Dr. Maria Pallavicini most recently served as interim president during the search for the university's new president — and what turned out to be the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with leading Pacific’s rapid transition to remote learning and work, she led the establishment of Pacific’s School of Health Sciences and oversaw the merger that created Benerd College. The renovation of the William Knox Holt Memorial Library and Learning Center helped bring to life Pallavicini’s vision for a modern hub of learning and innovation.
Prior to Pacific, Provost Pallavicini joined UC Merced in 2002 to establish the School of Natural Sciences for the new research university. She recruited faculty and staff and worked with them to establish undergraduate and graduate teaching programs and research programs in mathematics, biology, chemistry, environmental sciences, and physics. UC Merced opened in 2005. The School of Natural Sciences now includes 53 ladder-rank faculty and approximately 30% of UC Merced's 3,200 undergraduates, and teaches more than half of the total student credit hours at UC Merced.
Provost Pallavicini holds a BS in biochemistry from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. She has held research positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. She was a professor at UC San Francisco, where she taught and ran an active research program, for more than 11 years prior to joining UC Merced as a tenured professor and founding dean.
Dr. Pallavicini's research interest is in understanding the genetic and functional changes in stem cells in cancer (leukemia and breast cancer) that affect stem cell fate decisions. She has authored or co-authored more than 80 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and has presented on stem cells and cancer at scientific conferences around the world. She has held leadership positions in numerous professional societies and served on scientific editorial and advisory boards.
Dr. Pallavicini has taught freshman general education courses on stem cell biology, and health and disease, as well as advanced courses in cancer biology and genetics, and trained numerous graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in health sciences.
A native of San Francisco, Provost Pallavicini has three adult daughters who live in California, all of whom attended University of California schools.
