a couple of updates
Bill Maurer
Tuesday June 23 15:25:12 PDT 2020
Dear social sciences faculty, lecturers, staff, grad students and researchers,
Greetings! I am writing with just a few updates about some of the things
happening behind the scenes here to support our grad students, to begin
slowly re-starting research activities, and to prepare for fall quarter.
First, though, we had a wonderful retirement celebration via Zoom for
four of our long-serving, dedicated staff members: Pat Frazier, Justine
Sarashid, Gregory Gallardo and Carolynn Bramlett. Dave Leinen made a
special appearance, and our communications team produced a fantastic
video celebrating everyone's careers. There were tears! There was
laughter! It was a terrific way to honor our colleagues and celebrate
our community. Happy trails, Pat, Justine, Gregory and Carolynn! Thank
you so much for your combined 116 years of service!
Next: By now 52 grad students in the School will have received offers of
DTEI fellowships or Social Sciences Instructional Fellowships, and another
group will have received offers of employment to be trained as contact
tracers. This is on top of an unprecedented number of summer GSR and TA
appointments. By the end of this week or the beginning of the next, all
of the School's PhD students will have some form of summer support. This
has been a herculean effort, from securing the funding, arguing for
additional summer TAs, determining how best to allocate various sources
of funding given every student's very different circumstances, and then
actually onboarding everyone and making sure they get paid. I want to take
a moment to thank Associate Deans Mike McBride and Jeanett Castellanos,
Jennifer Gerson, Pat Frazier, Gianna Virgilio, Matt Arias, Rachel Neer,
Allison Marks, and all the chairs and grad program directors for making
this all possible.
DTEI and SSIF fellows will be providing support to faculty and lecturers
in developing summer and fall courses for remote instruction. The goal
is to up our game. We transitioned to remote instruction in 2 weeks time
over spring break, but now we have a little bit more time to make sure
we are doing the best we can under these difficult circumstances for
our students. Thank you all, again, for your efforts.
Senate faculty were emailed another opportunity for instructional
support this morning. With funding from the Provost's Office, we will
be able to provide a limited number of Faculty Summer Instructional
Fellowships. Please see my email from this morning, or email Allison Marks
(marksa@uci.edu) if you can't find the message.
Meanwhile, Mike McBride, Holly Hapke, Emily Grossman and Evan Schofer have
been busily reviewing proposals for Phase 2 research resumption. Thank
you all very much. Please remember that if you can continue to conduct
your activities at home, please do so--Orange County is still deemed
at high risk of a serious outbreak, and the more we can continue to
maintain social distancing, the better. Those who are returning to campus
are again reminded to inform their department manager of their planned
on-campus schedule so we can minimize density as much as possible.
Finally, congrats to Profs. Alana Lebron, Graeme Boushey and Laura
Enriquez for winning new grants from the Office of Inclusive Excellence's
Confronting Extremism, Advancing Equity program! Well done!
Wishing everyone the very best,
Bill