The University of Southern California (USC) has named leading racial equity expert Dr. Shaun Harper university professor. Since 2017, Harper has been the provost professor in the USC Marshall School of Business and the USC Rossier School of Education.

“I am genuinely grateful that our president and provost chose to honor me in such an extraordinary way,” said Harper. “I am honestly amazed by the numerous ways that USC leaders and other members of the Trojan Family have appreciated my work and me over these past five years. I love this University, and am genuinely grateful for all the ways it loves me back.”

Harper, who teaches in the management and organization department at USC Marshall, is one of only three USC faculty members to be both a university professor and provost professor. He is also the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership and founder as well as executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center.

His research focuses on race, gender, and other dimensions of equity in organizational settings, including K-12 schools, colleges and universities, and corporations. In 2021, Harper was inducted into the National Academy of Education. He is also the immediate past president of the American Educational Research Association.

By Rebecca Kelliher

>Read the original story on Diverse Issues in Higher Education

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USC Thornton Popular Music Program Chair Patrice Rushen is a model for what’s possible in a music career.

Patrice Rushen was definitely not the first to know when her 1982 hit song “Forget Me Nots” launched a dance challenge on TikTok. 

“My cell phone started blowing up with messages from my students: ‘You’re trending on TikTok! You’re trending on TikTok!’” said the chair of the USC Thornton Popular Music program. 

Rushen earned her first GRAMMY Award nomination for that dance-funk single and has seen it remain a part of popular culture over the past four decades. It was featured in the 1988 Tom Hanks movie Big and sampled by Will Smith for the 1997 Men in Black movie theme song. In 2000, it was ranked 34 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Dance Songs, and Rushen still gets a regular stream of requests from artists who want to sample it in their work. It was a phenomenon before it ever hit TikTok. So, when Rushen heard it was trending on the video sharing app, she probably shrugged as she said, “OK, that’s nice.” 

Then, her daughter said, “Mom, are you watching TikTok?” Her website developer in the Netherlands asked, “Are you seeing what’s going on worldwide?” And Rushen learned the dance challenge had gone viral — with tens of millions of views. 

“It’s crazy when I think back to what we had to do to just give the song a chance to get out there,” said Rushen, who co-wrote the song with bassist Freddie Washington and songwriter Terri McFaddin. “The record company, those many years ago, didn’t hear it. They didn’t like it. We put our pennies together and paid for three weeks of independent promotion just to get it to the radio stations. And it took off.”

“Forget Me Nots” peaked on the Billboard Top 40 pop chart at No. 23, the R&B chart at No. 4 and the dance chart at No. 2. 

“It just kept going, going, going, worldwide,” Rushen said. “And it just keeps going on. So here we come back around, and it’s on TikTok. But this time, what’s so cool about it for me is that I’m the one being the hashtag now. I’m getting the credit, whereas before people used to associate it with something else.”

Rushen can’t help but be amazed.

“This has been really cool to see the dances worldwide,” she said. “I’m saying, wow, this is like I’m living the dream, because the kind of musician that I always wanted to be was one able to share in these various worlds and dialects of music, to participate in the classical stage, jazz, dance music, R&B and pop — to just go across genres — because of the joy that all of those musics bring me. And now, that’s what I’m seeing.”

Trending in Classical and Jazz

Rushen is referring to the fact that she’s “trending” in the classical and jazz worlds right now, too. One of her symphonic pieces, “Sinfonia,” was part of Symphony Tacoma’s Oct. 23 season-opening program (and first post-pandemic concert), along with Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. She is also working on three commissions: a piece for jazz nonet for the Detroit Chamber Wind and Strings as part of the Resonate project with the Carr Center in which seven American composers explore the African diaspora, scheduled to premiere next May; and two pieces for Key to Change’s young persons’ violin ensemble, set to debut in January 2022. 

“From one side of the musical spectrum to the other,” Rushen said, “I’m enjoying the beautiful feeling of having my music in so many places, for so many people, all discovering what fun I’m having and defining some joy for themselves in it, too.”

Quinton Morris started the Key to Change studio to provide music instruction to underserved youth in Washington. Outreach has always been a priority for Rushen, who shares her time and talents with the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ GRAMMY in the Schools program and other organizations dedicated to music education and mentorship for inner-city youth.

A classically trained pianist who earned her degree at USC and later studied orchestration and conducting, Rushen wrote her first symphony, “Sinfonia,” in 1999 after decades of working with smaller ensembles. 

“The piece was really a reaction to not having the full palette of orchestral instruments,” Rushen said. “I wanted to use every color.” 

After she wrote the first movement to “Sinfonia,” she was literally boxing it up — “I had my cathartic moment and said, ‘OK, cool. It’s out of my system now.’” — when composer William Banfield called to chat and discovered what she’d written. He encouraged her to enter a reading competition with an orchestra, hosted by the American Composer’s Forum with members of St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. St. Paul and the Detroit Symphony chose her work to perform. 

A Model for What’s Possible

Patrice Rushen has seemingly done it all. She signed with the Prestige record label at 17, Elektra at 23 and has recorded 13 solo albums. A three-time GRAMMY Award nominee in R&B and jazz, she has also enjoyed a long career as a film and television composer and as a record producer for the likes of Sheena Easton. She became the first woman to serve as head composer and musical director for the Emmy Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, the People’s Choice Awards and Comic Relief V. She later added the GRAMMYs to her musical direction resume. Indeed, there are far too many career accomplishments to list.

Given the depth and breadth of her work across genres and generations, Rushen is a model for the kind of multifaceted career USC Thornton students are encouraged to build. 

“If I’m a model,” she said, “it’s a model for what’s possible.”

As a professor and mentor, Rushen educates and inspires her students to find their passion and purpose, to understand the “sometimes painfully slow and gradual” process (even for GRAMMY nominees) of building a career step by step and to embrace Thornton’s spirit of community. 

“In the popular music program, we need to take care of each other, lift each other up and inspire one another,” Rushen said.

She believes Thornton and the popular music program have been able to encourage all of those things, while giving students opportunities and exposure to different techniques, ideas and musical styles. The school is unique in that every genre is represented and students can collaborate and build diverse networks. 

“Having the kind of diverse interests and expertise within the faculty ranks at Thornton has allowed for a rare kind of communication,” said Rushen who, for example, has brought her symphonic work into composition classes for professors and students to analyze the orchestration techniques. 

“That communication has brought a modern awareness to the table to enhance the music education of the 21^st century,” Rushen said. “Music education requires a certain interdisciplinary consciousness and awareness of the intersection of all of the different kinds of music. And we’re doing it.”

By Julie Riggott

>Read the original story the USC Thornton School website.

Associate Professor of Theatre Practice John DeMita loops students and alumni in with his Netflix directorial projects.

Step into the booth of a recording studio with Associate Professor of Theatre Practice John DeMita and you’ll soon realize that well-dubbed voice work is an artform that takes a tremendous amount of skill.

“The dubber must not only honor the choices of the actor on screen, but also create a completely natural and personal performance of their own. It is very much the balance of intuition and technique, just like any form of acting on stage or screen,” he explains.

A seasoned voice actor, as well as a screen and stage actor and director, DeMita has lent his voice to hundreds of television series, films and video games, while teaching and directing at USC. His most recent role, however, is serving as a voice director for Netflix International Originals.

For Netflix, DeMita works with original talent and local voice actors to create English language dubs for films and television shows worldwide. Projects include films My Happy Family (Georgia), The Resistance Banker (Netherlands); and television shows Bordertown (Finland) and My Holo Love (Korea); among others.

During a typical recording session, DeMita shows the voice actor the scene in the original language while their lines scroll at the bottom in English. He then discusses major events of the scene, with a particular attention to transitions and beat changes, and other details like the distance between actors and background noises.

“Successful voice acting involves breath and articulation control, textual and rhetorical analysis, rigorous focus, and fearless improvisation,” says DeMita, citing that all of these as invaluable skills students learn at the USC School of Dramatic Arts. That’s why the professor looks to alumni and students when he is casting for voice work.

“While the job is matching someone else’s voice, there’s so much more than just the voice that goes into creating any performance. So being able to feel out another actor’s physical experience while voicing the English words is helpful,” Connor Kelly-Eiding BFA ’11 says.

The alumna — who auditioned and landed the English dub role for lead character Lea on Netflix’s We Are the Wave — has found her theatre training helpful in this line of work. At USC, she not only refined her ability to cold read, and maintain focus and presence, but also found that “there is a bodily awareness instilled by theatrical training that definitely comes in handy [with dubbing].”

While a student at SDA, Evan Macedo BA ’20 was cast in the Spanish melodrama Elite as the English dub for principal character Ander, as well as voice work for We Are the Wave.

“John’s voice class taught me all the skills, vocabulary and mindset to be able to confidently walk into any booth and understand what is expected of me,” he says.

For Angie Sarkisyan BA ’19, working with the familiar presence in a professional setting allowed her to excel.

“Going in, I knew I was in good hands even though I was really nervous. It was John’s talent as a director and the love he has for the art that really helped me to get out of my head and do my best,” says Sarkisyan about her voice work as Zazie on We Are the Wave. She also worked with DeMita on a second Netflix project, the recently premiered Brazilian drama Good Morning, Verônica.

With COVID-19 altering the process, DeMita now works from home to limit the number of people in studio. His office looks a lot like NASA mission control, he says, with numerous mics and monitors. In one of the bedrooms, he even has a recording booth set up.

For the German series Dark, all of the actors recorded from home — including Associate Professor of Theatre Practice Laura Flanagan, who was cast as a new character in the series. Some were equipped with professional booths, while others recorded from their bedroom closets.

“It was a constant challenge, negotiating internet speeds and ambient noises, but with the help of an excellent mixer, the show sounds great,” DeMita says.

While directing the show, DeMita spent his evenings directing an Asian American voice cast in the dub of the Korean film Time to Hunt. “It was an intense period, working 10-hour days, trying to make up for the lost time due to the first weeks of COVID,” he says.

Being a professor and a practitioner of the craft, DeMita has kept a busy schedule, to say the least, but both have kept his career fulfilling.

“In [their] senior year, my students focus on developing a deep understanding of why they have chosen to be artists. That answer for me has always been a need to help others tell their stories. Teaching has allowed me to do that for my entire career and I am very grateful.”

By Stacy Wang Rizzo

>Read the original story on the USC School of Dramatic Arts website.

>Read additional My USC stories here,

USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies has a new director, and he aims to enlist the full spectrum of natural, social and behavioral sciences as well as the humanities to help ensure a more sustainable future.

Joe Árvai was a newly minted marine scientist in the late ’90s when he stood before a small crowd to tell them about the danger of excessive underwater nutrients. The phenomenon, known as eutrophication, breeds bacteria that monopolize oxygen, suffocating aquatic animals.

Gathered as they were near an estuary on the Frasier River in British Columbia, Árvai assumed the people who had come to hear his presentation would be interested in what he had to say.

They weren’t.

“It struck me that peoples’ minds were already made up whether the problem was serious or even existed,” Árvai said. “People knew where they stood on the issue regardless of what I said.”

It was at that moment that Árvai realized that facts weren’t enough to advance good science or effective policy.

He had to find a way to break through people’s preconceived notions, prejudices, political biases and other cognitive barriers to help them understand environmental science, which was already flashing a bright red warning light.

So he enrolled in the University of British Columbia, not to study more marine science, but to earn his Ph.D. in a branch of psychology that looks at how people assess risk and make decisions.

Move quickly to ensure a livable future

Amber Miller, dean of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, saw incredible potential for the College to carve out a new space in environmental research.

Other research universities were building initiatives focused on science and engineering to improve things like solar and battery technologies. Indeed, USC Dornsife was conducting its own promising research in these areas. And Dornsife social science researchers were advancing economic theories to create a more sustainable environment and exploring issues of politics, policy, and environmental justice. Its humanists were putting environmentalism into context.

Miller’s vision was to leverage all of the College’s unique strengths to create something entirely new.

Over the past four years, she and her team have been erecting the building blocks for her vision: hiring and retaining the best faculty; building the Academy in the Public Square initiative that encourages faculty to share their expertise with the public; launching Public Exchange, which matches scholars with the private and public sectors to solve societal challenges; initiating the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future; and forming collaborations with USC’s professional schools.

Properly combined, these assets will enable the college to tackle one of the great unanswered questions of our time: How can we move faster, on an individual and societal level, to avoid global environmental catastrophe?

“Preserving our natural environment is not just a question of science. It is a question of politics, of policy, and of our societal capacity to respond before it is too late,” said Miller. “We need to find ways to break through the roadblocks that prevent more meaningful action.”

Miller realized that USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies could lead this multidisciplinary initiative to look at the entire spectrum of environmental research with a special emphasis on understanding how to more quickly establish policies and practices aimed at ensuring a livable future. The institute was already conducting environmental research, and its mission included connecting science with environmental policy.

But it needed a leader who was versed in both environmental science and human behavior.

