Gradlink is an electronic newsletter designed to serve UC Davis graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and the campus community.
Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Resources
Pathways Career Symposium 2008
An Inside Look at an Academic Search Committee
Time: 9:30-10:30am
Room: 126 Wellman
What do committee members look for when selecting potential applicants for an on-campus interview? What do they look for in making the final decisions to hire new faculty? Join our panel of distinguished faculty members as they share their experiences as academic search committee "insiders" and gain a better understanding of what these committees look for in the successful candidate.
Panelists:
Robert Irwin, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Spanish & Classics, UC Davis
Robert McKee Irwin, received his PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University in 1999. After teaching for five years at Tulane University, he came to UC Davis, where he is currently Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He was named Chancellor's Fellow in 2007. He is author of "Mexican Masculinities" (2003) and "Bandits, Captives, Heroines and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico's Northwest Frontier" (2007) and coeditor of "Hispanisms and Homosexualities" (1998), "The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901" (2003) and "Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos" (forthcoming 2008).
He is currently working on a collaborative project on the transnational reception of Mexican "golden age" cinema.
Ruth Ballard, Ph.D., Associate Professor & Department Chair, Biological Sciences, CSUS
Ruth Ballard is an associate professor and the department chair in Biological Sciences at California State University, Sacramento. She completed her Ph.D. (1997) and M.S (1994) in Genetics from UC Davis in 1997 and her B.S. in Biological Sciences in 1991 at CSUS. Her research interests include DNA forensics, DNA-based paternity testing, Third World human DNA identification testing: Population databases and capacity-building and service-learning pedagogy. She frequently serves as an expert DNA witness for both civil and criminal court cases with experience as a witness for both prosecution and defense teams. As a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis, she conducted research on Human genetics and RNA biochemistry and interactions between the double-stranded RNA-dependent kinase PKR and human Alu RNA.
Dr. Ballard has served on several hiring committees at CSUS and has had the opportunity to reflect on what makes a strong candidate for a faculty position in the sciences in the California State University system.