Graduate Studies DEI Events

Graduate studies hosts a variety of events and activities that are designed to build community and enhance the opportunities for success for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from historically excluded populations. We highly encourage students to participate in these activities, as they will ensure a more rich and fulfilling graduate school/postdoctoral experience.

Annual Graduate Anti-Racism Symposium (GARS)

Each year Graduate Studies hosts the Graduate Anti-Racism Symposium. This year the GARS planning committee (see below) is incorporating the 2025 UC Davis campus book project, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society, that addresses the ways that systemic injustices take a physical and mental toll on bodies. It investigates the lived consequences of hierarchies and power differentials for historically marginalized people.

The modern academy is also a place of hierarchies and power differentials that stress bodies and minds. Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are required to navigate institutions that, for many, were not established with them in mind. With this history in mind, how can emerging scholars expand the boundaries of human knowledge to consider a broader range of experiences? What lessons do their experiences offer to communities and the larger society?

This year’s GARS symposium, “Weathering in the Modern Academy,” showcases graduate student and postdoctoral scholar research that speaks to these issues. Specifically, we seek to engage the campus community about innovative ways that new scholars can “weather” the academic environment to manage academic life and make a place for themselves.

GARS 2025: Weathering in the Modern Academy is scheduled for May 9, 2025 from 9:00 am to 1:30 pm. The Keynote, Session 1, is being offered in both virtual and in-person options. Sessions 2-4 are in-person only, in the Gibeling Room, 1220 Walker Hall. Please register here for all sessions, https://ucdavis.zoom.us/meeting/register/1pBmxAAmQTmTKY3ELL-viw Following you will receive a confirmation including the Zoom link if you are participating virtually for Session 1.

GARS 2025 Program

Session 1, Keynote, virtual or in-person, 9:00 to 10:00 am
Session 2, Graduate Student and Postdoctoral talks with Q&A, in-person, 10:00 to 11:30 am
Session 3, Facilitator Response, Graduate Student and Postdoctoral talks with Q&A, in-person, 11:30 to 11:50 am
Session 4, Lunch and Roundtable Conversation, in-person, 12:00 to 1:30 pm

2025 GARS Planning Committee

Associate Dean and Professor of History, Ellen Hartigan O'Connor
Graduate Diversity Officer, Graduate Studies, Dr. Josephine Moreno
Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, Luis Carvajal-Carmona
Graduate Student Adviser to the Dean and Chancellor, Doctoral Candidate, Tamara Christiani
Postdoctoral Scholar, Genome Center, Dr. Nicole Halmai