West to greener pastures

It’s Oct. 27, 2020 and Árvai has been driving alone for several days. He started out in Detroit, and he’s not far from Laramie, Wyoming. It’s Big Sky Country, but today’s sky is obscured by light snow and some hail. He’d prefer to be riding his BMW R1200 if it weren’t so cold, and if it could carry all the belongs that are piled into his car.

He’s heading west and expects to arrive in Los Angeles in a few days to take up the position as Dana and David Dornsife Chair and professor of psychology, and director of the Wrigley Institute.

“I was drawn to the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, not only because of the work it had done in the past around marine and environmental science, but because of the potential there to be so much more when it comes to lighting the way on broad sustainability,” he said during a break from driving.

Árvai said the Wrigley Institute has an exciting opportunity to “fill a gap between really interesting high-quality work on the natural science side … [and] a real opportunity to inject a needed, heavy dose of social and behavioral science as well, to really truly do interdisciplinary work at the interface of environment and people.”

Árvai, who left his position as director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, is also excited by the willingness of California, especially L.A., to invent a more sustainable way of living. He can try things, and get things done, here that he can’t elsewhere.

But more than anything, it was USC’s growing ambition to become a powerhouse for innovative environmental research that caused him to pack his bags.

“Amber [Miller’s] vision and leadership really sold it for me,” he said. “Couple that with President [Carol L.] Folt’s commitment to sustainability, and it seemed like kind of the perfect storm of opportunity that a scientist like me dreams of.”

“The planet is talking to us”

Árvai divides sciences into two broad categories. The first encompasses the fundamental research to understand a given phenomenon. The second is use-inspired science, whereby researchers test solutions to a particular challenge. He wants the Wrigley Institute to combine the two.

That will take some doing. The Wrigley Institute and its antecedents have been home to marine scientists since the turn of the 20th century. And while it has undertaken a growing amount of terrestrial research, it has engaged less with the social sciences and humanities.

“We need to turn the Wrigley Institute into a hub that attracts researchers from across the natural, social, and behavioral sciences,” Árvai said. “But we can’t stop there; we need to give them a platform whereby their work can inspire and accelerate social and environmental change.”

Stemming from his own research, Árvai says there is an urgent need for scientists to bridge the gap between identifying problems and offering solutions. “To get from the diagnosis of a problem to the implementation of any potential solution, people inevitably need to make some tough decisions,” Árvai said. “Figuring out how to best support those decisions, and the tradeoffs that are central to them, is what we’re setting the Wrigley Institute up to do.”

Considering the severity of the sustainability challenges facing California, the United States, and rest of the world, Árvai and his team at the Wrigley Institute have their work cut out for them. Not only is the work vital, many see it as long overdue.

“The planet is talking to us, and more and more scientists, policy-makers and people are listening,” he said.

But, before hanging up the phone and continuing his drive to L.A., he added: “The problem is, listening isn’t enough anymore. We need to get to work.”

By Lance Ignon

>Read the original story on the USC Dornsife College website.

>Read additional My USC stories here.

Emily Cooperdock, assistant professor of Earth sciences, has hiked the Appalachian trail, studied rocks in the Swiss Alps and Oman, and is building a lab at USC Dornsife aimed at revealing new information about Earth’s history

Hundreds of millions of years ago, beneath the ocean’s crust, a beautiful green stone forms. Rocks rich in iron and magnesium, altered by heat, water and pressure, turn the color of jade. Time passes, the planet’s plates shift, and ridges of the material push up along fault lines, making it accessible to humans — and their ingenuity. 

Ancient Artic indigenous tribes carved bowls out of it, into which they poured seal fat to create oil lamps. It earned the name “serpentinite” for its slippery similarity to snakeskin. Modern architects, admiring its color and resemblance to marble, cut columns of the stone and installed them on the USC campus, at the USC Admission Center, where visitors can still view them today.

The columns help USC feel just a bit more like home for new faculty member Emily Cooperdock, assistant professor of Earth sciences at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Serpentinite happens to be at the center of her research. “I’ve kind of made my name on studying serpentinites,” she says.

As a Ph.D. student, she studied the metamorphic rock around the world, from ancient ocean basins high up in the Swiss Alps to the Arabian Peninsula. “Oman is really famous for having the largest slice of what was once oceanic crust that was thrust up onto the continent and is now just totally exposed,” she explains. “You can walk through miles of these mantle rocks.”

At the USC Dornsife Colleges of Letters, Arts and Sciences, her new USC Helium Lab focuses on innovative ways to date minerals, using the decay of uranium and thorium to measure the age of rocks, which produce helium during that decay (hence the lab’s name).

“In my Ph.D., I worked on figuring out new methods for dating minerals and rocks to ask questions that weren’t accessible before because we didn’t have a method to figure it out. Now, I’m setting up my lab to use these techniques to date rocks and measure chemistry, to ask big picture questions about plate tectonics: how things have moved in the past and how they change over time,” says Cooperdock.  

Her work could help us better understand our planet’s geological history, unlock information about earthquakes and volcanoes and, in the future, enable us to understand the plate tectonics of planets across the solar system.

A family affair

Cooperdock spent her childhood split between an army base in Germany, where her mother worked, and New York, where her father is a professor of Earth sciences at Columbia University.

She enrolled as an undergraduate at Columbia with the intention of focusing on environmental advocacy. “I thought I wanted to be an environmental scientist and work on conservation issues.”

As she moved towards graduation, her interest in minerals grew. This burgeoning passion was first sparked by an earlier experience with AmeriCorps. She took a gap year between high school and college, clearing trails and restoring natural habitat with the Nevada Conservation Corps. 

“What I found was that I was really, really enthralled by geology and being able to read the rocks. We’d go out to national parks a lot, we’d see these arches and all these really cool features, and they were super mysterious and beautiful. Now I go and I see geological processes. I can decode it all.” 

In 2017, she received her Ph.D. in geological sciences from The University of Texas at Austin, then headed to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for postdoctoral work. Shortly after, she accepted her current position at USC Dornsife, moving once again. As an Army brat, she wasn’t particularly phased by this. “I’ve moved maybe every five years of my life,” she says, laughing.   

By her side for this entire journey has been her husband. They met at age 17, on a summer job building hiking trails in Virginia. The two convinced their parents to allow them to take that gap year with AmeriCorps together, and they maintained a relationship while undergraduates at different universities (he at the University of Maine).

Their love of trails has remained consistent over the years. “We finally got to be in the same place after graduating from college and we hiked the Appalachian Trail together,” recounts Cooperdock. “We had to wait out flooding in Pennsylvania because of tropical storm Lee, and we got trapped in New York City because there was a tropical storm. We got ambushed by ice and snow unexpectedly and had a night where we woke up to everything being frozen.” Despite the tumultuous weather, the 2,200-mile journey was the adventure of a life time for the two. 

As her career grew, so did the Cooperdock family. “I defended my Ph.D. while pregnant, moved, started a postdoc and then had my daughter a month and a half into postdoctoral research.”

The trail blazer

Cooperdock says her rock and mineral research, while fascinating, can seem disconnected from real-world problems. “If I’m being completely honest, my work is not directly relevant to everyday life. That’s always bothered me. I happen to be very passionate about this science, but I don’t want to spend my life decoupled from making the world a better place. That tripped me up for a long time and then, finally, I realized I can just do it anyway.” 

She’s determined to promote equity, inclusion and diversity in the Earth sciences. She helped friend and fellow Earth scientist Rachel Bernard, whom she met while a Ph.D. student, write a paper published in Nature Geosciences in 2018. It highlights the persistent lack of diversity in earth, atmospheric and ocean sciences. 

“Only in the past decade have we started to approach some sort of gender parity in the fields of Earth and oceanic science, where about the same number of women as men are earning Ph.D.s. But if we look at racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, we’ve seen effectively no change in the past forty years,” Cooperdock says. 

Their paper has kicked up conversation across the field. “Since writing this, I now have these discussions with a lot of people as I travel around, from graduate students, to department chairs at different universities to deans.”

As she builds her lab at USC, she’s working on ways to create a space that embraces those values. “When I send out my ads for students, I list that we’re looking for someone who’s interested in these topics scientifically. Also, that we support working on issues surrounding diversity, inclusion and equity. What I’ve found is that almost all the postdocs and Ph.D. students who contact me reference that part of the ad.

“My level of power, influence and responsibility has changed dramatically in the past two and a half years,” she said. “I’m figuring out how I can use my position to affect the most positive change.”

Her time on the Appalachian Trail taught her important lessons about perseverance, no matter what project she tackled. She encourages her students with this philosophy as they work towards their own academic goals.

“Sometimes you’re wet, you’re cold, you’re tired, you’re bored, you have that feeling of ‘I just want to sit here and I don’t want to do it anymore.’ Well, if you just sit there, then you’re going to be in the same situation in an hour and two hours and 12 hours,” she says.

“The only thing that’s worth doing when you’re feeling like that is to put one foot in front of the other and keep on going. Even if it doesn’t look great in this short view that you have, you’re moving toward this larger goal. Once you hit a hard spot, you’ve just got to keep on walking forward at whatever pace you can manage and you will get to a better place.”

By Margaret Crable

>Read the original story on the USC Dornsife College website.

>Read additional My USC stories here.

Anne DeSalvo had never been to the Middle Eastern country before; her experience there was not what she expected — in a good way.

When Anne DeSalvo, an instructor in the USC School of Cinematic Arts, got the call to go to Saudi Arabia to teach acting, she was a bit surprised. DeSalvo, who has performed in TV and film, knew about the country’s history of media censorship.

It recently lifted its ban on movie theaters, which had been outlawed since the early ’80s. Much of film and TV there is consumed through DVDs or streaming.

DeSalvo was invited by the Saudi government to host a four-day workshop, which would go over everything from improvisation to acting out scenes and included a screening of The King’s Speech. It was part of an arts and cultural festival called Colors of Saudi, hosted by its tourism bureau.

It was her first trip to the country and felt like an opportunity to learn more about a nation sometimes closed off from the west and for her to share her experience as a performer. DeSalvo has performed on Broadway and starred in TV shows and films, such as Entourage, Monk and the 1980 Woody Allen picture Stardust Memories.

Enthusiastic students in acting class in Saudi Arabia

The country’s entertainment industry is still heavily censored and small, and most of DeSalvo’s students there — professionals in their 20s and 30s — weren’t planning to be professional actors or producers. Still, she said the students were some of the most enthusiastic she’s ever taught.

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“No one ever missed a class. Everybody was so into it and laughing and enjoying themselves.”

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“No one ever missed a class,” she said. “Everybody was so into it and laughing and enjoying themselves.”

The December workshop had 19 men and a few women, a less diverse group than she had hoped for but still a sign of progress for a country that’s slowly increasing the rights of its women. Last year, the nation lifted its ban on women driving and in recent years has seen women take on roles in law.

But progress is slow-moving. While the majority of its university students are women, they only make up about 17 percent of the country’s workforce, according to 2016 statistics from the International Labour Organization. For the most part, women can only work among other women and must have a guardian’s consent. Until last year, women weren’t allowed to attend sporting events at stadiums; now they can, but with segregated seating.

DeSalvo had to work around the strict traditions of the Islamic country, such as women not touching men outside their family. At first, she thought this would make scenes — such as between lovers or partners — difficult. But she found scenes where emotion was more nuanced.

Two days of acting classes were followed by two days of filming, where students got the feeling of being part of a production.

“They said to me, ‘You know, you’ve taken us so far in such a small time,’” she said.

Although she was only there for eight days, she said it gave her a small glimpse into a country that’s generally in the headlines due to conflict or controversy. She went shortly after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the Saudi government allegedly orchestrated.

“I had never been around people who were so generous charming and educated,” she said. “[I told someone] my experience of the Saudi people was so different than what I perceived coming here. He said, ‘We hear this a lot.’”

Acting class in Saudi Arabia: “Arts diplomacy”

Jay Wang, director of the Center of Public Diplomacy at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, said trips like this are dubbed “arts diplomacy” in his world — an opportunity for a nation-to-nation exchange at a micro level.

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“The arts as a form of communication is more capable of revealing emotional truths about us as human beings.”

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“The arts as a form of communication is more capable of revealing emotional truths about us as human beings,” he said of opportunities like the acting workshop. “It doesn’t matter what culture you live in.”

It also allows us to connect in a way that’s tangential to larger conversations happening perhaps at the state department level. There are other examples of this, like when famous musicians visit countries, called music diplomacy, prompting international conversations.

“This type of narrative medium allows us to develop empathy,” he said.

When it comes to do’s and don’ts of the cultural exchange, he says that both go in with a set of preconceived notions. The important thing is awareness.

“We always bring our own cultural biases. The beautiful thing with art is it probably makes them more aware of that,” he said. “We can see other cultures and other places both in our own light but also through their lenses.”

In fact, research shows that getting to know someone unlike you — dubbed “contact theory” — increases your awareness and understanding of another culture or background, he said.

That can be through high school or university exchanges, job placements or contact with the arts, he said.

DeSalvo is now itching to go back.

By Joanna Clay

>Read the original story on the USC News website.

>Read additional My USC stories here.

