year he will continue a leadership role in advocating for DEI as Vice Chair of the systemwide Coordinating Committee on Graduate Affairs (CCGA).

Tantillo’s research is focused on applying the tools of theoretical chemistry to construct new models of reactivity that can be used to both rationalize and predict the origins of reactivity and selectivity for organic, organometallic and biosynthetic reactions. He is recognized as a world leader in the Physical Organic Chemistry community, and is regularly invited to speak at top physical organic chemistry meetings. He is also arguably the world’s expert in applying quantum calculations to natural products chemistry. He collaborates with natural products chemists around the world involved in isolation, total synthesis, mechanistic enzymology and enzyme/biosynthetic pathway engineering.

Tantillo has worked for years on making chemistry accessible to visually-imparied students. Collaborating recently with graduate student Henry (Hoby) Wedler they developed learning tools for chemistry students such as accessible software interfaces and tactile printing and 3-dimensional printing as tools for the “visualization” of results from quantum chemical calculations. Currently, Tantillo and his students can print tactile reaction coordinates with Braille labels as well as 3-dimensional ball-and-stick models with different textures for different atom types and bonds bearing Braille text. Tantillo has published his work on accessibility in science in several top journals.