Faculty Spotlight: Chris Uyeda Inspires Greatness
La Jolla Country Day School exists to inspire greatness for a better world. Our brand promise commits to developing a culture and community of faculty, staff, students and families who believe in something bigger than themselves. Below Upper School science teacher Chris Uyeda speaks to how he inspires greatness for a better world.
Greatness can be achieved by actions both big and small. Greatness is not luck or an accident, it is achieved through a process. Research has shown that the most successful people in the world were not smarter than their counterparts in their field, but they possessed four common distinctions to helped them achieve greatness.
The Individual
1. Strong work ethic
2. Person of character
The Environment
3. Encountered advantages along the way in the form of access and mentors
4. Raised in an environment to challenge the norm and question “what is” and “what if”
About Chris Uyeda
Chris Uyeda has a deep love for the following: science, the ocean, teaching, his wife and daughter, and the greatest show ever made, Seinfeld. Somehow he has found a way to turn the first three into a profession.
Mr. Uyeda joined the La Jolla Country Day School faculty in 2010 as a chemistry and biology teacher, and his role is to help students understand that science is a process, not a body of knowledge, and what it means to think like a scientist. Primarily, though, his role is to give young people his attention.
Prior to joining LJCDS, Mr. Uyeda taught at High Tech High Media Arts and was adjunct faculty at Florida Keys Community College, where he taught marine science and scuba for Sea|mester, a global study-abroad program based on sailing school ships.
Along the way, he earned degrees from Stanford and the University of Miami in the fields of marine science and conservation and was a NOAA Knauss Fellow for Marine Policy in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Uyeda is a PADI Open Water scuba instructor and wilderness first responder and holds an IYT Master of Yachts 200-ton license. He lives in North Park with his wife and daughter.
“The first part of my career focused on taking students out into the world. Now I work on bringing the world into my class.”