Part artist and part inventor, Phillip Sliwoski makes handcrafted pieces that keep critical USC labs running.

Phillip Sliwoski is surrounded by glass — on his desk, in cabinets, in big bins at his feet.

He’s a scientific glassblower, which means he designs the glass instruments that chemistry professors and students need for experiments. He’s been at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ Department of Chemistry for nearly 10 years and is a symbol of a fading art form.

Scientific glassblowers used to populate research universities and corporate labs across the U.S., but due to everything from budget cuts to automation, they’re increasingly scarce. The American Scientific Glassblowers Society has seen its membership drop by 50 percent since the 1970s.

But scientific glassblowers are imperative for chemists who design glassware for their unique chemical reactions. This isn’t stuff you can order in a catalog.

“I make one-of-a-kind items here,” Sliwoski said.

Sliwoski is one of only a few glassblowers left in Los Angeles — Caltech is getting a new one and California State University, Los Angeles has one part-time.

“It’s an art that’s been around for 1,000 years,” Sliwoski said. “You don’t want it to disappear … No matter what, with automation and everything, there’s stuff we still need that’s made out of glass.”

Chemistry Professor G. K. Surya Prakash said his work would literally grind to a halt if it weren’t for Sliwoski.

“All special experiments would stop if we don’t have a guy like Phil in-house,” he said. “Phil is indispensible. I can say that.”

Outsourcing would likely cost more, take longer and leave the department without someone who can make sure an object works — and repair it if needed, faculty said.

Prakash pointed out that glassblowing has always been integral to science. It used to be the norm to take graduate school courses in it. He learned his trade while attending graduate school in both India and Ohio.

“Glassblowing is an art. It takes years and years to become proficient at it,” Prakash said.

Sitting at his bench burner — a flame of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit burning in front of him — Sliwoski informs you he’s not an artist “like what you see in Venice.”

Scientific glassblowing is more exact, he said, because he’s taking parts and melting them together. But he’s also creating things never made before.

“In some ways, he’s an artist and in some ways, he’s a very sophisticated engineer,” said Chemistry Professor Mark Thompson.

Students will walk in with a complex plan or design and walk out with something much simpler, thanks to Sliwoski, he said.

“My colleagues at other schools don’t have this ability. It enables us to do things that other people just can’t do,” Thompson said. “With Phil, the sky is the limit.”

By Joanna Clay

>Read the original on the USC News website.

>Read additional My USC stories here.

To help people in this time of need, Ruth White of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work is offering up stress management tips on Bay Area television.

USC faculty are pitching in to help in a variety of ways during the COVID-19 crisis. While some are making masks with 3D printers or sewing them, others are providing valuable advice over the airwaves.

Ruth White, a clinical associate professor in the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, is among the latter. She found her own way to help people feeling overwhelmed by the stress, sadness and fear brought on by the outbreak.

“I was up late one night — I’m very nocturnal — and around 3 a.m. I was searching for contact information to submit an article on stress and COVID-19 I’d written for Fast Company,” she recalled. “I suddenly thought, this information needs to be on television where more people can see it.”

She sent a quick email pitch to a TV station in her hometown of Oakland and got a response just hours later, offering her a Skype interview spot on the news program that morning.

White’s initial appearance on the program was a hit with viewers, so the producers invited her back for the rest of that week to continue sharing tips for stress management.

USC professor offers advice on stress management, wellness

Fast-forward two weeks and White has become a regular contributor on Bay Area Morning Buzz on the San Francisco station KRON-TV. Several times a week, she appears via Skype to talk about stress management and emotional and physical wellness.

Consistent with the unpredictable nature of television news, the producers often throw her a curveball. She was surprised when she was asked to comment on a controversial series of interviews with college students who ignored public health warnings and traveled to Florida for spring break vacation. White responded without judgment but with compassion: “Young adults are used to taking risks. They are also being defiant: ‘You can’t control me; you can’t tell me what to do.’”

She explained that young people may be more likely to listen to health professionals about slowing or stopping the spread of this virus.

“Because of the nature of the illness and the fact that the majority of younger people have mild or moderate symptoms — or no symptoms at all — they feel they’re not at risk. They need clear, accurate information about the risks to their families and communities,” she said.

On another day, she expressed empathy for the complex feelings people are experiencing at this moment, including anticipatory grief about what is still to come.

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“Most of us have never experienced anything like this. I think the hard part is the fear.”

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“Most of us have never experienced anything like this,” she said. “I think the hard part is the fear. All of us are hearing about people we know now who have COVID-19. Members of my own family have it. It’s getting personal. It’s now real … Everyone is feeling, what will happen to my loved one? Because of course, the unique situation is that you can’t go to the hospital and hold someone’s hand. And if they do die, you can’t hold a funeral or a memorial. Mourning alone is going to make people more at risk for depression.”

Students, parents and the elderly all need assistance with stress management

White draws on her own experiences to offer advice that people are desperate to hear. She thinks often about the unique pressures on her students. Many have emailed her asking for extensions on their assignments, and “some of them are freaking out.”“ She considers the challenges facing people who are suddenly working at home, while caring for young children or for elderly parents.

“I understand the unique pressures of sheltering in place and the stress it’s creating for people of all ages and situations,” she said.

She plans to share more tips on dealing with stress via short videos posted online — something she’s used in her work for creating healthier and happier workplaces, workforces, classrooms and communities.

“I’ve been online for several years now with USC and it’s second nature for me to communicate using these different tools, including videos,” she said. “I’m thinking of doing more content for my students, and then offering it up more widely.”

By Jenesse Miller

>Read the original story on the USC News website.

>Read additional My USC stories here.

A former child actor who played the role of Julius Rottwinkle in the movie Matilda, Leor Hackel joins USC Dornsife as an assistant professor of psychology. 

As a child, Leor Hackel starred in the successful film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s popular children’s book Matilda, about a gifted little girl who is neglected and bullied by her parents but develops powers of telekinesis to defeat her enemies. Hackel played Julius Rottwinkle, a fellow student at Matilda’s school, Crunchem Hall Elementary, who is thrown out of the window by the evil principle, Miss Trunchbull, for the terrible sin of eating two M&Ms in class.

Now, more than 20 years later, Hackel has returned to the classroom in a rather different role: as an assistant professor of psychology at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

How did the child actor metamorphose into a professor?

All the world’s a stage

Born in Honolulu, to a broadcast journalist and a sociology professor, Hackel moved to Los Angeles with his parents when he was 18 months old. Once here, he lost no time becoming what he describes with a laugh as “that L.A. stereotype — a child actor.”

He got his start in the acting world after successfully auditioning for a commercial for the National Education Association. “From there they sent me to an agent, and I spent the next 10 years or so going on auditions periodically.” When Matilda came up, the 7-year-old Hackel auditioned and won the role of Julius. 

He still has fond memories of making the movie, directed by and starring Danny DeVito.

“It was a ton of fun,” Hackel says. “There were lots of kids on the set and Danny DeVito was incredibly nice and fun to work with. Pam Ferris, the actress who played Miss Trunchbull, as scary as she is on screen, was also delightful and sweet.”

After his success in Matilda, Hackel was keen to make acting his career. In high school, he concentrated on theatre. He continued acting in college and began directing plays.

“I really loved that and thought I would be an actor until midway through college,” Hackel says. However, something else was vying for his attention: the classes he was taking in neuroscience and psychology.

“That had always been something that I was very interested in,” he recalls. “Somewhere along the way, I began to get more excited about it and more and more invested in it, until it just seemed like the natural next step.”

Indeed, as his fascination with neuroscience and psychology took over from his love of acting, Hackel realized that not only did it feel like a natural progression but that there was a big overlap in his interest in theatre and in his interest in psychology.

“Part of it was trying to understand the human condition and ask what it means to be human,” he says. “As an actor you’re constantly thinking about how people think, and what’s motivating my character right now. To me, moving from acting to psychology gave me a sense of moving from this subjective artistic exploration of that question to a more objective and scientific exploration.”

Merging two traditions

Hackel’s research focuses on how we learn about other people and make decisions about social interaction — whom we should partner with, whom we should become closer to and whether we should cooperate with, reciprocate or help others. To do that, his work tries to merge two traditions in cognitive science. 

Social psychologists have been traditionally concerned with how we form impressions of other people, think about their mental states and empathize with them, or categorize ourselves into social groups — in short, how we think about the social world and how we think about ourselves.

Cognitive neuroscience research has looked at how we learn about the world by making choices and experiencing rewards, and then making new decisions based on the value that we expect to gain. Asking “How do rewarding experiences reinforce our actions?” often involves computational models of cognition that can then be linked to brain activity.

“My work aims to merge those approaches,” Hackel says, “asking how we learn about the social world by making choices and experiencing feedback and using computational models to link this social learning to the brain.”

Hackel is currently working on understanding how people learn from instances of positive and negative social feedback from other people. He is particularly interested in applying this research to better understand mental health, examining how learning might track with symptoms in some psychological disorders like borderline personality disorder.

His research also explores how people’s identification with a group or the social norms around them lead them to value and decide how to contribute to a wider public good — for example, a coordinated response to climate change, which would require the participation of many people to be effective.

Bicoastal life

Hackel has been bouncing back and forth between coasts for the last decade. After a childhood spent in L.A., he went to New York for college, earning his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his graduate degree from New York University. He returned to California for his postdoctoral work at Stanford University, then briefly moved back east for a position at Rutgers University before joining USC Dornsife this fall.

Hackel has no regrets about abandoning the world of acting for the world of academia, but he admits he does sometimes miss his former career. With two young children, he says he no longer has time to act, even as a hobby.

In the meantime, he acknowledges that he can apply skills he learned as an actor to his current job as a professor, particularly in the classroom.

“Speaking in front of a crowd and getting used to that as an actor has been helpful for teaching,” Hackel says. “I’ve seen improv classes offered to faculty at several different institutions, and I can see why.”

By Susan Bell

>Read the original story on the USC Dornsife College website.

>Read additional My USC stories here.

Cancer experience inspires chemist both as a researcher and a science communicator

Michael Inkpen underwent cancer treatment for lymphoma, played indie rock and studied chemistry internationally before joining USC Dornsife

Ten years ago, Michael Inkpen had a busy schedule, shuttling from the chemistry lab where he pursued his Ph.D. studies by day to the London clubs and bars where he performed with an indie rock band well into the night. That changed abruptly when one day he felt a lump in his neck.

In retrospect, Inkpen sees something worthwhile in the life-interrupting diagnosis of Hodgkin lymphoma, that followed. His cancer turned out to be highly treatable and experiencing serious illness firsthand elicited a philosophical outlook that has stuck with him in the years since.

“Life is too short to get hung up on small things,” said Inkpen, assistant professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. “It was a humbling journey, realizing that you’re essentially just a bag of water, and amazing, really, that you’re here at all.”

After chemotherapy and radiation treatment, Inkpen’s cancer was in remission. He returned to juggling chemistry and club gigs before ultimately pulling back from performing to focus entirely on earning his Ph.D. Then, after a postdoctoral stint at Imperial College in the U.K., he spent two years at Columbia University in New York and one year at the University of Rennes 1 in France on an EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Global Individual Fellowship. This past January, his path led to Los Angeles, where he joined USC Dornsife and set about designing his own lab.

“Moving to Los Angeles and joining USC offered a dream opportunity to design and build my own independent lab and create a research group at a top university in a world-class city,” Inkpen said.

Building blocks

Inkpen’s research is located at the interface of chemistry and physics; his goal is to better understand how molecular systems can be used to transport electric charges. Building on his interdisciplinary training, he aims to both synthesize new materials and then study their properties by connecting them between tiny, nanoscale electrodes.

His approach is reminiscent of LEGO bricks — he explores relationships between individual molecular building blocks and their extended, assembled chemical structures in one, two and three dimensions. This research might eventually bring about insights into and breakthroughs in energy storage or molecular-scale electronics.

Moore’s Law famously predicted in the 1960s that improvements in microchip transistor manufacturing would yield ever-smaller components, resulting in steadily increasing computing capability. This principle has so far held true, as seen in today’s compact, more powerful devices. (Think smartphones.)

“If you extrapolate Moore’s Law, you eventually get to molecular-sized circuit components,” Inkpen said. “In addition to their small size, molecular components are highly customizable and demonstrate unique properties tied to quantum mechanics. Today there is growing interest in exploring what molecules can do that traditional silicon-based technologies cannot.”

Inkpen is particularly interested in how the introduction of positive or negative charges may change the electronic properties of materials. This is akin to how charging a balloon by rubbing it against hair will let it stick to a wall, whereas, demonstrating a different behavior, an uncharged balloon simply falls to the ground.

Scientific storytelling

Beyond the science itself, Inkpen is fascinated by how science can be shared with diverse audiences in innovative, creative ways. Human connection is important in science, he said, and the desire for it is what led him to co-found a band so many years ago.

“The Ph.D. can sometimes be a lonely business, particularly when your experiments aren’t working out and you don’t know why,” Inkpen said. “Writing songs and gigging was fun, and provided a healthy counterpoint to long hours at the chemistry bench.”

