Professor Aldana Receives Funding Through UC Davis' New SEED Program

The UC Davis Office of Research has awarded Professor Raquel Aldana $20,000 in funding under the new Humanities and Social Sciences Stimulating Exceptional and Essential Discovery (SEED) Funding Program. Aldana received the funding for her project “Adjudicating Credibility and the Role of Immigration Forensic Assessments.”

The Office of Research and Vice Chancellor for Research Simon J. Atkinson announced the SEED Funding Program award recipients on Jan. 24. Launched by then-interim Vice Chancellor for Research Jeff Gibeling, the awards support research activity with high likelihood of impact in historically underfunded fields in the humanities and related social sciences.  A total of $152,244 was awarded across nine faculty projects for the fiscal year 2023-2024. Read more about the project and recipients.

Raquel E. Aldana joined UC Davis in 2017 to serve as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity with a law faculty appointment. She returned to full-time law teaching in 2020. Aldana’s research has focused on transitional justice, criminal justice reforms and sustainable development in Latin America, as well as immigrant rights. Before UC Davis, Aldana was a professor of law at McGeorge School of Law, and the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She served as associate dean for faculty scholarship at McGeorge from 2013-17. She is a graduate of Arizona State University and Harvard Law School.