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Photo of Nile Green

New endowed chair in history goes to Nile Green, scholar of global history and Islam

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Photo of Nile Green

Nile Green

UCLA professor of history Nile Green, a prolific author whose research has focused on on Muslims in Asia, Africa and Europe, has been named the first Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History.

The Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair was created through a gift from UCLA alumnus Hollis Lenderking and is named to honor the Arab historiographer and historian Ibn Khaldun, widely considered as a forerunner of the modern disciplines of historiography, sociology, economics and demography. As a scholar, Green aims to bring global history into conversation with Islamic history.

“UCLA’s history curriculum expanded — I should say “exploded’ — my view of civilization during the tumultuous and pivotal era connecting the 1960s and 70s,” said Lenderking, who earned a bachelor’s degree in history from UCLA in 1971 and in 2009 also established the John Muir Memorial Endowed Chair in Geography, which is held by Glen MacDonald.

Lenderking recalled that when he was a student, the history department did not include specific classes on world history in the course catalog. He said he was fascinated to learn of its inclusion in recent years, especially considering the fact that the term “globalism” has become a lightning-rod for study and debate across societies, economies and cultures.

“It was hailed almost uncritically as the wave of the future in the 1990s, but has been rocked by disputation from every quarter in the decades since,” Lenderking said.

At a recent lecture celebrating his becoming the new chair, Green borrowed a phrase from poet William Blake to ponder “A World in A Grain of Sand: The Historian’s Dilemma of Scale” and how historians are reckoning with exponentially increasing amounts of data about more people in more places in more times.

“In recent decades, the accumulative character of historical knowledge has increased that dilemma, and access to big data will continue to do so, confronting the historian with the universal library imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1941 story, ‘La Biblioteca de Babel,’” said Green, who in 2015-16 he held the William Andrews Clark Professorship and who in 2018 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

But world history is not necessarily the same as the history of the world, Green would argue. And his exhortation to modern historians is to explore processes that use manageable or even micro-optics to address large-scale, macro problems.

“World history is defined by an approach, or method, rather than a fixed scale,” he said. “It is the study of processes that are intrinsically inter-regional; that unfold across geographical, ethnic, linguistic, or political boundaries. Examining those processes doesn’t necessarily require writing the history of the whole world.”

Green has a new book coming out in May titled, “The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca.” He’s also currently writing a book titled “A Very Short Introduction to Global Islam,” which seeks to address the questions what global Islam is and where it came from, as well as a book about the Indian Ocean, using Urdu and Persian travelogues to tell the story of interactions between India, Iran, Africa and Southeast Asia.

The galactic chimneys (yellow-orange areas extending vertically) are centered on the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Giant X-ray ‘chimneys’ are exhaust vents for vast energies produced at Milky Way’s center

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The galactic chimneys (yellow-orange areas extending vertically) are centered on the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

The galactic chimneys (yellow-orange areas extending vertically) are centered on the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

 

The center of our galaxy is a frenzy of activity. A behemoth black hole — 4 million times as massive as the sun — blasts out energy as it chows down on interstellar detritus while neighboring stars burst to life and subsequently explode.

Now, an international team of astronomers has discovered two exhaust channels — dubbed “galactic center chimneys” — that appear to funnel matter and energy away from the cosmic fireworks in the Milky Way’s center, about 28,000 light-years from Earth.

Mark Morris, a UCLA professor of astronomy and astrophysics, contributed to the research, which will be published March 21 in the journal Nature.

“We hypothesize that these chimneys are exhaust vents for all the energy released at the center of the galaxy,” Morris said.

All galaxies are giant star-forming factories, but their productivity can vary widely — from one galaxy to the next and even over the course of each galaxy’s lifetime. One mechanism for throttling the rate of star production is the fountain of matter and energy whipped up by the heavyweight black hole that lurks at a galaxy’s center.

“Star formation determines the character of a galaxy,” Morris said. “And that’s something we care about because stars produce the heavy elements out of which planets — and life — are made.”

To better understand what becomes of that outflow of energy, Morris and his colleagues pointed the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite, which detects cosmic X-rays, toward the center of the Milky Way. Because X-rays are emitted by extremely hot gas, they are especially useful for mapping energetic environments in space.

In images they collected from 2016 to 2018 and in 2012, the researchers found two plumes of X-rays — the galactic center chimneys — stretching in opposite directions from the central hub of the galaxy. Each plume originates within about 160 light-years of the supermassive black hole and spans over 500 light-years.

The chimneys hook up to two gargantuan structures known as the Fermi bubbles, cavities carved out of the gas that envelops the galaxy. The bubbles, which are filled with high-speed particles, straddle the center of the galaxy and stretch for 25,000 light-years in either direction. Some astronomers suspect that the Fermi bubbles are relics of massive eruptions from the supermassive black hole, while others think the bubbles are blown out by hordes of newly born stars. Either way, the chimneys could be the conduits through which high-speed particles get there.

