Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi has appointed Professor Mary Lou de Leon Siantz as director of the new Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science, or CAMPOS, which aims to increase participation by women, especially Latinas, in STEM academics.

The women who come here will find in CAMPOS an accessible and inclusive community of research collaborators and mentors, for career-long networking, said sociology professor Kimberlee Shauman, CAMPOS faculty director.

CAMPOS is one initiative of UC Davis ADVANCE, funded by a $3.725 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program. Katehi is the principal investigator on the grant, which covers the Davis and Sacramento campuses.

Siantz

Siantz is from the Sacramento campus, where she is a member of the faculty of the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. In being selected as the CAMPOS director, she said she is honored for the recognition of “the science behind the nursing profession and the critical role of Latina women in science for the 21st century.”

Beyond a physical location (1100 Surge III on the Davis campus) for networking and exchanging ideas, CAMPOS is also a faculty-hiring initiative to increase diversity in key STEM fields. In making up to 16 new hires, CAMPOS aims to build coalitions of STEM faculty who want to apply their research to serve underrepresented communities.

Siantz already does just that. With federal funding from the Office of Minority Health, Department of Health and Human Services, she is now researching the development of educational strengths in Hispanic immigrant adolescents and the promotion of their reproductive awareness.

Recently she researched the impact of migration on the health and development of Hispanic migrant and immigrant children and families.

Siantz is nationally recognized for her interdisciplinary efforts to prepare health professionals for leadership and policy roles, and internationally respected for her research in migrant health.

She is the associate director of the Community Engagement and Research Program at the Clinical and Translational Science Center. This program connects health researchers with communities of all kinds to ensure discoveries are translated into real-world interventions.

And she is an affiliated faculty member with the UC Davis-UC Berkeley Migration and Health Research Center, and a mentor faculty member of the UC Davis Latino Aging Research Resource Center.

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