Today, Inkpen attends science cafes and follows science bloggers and vloggers, including Derek Lowe of In The Pipeline, Dianna Cowern of Physics Girl, and the University of Nottingham’s Periodic Videos. Inkpen is a fan of the late physicist Richard Feynman, legendary for popularizing science in unique ways as well as for bongo drumming. Feynman, a Nobel laureate, published accessible works on the philosophy of science and delivered TV interviews and lectures in a timeless, inimitable style.

“These scientific rock stars didn’t stay in their ivory towers doing experiments, they embraced unconventional approaches to show millions of people why what they do, and how they think, is fascinating and relevant,” Inkpen said.

It’s no surprise that besides teaching and mentoring graduate students, Inkpen enjoys occasionally blogging about chemistry and life as a researcher and plans to boost his involvement in science outreach to K-12 and underserved college populations.

“For me, being a scientist is not only about the results and hard data; you are part of a community,” he said. “I have frequently been inspired over the years by captivating school experiments, science documentaries, blog posts or even simple tweets, and I am determined to pay it forward.”

By Rhonda Hillbery

>Read the original story on the USC Dornsife College website.

A Researcher’s View of Culture Change

If there’s one thing USC has going for it as it embarks on a journey of culture change, it’s that its community of faculty, staff, students and alumni care deeply about its mission. It’s a strength that Paul S. Adler, a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business, believes will help the university through this multi-year process.

Adler should know, as he’s dedicated his research to the business of organization — and reorganization — design. And he’s just taken on a new role as co-chair of the Working Group on University Culture.

That commitment to USC’s mission, he said, is a huge asset. People who work at USC are not just doing it to pay the rent. For many at the university, a belief in higher education and the goal of transforming people’s lives through education and research keeps them coming back every day, year after year.

Research Into Lasting Change

Adler is optimistic about USC’s prospects for change because of his research into how big organizations mobilize people toward new goals successfully.

The research — which includes Adler co-authoring a 2009 book about organizational change at Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health plans — identifies high-level concerns that can make real change elusive.

Broadly speaking, lasting change arises from three factors: motivation, process, and ability. According to Adler, USC is on track with all three. High levels of motivation to engage can be found at all levels of the university, and that’s a good thing.

As for the process, Adler said the aim is to create a method where people can effectively engage in the work to be done around culture. “We’re putting into place a process that will bring the right people together, around the right issues and in the right ways, over the coming year or so,” he said.

Similarly, efforts to ensure that community members have the ability to make and sustain changes are underway.

“I see serious commitment toward giving people the facilitation and management skills and tools they’ll need to make a difference,” he said.

Structural Issues

One challenge to overcome will be something that is also considered to be one of the university’s strengths: its decentralization. The university — with its medical center, 21 schools and dozens of departments — allows each of those units to run autonomously. The schools operate independently of each other and of the central administration.

“A number of people see intuitively that the university’s decentralized administrative and budget systems form a fairly serious impediment to the work ahead of us,” Adler said.

He shares that view but also sees the culture-change initiative as a step toward transforming that structure. “It’s hard to imagine that we’ll make much progress on these culture issues without modifying that highly decentralized, federated model,” he said.

One approach that has worked for other organizations is creating accountability not just for results but also for how they are achieved. The intent? To counterbalance the autonomy that has served USC well in some ways with a degree of accountability for the process as well as outcomes.

“I think part of our work is to build these new overlay systems and structures. In some cases, it may just be a matter of creating room for more or different groups of people discussing how schools or units are operating,” he said.

Forums — like the one held in March 2019 by faculty, staff and student organizations — may be one answer.

“People are going to have to get comfortable sitting in more of these multi-level forums where the way they achieve results is under scrutiny just as much as the results themselves,” Adler said.

A New Way of Thinking

People say that changing culture takes time, often many years. Adler made a finer point: it’s not culture change itself that takes so long, it’s the complexity involved in changing broad organizational structures, systems, and procedures.

“There’s nothing so mysterious about culture change that requires it to take a long time,” he said.

He recalled the poor-performing General Motors plant in Northern California that was reopened as a joint venture between GM and Toyota in 1984. In that case, Toyota took over management of the plant, transforming one of GM’s worst plants in terms of quality, productivity, absenteeism, and worker safety into the second-most efficient plant in their organization in under a year, using the same employees but hiring an all-new management team.

It’s a dramatic story that’s not replicable for complex organizations like USC. But it does underscore Adler’s point that culture change itself isn’t what takes so long — without a dramatic Toyota-like intervention — it is the complex underlying modifications.

USC is a complicated organization with many layers and units, and its culture is a reflection of all of the university’s facets: the schools and units and all the processes that go into hiring, promotion, how work is done, how decisions are made and what people are rewarded for doing.

All of those “managerial systems and procedures need changing if we really want to sustain the new values that we aspire to,” Adler said.

The culture-change journey can be a time to question and rethink the way things are done across the university. It can even be a time to rethink what it means to be in the Trojan family.

While the best traits of a family are that we share responsibilities, make decisions together and trust one another, it can also require a strong sense of loyalty that may not make sense as the main value for a complex community like USC.

“People need to feel they can challenge others who are stepping out of line, rather than to feel that they must be loyal at all costs,” Adler said. “In a community like ours, people need to feel like their concerns will be heard. I think people are optimistic now that leaders are paying attention.”

By Lynn Lipinski

>Read the original story on the Commitment to Change website.

Chantelle Rice Collins champions culture change: “It will have a radiating impact on people’s health”

Chantelle Rice Collins isn’t sure who nominated her to participate in USC’s culture change efforts, but their reasons for doing so become clear once she starts talking about her passion for cultivating individual well-being.

Rice Collins directs the USC Occupational Therapy Faculty Practice, the private clinic at the USC Mrs. T.H. Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy where occupational therapists help patients transform their lifestyles to deal with a variety of medical diagnoses and conditions.

Her expertise in how people make positive changes has been invaluable to the Working Group on University Culture, of which Rice Collins is a member. She hopes that her work in this effort and the earlier Task Force on Workplace Standards and Employee Wellness will help create a more positive environment at the university.

“This isn’t fluff,” Rice Collins said. “Creating nurturing environments at USC is for the benefit and the effectiveness of the university. We can start small, but we need to think long term.”

Achieving Lasting Change

As Rice Collins sees it, the university community’s focus shouldn’t be on how quickly change is achieved. Instead, she urges those involved to pay attention to how well the foundation is being laid to sustain those positive changes over time.

“One of the most difficult parts of change is consistency. We can implement changes, but if we don’t have structures in place to reinforce them then the effort is not worth it,” she said.

Once those systems and processes are in place, it’s up to the individuals within the university to make sure that they are assisting and mentoring others to achieve their full potential.

“That starts at the top, and the university leaders need to model those behaviors,” she said.

Managers Are on Front Lines of Change

As a manager and culture change proponent, Rice Collins seeks to create an environment where people want to show up at work every day. It’s part of her personal management philosophy to see co-workers and direct reports holistically as individuals, not just as a means to an end.

It also requires shifting the focus beyond the workplace to think about the impact of the organization on the health and well-being of employees outside of the office.

“I want their loved ones to know that when they go to work, they’re being well taken care of, that they’re respected and that they’re able to serve and help other people in the ways they want to,” she said. “That is what really drives me on a daily basis and why I want to improve the culture.”

At the end of the day, Rice Collins said, people want to work and want to contribute to a larger purpose, such as the one embodied in USC’s central mission — the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit. But she understands that working in unhealthy or unsupportive environments can inhibit rather than promote a good quality of life.

“If we can change the culture at USC and we can improve the quality of the work experience for the employees, then that will have a radiating impact on people’s health,” she said.

The Power of the Individual

While the workplace has a definite impact on an individual’s well-being, the good news is that there are small steps each person can take to improve their own healthy outlook. In other words, you have the power to enhance your well-being with your own actions.

For those seeking to boost their productivity and creativity, Rice Collins has some advice that might seem counter-intuitive but works. That advice: Take care of yourself first, whether that means finding a few minutes for yourself during the workday, getting up and moving around more or socializing with friends.

Often, she said, patients who come to her practice feeling stressed and anxious put themselves last on the list. They skip lunch and mandatory breaks; they stop socializing with friends; they forego exercise.

Rice Collins admits that it can be hard to get back into the habits of putting one’s self first, particularly in times of stress and change. Even those who acknowledge the importance of self-care may encounter an internal natural resistance to doing things that are good for them.

“It seems like taking care of ourselves is going to detract from productivity, but it’s not,” she said.

Most people, she added, find that building healthy habits doesn’t detract from work performance. Once they take the leap, they come to realize that simple things like getting enough sleep and asking others for help make them more effective.

It’s especially true in health care environments, like the faculty practice Rice Collins manages.

“If we don’t take care of our health care providers, we’re not going to be effective practitioners for our patients,” she said.

For skeptics or those who feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of changes that might be needed, personally or university-wide, Rice Collins draws on her knowledge of the complexities of human behavior change.

Even when people do not like the way things are, they often stay stuck because they find comfort in the familiar. A way to break through and make real change is to start small with a first step.

“Small changes have a radiating impact on the greater whole,” she said. “Once a person experiences the positive benefits of those changes, their mind expands and self-efficacy increases. The end result? They start to think, ‘What else am I capable of?’”

By Lynn Lipinski

>Read the original story on the Commitment to Change website.

“People always ask me if it’s too late to go back to school and I always say no,” says George Shannon.

Take one of George Shannon’s gerontology classes and he might look a bit familiar — like a leading man from a 1980s soap opera. Or maybe it’s the voice. You swear you heard it in a Cadillac commercial.

That’s because you did. Shannon, now 78, became a gerontologist at the age of 64, after a decades-long career as an actor, starring in shows like General Hospital and being the face of the Chevy Nova.

“The best teachers are born actors,” said Shannon, a USC instructional associate professor since 2006. “They love being in front of a group. They learn their material and they enjoy communicating.”

Drawn to gerontology

Shannon went back to school, with only a high school diploma, at age 55. He was drawn to gerontology after taking a class on women and aging.

“I was appalled,” he said, after learning about aging women in poverty, many reeling from the gender pay gap or losing the sole breadwinner in their household. “I have four daughters. I thought this is something I can learn more about and contribute to.”

He got his bachelor’s degree and then went to the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology for his master’s and PhD, completing them in nine years.

“People always ask me if it’s too late to go back to school and I always say no,” Shannon said, who was named Kevin Xu Chair in Gerontology last year.

Night-and-day difference

It was a night-and-day comparison to the last time he was in college, when he was in his 20s, married with four kids while juggling work and night classes at the University of Illinois.

“I was somewhat intimidated by the whole thing when I was young,” he said.

He dropped out to support the family, working as an elevator repairman in Chicago skyscrapers. On the way to a repair job, he got “discovered.”

“I was walking down Michigan Avenue with a toolbox in my hand and a woman asked if I ever thought of doing print work,” he said.

She was an agent. All of a sudden, he had headshots and auditions for modeling or acting parts.

“I was like Superman,” he said. “I would change into a suit [in my car], go into an agency and audition or actually do a job.” Then he’d run back to his car to change back into his work clothes.

New York times: furthest thing from teaching gerontology

But a couple of years in, he and his wife divorced. He decided to give acting a go full-time and move to New York. There he studied under Lee Strasberg, a teacher known for training the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, and Al Pacino.

“I probably did 1,200 commercials,” he said. “I was the Tiparillo man. I just did every car [ad] imaginable — Ford, Lincoln, Chevy, Mercedes-Benz. For 10 years, I pretty much always had a commercial on air.”

He did about 50 plays, from Hamlet to ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. He lived in a Paris for a bit, starring in a surreal film called I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse — apparently a cult favorite in France.

After a few years, likely lured by the weather, he moved to L.A.

He went on to star on several soap operas, from General Hospital to The Young and the Restless and How to Survive a Marriage from the ’70s into the early ’90s. He did a lot of voice-over work for automakers like Cadillac and Isuzu.

And just like a Hollywood movie, he met his wife here, locking eyes while shopping at a Sherman Oaks supermarket.

Getting into his 50s, his career was pretty steady, but he saw others struggle.

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“I just knew I needed to do something more meaningful than act.”

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“I decided to go back to school — it wasn’t because I was cracking,” he said. “It hit me and I don’t know what it was. I just knew I needed to do something more meaningful than act.”

And he’s found that.

Next role: teaching gerontology

“I’ve taught just about every class that there is in the last 10 years,” he said, from sociology and aging to classes on social policy, economics and the moral dilemmas of caring for aging adults in society.

He’s also the chief investigator of Dor Vador, which shares the stories of Holocaust survivors with children. The project is an intergenerational exchange in which young people watch a film of survivor stories and turn it into art, which they then share with the older adults they had seen on screen. It’s funded by the Jewish Community Foundation.

And he’s the executive producer of Motionless, a documentary on paralysis featuring a voice-over from actress Helen Mirren. One in 50 in the U.S. deal with paralysis, he said.

