Adela de la Torre, vice chancellor of Student Affairs and Campus Diversity, announced her appointment of Raquel Aldana to the new position of associate vice chancellor for Academic Diversity. She’s been teaching law since 2000, the last eight years as a professor at Sacramento’s McGeorge School of Law, a branch of the University of the Pacific.

She takes up her new post on July 1. Working with faculty and administrators across the campus, Aldana “will focus on increasing the diversity of our faculty and those in other career academic positions through community- and network-building, engendering an inclusive academic culture that values diversity and engagement, and enhancing efforts to increase diversity in the pipeline toward academic careers at UC Davis,” de la Torre said in her announcement.

She said AVC Aldana will support implementation of the UC Davis Diversity and Inclusion Initiative, as well as provide oversight for the CAMPOS Initiative and the UC Davis ADVANCE program.

Aldana is a graduate of Arizona State University (earning a bachelor’s degree in English and another in Spanish) and Harvard Law School. She was a professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, before joining the McGeorge faculty in 2009.

Her scholarship has focused on transitional justice and criminal justice reforms in Latin America as well as immigrant rights in the United States. She has taught immigration law and international human rights, lawyering for immigrants, “crimmigration,” criminal law and procedure, international labor law, and Latin American comparative law.

She founded and directed the McGeorge School of Law’s Inter-American Program, which trains bilingual and bicultural lawyers for transnational careers or to work with the growing Latino population in the United States. She served as the school’s associate dean for faculty scholarship, 2013–17.

She is co-editing From Extraction to Emancipation: Development Reimagined, a forthcoming book from the American Bar Association. She was recently re-elected to the Latin America and Caribbean Council of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative, and previously served as the co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Guatemala, 2006 and 2007.

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