Kelly Kovacic, TMC alum and Social Studies teacher at The Preuss School UCSD, an intensive college preparatory charter school for low-income students, has been named one of five California Teachers of the Year for 2010. Kovacic has also been selected as California’s nominee for the prestigious National Teacher of the Year competition and will soon be traveling to Washington, D.C., to meet President Obama. " All of my students will be the first generation of their families to graduate from college," states Kovacic. "I treat my students as future leaders, because they are." More ...

Kovacic is also one of five San Diego County "Teachers of the Year." More...

SVO President Justice Castaneda (left) stands with Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Penny Rue, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Admissions Mae Brown, and Associate Director of Financial Aid Vonda Garcia.

Thurgood Marshall College senior, Justice Castaneda serves as the president of the university’s Student Veteran Organization (SVO), where he’s collaborated with staff on creating events and developing initiatives that help support the campus’ 200 undergraduate students who have served in the military. The honor student also volunteers as a tutor and mentor to underprivileged youths at a local high school. More ...

New York Times and two time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof speaking on "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide." Half the Sky is a call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women in the developing world.

With Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake a journey through Africa and Asia to meet an extraordinary array of women struggling under profoundly dire circumstances. Their stories help us see that the key to progress lies in unleashing women’s potential—and they make clear how each of us can help make that happen. More ...

Transforming Women from Victims to Engaged Participants Key to Abating Global Poverty

Calling gender inequity the "central moral challenge"of this day, comparable with totalitarianism in the twentieth century and slavery in the nineteenth, Kristof painted a picture of ferocious persecution and fantastic promise for the world’s more than 3 billion women. Kristoff spoke to an audience of about 800 people in a packed Price Center ballroom Wednesday, October 28th as part of the Helen Edison Lecture Series, co-sponsored by Thurgood Marshal College. More ...

For the first time in UnOlympics history the Thurgood Marshall College students won the coveted Golden Shoe with their "Welcome to the Jungle" dance. All six colleges of UC San Diego gathered at the UnOlympics XXXI, for the first time Marshall went home with the shoe. More...

Laren Poole, a former UCSD student, spent more than six years documenting the plight of young children in Northern Uganda.
Courtesy of Invisible Children   [video]

Laren's time at UCSD, and especially his experience at Thurgood Marshall College, helped ignite his interest in social justice. He decided to go to Africa because he felt the United States’ image abroad was being tarnished. More...

Abbie Celniker has enjoyed a distinguished career in the field of biotechnology, holding senior positions at top companies, including Novartis Biologics, Genentech, and most recently as chief executive officer of Taligen. Dr. Celniker has more than twenty years of experience in building biologics-focused businesses. While serving as global head of Novartis Biologics, she built and managed the basic infrastructure and strategy for the late-stage discovery and development of protein therapeutics. At Genentech, her group was responsible for pioneering the use and refinement of many of the current analytical assays now used to characterize all protein biopharmaceuticals. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Arizona and a B.A. in Biology from the University of California, San Diego.

Alumni Association – Awards for Excellence