Dean's Message

As I write this, it is clear we are faced with complex challenges not only at home but in every region around the globe.

For each of these challenges, there are important social and political dimensions. As our state faces threats of wildfires and destruction of housing and property, how can and should governments respond?  How should scarce resources, such as medical care and educational attainment, be distributed among a population? What forms of public communication about health and safety can be effective? How do we build schools and social environments to support young children to grow and thrive? 

For each of these questions and many others, social scientists at UC San Diego play an important role. Our faculty debate economies of scale for scarce resources, including protecting property from wildfires.  We train graduate students in methods of teaching literacy to young children whose first language is not English. We study the impact of social media and digital environments on effective civic participation. Our faculty in partnership with faculty in other schools at UC San Diego have reached out across the country to partner with state governments in how to build trust and effectiveness in our electoral processes.

In the School of Social Science and across our departments and programs, we are the substance that links theory to action. We study how resources are collected and distributed according to political and social imperatives. We study the complex mechanisms of learning and memory in humans. We use big data to track language change over time, giving us a way to observe changes in social groupings within society.  We devise early education programs to ensure that young children are ready to learn to read and write when they begin kindergarten and first grade.  We compare competing models for funding poverty programs around the world to see which work better. We identify social networks of friends and colleagues and observe how they promote collective decision-making and community well-being. We extract artifacts from ancient civilizations and extrapolate how societies faced climate change three thousand years ago.

More than half of all students at UC San Diego take classes with faculty in the social sciences.  With 11 departments and 5 interdisciplinary degree-granting programs, we are the largest school on campus, with over 13,500 majors.

When we hire new faculty in the social sciences, our departments look for individuals who can deliver imaginative ways of tackling our society’s problems: new models, new approaches and new outcomes.  Our undergraduate and graduate students are apprentices and partners in our quest for an engaged and committed approach to the social sciences. Our broader project is to understand complexity and propose ways of bringing our problems to human scale. Welcome to the Social Sciences at UC San Diego.

Carol Padden
Dean of Social Sciences
Sanford I. Berman Chair in Language and Human Communication