The Science Division has announced that Erika Zavaleta, a professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, has won its 2023-24 Outstanding Faculty Award. The annual prize is the division's highest honor for faculty achievement, recognizing combined excellence in research, teaching, and service.
Since joining UC Santa Cruz in 2003 as an assistant professor in the Environmental Studies Department, Zavaleta has led groundbreaking research on biodiversity’s importance to people and nature, and on effective responses to climate changes. Examples of this widely influential, interdisciplinary work include a 2006 policy-strategy article that won the Ecological Society of America's annual award for best paper in sustainability science.
Other examples include publications on advancing ecological theory and informing conservation practice. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor since 2018, Zavaleta studies cross-scale ecological responses to climate and biodiversity changes. Specifically, her research follows two major themes: how declining biodiversity impacts ecosystems and societies, and on how to adapt ecosystems to a rapidly changing climate.
“Erika Zavaleta is everything we all wish we could be as an academic,” said Science Division Dean Bryan Gaensler. “She’s a world-leading researcher, a fantastic teacher, an extraordinary mentor, and a profound contributor to the university and the community.”
Zavaleta has also established multiple programs designed to lift up students who have faced adversity and help students of all backgrounds succeed. Zavaleta saw the need for these types of programs soon after becoming a professor, when, in one instance, a student of hers had to walk away from promising summer research in order to work and earn money.
Experiences like that led to the Center to Advance Mentored, Inquiry-based Opportunities (CAMINO), which Zavaleta founded in 2018 with a $1 million HHMI award. CAMINO removes barriers to research by providing accepted undergraduates with training and a paid summer research position in ecology. The program accepts between 12 and 25 students each year from hundreds of applicants.
The number of students is limited only by funding, according to Zavaleta, who notes that there has never been a shortage of researchers eager to mentor students.
Zavaleta also brought the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program to UC Santa Cruz in 2015, which prepares diverse groups of undergraduates for leadership in conservation. Over the past 10 years, the program has supported 160 emerging leaders who are making critical contributions to transform conservation in a myriad of ways.
Zavaleta also co-developed FieldFutures, a Santa Cruz-based organization that creates anti-harassment training for field research. FieldFutures cites studies showing that more than half of field researchers report experiencing sexual harassment while doing fieldwork, and one in five report assault.
In addition, Zavaleta is a leading ecologist in the state of California. She is president of the California Fish and Game Commission, which she was appointed to in 2021. Her expertise in functional biodiversity—the role a creature plays in the ecosystem—influenced the decision to list spring run Chinook salmon as threatened in the Klamath and Trinity rivers. She and many tribal members argued that since this genetically distinct fish migrates upriver during the spring, it has distinct ecological and human value from fall-run Chinook salmon and should be treated as distinct. She highlights this as an example of the impactful role that UC scientists play in informing natural-resource management.
A fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and the Ecological Society of America, Zavaleta has held the MacArthur Foundation Chair since 2023. She earned a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University, where she also obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology.
In receiving the Science Division’s Outstanding Faculty Award, Zavaleta said how deeply honored and grateful she is to its selection committee, her colleagues, and all the support from across campus. “I am incredibly proud of UC Santa Cruz, this division and our department — and of the values we embody as we serve our students, the wider community, and the world,” she said. “What a privilege to be part of it!”