Actor and gerontology professor

He had the chance to combine his two passions, recently consulting on a Norman Lear TV pilot set at a Palm Springs retirement community. Lear wanted to make sure writers were accurate in their portrayal of a woman in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

“I was sitting right next to Norman while they were filming,” he said. “It was wonderful being on set again.”

And as for acting, he’s not opposed to getting on stage again. When he’s not teaching, that is.

“I would do a play in a minute,” he said. “I just told my wife last night that I might grow a beard and play King Lear.”

By Joanna Clay

>Read the original story on USC News.

A 28-year partnership between Elizabeth Daley and Marlene Loadvine helped shoot the school to the top.

She was a producer, not an academic. So when Elizabeth Daley became dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1991, she needed a right-hand man — or woman. In stepped Marlene Loadvine, senior associate dean of external relations. Together they increased the school’s endowment from $6 million to more than $228 million. They also added new divisions: Interactive Media & Games and Media Arts + Practice. And, of course, they oversaw the creation of the state-of-the-art Cinematic Arts Complex. The duo recently took a look back at a changing industry and their 28 years of partnership.

Timing the rise of the School of Cinematic Arts in the 1990s

Marlene Loadvine: Everyone knew that the school had some amazing alumni, but the school itself struggled. Elizabeth came in and saw the potential. Many people in the industry had never had formal education or weren’t graduates of film school. But there were people like Martin Scorsese and George Lucas who had gone to film school, and now that they had made incredible films, they became household names. So high school kids said, “I want to be a filmmaker, where do I go to do that?”

Elizabeth Daley: The ’60s generation, with Lucas, kind of changed the view of Hollywood about film schools. Then you had the next wave, like Robert Zemeckis — who did the successful Back to the Future series — and they were reaching their peak.

Growing diversity in academia and Hollywood

ED: Coming here, in my first faculty meeting, the only other woman in the room was my assistant. There were a couple of other women on the faculty who just didn’t happen to be there, but it was very clear that this needed to change. We actively recruited women as students, and it was also critical to recruit women faculty. We began to change the faculty by sheer will.

ML: In terms of content, the industry is just now starting to be diverse. Kids from different ethnicities and cultures haven’t seen what is being portrayed on the screen and on television as replicating what they know.

Education for an industry in evolution

ED: What we train people to do today is the same thing we’ve always done: create compelling experiences. Those can be educational experiences, those can be purely entertainment experiences, they can be interactive experiences. But you’re always focused on creating an experience that people want to participate in. And then we have people in our Division of Cinema and Media Studies who are able to really study and look at the implications of that for our society, as well.

Looking back, looking forward

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“Our school has proudly been at the forefront of every movement and innovation in the last nine decades of moving image media”

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ML: I saw, in Elizabeth, immediately that she could articulate the mission of the school, she saw what she wanted to do, had enormous energy, and got it. As far as the fundraising goes, we don’t always agree on things—

ED: Thank goodness.

ML: —which is good, and I’m glad she’s a person who wants a lot of opinions and advice. My input means something, and that keeps this exciting. I think when we both took on these jobs, we said, ‘Well, I’ll do this for two or three years.’

ED: I tell Marlene: if she leaves, I leave.

By Desa Philadelphia

>Read the original story on USC Trojan Family website.

Steve Lamy is known throughout campus for his inspirational classes and his ability to remember hundreds of his students’ names. 

One of USC’s most beloved professors, Steven Lamy holds the distinction of being the only member of its faculty to have been portrayed by Robert Redford on the silver screen.

Redford played the inspirational Professor Stephen Malley (the name is a twist on Lamy’s) in the 2007 play-turned-movie Lions for Lambs, written by Lamy’s former student, Matthew Carnahan, and directed by Redford.

In a letter to Lamy explaining he was the basis for Redford’s character, Carnahan wrote, “Frankly, at the end of the day, Redford didn’t really come close to his character’s inspiration.”

Carnahan is not alone in feeling this: Alumni and students frequently cite Lamy as their most inspirational professor. He’s also (in)famous across campus for knowing everybody’s name and whether they attended class the previous week. No mean feat when his international relations classes are often packed with upwards of 250 students.

So, what’s his secret?

“Getting people to sit in the same place,” Lamy says, eyes twinkling. “And I make them wear name tags.”

But that’s not all. When Lamy joined USC Dornsife in 1982, he invested in a Polaroid camera. He takes mugshots of each student on the first day of class and keeps them pinned to his office wall. He grades all papers himself. (His teaching assistants use pencil; he uses pen.)

“While I’m grading, I’ll keep the pictures next to me. It’s a big-time commitment, but it’s worth it,” says Lamy, former director of the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching.

“These kids matter. They’re not numbers.”

On the morning of this interview, Lamy had received an email from a former student he taught in 2011 requesting a letter of recommendation for law school. “I’m the kid who went to Tokyo for a marathon and burned his hand trying to climb right before graduation. Remember?” writes Marcus Knoll.

Lamy does remember — he still has Knoll’s photograph in his files.

“I keep them all,” Lamy says, “because you never know when somebody’s going to need a letter of recommendation.”

Growing Up

Born in Goffstown, in rural New Hampshire, one of five children of a French-Canadian regional sales manager for Miller Brewing Company and a homemaker who later became a bank manager, Lamy spent his childhood outdoors, fishing, hiking and riding his bike. He grew up hearing and speaking French at home and was an avid reader who showed an early predilection for world affairs.

Returning home from his first day of elementary school, Lamy tried to read the local newspaper, then burst into tears. “I started crying because my mother had told me as soon as I went to school, I’d learn to read,” Lamy said.

By his senior year of high school, he was a foreign exchange student with the American Field Service, spending 16 months in Flemish-speaking Belgium where he learned to speak Dutch, perfected his French and taught himself to read German. Later, he would add Afrikaans.

Lamy’s Belgian classmates were supportive, but critical of America’s role in Vietnam.

“I found myself in a situation of trying to defend America, but not defend the war,” Lamy said. “I learned a lot about the importance of different narratives and belief systems.”

The death of his father shortly after Lamy’s return narrowed his college choices.

“I had to be closer to home. Often in life you have dreams to do one thing, and something else intervenes,” he says, adding philosophically, “but it’s all been to the good.”

Lamy earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Siena College near Albany, New York. Despite his love for the great outdoors, and the fact that all his college career aptitude tests said he should become a forest ranger, Lamy’s passion for world  affairs won out. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, where he was taught by Korbel, father of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. 

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“We don’t learn by PowerPoint, we learn by decision-making stories. It’s not stepping on the student’s toe, the top of their head opening up, and pouring in knowledge. It’s wrestling with that knowledge.”

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Passion for Pedagogy

Lamy joined USC Dornsife’s School of International Relations (SIR) in 1982, promptly taking on the challenge of revitalizing its undergraduate curriculum.

A firm believer in case-based learning, Lamy says, “We don’t learn by PowerPoint, we learn by decision-making stories. It’s not stepping on the student’s toe, the top of their head opening up, and pouring in knowledge. It’s wrestling with that knowledge.”

His case-based class remains among the most popular he’s created at SIR. One of the first case studies he teaches is titled “Keeping the Cold War Cold: Dick Cheney and the Department of Defense.”

“It looks inside Cheney’s head, examining theoretical and analytical concepts like the importance of belief systems,” Lamy says. “I’ve got lots of emails from kids who saw Vice (the 2018 biographical film about Cheney), saying, ‘It’s just like the case study.’ ”

Lamy also fosters problem-based learning through USC Dornsife’s Problems Without Passports (PWP) program, which he created.

One of his particular gifts is to break down complex world problems into relatable, human concepts. He encourages students to analyze global affairs from multiple perspectives using what he calls DEPPP skills — Describe, Explain, Predict, Prescribe and Participate — that allow them to go beyond ideological labels.

“The whole concept of PWP was to get kids involved in thinking about global challenges and problems and finding ways to resolve them,” he said.

He’s led undergraduates on four PWP trips to the Arctic, visiting Finland, Norway and Iceland and looking at the impact of climate change on culture, economics and politics.

Lamy tells his students that “what happens in the Arctic never stays in the Arctic” because the region is considered a canary in the coal mine for climate change. 

Just Do It

Lamy was a serious runner for many years, participating in the Los Angeles, Skylon (renamed in 2007 the Niagara Falls International Marathon) and Boston marathons. He still runs or cycles for 45 minutes a day. Two years ago, he was knocked off his bicycle by a hit-and-run driver who ran a red light. Lamy’s watch was ripped off by the impact as he went face first into the asphalt.

Two black eyes and a couple of bruised ribs later, Lamy’s motto remains, “just keep going.” He cites an old Nike commercial showing a man rising at 4:30 a.m. to run in the dark and rain. “It’s that ‘Just Do It’ kind of thing. I love that,” Lamy says.

Lamy certainly got it done. In addition to creating PWP and the USC Dornsife Washington, D.C. Program, and serving for five years as director of SIR and for 10 years as vice dean for academic programs, he set up SOAR (Student Opportunities for Academic Research) and SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fund) — two programs that award funds to students for doing research with professors.

He also established the Fisher Fellowship for first-generation students and founded TIRP (Teaching International Relations Program), which gives high school students a basic grounding in the key principles of foreign relations. Now he wants to concentrate on a new master’s program he’s developing and the Global Policy Institute he recently created.

“I’m very proud of the classes I teach and the work I’ve done intellectually,” he says. “There are some regrets in terms of not spending enough time writing the best book or the best article in the world. I still have time to do that.”

But when asked what he considers his greatest achievement, Lamy talks about how good he always feels when he sees students graduating.

“I don’t have children, so they’re like my kids, and to see them go on, it’s kind of neat.”

By Susan Bell

>Read the original story on USC Dornsife College’s website.

Smith is the go-to academic for this moment, churning out nearly a dozen reports a year that not only describe the state of inclusion but also offer clear remedies.

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“…Dr. Stacy Smith, who reminds us that we have these small victories, but the numbers don’t lie. Her Annenberg [research on representation in Hollywood] is essential for us to remember that there’s still lots of work to do.” – Lorie Bartlett

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She first suggested the concept of an inclusion rider in a 2014 THR op-ed; has partnered with Sundance Institute and Women in Film to examine the pipeline from independent to studio filmmaking; and has armed celebrities including Brie Larson and Tessa Thompson with data to compel studios to diversify press access and director ranks. “It’s been an inside-outside approach,” says Smith, who leads a team of seven full-time researchers and 100 students: “Informing the outside world about this problem so that consumers and audiences can demand more, but also working with insiders to give them the information they need to set target inclusion goals and create a path forward.”

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“Stacy Smith [of USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative]. Never has the evidence of the need to change been more clear, and the data she’s generated from the work she’s done is the main reason why.” – Franklin Leonard of Black List

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Every Studio Exec Should See … 

“The films I show my class — Searching for Debra Winger and Color Adjustment — reveal the scope and history of some of the systemic issues and exclusionary practices we are working to change.”

Most Egregious Example of Unconscious Bias I’ve Experienced in Hollywood 

“The idea that bias is unconscious. In Hollywood, bias is frequently conscious. Framing the problem as ‘unconscious’ makes it very difficult for people to take personal responsibility and create change.”

By Rebecca Ford and Rebecca Sun

>Read the original story on The Hollywood Reporter website

Childhood interest in chemistry leads to studies of large-scale energy solutions

Smaranda Marinescu now draws inspiration from nature to develop efficient and inexpensive catalysts for harnessing energy from renewable sources.

Smaranda Marinescu now draws inspiration from nature to develop efficient and inexpensive catalysts for harnessing energy from renewable sources.

While an eighth-grader in Romania, Smaranda Marinescu hungered to try out for a coveted spot in a National Chemistry Olympiad. A chemistry teacher, recognizing Marinescu’s talent and drive, encouraged the young scientist and provided practice tests.

The teacher also took an extraordinary step.

“She gave me the keys to the lab and said, ‘Go have fun,’’’ Marinescu said. With the freedom to experiment with mixing different chemicals on her own, the intrepid student mastered the basics and moved on to compete in that Olympiad as well as others through her high school career.

While much has changed in her life, her zest for chemistry has not. “I really enjoyed making molecules then, and that’s what I do now,” said Marinescu, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Chemistry at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

A 2019 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, she studies ways to gather energy harvested from sunlight and store it as chemical energy — much like plants do through photosynthesis.

“One hour of sunlight provides more than all of the energy consumed by the planet in one year,” she said. “We need to develop methods to capture solar light and store it efficiently so that we can use it at night when we need it.”

Marinescu and her team are working to convert stored energy into electricity by using what are called metal-organic frameworks. These flexible, ultra-thin and highly porous crystalline structures have unique properties that may one day efficiently store renewable energy at a very large scale.

Her research also might help combat catastrophic effects of climate change. With global annual energy consumption projected to grow 50 percent within 30 years, the need for renewable non-fossil fuel technologies is not only urgent, but it is also driving innovation and investment dollars, Marinescu said.

Finding efficient solutions that have the potential to be scalable presents a challenge in sustainable energy research. Scientists must develop catalysts that are not only active and selective for one particular reaction, but also contain only inexpensive elements.