Understanding how energy makes its way from a galaxy’s center to its outer limits could provide insights into why some galaxies are bursting with star formation whereas others are dormant.

“In extreme cases, that fountain of energy can either trigger or shut off star formation in the galaxy,” Morris said.

Our galaxy isn’t quite that extreme — other galaxies have fountains powered by central black holes weighing a thousand times more than ours — but the Milky Way’s center provides an up-close look at what might be happening in galaxies that are more energetic.

“We know that outflows and winds of material and energy emanating from a galaxy are crucial in sculpting and altering that galaxy’s shape over time — they’re key players in how galaxies, and other structures, form and evolve throughout the cosmos,” said lead author Gabriele Ponti of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. “Luckily, our galaxy gives us a nearby laboratory to explore this in detail, and probe how material flows out into the space around us.”

Morris said the centers of the nearest galaxies are hundreds to thousands of times farther away than our own. “The amount of energy coming out of the center of our galaxy is limited, but it’s a really good example of a galactic center that we can observe and try to understand,” he said.

Nine authors from five countries contributed to the study. The research was funded by NASA, the French National Center for Space Studies, the French National Agency for Research, the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, the German Aerospace Center and the Max Planck Society.

Photo of Justin Caram, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College, and graduate student Dayanni Bhagwandin.

New UCLA fellowship aims to make environmental science more inclusive

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Photo of Justin Caram, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College, and graduate student Dayanni Bhagwandin.

Justin Caram, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College, and graduate student Dayanni Bhagwandin.

 

Climate change touches every life on the planet — so why are so many environmental scientists white men?

Last year, UCLA became the first university to launch a center for diversity in environmental science to counter the problem. Its goal: to inspire a generation of leaders that actually matches the demographics of the U.S. population.

This year, the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science’s first class of fellows takes flight, building a critical mass to ensure students and faculty of diverse backgrounds have what they’ll need to succeed, from funding to a supportive community of scientists with similar backgrounds.

“With challenges like climate change, the stakes have never been higher for ensuring we have scientific literacy coupled with representation and innovation,” said Aradhna Tripati, the center’s founder and a UCLA climate scientist. “We need every person’s imagination to overcome some of the greatest challenges our society has faced.”

Karen McKinnon, a professor in the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability knows only too well how that sense of isolation affects a student. As one of just a few women in her doctoral program, McKinnon experienced first-hand what it’s like to be a minority in an academic setting.

“The experience of having only a small number of female peers was challenging because you always felt just a little bit out of place,” said McKinnon, who is also a professor of statistics. “It was a visual reminder that I was not the ‘typical’ scientist.”

In the United States, 86 percent of the environmental science workforce is white and 70 percent is male, despite the fact that the EPA found in a 2018 study that non-white communities had a 28 percent higher health burden from environmental issues. Those under the poverty line had a 35 percent higher health burden.

The inaugural fellows class consists of 47 high school, undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, along with 22 faculty fellows from UCLA. The students will work in groups on research and outreach campaigns while the faculty fellows serve as mentors and role models.

Photo of Postdoctoral scientist Adeyemi Adebiyi and Jasper Kok, associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

Postdoctoral scientist Adeyemi Adebiyi and Jasper Kok, associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

The fellows aim to break barriers that prevent women and minorities from pursuing academic careers in the sciences through group collaboration, workshop training sessions and community outreach. Students are paid for their work with financial support from the National Science Foundation and private donations.

The fellows aim to break barriers that prevent women and minorities — including people of various gender identities and sexual orientations — from pursuing academic careers in the sciences through group collaboration, workshop training sessions and community outreach. Students are paid for their work with financial support from the National Science Foundation and private donations.

Ronald Thompson, a second-year environmental science student from Sacramento, said he is one of few black students in most of his classes.

“Diversity provides comfort in a work environment and shows that you can do anything despite your race, religious beliefs or sexuality,” said Thompson, who wants to pursue a research career in conservation biology. “It lets you be comfortable with what you’re doing and makes you feel like you’re not being judged or looked at differently.”

For his research component of the fellowship, Thompson works with other undergraduates in a group overseen by a doctoral candidate to analyze sediment from ancient lakes across the western United States. Their research aims to discover how those lakes persisted through past changes in climate — and how they might react to modern climate change. While the work is fulfilling, Thompson said the best part is working with others just as passionate as himself about the environment.

“People go above and beyond what is required of them out of pure passion for the work they do,” Thompson said. “Everyone wants to be a part of the change that promotes a better future.”

Next year, Thompson will be paired with a faculty fellow for one-on-one mentorship, a cornerstone of the fellowship program.

