J. Arthur Woodward

J. Arthur Woodward is a Professor and founding faculty in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at the University of California, Merced.

A Personal Message to Students

I was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I worked on our family farm, fishing in our lake and hiking in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains until I left for college. So moving to the Merced area is nice for me because, on the one hand, it's rural and a gateway to places like Yosemite, but also is close to one of the most beautiful cities in the world --San Francisco. What is most exciting to me is the opportunity to help create a new university.

After I was graduated from Wake Forest University I entered the Peace Corps. I went to the Philippines where the International Rice Research Institute was developing new strains of rice that genetically were designed to resist local diseases and to have greater yields. Social psychologists were involved in helping to promote adoption of the new rice by farmers. That was the first time I had seen either genetics research or psychology in action. This had a lasting effect on what I did later.

After returning to the U.S., I taught in the public schools for several years, first as a junior high school teacher and later as a physics and chemistry teacher in high school. That was an eye opener! It is hard to be an effective public school teacher. So that experience shaped many of my attitudes about education, and raised questions that have never been answered for me even today, like how can we recruit better people into teaching, how can teachers be better trained, and why are our public school teachers not given better salaries and support?

After graduate school my first and only academic job before U.C. Merced was in the Psychology Department at UCLA. I taught quantitative methods including basic statistics and experimental design to incoming graduate students. During the late 1980s, I became the department chair and remained so more than a decade. That was another eye opener! It is (necessarily, I guess) hard to bring about meaningful change in a huge established organization of any kind, and so this adds to my excitement about the new U.C. campus at Merced.

My research has evolved across a number of content topics, but always has as the core, the development of new statistical methods and novel applications of existing techniques and knowledge. At one point I became involved with the federal government's efforts to develop methods to estimate the number of heroin uses in the major U.S. cities. Stemming from my interests in education, as well as cognitive science, a former graduate student and I carried out a 6-year effort to design multimedia software to teach math to children who were too young to even read. With money raised from the private sector, we formed a team of software engineers, artists, musicians, content specialists, and a local kindergarten teacher. We got a license for the Stuart Little character from Sony Pictures Entertainment, installed Stuart Little as our main character, and the Learning Company now distributes the software. That project brought together many different disciplines: cognitive development, graphic arts, music, programming, human factors, and early education. So Merced continues the opportunity for me to do integrative scholarship – here we will have no departments! Faculty from many disciplines will pursue common interests without the confinement of traditional administrative departments.