Personal Profile
My first 12 years were spent in a small town near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I loved living in Holland but immigrating to California was exciting because it allowed me to explore a new environment and a different culture. I did my graduate work here at UCSB and received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry. As a lecturer, lab coordinator and outreach program director, I enjoy working with students, graduate student instructors, and K-12 students and teachers. I have a daughter and son who are both attending Universities.

Research Interests
My first 12 years were spent in a small town near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I loved living in Holland but immigrating to California was exciting because it allowed me to explore a new environment and a different culture. I did my graduate work here at UCSB and received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry. As a lecturer, lab coordinator and outreach program director, I enjoy working with students, graduate student instructors, and K-12 students and teachers. I have a daughter and son who are both attending Universities.

Teaching Style
My main goal in teaching is to motivate and inspire students. I want students to enjoy the learning process and learn how to think for themselves. I like to engage students into discussions by asking questions. I also use demonstrations as a tool to draw students into discussions and to help explain concepts. Chemistry lends itself well to demonstrations and they are fun. I want the students to see how chemistry is relevant to their lives and to their other courses and also to understand enough of the details and develop sufficiently strong problem solving skills, to allow them to be successful throughout their academic career.

Idea of a Good Time
I have a great time teaching, learning, and understanding how other people think and learn. I love sports, including tennis, running and hiking. I also love spending time with my family.

Most Important Thing to Learn at College
To find a subject that really excites you. To learn how to manage your time and to balance your work and personal life. To network with peers, faculty, and advisors. To learn how to learn, to ask questions and to be open to new ideas. To establish your identity and understand who you are. To learn how to make your own decisions, weighing the positives and the negatives.

Advice for New Students at UCSB?
Challenge yourself beyond what you may think you can do. Take advantage of the many opportunities available at UCSB. To be successful in all of your classes, study 5 hours per day. Study before, between and after classes. Take some classes for fun. Ask for help when you need it.

Personal Profile
I was born in Ibadan (formerly the largest city in West Africa) in Nigeria and came to the USA in 1993 to get a doctorate degree from Northwestern University. Most of my family is still there (a brother lives in London and a sister lives in Maryland). I have basically been mostly interested in knowledge, which is why I became a professor. The history of human knowledge production is fascinating especially in how human societies prioritize and value specific kinds of knowledge. Most of my work investigates how particular forms of knowledge achieve value and are disseminated. My primary hobby is science and I keep abreast of space exploration and also high theory physics (Unified Field Theory, Quantum physics, revolutionary mechanical design, etc).

Research Interests
I am a polymath. My work covers Classical, Modern and Contemporary African Art; African Daispora Art (including a major focus on African American Art); Critical Theory and Art History Methodologies, Alternative Modernities; and Knowledge Systems Theory. After working in the field of traditional art history in the past decade and a half, I have started moving my work into more contemporary issues, engaging visual culture, and above all, investigating the use and adaptation of indigenous knowledge systems in the production of knowledge. I have also started a publishing company recently to issue books on modern and contemporary African artists. This is because they are so woefully underrepresented in available texts which acts as an impediment to decent pedagogy on the subject.

Teaching Style
I aim for inspirational instruction. Over the course of their time at UCSB, the average student will be provided with a healthy dose of the gospel according to Western knowledge, which aims to explain the world in relation to the West’s domination of the rest of the planet. I provide my students with a historical location of the West as a powerful culture but simply one of many other powerful cultures in history. From this viewpoint, I get them to investigate the role and impact of other cultures (mostly the African cultures I focus on) on world history and development. For example, you can probably name any number of white inventors in the USA. But do you know who Elijah McCoy is, and if not why not?

Idea of a Good Time
Travel to new and foreign places. Fortunately, my wife also likes these activities although I do quite a lot of traveling to give talks at many institutions.

Most Important Thing to Learn at College
That knowledge is an ever-evolving thing, and things are not always what they seem. A student needs to learn the old Socratic ideal that the only thing one truly knows is that he/she knows NOTHING. This is basically a call to be humble in defining what we know, since knowledge is malleable and subject to historical interpretation. What you know at any given time is subject to how the past or present is interpreted (for example, how does anyone know that there is a God? How equally can you be sure there isn’t a God?). I teach my students to learn that every question has many sides. Since they mostly have spent their lives imbibing the prevailing ideology of Western Supremacy, I bring them face to face with what Western knowledge omits in its inscription of white world dominance. This information is not always pretty but hopefully it creates empathy and understanding of those who are foreign to the students. In this age of grave uncertainty (and imperial arrogance) empathy may yet save the human race.