Tripati said that having a continuum of scientists at all levels — from high school students to professors — is an effective strategy to build professional communities that are inclusive of all forms of diversity: gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, race and ethnicity.

Lack of diversity in such programs can have global implications when it comes to environmental issues, she added.

“If you don’t have women in science, you’re missing some of that talent pool,” McKinnon said. “There remain a lot of fundamental questions to answer about how the climate system responds to human influence.”

One way to make students more comfortable in class is to encourage teachers to embrace inclusive teaching techniques, said Jasper Kok, who is one of the faculty fellows and an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences in the UCLA College. Every class includes a 10-minute exercise during which students work with their neighbors.

“Techniques that engage students and let them work collaboratively help those students who feel like they don’t belong feel more at home and more likely to stay in that field,” he said.

For student fellow Thompson, the benefits are more personal.

“It’s an opportunity to give back to communities and be a role model to other college students, high school students and middle school students,” he said.

Painted Lady Butterfly

UCLA aflutter over the butterfly effect

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Painted Lady Butterfly

A painted lady butterfly taking a rest in UCLA’s Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden during a mass migration in 2019.

You’ve seen the butterflies fluttering across Los Angeles and speeding through campus. You’re likely to see them for another couple of weeks, according to research scientist Jeff Holmquist, a community ecologist at the UCLA White Mountain Research Center and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Holmquist explained in an interview why there are so many butterflies this year and why he’s betting on this species despite climate change. He also clarifies that the migration has nothing to do with the wildflower super bloom, and why that yellow splat on your windshield is the same thing that helps the butterflies make their migration — and what makes butterflies a nutritious snack.

Where are these butterflies coming from?

These are painted lady butterflies. They have a famous migration pattern. They winter in various places in northern Mexico and Southern California like the Mojave Desert. They prefer open habitat like desert, sage growth and meadows.

Why are we seeing so many in Los Angeles right now?

The big migration years seem to be in wet years, when there’s a lot of food for the caterpillars. Big rain years like the one we just had are just huge for the forage plants that they eat. So the female will lay individual eggs on plants, and they hatch in about 5 to 7 days. The caterpillars just eat and eat for a few days, then make a chrysalis.

I’ve been studying invertebrates my whole career, and butterflies are just extraordinary. To reorganize the body like that takes a huge amount of energy. You may as well imagine eating like crazy for a week, crawling into a sleeping bag for a few weeks, and coming out as an eagle.

They’re flying north where it’s temperate to lay eggs.

Do they migrate every year?

Normally we see a few here, a few there, but yes, there’s always a migration. They’re very fast fliers. They can go about 20 miles per hour, and they’ve been clocked at 25. If I can maintain about 25 miles per hour on my bike, I can fly along with the butterfly flight. It’s quite fun. I’m looking forward to the migration making it north where I am in a few weeks. They also have a return migration that tends to be at high altitude. There’s some mystery there, because it’s really unknown by scientists how frequently they migrate at high altitude. We may be missing some of the picture because they fly quite high.

[Editor’s note: the White Mountain Research Center where Holmquist works is about 260 miles north of UCLA, close to California’s eastern border.]

Are they attracted by the super bloom of wildflowers in Southern California right now?

It’s more that they fly at the same time that flowers bloom. As you’ve seen, they’re on a mission. They’re not stopping to feed. Right now, they’re living on their fat reserves. They’re very good at turning their food into energy in the form of lipids — that is, fat. They have to take a backpack full of food, essentially, to make this migration, and for them that’s an abdomen full of fat. If you see them hit your windshield, you’ll see that yellow splat, and that’s the lipids.

Fat reserves are very important for a lot of insects, and that’s part of why many societies are rediscovering them as food right now, or have traditionally eaten them. Butterflies are very fatty.

I’ve heard of insects as high-protein, but not fatty.

Oh yeah, they’re like little chicharrones. I have a project going right now with our local Paiute tribe, and butterflies are an important traditional Native American food. The Paiute use a different species, but they catch the caterpillars, then roast, salt and boil them, and they preserve very well throughout the year.

Is the change in this year’s migration related to climate change?

My sense is that over time we can expect to see earlier migrations, as the climate warms. I’m not sure this year’s is early, though. And there’s the unknown factor of rain. A lot of butterfly booms are cyclical, but this one is really driven by rains. In a year with more rain, we would anticipate another large migration.

 

 

Are there other ways that climate change could interfere with painted ladies?

It’s possible. They might get too hot earlier. But I wouldn’t bet against the painted lady. It’s probably the world’s most widely distributed butterfly, living everywhere but South America and Antarctica. It’s very well-adapted. There’s a very large migration in Eurasia that’s even more striking than what we have right now, and one that goes from the Sahara to England.

A lot of species are very specific in their choice of host plants, but painted ladies aren’t picky. They’re real generalists. They eat lots of thistles, sage, sunflower and mallow plants. So they’re fine. But we’re in danger of losing so many other species.

