This week, Dateline’s Org Chart column is all about centers: A new director for the Genome Center, an interim executive director for the Mondavi Center, and the departure of the director of the UC Center Sacramento.

Dateline UC Davis welcomes news of appointments of various kinds for faculty and staff, for publication in Org Chart (formerly titled Transitions). Send information to dateline@ucdavis.edu.

Genome Center director

Blake Meyers, a principal investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and a professor of plant sciences from the University of Missouri - Columbia, has been named the new director and Novozymes Chair in Genomics at the UC Davis Genome Center. Meyers, who studies plant RNA biology, bioinformatics and functional genomics, will step into the role on March 1.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Meyers succeeds the center’s founding director Richard Michelmore, a distinguished professor in the Departments of Plant Sciences, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Medical Microbiology and Immunology.

Read more about Meyers’ appointment in this article.

— Evan White

Interim Mondavi Center director

Jeremy Ganter has been named interim executive director of the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts as the search continues for a replacement for Don Roth, who will retire this week after 17 seasons with the center.

Ganter currently serves as associate executive director and director of programming at the Mondavi Center. He’s also a Ph.D. student in U.S. history.

UC Center Sacramento director

Richard L. Kravitz, director of the UC Center Sacramento, or UCCS, has announced he will step down on June 30, after nearly 11 years leading the center. Kravitz will return full-time to the faculty in the UC Davis School of Medicine, where he is a distinguished professor of medicine. The University of California will launch a search for his successor this fall.

UCCS is a systemwide program managed by UC Davis, with the director dually reporting to the UC Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs and to the UC Davis Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor. 

Kravitz was initially appointed interim director of UCCS in 2013 and became its permanent director two years later.

Read more in the full announcement.

— Cindy Brown