Vicki was born and raised on a large commercial farm in Napa, California. She was able to combine her farm knowledge and love of science when she studied at California State Polytechnical Institute in San Luis Obispo with a major in Dairy Science. She has worked in the SFCC Admissions & Registration office for 20 years. During this time, she had the opportunity to serve students from application to completion and beyond.

Vicki joined the Computing, Math, and Science Division as a Guided Pathway Specialist in 2022. She is passionate about STEM, pathways and dedicated to helping students achieve their goals by meeting them where they are.

When off-campus, she enjoys spending time with her family, gardening and reading. She is proud of her 3 sons and 2 daughters-in-law who attended CCS.

Adriana began her higher education studies as a non-traditional community college student. A love of nature and curiosity about natural phenomena led her to obtain a BS with a double major in Chemistry and Biology, followed by an MS in Chemistry from the University of Houston, Clear Lake. She continued her studies with one year of graduate level biology and toxicology classes at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Adriana completed an internship with Exxon at their Polymer Research Center and worked for Krug Life Sciences, a contractor for Johnson Space Center in Houston. To explore a career in education, she began teaching at night at community college and enjoyed it so much she decided to seek a full-time teaching job. Adriana has been teaching chemistry at SFCC since the fall 1998 and has loved every year since.

Dr. Gates received her BS in Biochemistry and minored in Chemistry and the University of Washington. She received a doctorate in Chemistry at the University of Oregon where she focused on the auto-regulation of MBNL1 pre-mRNA in myotonic dystrophy.

Holly is the Lab Technician for the Physical Science Department at SFCC.  She earned a B.S. in Geology from Eastern Washington University.  When she’s not at work doing science, she is backpacking and camping with her German Shepherd.  Holly is passionate about the physical sciences because they help answer some of our planet’s greatest mysteries.  She is happy to be a part of student success in STEM at SFCC!

Joanna’s Greek, born and raised in the beautiful Mediterranean island of Cyprus. She was one of twenty females to attend the boys Science High school on the whole island (girls at the time were not supposed to study science). There she studied math, chemistry, and physics. Since childhood she collected rocks. Immediately she got interested in the chemistry of rocks, and that made her a chemist. She got her BSc of science in chemistry and her M.S. in organic chemistry at the amazing American University of Beirut Lebanon. She got her Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque N.M. She completed two post-doctoral appointments: the first, in drug design (specifically cancer drugs) at Claremont Colleges, California and the second in Toxicology at Lovelace Inhalation and Toxicology Institute in Albuquerque N.M. She’s very passionate about teaching, sharing her knowledge, and is here to help you succeed and achieve your goals. The biggest award for Joanna is when she receives letters from her students thanking her for being very influential to their success as doctors, pharmacists, engineers, nurses….and the list goes on.