As long as people have butterflies on the brain right now, what can they do to support butterflies and biodiversity?

Plant some milkweed. While painted ladies eat lots of plants, monarch butterflies need milkweed. People need to plant the native northern milkweed — the southern, more tropical milkweeds don’t have the same seasonal cycle, and that may remove an important migration cue for monarchs. Other than that, any good nectar plants are good for a butterfly garden.

For painted ladies, maybe slow down a little if you see them while you’re driving. I brake for butterflies. But that may not be the thing to do on the freeway.

Any other advice about the migration?

Enjoy it. This is nature’s fireworks display.

Photo of Kara Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA.

The parallels of female power in ancient Egypt and modern times

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Photo of Kara Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA.

Kara Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA.

 

Over the course of 3,000 years of Egypt’s history, six women ascended to become female kings of the fertile land and sit atop its authoritarian power structure. Several ruled only briefly, and only as the last option in their respective failing family line. Nearly all of them achieved power under the auspices of attempting to protect the throne for the next male in line. Their tenures prevented civil wars among the widely interbred families of social elites. They inherited famines and economic disasters. With the exception of Cleopatra, most remain a mystery to the world at large, their names unpronounceable, their personal thoughts and inner lives unrecorded, their deeds and images often erased by the male kings that followed, especially if the women were successful.

In her latest National Geographic book, “When Women Ruled the World” Kara Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture and chair of the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, tells the stories of these six women: Merneith (some time between 3000–2890 B.C.), Neferusobek (1777–1773 B.C.), Hatsepshut (1473–1458 B.C.), Nefertiti (1338–1336 B.C.), Tawroset (1188–1186 B.C.) and Cleopatra (51–30 B.C.).

As we ponder Women’s History Month, and look forward toward a U.S. presidential primary campaign that includes more women candidates than ever before, we asked Cooney about themes of female power and what Egypt can illuminate for us.

Your book illustrates that Egyptian society valued and embraced women’s rule when it was deemed necessary, but these are not instances of feminism. Their attempts to rule was really about keeping the set structure in place.

Studying Egypt is a study of power, and specifically of how to maintain the power of the one over the many. That story also always includes examples of how women are used as tools to make sure the authoritarian regime flourishes. This is the most interesting part to me because then the whole tragedy of the study, of the book, is that this is not about feminism at all. It’s not about feminists moving forward, it’s not about the feminist agenda. It’s not about anything but protecting the status quo, the rich staying rich, the patriarchy staying in charge and the system continuing. We still do this, us women. Women work for the patriarchy without thinking about it, all the time. In the end, did women rule the world? Yes, they did rule the world but did it change anything? No.

I want to look at our world the same way. It doesn’t matter if we have a female president. What matters is how people rule and whose agendas are served.

People who have been to Egypt probably know the name Hatshepsut and maybe Nefertiti, but clearly the most pervasive female cultural Egyptian reference is Cleopatra. Why is she the one? Do we just have more materials related to her?

No, it’s because when you are successful, you can very easily be erased. Cleopatra failed in her efforts to hold on to power and hold onto native rule in Egypt. When you are a failure, it’s aberrant, strange and it spins a good tale. It’s a great story, failure. Whereas success is doing what everyone did before you and what everyone will do after you. It’s the same and nobody cares. It’s the same as being a successful female in a meeting or a successful female who shares a great idea with her boss and her boss takes that idea into the meeting while she sits there meekly, letting the boss take it for his or her own because it’s a successful, great idea.

So it’s the women who are the greatest successes in the story who are the most successfully erased. The women who did it all wrong and didn’t leave their land better than when they found it, who are remembered as cautionary tales. That’s our cultural memory. That’s why everyone can pronounce the name Cleopatra and no one has any idea how to pronounce Hatshepsut. She is not in our cultural memory. It doesn’t serve our patriarchal system to add her to it.

But remember, in the Egyptian mindset Cleopatra wasn’t a failure. She fought Rome and lost, but in the Arabic sources Cleopatra is remembered as an adherent to Egyptian philosophy, a freedom fighter against Rome and as a learned patriot to her people.

Book cover of When Women Ruled the World

How does the framework of Egypt’s long and relatively well-documented history and culture inform our perspectives on power as American citizens, a country of such a comparatively short history and governance?

Egypt is such a gift. When I get asked — and I do — “Why bother devoting your life to this place that’s been gone for 2,000 years and studying people that are as old as 5,000 years?” the answer is that Egypt provides me with 3,000 years of the same cultural system, religious system, government system and language system. I can follow them through booms and busts, through collapse and resurgence and see human reactions to prosperity and pain. That’s really useful. We are in this infancy of 250 years and we think we are so smart, we think we are post-racial, post-sexist and all of these things. But we’re not. Egypt is a huge gift to compare the situation that you are in to the past to see how you might better face the future.

