Campus News
Science Division staff honored with new award for outstanding service, dedication
Jeannette Peters, Patti Schell, and Deana Tanguay share division’s first Outstanding Staff Award
The Science Division is honoring staff members Jeannette Peters, Patti Schell, and Deana Tanguay for demonstrating outstanding service and dedication to the division’s mission within the past five years. Science Dean Bryan Gaensler said that the annual Outstanding Staff Award was created to run in parallel with the division’s annual Outstanding Faculty Award.
The new staff award recognizes leadership, innovation, and “invisible labor,” which refers to work that is unseen, unvalued, or undervalued despite its essential role in supporting the functioning of workplaces, families, teams, and organizations.
Through their tireless service over the years, Peters, Schell, and Tanguay have clearly demonstrated their dedication to and embodiment of the division’s core pillars: providing students with degree-defining experiences, producing impactful research that benefits people and the planet, and a deep commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Jeannette Peters
Peters is an undergraduate advisor in the Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology Department. Colleagues say she dedicates 100% of her time to helping students navigate the difficult pathways through their majors. She has also committed herself to enhancing student diversity as a member of the Science Division’s DEI Committee and is working to improve her skills as an advisor through the university’s advising certificate program.
Along with managing a caseload of over 500 students, according to those who nominated her, Peters continuously provides detailed responses to students’ questions within 48 hours and makes herself available to students outside of scheduled appointment hours.
Through the many changes in advising due to budget reductions and staff vacancies, Peters has maintained her commitment to providing high-quality support by keeping students a top priority. Her teammates point out the difficulty of quantifying the amount of work that goes into advising. But they say the daily efforts of undergraduate advisors can have a momentous impact on a student’s college career.
“I’m extremely proud to receive this new Outstanding Staff Award and am very grateful for the people who have helped me get to this point in my career,” Peters said. “My main goal at UC Santa Cruz is to help as many students as possible complete a degree they are passionate about, while also having fun doing it. I pride myself on my ability to work closely with my peers and provide thorough care to a high course load of students to better their experience within this division and university.”
Patti Schell
Schell has worked in the Science Division since 2008, serving as the department manager for Astronomy & Astrophysics, then for Chemistry & Biochemistry. After retiring in 2019, she returned for various stints as a rehired retiree to help with multiple department vacancies and projects. Then in August 2023, she was appointed the division’s inaugural “Department Manager – Special Projects.” In this role, she has filled in as a department manager for Ocean Sciences, Earth & Planetary Sciences, Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics, and Chemistry & Biochemistry.
Schell’s nominators say she applies her extensive experience toward two primary goals: improving work processes to make them more efficient, and supporting the people around her. They cite how innovative she is in streamlining workflows and reducing redundancies. In one case, she led an effort to ease the administrative burden of the division’s reimbursement process by working with its accounting team, researching campus and UC-wide policies, and suggesting improvements that have since been adopted and are simplifying approvals, reducing documentation, and ultimately saving time and energy.
In terms of supporting colleagues, nominators described an instance when she was a steady presence during a challenging time in the Physics Department, which at one point lost its department manager and its assistant. Schell demonstrated sensitivity and carefully monitored the remaining staff’s workload. “If it had not been for her, we would have likely lost another staff member, at which point the department would have been on the verge of collapse,” they wrote.
Schell, who has onboarded and continues to mentor new department managers in the Science Division, expressed deep gratitude for the recognition. She recalled how, as a child, she would lose herself in the pages of the Time-Life Science Library and the Encyclopædia Britannica, endlessly fascinated by the world of knowledge—with a particular passion for science that sparked her curiosity about how the world works.
“My dedication to education is something I owe to my father, who was an educator himself and taught us the immense value of knowledge and learning,” Schell said. “Being part of an academic department today, where I have the opportunity to support both faculty and students in their academic pursuits, is a privilege I truly value.”
Deana Tanguay
Tanguay is the managing director of the Lamat Institute, which provides research opportunities for undergraduate students at community colleges and four-year universities. One hundred percent of Lamat fellows earn a bachelor’s degree in STEM, and 80% go on to graduate school. Her nominators say this is driven by the individual attention that Tanguay works diligently and enthusiastically to provide.
They cite many personal gestures that qualify as “invisible labor” for the department and its people: baking brownies for students, organizing an end-of-summer bonfire, buying an international student a new pair of glasses with her own money when theirs broke. Tanguay shares her grant-seeking know-how with graduate students to help them win research funding, and connects them with potential collaborators and alumni, fostering a “community of care” akin to a family.
Tanguay is also the director of programs at the Center for Reimagining Leadership and serves as an indispensable administrative aide supporting the research group of astronomy and astrophysics professor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. She meticulously manages his extensive calendar, always prioritizing the needs of the graduate students he mentors while also coordinating logistics with visiting researchers and speakers.
“I have the honor and privilege of learning from and supporting the incredible students and faculty at UC Santa Cruz. Their brilliance, resilience, and drive in the face of inequities and racism highlight the need for greater representation and brings me purpose,” Tanguay said. “I am humbled by the students’ nomination and grateful for Professor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz’s visionary leadership of Lamat and the Center for Reimagining Leadership, and for the opportunity to be part of this work in co-creating spaces where all people belong and thrive.”
As with the Outstanding Faculty Award recently given to ecology and evolutionary biology professor Erika Zavaleta, the Outstanding Staff Awards presented to Peters, Schell and Tanguay are for the 2023-24 year.
Recipients of the staff award will receive formal recognition during a divisional meeting, have their names added to the Outstanding Faculty Award plaque in the dean’s office lobby, and will be featured on the Science Division’s website.