Following cues from nature, Marinescu has developed materials that contain biologically available elements and structural features and facilitate the conversion of abundant small molecules into chemical fuels.

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“What I really enjoy is coming up with new solutions. Developing metal complexes and materials that display unique physical and chemical properties is very exciting, and this keeps me going.”

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Marinescu completed her undergraduate studies at Caltech, where she conducted research in organometallic and organic chemistry. After graduating, she attended MIT, where she worked on olefin metathesis, receiving her Ph.D. in 2011. Returning to Caltech as a postdoctoral scholar, she investigated the mechanism of hydrogen formation with a cobalt catalyst. She launched her independent career at USC Dornsife in 2013.

A recipient of an NSF Career Award in 2016, Marinescu created a mentoring program that pairs incoming female graduate students with more experienced female classmates to foster friendship and support.

While the ratio of women to men in graduate chemistry is roughly 50-50, female representation drops off precipitously at the postdoctoral and faculty levels. By providing a women-specific mentoring program to facilitate female-to-female peer networking and mentorship early on, she hopes to help increase participation of this underrepresented group in science.

“They get the chance to talk and connect with somebody right away to ask questions about picking classes or choosing a lab and so on,” she said. “Then they have a friend right there who can show them the ropes and provide support.”

By Rhonda Hillbery

>Read the original story on USC Dornsife College’s website.

9/11 first responder and social work professor inspires students around the world

When social work professor Laura Owen is talking, it’s hard not to get completely absorbed. Like when the former U.S. Air Force captain tells the story of responding to 9/11.

“Do you remember the show M.A.S.H.?” she asks, referring to the 1970s and 1980s CBS show. Well, that’s what she was doing, part of a combat support hospital that arrived outside New York City in the wee hours of Sept. 12 to help those wounded in the attack on the twin towers.

“The injuries people sustained – they were emotional injuries,” said the trained social worker, noting the busiest people weren’t doctors and surgeons but social workers, psychologists and chaplains.

Stationed on a base since she joined the Air Force in 1999, her position hadn’t been much different than a civilian social worker up until that point. But 9/11 changed that. It was her introduction to military service. “It absolutely changed the trajectory of my career and who I am,” Owen said.

Weeks later, President George W. Bush announced the deployment of troops to Afghanistan. Owen would be among the first deployed to an air base in Oman, to a mobile medical unit where she would do mental health work.

A former Peace Corps volunteer, she never saw herself as the military type. But her husband, who she married right after graduate school, had always wanted to serve.

“I could never stay at home and be an officer’s wife while my husband had these great adventures,” she said. She joined with him. Plus, it was peacetime.

“I couldn’t imagine a social worker deployed to war,” Owen said, an adjunct assistant professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, who teaches in its online master’s program. “It turned out to be the biggest event in U.S. history.”

The value of military social work

After serving more than three years, she moved to Washington, D.C. for a few years before settling down in San Diego in 2009. Since then, she’s thrown herself at veterans issues.

She researched the connection between mental health and military deployment, studying both the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and worked as a researcher for the the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System. She co-founded San Diego-based nonprofit American Military Muscle, which provides rehabilitation and mental health services to combat veterans in the area.

She realized veterans were a microcosm of the marginalized populations she cared about.

“If you care about kids, abused children, join the military,” she said. “If you care about women’s issues and sexual trauma, that happens in the military. Everything you see in the civilian population – mental illness, addiction, family violence – it happens in military populations too.”

Oftentimes youth who grew up in difficult circumstances see the military as a way out. They can benefit from the GI Bill and go to college or buy their first home with a Veterans Administration loan, she noted.

“In my own family, that has certainly been true,” she said. “My maternal grandfather was a descendant of slaves. He and his brothers joined the military, one in each branch of service. The career success [my grandfather] found in his Army career solidified his place in the American middle class. I think that’s a common story, particularly now that we have an all-volunteer military.”

Connecting with students virtually

Owen has been teaching at USC for eight years, including courses on leadership, policy and advocacy. Students say her enthusiasm for her career is infectious.

“We would all agree she’s the greatest instructor we’ve ever had,” said Vanessa Reiser, who graduated with her master’s in social work in 2016. “It’s a lot of admiration to have for a person I’ve never met in person.”

Owen hasn’t met most of her students in person because she teaches online through the school’s virtual academic classroom. Her students are all over the world, including Canada, Germany, Korea and Tallahassee, Fla.

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“We would all agree she’s the greatest instructor we’ve ever had.”

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“Because classes are offered on Pacific Time, I’ve also had a handful of students log into class at 2 a.m. their local time because they were so committed to getting that Trojan diploma,” she said. “When I see the lengths my students will go to get their MSW from USC, it makes me want to be a better professor for them. I show up and give everything I’ve got because they show up and give everything they’ve got.”

For Owen, it’s the only way she could teach, since her work schedule wouldn’t allow her to commute from San Diego to Los Angeles regularly. And for students, it’s exposure to someone they might never meet any other way, a mentor who has exciting stories and practical advice, greeting them via their screens – sometimes in the middle of the night.

To connect with students through a screen takes a certain personality and Owen is built for it, says June Wiley, who oversees the online program.

“There’s a fair amount of showmanship in my teaching,” Owen said. “I tend to teach big. I have salty language. I always have. I think I can get away with it because I’m a combat veteran.”

Social work beyond therapy

In social work, like many caring professions, burnout or “compassion fatigue” is common, she said. Because of that, she’s straight with students.

“The pay isn’t always good and the clients aren’t always particularly receptive and appreciative,” she said. “I’ve been very lucky in my career in that I’ve never burned out.”

A big tip: play to your strengths. She knows from personal experience.

“I thought I would be a brilliant clinician,” she said. “I turned out to be terrible at it.”

In a one-on-one therapy setting, she wanted to fix things – which is the worst approach, she said. Instead, she followed what she was good at: advocacy, management and fixing institutional problems.

The advice hit home for Kristal Ibrahim, who graduated from the master’s program in December. She had planned to become a therapist but wasn’t enthusiastic about it.

“It’s not like I’m waking up in the morning rubbing my hands together,” she said. “It just opened my eyes to what social work could be beyond therapy. You don’t have to be a clinician if that’s not for you.”

When it came time for her internship placement, Ibrahim opted against a clinical setting. She instead interned in cause marketing, which is using marketing tools like social media to get the word out about social issues. In doing so, she found a possible career path.

“I would love to do cause marketing,” she said. “I’m kind of artistic and I found the opportunities to make memes and infographics a form of self expression for me, while getting the word out on causes that are important to me as a social worker.”

Inspiring passion in policy

And even though Owen isn’t in the classroom with her students, she’s accessible. Regardless of time zone, they have access to her cellphone, to call or text.

“They text me at 9 at night or 4 in the morning,” she said.

Sometimes it’s about assignments but sometimes it’s also advice about their professional or personal lives, since many of the students juggle jobs with the course load. She’s comforted students who’ve experienced personal tragedies. She’s also talked them through workplace issues or when they’ve lost a patient to suicide.

Her passion for certain issues, such as policy work, has rubbed off on her students as well.

Simon Parker, a student based in New York but originally from England, wasn’t too interested in American politics. But Owen’s policy class got him thinking. It was around the 2016 election when immigration was – and continues to be – a divisive issue. The formerly politically apathetic Parker decided to take a trip to Nogales, Ariz., to see what was happening at the border firsthand. Owen gave him tips on who to meet and where to go. He ended up accompanying a soon-to-be Jesuit priest to a shelter on the Mexico side of the border.

“She inspired me to do that,” he said. “Her class was the most useful class I took – by far. It was a bit life changing.”

By Joanna Clay

>Read the original story on USC News.

Myrna Ayoub is a lecturer at the USC School of Architecture and also received her Bachelor of Architecture at the school.

Can you tell us about your background?

I was born and raised in Los Angeles to immigrant parents from Lebanon. I grew up in an environment where heritage and culture were an important part of everyday life. I had the privilege of traveling and spending my summers in the Middle East as well as interacting with people from various cultures across the globe. Inherently, that’s been a huge influence on my view of architecture and how the places I visited were so differently shaped by specific identities, rituals, traditions, and governance.

I received my Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Southern California. After practicing in design offices in Los Angeles, France, and Lebanon, I pursued a Master of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. While teaching on the East Coast, I worked at several Design Research Labs where part of my research focused on various sensory experiences in relation to the urban environment. I collaborated with people across disciplines to run seminars, lead workshops, curate exhibits, and lecture around issues of identity, displacement, sanctuary, and refuge. Last year, I made my way back to my hometown of Los Angeles. In addition to teaching at USC, I pursue architecture projects, design research, and design education mentorships with several collaborators in Los Angeles and internationally.

What will you be teaching at USC Architecture?

I currently teach an undergraduate studio ARCH 102b, “Architectural Design I,” and a seminar for non-architecture majors ARCH 106x, “Workshop in Architecture.” This past fall I taught the undergraduate core classes, ARCH 102a, “Architectural Design I,” and ARCH 105, “Fundamentals of Design Communication.” The past two years, I have also taught the summer program for high school students called “Exploration of Architecture.”

What drew you to the USC School of Architecture?

I’ve been a part of the Trojan family for a long time. As a high school student, I decided to enroll in the summer Exploration of Architecture program for two weeks. It was my first taste of any formal understanding of architecture, and that experience led me to apply for a B.Arch at USC. I’ve been in and out of the USC School of Architecture in several roles ever since – as a prospective student, undergraduate, alumna, critic, and now faculty member. It’s been really important for me to teach while practicing – teaching is a platform to exchange ideas, and sometimes what’s conducive in practice isn’t in academia or vice versa. At USC, there is an environment with such diverse backgrounds that I often feel like I am learning as much I am teaching. It’s been an honor being back and teaching alongside people that inspired me and had such a huge influence in shaping my outlook on architecture.

What excites you about your faculty role?

I’m most excited when working with students directly; I enjoy mentoring a new generation. I have a long standing interest in design education and I believe it’s an environment to foster creative confidence, cultivate curiosity, and encourage an inventive culture. As an instructor, I try to invoke in my students the power of design in everyday life. I encourage students to exchange ideas, critique, and learn from each other’s work in the classroom and beyond. In return, they offer as many perspectives as I do, with an understanding that different perspectives help reveal several truths and possibilities—a vital discernment when addressing any design solution.

What are your thoughts on the current state of architecture across the globe?

I strongly believe that architecture has the power to make a difference in society. It is the physical manifestation of space that represents the uniqueness found in cultures across the globe—we must retain that. There are many challenges the field is facing to regain architecture’s agency in today’s society. Architecture is political, it is social, and it is rapidly changing—often without time to consider its implications. Collectively, we must find a way to make people aware of the values we hold when shaping today’s built environment. We are taught to imagine possibilities, think outside the box, challenge conditions, and visualize spatial constructs. The discipline of architecture can lend itself to many scales of intervention. By understanding that what we do is part of a larger discourse in history and a powerful tool for change, we can begin to take part in timely conversations and offer a meaningful perspective on global issues.

Who or what inspires you?

My main source of inspiration is traveling. Sometimes that’s across borders, states, and countries but often it’s exploring a new neighborhood or place in the city I’m living in. I’m known as an urban explorer—I get lost in cities, climb lookouts, crawl into alleyways—I’m fascinated with sociology and ethnography. Traveling is a lens into new urban environments and the customs found in many societies. In my work, these customs are often a starting point when constructing a project. Recently, I’ve used photography and collage as an avenue to document these rituals and spaces. I’m also inspired by the work of Lewis Hine, Martha Rosler, Walid Raad, and Akraam Zaatari—these explorations challenge the notion of narrative and archive.

I’ve always been inspired by fashion; my first job after undergrad was as an architecture designer at Louis Vuitton Malletier. That was an opportunity for me to infuse fashion, exhibition, and branding in the production of retail spaces and furniture. The work of designers such as Dries Van Noten, Kenzo Takada, Miuccia Prada, Yves Saint Laurent, Elie Saab, and Coco Chanel have played a major role in the way that I look at craft, form, texture, material, and color.

In addition, as an avid oil painter, I’m inspired by traditional artwork and paintings. I was classically trained in baroque, impressionist, post-impressionist, surrealist, and romantic styles. I love mixing colors, layering paints on canvas, and experimenting with brushstrokes. I enjoy cooking, which lends itself to a more temporal avenue to creatively experiment with flavors and textures. These eclectic resources of inspiration play a large part in my projects—sometimes offering a new lens through which I can address a proposal or a new source of representation. I find that a strong knowledge in historical and theoretical practices in architecture are vital in terms of understanding how to intervene, but all these other fields and interests you take part of spark inspiration; they help conceive. 

What are your research interests? What drew you to the work you are doing now?

My interests are quite diverse in scale and content but they all to touch upon themes of social and cultural dynamics within the public sphere. Currently, my research has been primarily directed at understanding the urban conditions in spaces of conflict. These are often spaces, cities, or countries that have been affected by wars, political turmoil, social disparities, or natural disasters. My research attempts to understand the forces of conflict and the challenges they place on the development of urban environments. Currently, this research is explored through cartographic practices and photography, specifically in Syria and Lebanon, looking at context and identity. This research began as a way to understand the complexities existing in the Middle East, with a desire to contribute to the landscape in the region.

