Denice Denton

Denice D. Denton was the chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz — the youngest and first openly gay chancellor in the UC system — and an electrical engineer and advocate for women and underrepresented groups in science and engineering. She earned four degrees in electrical engineering from MIT — a bachelor’s, engineer’s degree, master’s, and Ph.D. — completing her doctorate in 1983 with a dissertation on moisture transport in polyimide films in integrated circuits. Her research focused on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) as an enabling technology, particularly for life sciences applications. She began her academic career at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 1987 as the only woman in her department, and in 1996 became dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington — the first woman to hold such a position at an NRC-designated Research I university. She co-founded CELT, an NSF-supported program to improve engineering instruction that was later modeled by Harvard, Stanford, and others. In 2005, she was appointed the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the youngest chancellor in the UC system at the time. She was a fellow of the AAAS, IEEE, and Association for Women in Science, and held three patents. Chancellor Denton passed away on June 24, 2006.