College Scholars Program
College Scholars Program
Chris Grey
pmorale5@ucsc.edu
Chris Hables Gray researches the social and political implications of science and technology. He has written over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is the author of Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict (1997), Cyborg Citizen (2001), and Peace War and Computers (2005). He was lead editor of The Cyborg Handbook (1995) and Modified: Living as a Cyborg (2021).
He has a number of books in process, including Virus is a Language: AI, COVID-19, and QAnon (forthcoming from Goldsmiths University Press), Sacred Violence, Military AI, and War in the Middle East (with Dr. Cheyenne Laue and under accelerated review and publication by Palgrave Press) and Prefigurative AI: The Making of AI (with Prof. Angel Gordo, under consideration by Bristol University Press). He also writes science fiction, and two of his stories from a cycle about the psychological implications of emerging technologies have been published.
Both his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from UCSC´s infamous History of Consciousness program are interdisciplinary. He first taught at Stanford in the 1970s, courses on anarchism and also men and feminism. After school he spent several decades as a working class activist. He remains a committed citizen of California, which means taking part in many different levels of politics.
He taught the required core course at Crown College for many years, along with other classes at UCSC. He has held full time positions at Goddard College, the Union Institute and University and the University of Great Falls. He has also taught at Oregon State University, University College Cork (Ireland), Jan Masaryk University (Czech Republic), and most recently NYU.
A tenth generation Californian, he lives downtown in Santa Cruz with his oldest son, a winemaker, when he is not traveling, most often to Spain and Cataluña. Besides writing, he does art, such as creating Tarot cards, gardens on his balcony, plays disc golf, and keeps promising himself he will soon get a cat.
Katie Greaney
CRWN 86: Professional Communication in a Digital Age, CRWN 90: Start-up Entrepreneurship Academy
Kati Greaney came to UC Santa Cruz from St. Louis, MO as an undergraduate in the Community Studies department and then returned as a graduate student in the Social Documentation program. Her interest and passion for humanity and storytelling led her to work as a photographer and documentary filmmaker on projects across the US, throughout Southern India, Cuba and Brazil. She is currently teaching the college one course at Crown College and John R Lewis College, in addition to courses in Digital Storytelling and Entrepreneurship.
Pedro Morales-Almazan
CRWN 85: Math Problems in Data Science
pmorale5@ucsc.edu
Pedro Morales-Almazan, originally from Guatemala, is a Teaching Professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His fascination with mathematics began during high school math competitions, which sparked his enduring interest in mathematical puzzles and brain teasers. This passion led him to study mathematics and engineering in college, recognizing math’s dual nature as a source of both theoretical creativity and practical application. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics and has worked as a professor at The University of Texas at Austin and now at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Pedro firmly believes that mathematics is a guiding force for intuition and reasoning, with the capacity to discover and describe our world. His teaching interests include Inquiry-Based Learning, technology-enhanced teaching, and improving student engagement, while his mathematical research focuses on Zeta Functions in Number Theory and Quantum Field Theory. Additionally, his outreach efforts encompass Math Circles and Math Teachers’ Circles.
Peter Rothman
CRWN 88: Computational Futurology
Peter is a technologist, futurist, and entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in high tech companies and applied research. Peter was an early developer and innovator in the fields of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and streaming media. Peter was a founder or early-stage employee of over a dozen start-up companies acting as director of software engineering, chief technology officer, or chief scientist. He did cutting-edge research for the US Department of Defense and was a pioneer of automated sensor fusion and sensor management as well as training applications of virtual reality. He developed early applications of recurrent neural networks and designed a neural computer for DARPA. His companies developed numerous firsts including the first business application of virtual reality and a touch enabled stock market visualization app for the first iPad. He has developed award-winning applications for personal computers, tablets, and smartphones.
Peter is currently a lecturer at Crown College, teaches CRWN 88, Computational Futurology, a class that explores the use of computational approaches for prediction of human behavior. He is an alumnus of the university with a degree in mathematics from Porter College as well as a master’s degree in computer engineering from The USC Viterbi School where he concentrated in artificial intelligence and neural computing, studying with early pioneers Bart Kosko and Michael Arbib. His current research focuses on the dynamics of misinformation and societal collapse.