Advice for New Students at UCSB
Great campus. Take advantage of it. To each thing its time: time to party, time to study. Above all, move outside your comfort zone. Engage your fellow students. This is the time of your life. In the future, you will remember how carefree it was, how so full of possibilities, and that such a time will never come again.

Personal Profile
I am one of the few native Angelenos my age (51!) you will find. I grew up in LA, attended Pomona College (where I majored in history) and then went on to UCLA Law School. I briefly worked in a law firm and still maintain my California Bar Association membership, but Cleo's call proved irresistible. In 1982, I received my PhD from Yale and was offered a position here. I accepted the offer without even asking what my salary would be. You can imagine how thrilled I was to return to my homeland. I am also currently President of UCSB Hillel.

Research Interests
I write about the history of American legal thought, legal education, the legal profession and the U.S. Supreme Court. I also write political history.

Teaching Style
I teach a variety of courses about the history of American politics, culture and law since 1920. The material is charged. I try to be as forthcoming as I can about my interpretations as a way of encouraging students to develop their own. I also try to provide them the material they need to develop alternative interpretations. As I tell my students, we all have the same evidence, and we all weigh it differently. Each of us brings our own experiences and our current concerns to the study of history. Though Harry Truman was reviled when he left office, historians writing in the aftermath of Watergate transformed him into a hero. Each generation must write its own history, and historians must understand that reasonable people can and should disagree. The diverse historical interpretations that ensue give history its vitality—and keep historians employed.

Idea of a Good Time
Like most historians, I live to read other people’s mail. I am very happy when I am in the archives doing just that.

Most Important Thing to Learn at College
That's a tough one, and I think what is the most important thing for one student to learn may not be the most important for another. Generally speaking, I hope that students will learn to think critically and to write well. I hope that what they learn will increase their intellectual curiosity and help to make them engaged and responsible citizens with a lively appreciation for different points of view. Beyond that, it is probably useful for students to learn how to cook, if they don't know how to do so already. And it would be good for them to learn how to balance a checkbook, if they do not bank online and if they do not know how to balance one already: That would put them ahead of me!

Advice for New Students at UCSB?
Go see your professors during their office hours. Part of our job is to write you recommendations, and we can write more effective ones if you are more than a perm number. And keep up your grades up during your freshman year. It saddens me when I have to write a recommendation for an excellent student who "messed up" during his or her freshman year. It can be hard to live away from home for the first time, and our party scene is as lively as that on most campuses. Keep your eyes on the prize. If your grades are bad during your freshman year, it can be fatal to your GPA, no matter how studious you become down the road.

Personal Profile
I was born and raised in HuaLien, a remote city of Taiwan which now has become a famous national park of the country. I went to National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan to study Computer Engineering and received my Bachelor degree from the university. After a two-year mandatory military service, I went to the University of Texas at Austin for my Ph.D. Then, I spent five years in the PowerPC design center jointly operated by IBM, Motorola and Apple, also located in Austin, Texas. Because I left my home town at the age of 15 and later spent 12 years living in Austin, Texas, I always feel that Austin is my second home town. I moved to UCSB in 2000 to pursue a different career path of research and teaching. Now my greatest pleasure is spending time with my students on research. Beside research on the topics in Computer Engineering, I am also very much interested in history, philosophy, religious study, and film making. I dream about one day being able to write a few books on those topics.

Research Interests
My research focuses on software techniques to automate the process of semiconductor chip design. One particular line of research I do is trying to bring the technologies developed from the statistical learning and data mining communities into applications to help semiconductor chip design.

Teaching Style
I like to teach technical knowledge by drawing analogy to life experience. I believe many fundamental concepts in science and engineering are natural and hence, they are all applicable in our real-life experiences. I like to teach intuitions rather than mathematical detail. Also, I often like to tell real stories from the industry such as why a company fails and the other succeeds. Because of the dynamically-changing nature of the computer industry, I like to reflect the state-of-the-art practices in my courses.

Idea of a Good Time
When you wish for something and it comes true, that is the moment of a good time. When you talk to a friend and share common feeling, that is the moment of a good time. When you are with your family and see that they are happy and healthy, that is the moment of a good time. When I work with my students and see them becoming wiser, that is the moment of a good time. When I realize something I did not know before, that is the moment of a good time. When I see someone or myself contributing to the happiness of others, that is the moment of feeling a good time.

Most Important Thing to Learn at College
Regardless of what their major may be, students must learn the art of critical thinking. There are two essential steps: developing the ability to form an independent point of view based on careful analysis of the material, and honing the skills, both verbal and in writing, to express ideas in a persuasive manner.

Advice for New Students at UCSB?
Learning demands discipline and being persistent. During the first year of college, students should try to figure out a way to structure their student life so that they can carry out effective learning in the remaining years. Learning how to learn is perhaps the most important task for a new student to do first.