“Ultimate Broker” Carole Hom Retires After Decades of “Amazing” Mentorship

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.” 

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