It must be difficult to unearth women’s stories because of the ways in which historical records from around the world largely excluded information about them.

That’s the frustration of working with Egypt. We can’t forget that this is an authoritarian regime. It’s not a competitive place where I can get a speech from a competitor and try to understand a different viewpoint and agenda. It’s my responsibility as a historian of this regime to try and break it down and see what the truth is between the lines. For these women in power it’s even harder because so many of them were erased when their stories did not fit the patriarchal narrative. My job is to be a historical reconstructionist without being a revisionist. I’m interested in seeing how people work within a system and why we are so opposed, even hostile, to female power.

Why are we so hostile to female power?

The stereotype is that the female is going to use emotionality, her own and others, to manipulate and lie, to shame and guilt people into doing something. The man somehow won’t do that. He will be a straight shooter.

There is the idea that there is the masculine emotionality and a female emotionality. This female emotionality, which many men also bear, is the reason we don’t allow them to wield power because they’re happy, sad, up, down. They feel too many emotions that cannot be allowed.

The men that we ask to lead must suppress those emotions and show this even-keeled strength or only anger and no other softer emotions and then only strategically. We demand a kind of emotionality from our leaders that I find quite stunted and I want to know what the evolutionary biology of that is because a lot of this is a knee-jerk reaction to what serves us better in a short-term, acute time of crisis. I think we all need to discuss what it is about that female emotionality, of connecting with our own emotions and others or even manipulating our emotions for our own gain, that is so problematic.

As of now, six women have announced Democratic presidential campaigns for 2020. What does our historical knowledge of what happens to women when they seek power bode for the coming election season?

I get rather cynical about it, to be honest. Already I see the dialogue revolving around deceit and not being a straight shooter.

Again, it’s that double standard that you wouldn’t necessarily get with a man. It’s interesting to see how people are judging women based on emotionality and how much of that they show, how ambitious they seem to be and how duplicitous they may or may not be.

That possibility for deceit is something we are quite obsessed with for female candidates. The possibility of lies by the female is that much more powerful than the outright, absolute fact of deceit by a male candidate or leader. That is very interesting to me. The female is assumed to be a liar, but when a man lies he’s doing it for a reason and he’s on my side so I’m cool with it.

We’ve been discussing racism for some time but we do not discuss our hostility towards females in power. Unless we start to talk about it and openly discuss it, it won’t change.

Photo of Shane Campbell-Staton

UCLA biology professor uses superheroes to help students sift fact from fiction

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Photo of Shane Campbell-Staton

Shane Campbell-Staton, shown in his UCLA office, says comic books offer a fantastical look at biological concepts.

While Shane Campbell-Staton was working on his dissertation at Harvard in 2013, he walked into a comic book store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and saw a comic in which Superman fought Muhammad Ali. That was the first comic book he ever bought.

An evolutionary biologist, he spent his days writing about the evolution of a small green lizard that adapted from a warm, sub-tropical environment to the cold winters of Tennessee, North Carolina and Oklahoma. Before going to sleep, he read the comic book as a guilty pleasure.

“Pitting the peak of human performance in Muhammad Ali against the peak of science fiction performance in the Man of Steel, in a ring with gloves on, I had to see how that fight ended,” Campbell-Staton said. (He refuses to spoil the ending by saying who won.)

Campbell-Staton became curious about other comic book universes, and returned to buy a couple of other superhero comics, which he also read before falling asleep. He started to have strange dreams that combined the biology he was thinking about with the comic books he was reading. He had a dream about the Flash – the fastest person in the world whose super speed is coupled with superhuman reflexes – running faster than a bullet. Campbell-Staton woke up thinking about muscle fiber, friction and metabolism — things that fuel a body.

“Science fiction and comic books are a really good way of approaching classic questions in biology from a different angle,” said Campbell-Staton, a UCLA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, whose research focuses on how reptiles and other animal species adapt to extreme environments, and the physiology, biology and evolution behind that process. “Comic books offer a fantastical look at the same concepts.”

Campbell-Staton started his popular Biology of Superheroes podcast in late 2017, which was a top 20 iTunes science and medicine podcast this January.

This quarter he is teaching a new “Biology of Superheroes” course for juniors and seniors in the life sciences. He uses superheroes such as Batman, Captain America, Black Panther and Wonder Woman, as well as Jurassic Park and zombies, to teach his students the biology of aging, genetics, evolution, genetic engineering, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, the ethics of reviving extinct species, parallel universes, intelligent alien life and how biology shapes modern society.

Photo of Shane Campbell-Staton giving a lecture to students.

Shane Campbell-Staton teaches his “Biology of Superheroes” course at UCLA.

