Professor Zulema Valdez joined the Division of Equity, Justice, and Inclusive Excellence as Interim Associate Vice Chancellor in the Fall of 2023. Prior to this appointment, she served as Associate Vice Provost of Academic Personnel, a position she held from 2018 to 2023. In that role she oversaw faculty development and diversity initiatives aimed at the recruitment, hiring, and retention of faculty, and developed processes related to formal and informal conflict resolution and building a healthy campus climate. She established programs to train faculty on implicit bias and best practices in faculty searches, including early career faculty success programs, workshops to better understand and evaluate contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in hiring, and a faculty learning community for enhanced virtual/hybrid teaching under unprecedented conditions relating to the pandemic. She served as an ex-officio member of the Academic Senate Committee on Diversity and Equity and the Committee on Faculty Welfare and Academic Freedom. As past Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Sociology, where she serves as a full professor, she oversaw the recruitment, admissions, and program assessment for graduate programs in public health and sociology. She leads/Co-leads several grants sponsored by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and UCOP’s Advancing Faculty Diversity, totaling over 1.5M to date.
In her role as interim AVC, she is committed to developing sustainable initiatives focused on equity and inclusive excellence for and across our campus community.
Professor Valdez's research interests center on the emergence, persistence, and reproduction of social inequality and stratification in the United States, particularly in institutions such as the labor market, higher education, and neighborhoods. She is an expert in the study of undocumented students in higher education, minoritized entrepreneurship, and health disparities in low-resource communities; a program of research that she approaches through an intersectional lens. Professor Valdez has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Poverty Center and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, as well as grants from the National Institute for Health and NSF/American Sociological Association. She is the author of two books, The New Entrepreneurs: How Race, Class, and Gender Shape American Enterprise and Entrepreneurs and the Search for the American Dream; an anthology - Beyond Black and White: A Reader on Contemporary Race Relations; several edited volumes and dozens of articles.
Professor Valdez grew up in the Central Valley. She is a proud first-generation college student, community college transfer student, and graduate of UCLA.