Vice Provost and Dean Carolyn Thomas has been elected the next president of the Reinvention Collaborative, a national organization of campus leaders responsible for undergraduate education at major research universities.

Thomas, a professor of American studies who has led UC Davis  Undergraduate Education since 2013, will serve as president-elect through the collaborative’s 2020 national conference, then serve a year as president and board chair.

Announcement of Thomas’ election came during the Reinvention Collaborative’s recent meeting at UC Davis. Thomas co-convened the meeting with Steve Dandaneau, the collaborative’s executive director. Dandaneau is associate provost at Colorado State University, which hosts the collaborative’s headquarters.

The meeting drew representatives from some 75 major universities, including 55 vice provosts and 75 advising directors, for the largest attendance in the organization’s 19-year history.

UC Davis is a charter member of the Reinvention Collaborative and has actively participated in its leadership since its early years. The group was founded in response to the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates’ Carnegie-sponsored 1998 report, “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities.”

Craig Tracy, distinguished professor of mathematics, and Professor Harold Widom of UC Santa Cruz will receive the 2020 Steele Prize for Seminal Contributions to Research from the American Mathematical Society. The prize recognizes their landmark work on Tracy-Widom distributions, a major breakthrough in statistics with applications in signal processing and other fields.

The Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research is awarded annually for a paper that has proved to be of fundamental or lasting importance in its field, or a model of important research. The 2020 prize will be awarded Jan. 16 during  the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Denver.

Adam Napolitan, director of Web Communications in Strategic Communications, is an Edgie Award winner. The award is from BrightEdge, a company that works in the online world, providing search engine optimization and content performance management services for large institutions, including UC Davis.

Napolitan’s digital marketing Edgie recognizes him as an SEO professional who excels broadly outside of SEO.

Edgie Award recipients are selected from all of the service regions that BrightEdge serves, including the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.

Dateline UC Davis welcomes news of faculty and staff awards, for publication in Laurels. Send information to dateline@ucdavis.edu.

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