Maria Pallavicini
As Provost, Dr. Maria Pallavicini serves as the University's chief academic officer and has overall responsibility for the institution's educational and research programs, library services, enrollment, financial aid, registrar and continuing education. She oversees Pacific's liberal arts college and eight other schools on campuses in Stockton, Sacramento and San Francisco, encompassing 120 academic programs, 839 faculty, 6,700 students, and a $115 million budget.
Prior to Pacific, Provost Pallavicini joined UC Merced in 2002 to establish the School of Natural Sciences for the new research university. She recruited faculty and staff and worked with them to establish undergraduate and graduate teaching programs and research programs in mathematics, biology, chemistry, environmental sciences, and physics. UC Merced opened in 2005. The School of Natural Sciences now includes 53 ladder-rank faculty and approximately 30% of UC Merced's 3,200 undergraduates, and teaches more than half of the total student credit hours at UC Merced.
Provost Pallavicini holds a B.S. in biochemistry from UC Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. She has held research positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. She was a professor at UC San Francisco, where she taught and ran an active research program, for more than 11 years prior to joining UC Merced as a tenured professor and founding dean.
Dr. Pallavicini's research interest is in understanding the genetic and functional changes in stem cells in cancer (leukemia and breast cancer) that affect stem cell fate decisions. She has authored or co-authored more than 80 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and has presented on stem cells and cancer at scientific conferences around the world. She has held leadership positions in numerous professional societies and served on scientific editorial and advisory boards.
Dr. Pallavicini has taught freshman general education courses on stem cell biology, and health and disease, as well as advanced courses in cancer biology and genetics, and trained numerous graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in health sciences.
A native of San Francisco, Provost Pallavicini has three adult daughters who live in California, all of whom attended University of California schools.
