UAW 5810 - Key Persons
My name is Ambika Kamath. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at University of California Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management. Soon I will be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Colorado Boulder. My research is focused on the Evolution of Animal Behavior. I have been a member of the UC Postdoc Union, UAW Local 5810, and at CU, will join UCW-CWA Local 7799. I believe that science is at its most powerful when it serves the public interest, and that labor unions are our most powerful tool for democratizing science.
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, and a member of UAW 4121. Science affects all lives, and at its best, uplifts the lives of everyone. A just, equitable, diverse, and supportive research environment is conducive to better, impactful science. I believe that scientists, as workers and as citizen stakeholders, can leverage the power of collective action to improve science within research institutions and beyond, at a national and global level.
I started working at Columbia in 2012 as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the department of Genetics and Development, researching how the cellular environment affects the expansion of incipient cancer cells, and I am now the President of Columbia Postdoctoral Workers-UAW Local 4100. Back in 2015 I and other researchers started discussing the many difficulties and issues of working in Academia. As we started to organize our union at Columbia, and more recently since winning our first contract, it became clear that when we stand together we are able to improve our working conditions and research outcomes. Just as important, along with other unions we can raise the collective voice of researchers nationally, using our different types of expertise to serve the broader community and build a better society for all.
I'm a postdoc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography studying geophysics. I'm a current and former member of a union and have seen first hand how powerful and impactful collective bargaining is. At my previous institution, where I helped form a student worker union for the first time, graduate researcher pay had languished for decades, cost of housing had soared, and sexual harassment was rampant with little recourse for victims. As soon as we began organizing ourselves and collectively demanding improvements to our working conditions, the University began raising our pay and taking harassment more seriously. The more we work together for our collective good, the more we can change research for the better.
I'm a postdoc/lecturer in mathematics and I study random matrices and quantum probability. I'm a current steward in UAW 5810. Mathematics, like many other sciences, suffers from severe gender inequity and lack of representation of minoritized races, despite the clear existence of talent in these underrepresented groups, a problem which is especially pronounced at top research institutions. I believe that collective action by committed scientists must be part of the solution.
I'm a member and organizer with UAW 4121, the union that represents over 6,000 Academic Student Employees and Postdocs at the University of Washington, where I earned my PhD in Pharmacology. In my 10 years at the bench, I've learned that we are all better scientists when our workplaces are inclusive and just and when our basic human needs are met. I believe that as a scientific community, we must reject scarcity and turn our collective focus towards working in solidarity with each other to take collective action in order to create the future we want: well funded research, career stability, inclusive and welcoming institutions, and science as a public good in our society.
I'm a Graduate Student Researcher in Neuroscience using optogenetics to explore visual processing in mice. Academic workers need unions because lab work is hard enough in the best circumstances, and too many of us experience discriminatory and unsafe working conditions. By organizing together, we can better protect ourselves from harmful workplace practices.
I'm a postdoc at UCSC, in the chemistry department. My research uses imaging mass spectrometry to answer questions about small-molecule communication, from bacterial-fungal interactions to cancer in mammalian systems. As an international scholar and an out queer individual in science, I care about building welcoming spaces for those who have been left out by systemic discrimination. Being part of a union gives me the opportunity to push for equitable policies and spaces which include marginalized and historically underrepresented people. Science thrives on innovation, so it is vitally important to include the perspective of as broad a coalition of people as possible. This means not only including minoritized groups - people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, noncitizens - but challenging the systemic issues that lead to their exclusion in the first place.
I am a former member of UAW 2865 and UAW 5810, and a current Postdoc at NIH conducting research in computational biophysics. My experiences as a union organizer showed me how, by standing together as workers, graduate students and postdocs can improve their pay and working hours, fight harassment and discrimination, and push for policy changes that improve their workplaces and broader communities. I therefore strongly believe in the power of collective action to transform the scientific enterprise into a just, equitable, and democratic institution.
Hi, I am Stacey Sargent Frederick, Program Coordinator for the JFSP California Fire Science Consortium based at the University of California, Berkeley where my position is a represented Associate Specialist. As part of the Joint Fire Science Program's Fire Science Exchange Network I strive to bridge the gap between knowledge and practice throughout the fire world. I have been involved in organized labor since I fought for graduate research assistants to join the graduate student unit at Oregon State University and now serve as the recording secretary for UC Berkeley on the Joint Council. The solidarity across institutions and science fields to work internally towards creating and enforcing a more equitable and safe workplace is beyond inspiring.
I am a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley studying the gut microbiome. Organizing researchers allows us to have more leverage in the unbalanced power dynamic that we currently have in Academia. Through our low wages and dismissed cases of harassment and discrimination, we are made to feel that we are undervalued and disposable. However, by binding together and speaking with one voice, we can remind our institutions that we are the life-blood of the research that makes our universities great. We are always stronger together.
My name is Álvaro Cuesta-Domínguez and I'm an associate research scientist in the department pf Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University and current member of CPW-UAW Local 4100. Since I started this position 5 years ago I have taken an active part in organizing our co-workers to form a union (the first postdoc union at a private university nationwide!). After intense months of bargaining we finally won our first contract last summer, but we keep on working in different areas such as improving parent workers conditions, fighting racism and bias, increasing diversity and inclusion and establishing a much needed anti-bullying policy.