Dr. Marquita Grenot-Scheyer serves as Assistant Vice Chancellor of Educator Preparation and Public School Programs, for the California State University (CSU), Office of the Chancellor. She is responsible for leading, coordinating, and facilitating system-wide efforts to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers, counselors, and school leaders for schools and communities. She represents CSU at the state and federal levels, providing policy and practice recommendations to ensure high-quality educator preparation programs. Prior to this appointment, she served as Dean of the College of Education at CSU Long Beach. Dr. Grenot-Scheyer serves on the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing board, the WestEd board, and was recently appointed to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education board of directors. She was a member of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities Teacher Education Task Force on Teacher Preparation in 2016, which produced the report Preparing Teachers in Today’s Challenging Context. She previously served two terms as a board member of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation from 2013 to 2017, and served as a commissioner on the Commission on Standards and Performance Reporting from May, 2012 to June, 2013.

She earned her Ph.D. in Special Education from the joint doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles and California State University, Los Angeles. In recognition of her career accomplishments, she was selected as Distinguished Alumna, California State University, Los Angeles Charter College of Education, in 2008.

Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan (Dr. Ram) is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. Dr. Ram discovered the greenhouse effect of cholorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in 1975 that established non-CO2 gases as a major contributor to global warming and enabled the Montreal protocol to become the first successful climate mitigation policy. For this work, he was awarded the Tyler Prize in 2009. In 1980, he was one of the first to statistically predict that global warming would be detected above the background noise by 2000—later verified by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001. He led a NASA study with its climate satellite to show that clouds had a net cooling effect on the planet and quantified the radiation interactions with water vapor and its amplification of CO2 warming. Dr. Ram led international field campaigns and developed unmanned aircraft platforms for tracking brown clouds pollution worldwide. His work has led to numerous policies including the formation of UN’s Climate and Clean Air Coalition.

Dr. Ram founded and designed Project Surya with Nithya Ramanathan and Tara Ramanathan, an extended effort to characterize and mitigate climate and health impacts of cooking with solid biomass and to protect the poorest three billion from climate change. He is now leading a University of California climate solutions effort which launched a course on interdisciplinary climate solutions, Bending the Curve.

He was honored as His Holiness Pope Francis’s Science Advisor to the historic 2015 Paris Climate Summit and also served as an advisor to former California Governor Jerry Brown. He was named the United Nations Climate Champion in 2013, and elected to the United States National Academy and the Royal Swedish Academy. In 2014, Foreign Policy named him a thought leader, and in 2018 he was named the Tang Laureate for sustainability science.

Dr. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, the inaugural UCLA Wasserman Dean, leads two academic departments, 16 nationally renowned research institutes, and two innovative demonstration schools at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. His research focuses on cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, with an emphasis on migration, globalization, and education. His award-winning books have been published by Harvard University Press, Stanford University Press, University of California Press, Cambridge University Press, New York University Press, and others. His scholarly papers, in a range of disciplines and languages, appear in leading journals including Harvard Educational Review, Harvard Business Review, Revue Française de Pédagogie, Cultuur en Migratie, Temas: Cultura, Ideologia y Sociedad, Ethos, The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Policy Review, and other journals. He regularly contributes to national and international media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, U.S News and World Report, the Huffington Post, CNN, NPR, CNN Español, MSNBC and others.

Dean Suárez-Orozco serves as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Governance and Trust Board) and the National Academy of Education, a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and is the recipient of the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle. He has served as Special Advisor to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. At Harvard, he served as the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education and Culture, Co-founder and Co-director of the Harvard Immigration Projects, and founding member of the Executive Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. At New York University, he served as the inaugural Courtney Sale Ross University Professor of Globalization and Education. Dean Suárez-Orozco has held fellowships at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. He has been Visiting Professor at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris), University of Barcelona, and Catholic University of Leuven, and has lectured at the German, Mexican, and Spanish Foreign Offices, the Vatican, United States Congress, the United Nations, Davos, and other venues.

In January of 2018, His Holiness Pope Francis appointed Dean Suárez-Orozco to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and on July 4, 2018, the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him a “Great Immigrant”. An immigrant from Argentina, Dean Suárez-Orozco is a product of the California Master Plan, having studied in a community college and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1986.

Dr. Fred Uy serves both as a director of the Department of Educator Preparation and Public School Programs and Co-Director for the Center for the Advancement of Instruction in Quantitative Reasoning at the Office of the Chancellor, California State University (CSU). Before joining the Office of the Chancellor, Dr. Uy was a Professor of Mathematics Education at California State University, Los Angeles, and a K–12 mathematics teacher. As director, Dr.Uy is responsible for overseeing and increasing the capacity of the department to provide leadership and support to the educator preparation programs on campuses across the CSU system. He has contributed to CSU initiatives in secondary school teacher mathematics preparation as a trainer for the Early Assessment Program in Mathematics and as a leader of the CSU Math Teacher Education Partnership. Dr. Uy also has served as a mathematics consultant for school districts and publishers and has conducted numerous professional development trainings in the following areas: mathematics pedagogy, teaching mathematics to English language learners, assessments, linked learning, arts integration, and bilingual education.