Prof Slam 2026

Denise Montell earned her BA in Cell Biology from the University of California, San Diego, and her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University. After 20 years on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, she returned to her California roots and joined UCSB as the Duggan Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. She is a two-time winner of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award and the recipient of the 2024 E. B. Wilson Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society for Cell Biology. In 2021 she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

Jarett Henderson joined the history faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Before swapping snowboots and toques for slides and beanies, he was an Associate Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. He earned his Ph.D. from York University and an M.A. and a B.A. from the University of Manitoba. Jarett’s research rethinks nineteenth-century Canadian settler colonialism within a transnational framework. His current project traces how debates over settler self-government were tangled up with anti-sodomy laws and broader questions of whiteness, masculinity, and sexuality across the British Empire. He is co-editor, with T.J. Tallie and Kristen Thomas-McGill, of the forthcoming Queering the Tensions of Empire (2027). Jarett teaches courses on gender and sexuality, queer North America, and comparative settler colonialism and oversees the Undergraduate Journal of History—work for which he received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentorship in 2023. Outside the classroom, Jarett still laces up weekly at Ice in Paradise in Goleta.

Joe Walther holds the Bertelsen Presidential Chair in Technology and Society. He's a Distinguished Professor of Communication at UCSB and a faculty affiliate at Harvard Law. He's contributed several landmark theories about how people relate to others online that have been recognized for their lasting impacts on the Communication field.

Dr. Marley Dewey is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Dewey earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maine and her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. During her graduate career, she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, won various art of science contests, and was awarded the Annual Innovation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis from the University of Illinois. After her graduate career, she was a postdoctoral NIH TL1 Clinical and Translational Science Fellow at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Her lab combines biomaterials with extracellular vesicles, and specifically, a new type of extracellular vesicle found embedded within tissues throughout the body, termed matrix-bound nanovesicles. Her lab studies how biomaterials and extracellular vesicles can be leveraged to discover treatments for bone cancer, accelerate bone repair, prevent bone infection, and restore coral reefs. As an assistant professor, she has won various awards and research grants such as an NSF CAREER award, an NIH Maximizing Investigators Research Award, a Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship, a Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship, and an Early Career Faculty Excellence Award.

​​Ralph Armbruster Sandoval is Professor and Chair of the Department of Chicana/o Studies. He is also Faculty Director of the UCSB Community Labor Center. Dr. Armbruster Sandoval has been active in social movements on the Central Coast for nearly 30 years.

Siddharth Dey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and thereafter conducted post-doctoral research at the Hubrecht Institute in The Netherlands. Dr. Dey then moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2017 to start his independent research group. Dr. Dey’s lab has been funded by NSF grants and NIH R01 grants from NICHD and NHGRI that support their work developing multiomics single-cell sequencing technologies to study how variability in the epigenome regulates gene expression heterogeneity and cell fate decisions during early mammalian development. As a PI/co-PI on training grants from NIH and NSF, Dr. Dey is also deeply committed to training the next-generation of scientists. Dr. Dey’s work has been published in several leading journals, including Nature Biotechnology, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Nature Communications, Nature Protocols, Cell, Cell Reports Methods, Stem Cell Reports, and Molecular Systems Biology. For his recent accomplishments, Dr. Dey has received the NSF CAREER Award, Shu Chien Early Career Jury Prize, and has been invited to present the Potter Lecture at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center for his contributions to technology development in biosciences.