Why is now such an exciting time to study urbanism and architecture?

It’s both an exciting and challenging time to study urbanism and architecture. The changes in recent decades are rapidly affecting the access we have to spaces, the way we use them, and the way we interact with people within them. The factors are many: you can attribute this to the development of technology, the depletion of resources and climate change, social disparities, economic fluxes, and even humanitarian issues. Currently, there are more displaced persons than there were during World War II! Now more than ever, there are opportunities to translate the imaginative, theoretical, and farfetched into real long-lasting spatial impacts.

Any advice to current students?

Explore several mediums when presenting your ideas—read, write, make, draw, build, curate, discuss, teach—you’ll be surprised what emerges when you engage in more than one medium. Find inspiration outside of architecture. Architecture school is quite demanding but don’t lose interest in the hobbies and activities you took part in while growing up; you’ll regret giving them up and they often can be integrated into your work and lead to a unique perspective. An education in architecture is invaluable; it’s a way of thinking that can be used in several fields. The way you are taught to iterate and critically address a project through creative solutions can be translated to so many things. Don’t limit yourself. The skills you acquire here will take you a long way. Be critical, understand your surroundings, and start questioning how you can intervene to make a mark on society.

>Read the original story on USC Architecture’s website.

Meet the lawyer-turned-professor behind USC Gould’s Small Business Clinic

In law school, class work is largely theoretical, which students will apply when they graduate and go off to a firm.

But Michael Chasalow, a professor at USC’s Gould School of Law, thought what if you could approach teaching the other way around? Take real world experiences and make it an academic exercise.

That’s what led him to start USC Gould’s Small Business Clinic a decade ago. It’s a competitive year-long program, only a couple students get in a semester, and although he oversees it as the practicing attorney on each case, students really lead the charge – each assigned to clients who likely wouldn’t afford legal help otherwise.

For the most part, it’s helping small businesses start – such as creating an LLC — and protecting founders from personal liability. They’ve launched a vegan ice cream company and helped two beekeepers partner up — including combining their bees.

Chasalow, who cut his teeth in big firms, was happiest working with small businesses, counseling investors working with start-ups from roughly 1999 to 2008. On top of his Juris Doctor degree, he also has an MBA.It’s really hard to be with people who are starting a business and not be caught up in the enthusiasm.

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“It’s really hard to be with people who are starting a business and not be caught up in the enthusiasm.”

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“It’s really hard to be with people who are starting a business and not be caught up in the enthusiasm,” he said.

“There’s so much possibility and so much excitement. People just find it incredibly rewarding.”

USC Gould’s Small Business Clinic: A safe place to learn

Since its inception, the clinic has helped nearly 3,000 clients – most of whom would not be able to afford the services of a law firm — receiving free services valued at up to $25,000. Roughly half its clients are women and people of color.

They handle every facet of a client’s project — explaining paperwork and legal implications to meeting deadlines, he said. He’s there for feedback and guidance.

It feels like a safe place to learn, students said. Graduating and jumping into a big firm – where one mistake could cost your job – can be dizzying for some students. In the clinic, Chasalow trains students to be detail-oriented and to respond to crises directly.

“I always say to people: It’s not about whether or not you mess up; it’s what you do about what you messed up,” he said. “It’s a really hard thing to learn.”

And he’s honest. He’ll say, “Look, if you were on the job, you’d be getting yelled at.”

Lauren Stadler, who graduated from USC Gould in 2011 and practices at a public real estate company in L.A., said the ability to learn by doing was huge.

“It mentally prepared me and it also made me more confident in what I was doing,” Stadler said, whose clients included a Downtown L.A. peanut brittle maker and a life coach. “A lot of people entering their first job haven’t had any experience doing any of the work they’d be doing every single day of their careers.”

Shortly after Gould, Stadler was reminded of her time at the clinic during a trip to Napa. She was in a Dean & DeLuca, the gourmet grocer, when there it was – her client’s artisanal peanut brittle.

Eight years later, she still calls Chasalow all the time, whether it’s asking him what it’s like to go in-house or getting tips on juggling motherhood with her career. Chasalow has triplets. She and her husband recently met with him for drinks.

“He cares for his students, not just on a professional level, but as people,” she said. “He tries to be there for you in all aspects of your life.”

Although many of his students, like Stadler, go on to work with corporations or firms, those experiences with small businesses or “mom and pops” come in handy. For example, that student who helped the beekeeper went on to work with a company that dealt in agricultural products.

“She called me up and said ‘I worked on a bee acquisition,’ of course it was millions of dollars, but she said, ‘I was the only one who had bee experience,’” Chasalow said.

Going above and beyond

The clinic, and the chance to do hands-on legal work and impact the community, has been a big draw to prospective law students. It was meeting Chasalow during a USC visit, and hearing about his clinic, that solidified Katy Neubauer’s decision to study at Gould.

She’s now counseling Mahkana, a bracelet company that raises money for nonprofits. It’s already leading in the cause-marketing space. The founder, Erica Wenger, is also a USC student. She’s seen Chasalow step in to offer his expertise, like when he reached out to colleagues who were well-versed in tax regulations to address her concerns.

“He totally goes above and beyond his job description,” Wenger said.

For Chasalow, teaching became his calling sort of unexpectedly. He taught his first classes roughly 20 years ago, first at Whittier Law School and then at USC.

“My wife started pointing out when I wasn’t teaching, I wasn’t as happy,” he said. “Being able to explain things more clearly to students is a really rewarding activity for me – that I’m making what’s foggy a little bit clearer.

“Maybe that’s a simple career goal but that feels really good to me.”

By Joanna Clay

>Read the original story on USC News.

Berislav Zlokovic searches for better treatments for dementia with a drive to make a difference now.

Berislav Zlokovic’s office at USC’s Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute is a jumble, stuffed with pictures of singers and musicians and diplomas written in Cyrillic script. A small waterfall burbles down a wall and gurgles steadily, punctuated every so often by Zlokovic’s avuncular chuckle. He’s a man quick to smile. On this day, he’s nursing a shoulder injury that happened while playing volleyball with “guys who were much younger and faster,” he says with a laugh.

Zlokovic is more than the charismatic character known as “Betza” to friends and colleagues. He’s committed to whatever he puts his mind to, whether it’s music, barbecue or science. And when it comes to science, he’s drawn to problems that matter to a great many. He’s changing the way modern medicine studies and treats Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions that cause dementia.

Across the globe, about 35.6 million people have dementia—and that number is expected to double within 20 years. There’s no known cure for dementia, but Zlokovic is working on it.

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For Zlokovic, the passion for discovery pushes him onward. His next frontier: finding markers that could predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease 10 to 15 years before symptoms arise.

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While studying the vascular system as a research fellow in London in the 1980s, cognitive disorders piqued Zlokovic’s interest. He had personal reasons: His grandmother had a form of dementia. Maybe, he thought, blood vessels in the brain might play a part in the syndrome.

Many researchers studying Alzheimer’s disease focus on the tangles of proteins in the brains of people affected by the disease, but Zlokovic takes a different approach. He was the first to propose that impaired blood flow and flaws in what’s called the blood-brain barrier drive neurodegeneration, which underlies all kinds of cognitive disorders, from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s. “We began to see Alzheimer’s not as a disease of overproduction of proteins in the brain, but a lack of clearing out those proteins—and the blood vessels take an active role in the clearing process,” he explains.

His work has shown that declining memory and thinking is only a secondary symptom in people with dementia. The first signal that something is awry happens in the blood vessels, he says. By targeting the vascular system and keeping its shortcomings from damaging important nervous system cells called neurons, he believes that dementia could be halted or prevented.

Zlokovic studies the function of brain pericytes—cells that scientists have known about for more than a century, but whose purpose was unclear. He found that pericytes control key neurovascular functions, basically acting as guards for the blood-brain barrier. This barrier keeps potentially dangerous foreign substances from moving from blood vessels into brain tissue and maintains a constant environment for the brain. If pericytes start to break down, the brain ultimately suffers.

In research published two years ago while Zlokovic was working at the University of Rochester in New York, his team found that when they reduced the number of working pericytes in the brains of mice, the effects included reduced blood flow, greater exposure of brain tissue to toxic substances, impaired learning and memory, and damage to neurons—all phenomena that are likely to happen to people as they age.

A year later, the team showed that a gene linked to late-onset Alzheimer’s disease called ApoE4 appears to cause harmful levels of an inflammatory protein to accumulate in pericytes, which in turn causes blood vessels in the brain to become leaky.

Zlokovic’s work has had a huge influence on the field of neurodegenerative disorders, says former student Robert Bell, now a principal scientist and lab head at Pfizer’s neuroscience research unit in Cambridge, Mass. “He’s done it in the face of people who take a more neurocentric approach, and it hasn’t been an easy path to carve out,” says Bell, who studied with Zlokovic in Rochester. “Betza stuck with it, and now most neuroscientists agree that understanding the neurovasculature is essential to developing treatments.”

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“This is why I’m so excited about what we’re doing at USC, working with colleagues from so many different departments to reduce the gap between experimental and clinical findings.”

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Some of those treatments may come from Zlokovic’s own lab. Using transgenic mice and studying human brains post-mortem, Zlokovic’s team at the Keck School of Medicine of USC’s Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute is now looking at ways to harness the power of pericytes to help patients. “What we’d really like is to detect early changes in the vascular system that predispose people to loss of cognitive function. If we can start detecting changes in someone who is 40, the declines don’t start happening for another two decades, giving a lot of time for treatments,” Zlokovic says.

Scientists have already applied his research to therapies. Zlokovic is listed as an inventor on 14 patents. He’s founded three biotech companies, and his discoveries have contributed to the development of clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

Zlokovic’s research on the connection between blood flow and brain health has led him to a surprising conclusion: Brains could function for much longer than the average human life, if only the vascular system would stay in shape. “Our brains have the capability to live 150 years if the vascular system could keep up. Heart disease or heart attack, known as infarction, isn’t disease of heart muscle. It’s a disease of vessels in the heart—coronary vessels,” he explains. “The brain was never exceptional in the body—it’s only as strong as the weakest links.”

For Zlokovic, the passion for discovery pushes him onward. His next frontier: finding markers that could predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease 10 to 15 years before symptoms arise. His research group is trying to identify such biomarkers in people who are cognitively normal today but who may develop Alzheimer’s later in life. The earlier patients can get treatment, the better the chances of slowing down the progression of the disease, Zlokovic says.

“We are searching for biomarkers in brain fluids, particularly cerebrospinal fluid, and blood, or imaging markers in the brain, in individuals at risk for Alzheimer’s and in models of Alzheimer’s and neurodegeneration that will tell us about leaky blood vessels and early damage of the brain’s vascular system and its impact on the brain,” he says. “We believe that sealing damaged vessels would allow the brain to self-repair and re-establish its normal functions.

“This is why I’m so excited about what we’re doing at USC, working with colleagues from so many different departments to reduce the gap between experimental and clinical findings. That process has already started.”

By Katherine Gammon

>Read the original story on USC Trojan Family Magazine

Photonics Pioneer Alan Willner, an Orthodox Jew, runs a lab made up of students from countries that aren’t always the best of friends.

Professor Alan Willner is very accomplished.

He has been recognized by the US National Academy of Engineering, the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the White House, the Guggenheim Foundation, the IEEE, and so on and so on.

He’s served as President of the Optical Society and President of the IEEE Photonics Society. He’s been the chair of several professional committees with long and important sounding acronyms. He’s served as editor-in-chief of no less than three scientific journals. He has produced over 350 refereed journal papers, 30 patents, and one book.

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Now let’s talk about his real accomplishments.

There is a word in Hebrew, kehillah, which defined loosely, means a community. More than that however, a kehillah is a group of people with a shared purpose or mission. It is a word that Alan Willner, an Orthodox Jew and leading engineer in the field of photonics, takes extremely seriously.

When I first knocked on his door at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering to speak to him about the work he is doing, it quickly became clear that Dr. Willner only wanted to talk about the community he is a part of at USC. It turns out that all the background reading I had done into twisted data-carrying electromagnetic beams had been for nothing.

In 1990, when Alan first walked in the door for an interview with then-chair Jerry Mendel, he was, as always, wearing a yarmulke (i.e., Jewish skullcap). Mendel immediately noticed and rushed to change the post-interview dinner reservation to a Kosher restaurant, which also happened to be owned by Steven Spielberg’s mother. “Of all the places I interviewed with, USC was the only place that accommodated my religious observance so sensitively and proactively,” Willner said.

A few months later, while walking along Venice beach on a beautiful January day with his fiancé, Alan decided to join USC Viterbi.

“From day minus one, I felt I was joining a real community, not just a workplace,” Alan said, referring to the day he was hired as an assistant professor.

But a most telling example of community Alan experienced in his early years had to do with an engineering department’s most valuable resource – lab space.

