Several hundred UCOP staff joined UC President James B. Milliken via Zoom on March 6 for the second event in the President’s Leadership Conversation Series, featuring UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive.

The series launched in December 2025 to provide UCOP staff a chance to hear directly from UC leaders about their professional journeys, their unique campuses, and topics that are most pressing for them today.

President Milliken explained that he hoped the conversations would reinforce how the work of UCOP staff connects to and supports UC campuses.

An unconventional path to leadership

Over the course of the conversation, Chancellor Larive shared memories of her upbringing on a small subsistence farm outside Deadwood, South Dakota, a gold-mining town of about 2,000 people (made popular by the HBO series of the same name). Her father left school in the third grade and, like most men of the town, worked at the mine. Her mother earned a high school diploma.

“My parents wanted something better for me,” Chancellor Larive explained. When she caught her bedspread on fire with the alcohol burner in her chemistry set (a birthday gift from her parents), her mother was matter of fact. “She said to me, ‘If you’re going to be a scientist, you have to be more careful. You don’t need a bedspread, but I don’t want you to do your experiments on your bed any longer.’”

Chancellor Larive imagined a future as a high school chemistry teacher, but her aspirations shifted after a chance encounter with a scientist at her summer job at the mine. “I stayed and talked to him for a long time, and he asked what it was that I wanted to do. I explained that I wanted to be a high school chemistry teacher — because I knew what that was — and he said, ‘Well, that’s good. We need chemistry teachers. We also need scientists. You could be a scientist.’ That was the first time I learned that being a scientist was a career, and it changed my whole trajectory.”

Chancellor Larive also shared the importance of mentorship in her professional journey. “I went to South Dakota State University because I got a scholarship to go there. At the beginning, I was very insecure. It seemed like everybody was smarter than me, and I wasn’t sure I belonged. One day, after my first-semester chemistry course, the instructor asked me to come up after class. I felt ready to be sick — I thought they’d found out that I was an imposter. But he invited me to get involved in undergraduate research as a freshman, and it was a life-changing experience. I see that repeated here at UC Santa Cruz — students being mentored and helped by our faculty through research and fieldwork. It helps them to not only have a powerful educational experience, but also to be welcomed into the university in a very personal way.”

Looking forward at UC Santa Cruz

At UCSC, Chancellor Larive is focused on elevating the capacity and potential of her campus, as well as its ability to provide homegrown talent throughout the greater region.

One program she is particularly enthusiastic about is the UC PRIME Central Coast partnership between UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis, launching in 2027, which will provide training for students dedicated to improving health outcomes through culturally responsive care, community partnerships, and preventive medicine in local communities. “Here on the Central Coast, we do not have enough doctors. We’re in a health care desert,” Chancellor Larive explained. “This will be a pathway program where medical students from the Central Coast will complete their first two years at UC Davis and then come back here to the Central Coast to do their clinical coursework, and hopefully also their residency.”

Chancellor Larive also shared how the UC Santa Cruz Innovation and Business Engagement Hub is working to reverse the trend of successful tech companies moving out of Santa Cruz to more concentrated tech hubs like Silicon Valley. “By welcoming companies who are interested in collaborating with our faculty or licensing our technologies, we have, over the past four years, had over 200 invention disclosures, about 150 patents, and eight startup companies that have life sciences intellectual property.”

And, she explained the many ways in which the campus has embraced artificial intelligence — in its research enterprises, in its administrative management strategy and in its philosophy around the importance of a liberal arts education. “What we can give to students at UC Santa Cruz are the traditional educational liberal arts ideas of critical thinking, reading deeply, analyzing data, communicating well with other people, and working as part of a team — as well as being able to use your judgement in ways that have an ethical basis. I am absolutely convinced that this is a tremendous opportunity for humanities disciplines that have been declining in popularity over the years.”

To hear the entire conversation, including questions from audience members, watch the event video.

Editor’s note: Direct quotes have been lightly revised for readability in this format.

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