As Black History Month draws to a close, we celebrate and reflect on the many outstanding achievements and contributions Black Americans have made to our state, our nation and to the world at large.

“Throughout UC’s history, Black alumni, faculty and students have been integral to our excellence, making pioneering advances in science, medicine, the humanities, the law and other fields,” said Michael Drake, president of the University of California.

In honor of Black History Month, Victoria Watson-Zink, the Graduate Student Advisor to the Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, has highlighted four legendary trailblazing Black scientists:

• Margaret James Strickland Collins, PhD, who was the first Black female entomologist
• Charles Henry Turner, PhD, who was the first person to discover that insects can hear and alter their behaviors based on memories of past experiences
• Ernest Everett Just, PhD, who was a pioneer in the field of cellular biology and embryology
• Roger Arliner Young, PhD, who was the first Black woman to obtain a PhD in Zoology and the first Black woman to publish in her field

We’d also like to share a very short, non-exhaustive list of Black researchers who are currently active in the biological sciences:

• Janet Buckner, PhD (UT Arlington): Macroevolution in living and extinct tetrapods
• Liliana Davalos, PhD (Stony Brook): Molecular evolution, phylogenetics, tropical conservation
• Cassandra Extavour, PhD (Harvard): Embryogenesis, developmental differentiation
• Kassandra Ford, PhD (University of Bern): Electric fish, skull evolution, feeding morphology
• Swanne Gordon, PhD (Washington University): Rapid evolution, color polymorphisms, sexual selection
• Melissa Kemp, PhD (UT Austin): Extinction, paleobiology, ecology, conservation, diversification
• Danielle Lee, PhD (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville): Small rodent behavior, biogeography
• Karen Nelson, PhD (JCVI): Microbial ecology, microbial genomics, microbe physiology, metagenomics
• Lynette Strickland, PhD (TAMU-CC): Phenotype-genotype evolution, tortoise beetles
• Jessica Ware, PhD (AMNH): Systematics, behavior, genomics, morphological ecology

About the advisor to the dean for diversity, equity and inclusion

Victoria Watson-Zink was born and raised in Miami, Fl. by a single mother and completed her B.S. in biological sciences at Cornell University in 2013. During her undergraduate career, she studied climate science, marine biology and coral reef biodiversity at the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, as well as the Indonesian Biodiversity Research Center in Bali, Indonesia, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

After graduating, she worked for two years as a lab manager and research technician at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., which is where she discovered her passion for understanding life-history evolution in terrestrial crabs. She began her Ph.D. in Population Biology at UC Davis in 2015, and has traveled extensively across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to observe and collect genetic samples from land crabs. As a disabled Black woman in evolution and ecology, Watson-Zink is passionate about increasing, supporting, and retaining diversity of all kinds in STEM fields.

Watson-Zink serves as the Graduate Student Advisor to the Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis.

A college-wide commitment to supporting diversity

The College of Biological Sciences is committed to increasing and supporting diversity in all of its facets in our student body, our workforce, our faculty and our educational programs. We strive to build a diverse, vibrant and collaborative community of people from different racial, socioeconomic, cultural and ethnic backgrounds regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation and disability and veteran status.