Students read peer-reviewed research journal articles, chapters from science books and comic books. They can create their own science fiction or superhero podcast for their final project, or write a paper or a superhero short novel. Campbell-Staton said he would like to include some of their podcast material on his podcast.

Campbell-Staton said he wants to push students to think about biology in ways they typically would not.

“Regardless of whether these students go into medicine, research, politics, or other fields, my job is to help them sift fact from fiction,” Campbell-Staton said. “If you can sift fact from fiction in Spider-Man, that is a training ground for asking questions about what is true, what is not, and how to tell one from the other when it comes to complex ideas they will confront later in their lives.”

His students agree.

“Usually, we learn the biology of plants and animals. This class is refreshing and cool,” Fayt Sarreal said.

Student Andy Duong said Campbell-Staton cleverly weaves science into the superhero discussions in a creative and engaging way.

In a recent class session, Campbell-Staton raised a question posed by Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould (who died in 2002): If you replay the tape of evolution, will you repeatedly get the same results or different results?

The consensus among the students was the results would be different. One said the six-mile-wide asteroid that crashed to Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and approximately 75 percent of the world’s animal and plant species, might miss the Earth in an alternate scenario, and if so, the dinosaurs likely would still roam the Earth.

The 2018 movie, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” addresses this question with alternate universes. The character Peter Parker is Spider-Man in one universe, while Gwen Stacy is Spider-Woman in another universe. The same characters appear in different universes, but as a superhero in one universe, a normal person in a different universe, and a supervillain in another universe. The role of determinism in evolution is a lively, ongoing debate in evolutionary biology — one this movie explores through the lens of the multiverse, Campbell-Staton said. Gould argued that replaying the tape of life repeatedly would yield different results, likely not including humans.

An earlier class session covered whether elite athletes have to be extraordinarily gifted genetically. Campbell-Staton discussed specific gene mutations that influence endurance and muscle strength. He plans to teach the “Biology of Superheroes” each year in winter quarter.

When Campbell-Staton was in high school, he took a memorable course on myths and legends that delved into broader issues. “That always stuck with me as a unique and enjoyable learning experience that forced me to push myself,” he said.

Photo of a UCLA Chemistry lab

41 UCLA scientists among world’s most influential scholars, based on citations

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Photo of a UCLA Chemistry lab

A UCLA chemistry lab. The Clarivate report identifies researchers whose publications have “been repeatedly judged by their peers to be of notable significance and utility.”

 

The world’s most influential scientific researchers in 2018 include 41 UCLA scholars.

In its annual list, Clarivate Analytics names the most highly cited researchers — those whose work was most often referenced by other scientific research papers for the preceding decade in 21 fields across the sciences and social sciences. (The 2018 list is based on citations between 2006 and 2016.)

The researchers rank in the top 1 percent in their fields in producing widely cited studies, indicating that their work “has been repeatedly judged by their peers to be of notable significance and utility,” according to Clarivate. Current UCLA faculty members and researchers who were named to the list, noted with their primary UCLA research field or fields, are:

Three UCLA professors awarded 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships

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Three young UCLA professors have been named recipients of 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships. The fellowships, which were announced today, were awarded to 126 scientists and scholars from 57 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.

“Sloan Research Fellows are the best young scientists working today,” said Adam Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Sloan Fellows stand out for their creativity, for their hard work, for the importance of the issues they tackle and the energy and innovation with which they tackle them. To be a Sloan Fellow is to be in the vanguard of 21st-century science.”

Winners of Sloan Research Fellowships receive a two-year, $70,000 award to support their research. The fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of exceptional young scientists and scholars in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics.

UCLA’s 2019 recipients are:

 

Photo of Denis Chertverikov

Denis Chertverikov

Denis Chetverikov

Chetverikov, an assistant professor of economics at UCLA since 2013, studies econometrics, an area of economics that focuses on the use of mathematical and statistical methods to describe economic systems. His recent research includes work on high-dimensional models, shape restrictions and applications of empirical process theory in econometrics. He has been published in Econometrica, the Annals of Statistics, and the Annals of Probability. He is also the recipient of a 2016 grant from the National Science Foundation; and the MIT Presidential Fellowship in 2008. He received his doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013 and his master’s from the New Economic School in Moscow in 2007.

 

 

Photo of Yongjie Hu

Yongjie Hu

Yongjie Hu

Hu, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, studies nanoscale transport processes and advanced materials for research into energy and micro/nanoscale sensor systems. His group’s discovery of the world’s most efficient semiconductor material for thermal management was featured in the Aug. 10, 2018 issue of the journal Science. His research has been recognized with a National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, U.S. Air Force Young Investigator Award, and the American Chemical Society’s Doctoral New Investigator Award. Hu and colleagues also received a UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge grant, a program made possible by the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation. Hu joined the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering in 2014. Prior to UCLA, he was a Battelle postdoctoral fellow at MIT and earned his doctorate from Harvard University.

