Longtime UC Davis academic coordinator Carole Hom, who retires this year after a quietly influential career, is so beloved that she has two nametags: one bearing her official title, and another with alternates—“Spiritual Leader” and “Chief Guru”—made for her by colleague Rick Grosberg, a distinguished professor emeritus of Evolution and Ecology. 

As her alternate titles suggest, it’s all but impossible to capture the breadth of Hom’s career. In nearly 40 years on campus, she has mentored students, helped to secure more than a dozen grants, crossed disciplinary boundaries, taught classes, and coordinated training programs like those under the umbrella of the UC-HBCU initiative, which brings students from historically black colleges and universities to Davis for research, and PREP at UC Davis, an NIH-funded post-baccalaureate program that prepares scholars from historically underrepresented groups for Ph.D. programs in the biomedical sciences.

Grosberg, who has worked with Hom for decades, says that Hom has a unique ability to nurture community. “Carole is the ultimate broker of collaborations between people from all walks of life,” Grosberg says. “There should be a statue to Carole as the embodiment of everything that we really mean by the principles of community. She recognized the importance of bringing diversity to our institution in a tangible way.” 

Characteristically, Hom is more modest. “I’ve had a number of appointments, stitching things together,” she says. “It’s appropriate, I guess, that I’m a quilter.” 

A Biologist at Heart

Hom, who is Cantonese-American, grew up in the Bay Area and was a first-generation college student. As she was finishing her master’s degree, she “got hooked on the biology of salamanders,” she says. After mathematical, lab, and field work studying how salamanders allocate the food they take in to either making eggs, storing fat, or growing larger, she earned her Ph.D. in theoretical ecology at the University of Tennessee in 1986. 

She arrived at Davis as a postdoctoral fellow in 1987. In some ways, her research in an interdisciplinary field that bridged mathematics and biology was ahead of its time. 

“My teaching was in mathematics, but my research tended to be more biological,” says Hom, who has continued to teach in the math department over her decades at Davis. “So when I applied for tenure-track positions, the math departments thought I was a biologist and the biology departments thought I was a mathematician. The math departments were right. Deep in my heart, I am a biologist.” 

Grosberg and other faculty members who have worked with Hom say her academic background is critical to both her partnerships with faculty and her skill as a mentor. Joanna Chiu, a professor and chair in the Department of Entomology and Nematology, who has worked with Hom since becoming director of the PREP program two years ago, says: “She knows the struggles, how to get into grad school, how to navigate it, and how to be faculty. She also knows UC Davis and its resources, faculty, strengths and weaknesses very well.”

Mentorship with “Compassion and Empathy” 

Indeed, Chiu says Hom’s reputation helped entice her to take on directing PREP. “I would not have taken the position if she were not the coordinator,” says Chiu. “Carole really cares about every single student. I wish I had worked with her longer, because I would have learned a lot more from her compassion and empathy for students.”

Chiu took over PREP from Dan Starr, a professor of molecular and cellular biology, who had been PREP’s director since its inception seven years ago. He credits Hom with the idea of bringing PREP to UC Davis—though she, modestly, says it was his idea. To date, the program has served 39 students, of whom 37 have been accepted to highly ranked graduate programs; of those, 14 have received NSF graduate fellowships to fully fund three years of PhD study. This year, there are four NSF fellowship recipients, all of whom attended primarily undergraduate institutions. Says Hom: “We’re really proud of that.” 

That’s a remarkable result, Starr emphasizes: “These are students that got rejected from grad school the prior year, and now they’re getting these incredibly prestigious fellowships after working with Carole and the rest of our support group for five months,” says Starr.

But that’s just one facet of Hom’s career, says Starr: “Her real legacy is all the individual students that have benefited from her one-on-one guidance. When a student is in crisis, she just knows when to give them a hug and when to push them. She’s a mother figure.” 

Students who have worked with her agree. “Carole is why I ended up in grad school,” says Alexandria (Allie) Igwe, a former UC-HBCU Initiative Fellow who earned her Ph.D. in microbiology at UC Davis in 2020 and is now an incoming assistant professor at Virginia Tech. “When it was between UC Davis and another institution, I chose UC Davis because Carole would be there.” 

That choice paid off, literally, when Hom advocated for Igwe at a critical moment when her funding was in question. “That relieved an immense amount of pressure and helped me focus on other research and professional development opportunities,” says Igwe. “She goes above and beyond for her students and is an all-around amazing person, professor and mentor.”

For her part, Hom points to Davis’s collaborative, interdisciplinary spirit. “Our faculty here are incredibly open and they’re willing to stretch beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines to take on new things,” she says. “They play well together, and we try to get students who like to do the same. The campus atmosphere is a key part of the success of the programs.”

“I really take to heart the university’s three-part mission of research, teaching and service,” says Hom. “It’s baked into what I’ve done.”

A Continuing Legacy of Changing Lives

Hom plans to enjoy her retirement by traveling, gardening, and continuing to sing. For many years she was a member of university’s Early Music Ensemble, where she met her husband, Neil Willits, also a singer and also retired from a career at UC Davis. “I’ll also do needlework of some sort and spend more time with my dog,” a Cardigan Welsh Corgi named James.

Still, she won’t be leaving UC Davis behind completely. “I hope to disengage enough that my successors can have the freedom to run with the programs the way that they see fit,” Hom says with a smile, “and I hope the programs continue to thrive.” She does, however, plan to continue to support students as a volunteer reader for PREP students’ draft proposals. 

Although the programs Hom coordinated will continue, colleagues say her institutional knowledge and commitment will be deeply missed. “From the smallest details of engagement and empathy to the largest programs she’s run, she is the nucleus,” says Grosberg. “Everything that’s happened in science on our campus that involves collaboration and engaging parties that aren’t traditionally well represented, Carole has done it and quietly disappeared into the background. But long after her retirement, she will be remembered by the individuals whose lives she’s changed.”