Many of you know and have received support for your scholarship from Dr. Kalindi Vora. For four years, Dr. Vora served as faculty director of the Feminist Research Institute and was instrumental in growing our mission-driven programming.

“There are countless individuals on campus who benefit from Dr. Vora’s support, leadership and knowledge. We at FRI know we are not alone when we say that she’s made many lasting contributions to her field and campus,” said Associate Director Sarah McCullough.

During the 2021-22 academic year, Dr. Vora is on leave from UC Davis and is serving as Visiting Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. FRI will appoint an interim faculty director in her absence, and an announcement is forthcoming.

While director of FRI, Dr. Vora oversaw significant programmatic gains, including

• Asking Different Questions: As co-PI, she helped to secure NSF funding for an innovative experiential program training STEM practitioners and researchers on social justice and research culture interventions. By establishing approaches to research in STEM fields informed through feminist, anti-racist and other equity-based standpoints, ADQ seeks to improve projects and make our knowledge base more impactful.
• Feminist Collaboratory: As director, she led numerous multidisciplinary groups of scholars to examine research topics that connect back to FRI’s values of: transformation, inclusion, justice and intersectionality. Supporting faculty, graduate fellows and visiting scholars, these collaboratories provided a vital hub for feminist research at UC Davis. Projects include FRI's Beyond Health Collaboratory and the Collaboratory on Feminist and Social Justice Science Methods.
• She also contributed as a leader to emerging fields of scholarship within STS and gender studies, including co-authoring, with Dr. Neda Atanasoski (UC Santa Cruz), Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures from Duke University Press (2018) and, as a member of the Precarity Lab, Technoprecarious from MIT Press (2020).

Among other events, Dr. Vora helped FRI organize several social justice-focused conferences, bringing together administrators, faculty and advocates together to examine diversity efforts among public universities, and lay out a new, future-looking feminist vision for solving big social problems.

Last but not least, she is one of FRI’s staunchest advocates. During times of uncertainty, her strength of leadership kept us brave and her commitment to her students and the FRI community kept us focused. Because of her hard work to earn us advocates and allies among administration and faculty, FRI will be able to do more impactful work in the future. We are proud that she will continue to play a role in the stewardship of FRI’s values and work. Please join us in saying thank you, but not goodbye, to Director Kalindi Vora.

Thank you, Kalindi.