 

 

Aaswath Raman

Photo of Aaswath Raman

Aaswath Raman

Raman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, investigates how to control light and heat at the nanoscale. His laboratory brings together a multi-disciplinary computational and experimental perspective to design, fabricate and study metamaterials and new complex optical materials that can shape, absorb and emit light in highly unusual and useful ways over a broad range of wavelengths. Raman and his team are strongly motivated by climate change and the need for new energy technologies that better harness the light and heat around us. He has pioneered the development of radiative sky cooling as a new energy technology, showing how a natural phenomenon in which heat dissipates into the sky and space can, among other things, cool buildings without using electricity, and also generate electricity at night. In 2018, Raman gave a widely viewed TED talk on his research. His honors include being named to MIT Technology Review’s annual Innovators Under 35 list. He is a recipient of the Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction from the Government of Alberta, Canada; the SPIE Green Photonics Award; and the inaugural Nelson “Buck” Robinson Science and Technology Award for Renewable Energy from the Materials Research Society. Raman is also the co-founder and chief scientific officer of SkyCool Systems, a startup company based on his radiative sky cooling research.

U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu speaks with UCLA professor Abel Valenzuela during an audience Q&A following the Winston C. Doby lecture.

U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu says government can help make society more just for all

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U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu speaks with UCLA professor Abel Valenzuela during an audience Q&A following the Winston C. Doby lecture.

U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu speaks with UCLA professor Abel Valenzuela during an audience Q&A following the Winston C. Doby lecture.

U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu came from Taiwan to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old. And since then, he has tried to champion the ideals that propelled him and his family to success.

“In my mind, [my parents] achieved the American dream,” the California Democrat told the crowd as he delivered the UCLA Academic Advancement Project’s Winston C. Doby Distinguished Lecture. “They went from being poor, to owning a home, to giving my brother and I an amazing education.”

Lieu told his story to a rapt audience of students, faculty and alumni on Feb. 19 at the California NanoSystems Institute. This year was the seventh Doby lecture, which is put on by UCLA’s Academic Advancement Program.

Known as AAP, the Academic Advancement Program is the nation’s largest university-based student diversity program, with a tradition of more than 40 years at UCLA. It has reached more than 5,600 students through academic advising, collaborative learning workshops, mentoring, scholarships and a summer bridge program for entering freshmen and transfer students.

AAP established the Doby lecture to honor its creator and first director, Winston C. Doby, who devoted more than 40 years advocating for access and social justice in higher education for all students.

“He continues to be an inspiration to me,” said Charles Alexander, associate vice provost for student diversity and current AAP director. “He was very involved in many, many incredible things in terms of building this campus and building campus community.”

As Lieu considered the topic of how to make society more just and fair for everyone, he broke it down into three distinct areas for his approximately 45-minute lecture: education, immigration and criminal justice reform.

“The single best investment our nation can make is in education,” said Lieu, who added that he found inspiration in Doby’s work and the work of UCLA’s Academic Advancement Project. “We have to think about it, not just for higher education, but all the way down.”

Lieu emphasized the benefits of investing in education for children ages 0-5, and to also look for holistic solutions. He emphasized the need to lift families out of poverty as the best way to improve educational outcomes

“That would do more to improve public education than anything we could do,” Lieu said.

He cited an example of a Los Angeles nonprofit that went into schools and tested children’s eyesight. As many as 30 percent of students in several schools needed eyeglasses, which the nonprofit delivered. Once the students were able to see clearly, test scores improved. “If you could take into account these non-school factors, that is a big way to improve public education.”

On immigration, Lieu expressed his frustration that a deal to protect people who qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program fell through, but vowed to continue to find a way to halt any unfair immigration laws that President Donald Trump’s administration might propose. Lieu said that he would still consider giving in to some of the administration’s demands — perhaps even a wall — if there was comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, he and many others seek. Lieu said he did not want to rule that out.

Even though it can often be difficult to find political common ground in Washington, D.C., Lieu co-authored a recently passed criminal justice reform bill. The bill has lowered sentences for non-violent crimes, among other actions.

“It was not huge, but it was a step in the right direction,” Lieu said, adding that a good second step would be to implement bail reform. “If you really look into it, it is a disaster. On any given day, hundreds of thousands of people are locked up in prisons and jails, not because they’ve been convicted of anything, but because they are too poor to pay the fee to get out of jail or prison.”

Under current bail laws people get released because they can afford to pay a large bail, not because they committed a crime that makes them less of a threat to the community. Consequently, poorer people languish in jail.

Lieu said a newer risk analysis system that adjusts to that reality has been previously implemented in Washington, D.C. and Kentucky — and this year in California — has shown early positive results.

Lieu briefly discussed Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the border between the United States and Mexico.