“After 6 months, I outgrew the space I started out in,” Alan said.  “One day Lloyd Welch – a much more senior and well-known professor – came up to me and said ‘why not take my lab, you seem to need it more than me.’ This is simply something that doesn’t happen at universities!” Alan says, still surprised to this day.

That space soon filled up as well and another giant of the department, Irving Reed, offered him some room next door. “I was like the creeping goo,” Alan says proudly, “eventually I took over the whole wing and I never had to ask for any of it.”

Today, Alan is the Steve and Kathryn Sample Chair holder, honoring the late great USC President.  His lab, the Optical Communications Laboratory, features 2,500 square feet of space. Here, he and his 14 PhD students use state of the art technology to conduct high-speed experiments on optical systems and devices.

His current students hail from six countries: China, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the US. Throw in former students from Germany, India, Israel, Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey and suddenly that 2500 square foot lab doesn’t seem quite large enough to contain the grievances their nations could claim against each other.

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“From day minus one, I felt I was joining a real community, not just a workplace,” Alan said, referring to the day he was hired as an assistant professor.

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“One important lesson I learned over the past 25 years is that USC does not just tolerate diversity, we celebrate it.” Alan says. “Just as my differences were embraced by the larger USC community when I first began here, I try to live by that standard with my students today.”

Twenty years ago, University of Minnesota Professor Imran Hayee was a PhD student in Alan’s lab. “Being a Muslim, I used to go to Friday prayers every week. He always respected that and made sure to arrange group meetings around my schedule,” Hayee said. “First, I was the only Muslim in the group, but since then several other Muslim students have joined.”

To this day, the group never holds research meetings on Fridays between 1 and 2pm in case any of the students want to go to Mosque. And Alan’s whole group has attended each of his four sons’ Bar Mitzvah ceremonies, even dancing together at the last one.

Alan and his students rarely talk politics, but they do discuss religion and culture — a lot. As the first identifiable Jew many of them have ever met, Alan encourages his students to ask him anything about his religion.

“My Chinese students tend to ask about kosher food – what it is and what it means.” Willner explains, as a large unopened jar of gefilte fish sits casually on his desk.  “I once had a Muslim student ask me if Jews believe in the Devil. We don’t, and as it happens neither do Muslims. We ended up having a wonderful hour-long discussion about it in my office.”

“Before I joined the group I knew almost nothing about Islam or Judaism”, says 5th year PhD student Yongxiong Ren. “But I soon learned that they each follow lunar calendars, just like we Chinese do, with similarly deep meanings. This really strengthened the idea in my mind about respecting people with different backgrounds.”

Nisar Ahmed, one of Dr. Willner’s recent graduates from Pakistan, recounts what it was like to be in the lab. “Professor Willner’s lab had students from all over the world, including one student from Israel, which was particularly interesting to me because I had never met anyone from that country,” he said. “The two of us became close and while working together I was able to correlate many common beliefs between our faiths. He even invited my family to his home for Shabbat (Sabbath) dinner, an experience I may otherwise never have had.”

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“I soon realized we all share the universal language of science, which unites people no matter where they’re from.” – Ahmad Fallahpour, Ph.D. Student

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Dr. Willner’s new students are exposed to this environment the moment they first step into his lab. “When I joined, I was extremely nervous because I’d never had experience working with international students,” said Ahmad Fallahpour, a first year PhD student from Iran. “When I arrived, I found people from different nationalities, cultures, religions and educational backgrounds working together. Now I have mentors from China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. I enjoy working with them because I get to learn about their cultures.”

Everyone in the group is acutely aware of their differences, but it is always approached in good humor.  Willner recounts an episode when two students, a religious Muslim and a religious Jew (two good friends, both with long beards), were sitting next to each other in a research meeting.

The Muslim student reported that his experiment was working and the Jewish student reported that his was not. Willner turned to the Jewish student and said, “Look, he prays five times a day and you only pray three times a day. Of course his experiment is going to work before yours.”  The entire group broke out in laughter.

So, to summarize: Alan Willner runs a lab full of students thrown together from a list of countries that collectively mistrust each other at best, and downright hate each other at worst. It’s like some sort of nerdy, engineering version of The Breakfast Club…with lasers.

The reality is that Alan’s lab actually thrives on this diversity. “Students aren’t homogeneous,” Alan says, “There may be rich differences in the way they approach work that stem from their background.”

Some countries might tend to emphasize a broader approach to engineering, while others may educate students in more focused areas. One cultural institution might be more hierarchical, encouraging students to defer to older peers. Another might emphasize a more individualistic perspective. None of these facts define an entire culture or person, and neither are any of them more right or wrong.

“I try to take all the cultural aspects from my group and see how we can make them work together. What we end up with is a collection of best practices from all over the world that allows us to work really smartly and efficiently,” says Willner.

Yongxiong Ren has taken this idea to heart. “Among all the lessons I learned in our lab, the most important one is that diverse teams are smarter and more creative. Some exciting ideas and solutions to technical challenges come from our discussions and debates. This is thanks to our different backgrounds and philosophies.”

This is an approach to people and life in general that has implications outside of a basement laboratory. A few years ago, when Alan hosted a brainstorming session with U.S. Military DARPA Fellows, his students from the Chinese and Muslim world were able to interact face-to-face with uniformed military personnel.

“When the event was over, the military folks came up to me and told me how much it opened their eyes to be able to interact with people they don’t normally cross paths with,” Alan says proudly.

That’s not to say that just putting U.S. military officials and Iranian PhD students in a room together is going to solve any major geopolitical problems – but it couldn’t hurt.

“One of the greatest lessons I learned in Dr. Willner’s lab was about the cooperation between people from diverse backgrounds working together for a common goal with mutual respect for each other.” Nisar says. “Imagine how this mindset can change our world.”

This was quickly learned by Ahmad as well. “At first I was astonished that the group worked together so well. I soon realized that we all share the universal language of science, which unites people no matter where they’re from.”

Alan understands that these experiences not only make for better engineers, but for better people as well. And at the end of the day, that is what he’s really after. “Do my students come out as better researchers than when they started? I believe so. But are they also changed for the better? Are they happier? I certainly hope so.” He says as our interview concludes.

Somehow, an underground photonics lab in the electrical engineering department seems to be the perfect place for people and ideas to come together. These students are here because of their shared passion for engineering. They have a shared mission; they are a kehillah. Sure, they have political positions, and religious affiliations, and long memories, just like everyone else. But sometimes the best way to get people to understand each other is to put them in a lab and force them to solve the problem of optical-fiber-induced data signal impairments, together.

By Ben Paul, originally written September 26, 2016.

>Read the original story on USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s website.

The power of fear drove cancer researcher Peter Kuhn toward his vocation

Kuhn is a cancer researcher at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience. He studies how cancer invades the human body.

One day, his mother, Rosi, found a lump in her breast. Cancer. It was foreign to her body and her temperament. She was barely 50, jovial and hardworking in the orchard.

“But the fear in her face for her future when she found out. I remember that. I grew up with that in my life. You never forget that,” Kuhn said.

His mother underwent an experimental treatment to control the tumor. She survived. But the fear persisted. Thereafter, any ache or pain triggered dread.

“I would see it in her eyes, her very first thought was, ‘It’s back, isn’t it? Cancer is back!’ So you ask yourself as a young man, ‘Why is that? Why does that happen? What can be done about it?’”

Another woman in town was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was treated at the same time using the same approach at the same clinic. The two women became friends, bound by circumstance and disease. The other woman died. Before she passed, she told Rosi, “Tell Peter to keep doing what he’s doing, to keep studying science, because someday it will lead to something good that can help women like us.”

He did.

By Gary Polakovic

> Read the original story on USC News.

“One of the things I’m the most proud of is being the first skateboarding envoy for the U.S. government. We worked with the embassy in the Netherlands to engage the Syrian refugees who’d been granted asylum in the Netherlands. It was an amazing project. And, not only was it engaging the Syrian refugees, but it was also engaging the youth of the Netherlands. Both of those groups are going to be the future of the Netherlands populace.

Neftalie Williams says skateboarding is his passion.

“When I’m skateboarding, I feel free. It gives me the space to do what I want to do and sort of tune out the rest of the world. All I do is what feels good to me, what feels great under my feet and it lets me belong to a larger community. So I feel it all, all at the same time.”

As a young adult, Williams gained a larger view on skateboarding.

“Right when I got to be about 20 years old, that’s when I decided that not only was skateboarding important, but it’s something that I should really, really be involved in — not just working on being an amateur sponsor skater, but that skateboarding meant more to more people and it was a way to sort of connect communities everywhere.

“So, for me, I started thinking about skating in a broader context. I ended up putting together my own skateboarding camp for kids in New England, because that was me wanting to give back to the sport that gave me so much life. And a lot of my good friends have now become pro skaters and they were counselors at my camp at that time. So, that was my first foray into making things bigger for skateboarding as a whole.”

Neftalie Williams is a researcher and lecturer with the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California (USC). He teaches a course called “Skateboarding and Action Sports in Business Media and Culture.”

Williams studied skateboarding in college and received a master’s degree in Public Diplomacy from USC. He is the first professor in the United States to teach the sport.

“I am the first professor of skateboarding and action sports here in the U.S.,especially at a major university, USC. I’ve been looking at how skateboarding can be used as a tool for cultural diplomacy. So, when it came time to bring the class together, they knew that I’d been working out in the field in Cuba and Brazil and South Africa and that we were trying to find new ways to engage youth all over the world.

Examining skating as a tool for cultural diplomacy worldwide, Williams joined forces with the U.S. State Department, becoming the first skateboarding and academic sports envoy in U.S. history.

“One of the things I’m the most proud of is being the first skateboarding envoy for the U.S. government. We worked with the embassy in the Netherlands to engage the Syrian refugees who’d been granted asylum in the Netherlands. It was an amazing project. And, not only was it engaging the Syrian refugees, but it was also engaging the youth of the Netherlands. Both of those groups are going to be the future of the Netherlands populace.

Excerpted from Neftalie Williams: Skateboarding Is a ‘Tool for Cultural Diplomacy’ by Marsha James

> Read the original story on VOA Learning English.

The Cross-Generational Friendship That Inspired a Life’s Work

A decades-long friendship taught a gerontologist that independence and dignity are worth fighting for.

It began in 1966 with a tap on Jon Pynoos’ door.

Dorothy Benton, a spry 73-year-old neighbor dressed in silk brocade, asked Pynoos, then a Harvard grad student studying urban planning, to join her for tea. Pretty soon, they were close friends.

Connecting with “Mrs. B.”—as Pynoos fondly calls her—created an unlikely intergenerational bond. It also diverted Pynoos’ career path.

Today, he is the UPS Foundation Professor in the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. He has written six books and hundreds of articles on housing and the elderly, and advocates for “aging in place,” or seniors living independently as long as possible.

“Were it not for Mrs. B., I probably wouldn’t have been in the field of aging,” says Pynoos, who joined USC’s faculty in 1979. “I wouldn’t have met my wife, and I wouldn’t have ended up at USC.”

It was Mrs. B. who encouraged Pynoos to apply for a job running a Boston-area home-care agency tasked with keeping seniors out of institutions. That led to his meeting fellow gerontologist Elyse Salend. Mrs. B. attended their wedding. The couple’s daughters Jessica Pynoos MSW ’09, MSG ’09 and Rebecca Pynoos MSW ’10 also work in the field of aging; son Josh Pynoos MPP ’14 focuses on criminal justice.

The stately brick apartment building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been home to Mrs. B. for more than 30 years when Pynoos moved in. She was unlike anyone he’d ever met: a refined, articulate, intensely independent woman; a divorcée who’d raised a daughter alone; a retired teacher who checked in on elderly shut-ins for the Red Cross. Above all, she was a social butterfly. Her afternoon teas brought together an eclectic cross-section of Boston society, young and old.

As their friendship deepened, Pynoos saw their apartment building through her eyes: how three flights of stairs took their toll; how removal of the dumbwaiter made grocery shopping harder. At age 94, Mrs. B. fell in her apartment. She waited 14 hours for help to arrive, her telephone inches out of reach. Deemed too frail to return there, she was consigned to a nursing home.

“Hard as it is to believe, I am no longer mistress of all that I survey,” she wrote Pynoos from the facility.

When Pynoos visited, he didn’t like what he saw. He intensified his advocacy for “universal design,” a movement to create environments accessible to everyone, including the elderly and people with disabilities.

Today, he directs the USC Davis-based National Resource Center on Supportive Housing and Home Modification, and he co-directs the USC-affiliated Fall Prevention Center of Excellence. An online executive certificate program he co-founded in 2004 has trained more than 1,000 building contractors, social workers, occupational therapists and other professionals to create safe living environments for seniors.

Jon Pynoos is now the same age Mrs. B. was when they first met. Over their decades-long friendship, he recorded 40 hours of interviews with her, planning to publish them as an oral history. That project is finally coming into focus.

Old friends don’t forget.

By Diane Krieger

> Read the original story on Trojan Family Magazine.