“Study after study after study say that both documented and undocumented immigrants commit less crime than people born here,” Lieu said, adding that he thinks there is a good argument to be made in the courts to halt the national emergency declaration.

Lieu concluded by taking the time to talk about the humanitarian crisis caused by the Yemen Civil War. He said his heart goes out to the Yemen civilians who are suffering, and he’s distressed by the mounting casualties from Saudi Arabian airstrikes — something he has fought to bring to the national consciousness. “War crimes are not a partisan issue.”

After his speech, Lieu fielded questions from the audience, assisted by moderator Abel Valenzuela, UCLA professor of urban planning and Chicana and Chicano studies, as well as UCLA Chancellor Gene Block’s adviser on immigration. Topics included the 2020 presidential election, Green New Deal and affirmative action.

Lieu concluded by emphasizing the social justice aspect of the evening, and vowing to continue to fight for those ideals in Congress. “I’m in politics to make sure this [American] dream remains possible for people who want to work hard and succeed.”

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Political science professor’s new bestseller illuminates America’s ‘Identity Crisis’

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Lynn Vavreck

For almost a decade, UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck has been telling us the message matters when it comes to American politics, specifically presidential campaigns.

“Every election will create narratives about how the winner won,” said Vavreck, co-author of a recently released bestseller about the 2016 presidential election that uses data-driven analysis to dispel popular misconceptions about why Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

“But it’s common that those narratives don’t quite hold up under scrutiny when we look at polling data and electorate surveys and other data, and that’s particularly true of what we found when we looked closely at 2016,” said Vavreck, who was named the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy in January.

In “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America,”Vavreck and co-authors John Sides, professor of political science at George Washington University, and Michael Tesler, associate professor of political science at UC Irvine, methodically outline the primary battles that led to the eventual matchup between Trump and Clinton. The authors dissect media coverage, national polling, data about voters’ attitudes, the effects of Russian interference, the impact of social media on misinformation and the candidates’ messaging and overarching campaign strategies.

As the nation recalibrates after a contentious midterm election season punctuated by polarized rhetoric and high voter turnout, “Identity Crisis” takes a microscope to what mattered most in 2016.

While historically presidential elections are almost always a referendum on the party in power, and typically a referendum on how well the economy is performing under that power, it’s not ever solely about the economy, Vavreck contends, and which she outlined in her 2009 book “The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns.”

For the most recent election, which was always going to be a toss-up, as “Identity Crisis” painstakingly documents, the message that emerged was all about identity.

Photo of the bestseller "Identity Crisis"

“Identity Crisis” cover

“In 2016, the notion of identity, and how people think about their group compared to other groups was a prism that refracted voters’ ideas about the economy, which created a phenomenon we call ‘racialized economics,” Vavreck said.

Trump was particularly good at identifying and stoking the flames of in-group/out-group insecurities and flash points, with fiery rhetoric around complicated issues like immigration, criminal justice and fears of Islamic terrorism, as well as economic anxiety. Shortly after the election, a prevailing theme of voter rage and frustration began to emerge to explain Trump’s win.

But, according to Vavreck and her co-authors and the data they examined, voters weren’t markedly angrier in 2016 than they were in 2012 or even 2008. And, voters’ attitudes about race weren’t much different between those election time frames, either.

What was different in 2016 was the message, the players, and the fact that “outsider” Trump was willing to tap into racial fears and attitudes in ways that previous Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney, both of whom campaigned against a black candidate, declined to do, Vavreck said.

“I think Trump is not held to the same standards as ‘professional’ politicians because of who he is — so in some way, he was able to do what a typical politician could not do — or certainly would not do,” she said.

This identity messaging strategy was again in play during the recent midterms when the president frequently held up a caravan of asylum seekers from Central America as a national threat while speaking in support of Republican candidates.

Meanwhile, although almost every week there’s a news story about Facebook’s effects on elections and democracies, Vavreck is doubtful about how much impact the social networking platform truly wields, mostly because of the nature of the interaction on the site. People mostly follow and see posts from people who already think very similarly to them.

And the oft-discussed Russian ads were seen by a relatively small number of people, and mostly within those echo chambers, Vavreck said.

“I’m pretty skeptical of the social media angle because of the self-selection into conversations on those media,” she said.

Vavreck has emerged as a respected voice in the world of presidential politics. She contributes regularly to the New York Times data-driven politics and economics blog “The Upshot,” and is a coveted local, national and international commentator on American presidential campaigns.

She’s already thinking about what 2020 will bring, this time planning to write a book on her own, without her collaborators from “Identity Crisis.” Along with Sides, she co-wrote the well-received “The Gamble:Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election.”

“I am really interested in the role of ‘authenticity’ in politics — what it is, how we can measure it, how people perceive it, whether it really does any work,” she said. “People evaluate art and music this way all the time, and I’d like to try to evaluate politicians as performers in this way.”