16 minute read
Curriculum
How Alumni Continue to Learn From USC Dornsife Faculty
If you don’t see the connection between black holes, COVID-19 and the economics of happiness, you’re probably one of our few readers who hasn’t yet discovered the monthly, virtual event series known as Dornsife Dialogues. The hour-long forums, which skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic, feature USC Dornsife scholars (and others) engaged in fascinating discussions on a wide range of topics.
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SHARING EXPERTISE “Unless you’re a student, you’ve got few opportunities to hear our brilliant scholars share their expertise on a wide range of interesting and topical issues,” says USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller. “Dornsife Dialogues changes that dynamic, offering our alumni and others the opportunity to not only hear directly from our faculty and researchers, but to ask them questions.”
Launched in 2017 as a limited series of in-person forums that were recorded and shared via USC Dornsife’s YouTube channel, Dornsife Dialogues was revived in early 2020 as a series of live Zoom events. The first event of the new series, “The Pandemic Election,” featured the leaders of the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, Robert Shrum and Mike Murphy, in a lively discussion about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 election.
There have been 38 events since then; collectively they have had well over 60,000 views.
HUNGER TO CONNECT “We sensed there was a hunger among our alumni, particularly early on in the pandemic, to not only connect with their alma mater, but to hear from experts on timely and interesting topics,” says Sarah Sturm, senior executive director of USC Dornsife alumni relations. “What we didn’t know was how intense the interest would be and that more than two years later, it would remain so strong.”
Ben Wong ’78, who has a PhD in cellular and molecular biology, says he has watched about 20 Dornsife Dialogues. “I truly enjoy learning new things,” says Wong, “especially since there are no quizzes, midterms or final exams.” His favorite event was titled “How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.”
PROVIDING BALANCE “I trust the information to be current, accurate, reliable and presented without an agenda, other than to inform,” Wong says. “Certainly, speakers have their own viewpoints, and frankly if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be very interesting. But USC Dornsife does an excellent job of providing balance.”
The politically themed events were some of the most popular for Larry Goodkind ’84, who says he watches to enjoy “a discussion that’s well-rounded and thoughtful on ways forward.” But the double major in political science and broadcast journalism says he has also enjoyed some of the discusions that “were lighter in nature,” including one regarding the history of the Olympics, hosted by a student. —J.K. A series of free, virtual events enable alumni to connect with USC Dornsife experts and savor the joys of lifelong learning — without the stress of quizzes, essays or finals.
“The Unexpected Spy” aired May 6, 2020
—Tracy Walder, (BA, history, ’00), former CIA/FBI field agent
“The Evolution of COVID-19” aired January 19, 2022
— Peter Kuhn, Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences and professor of biological sciences, medicine, biomedical engineering, aerospace and mechanical engineering and urology
“Witches: Beyond Myths and Magic” aired October 31, 2022
— Lisa Bitel, Dean’s Professor of Religion and professor of religion and history
Scan the QR code to watch highlights from past Dornsife Dialogues. Visit dornsifedialogues.usc.edu to watch past events and subscribe to the email list.
IMAGES BY DENNIS LAN DORNSIFE DIALOGUES ARTWORK BY USC DORNSIFE OFFICE OF COMMUNICATION / IMAGE SOURCE: ISTOCK; CLIMATE CHANGE AND DEMENTIA IMAGE SOURCE: ISTOCK TOP 3 FOR LIVE VIEWING
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Climate Clarity
Experts aim to inspire action on climate change by refining messaging to increase public engagement.
Recipients of the 2022 Faculty Innovation Awards, presented by the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, based at USC Dornsife, are taking steps to explain to the public the threat posed by climate change — such as more powerful tsunamis and hotter temperatures — in ways that inform and inspire action rather than deepen cultural divisions.
“To make the best use of climate change research, experts need to share that knowledge with the public in ways that are clear and meaningful,” says Jessica Dutton, executive director of the USC Wrigley Institute and adjunct assistant professor (research) of environmental studies.
For example, Matthew Kahn, Provost Professor of Economics and Spatial Sciences, and Rob Metcalfe, associate professor of economics, both at USC Dornsife, are using cutting-edge digital tools to accurately convey potential long-term environmental risks for homebuyers. They have partnered with Redfin and the First Street Foundation to incorporate historical and current weather data to assign properties with a risk score for flooding or wildfire. The two are also investigating the effect this data is having on purchasing tendencies.
“More homebuyers are asking: Is the home in a fire zone? Is there a risk for flooding?” Kahn says. “Thus, buyers are less likely to regret their purchase and sellers can take steps to offset Mother Nature’s punches so that they can still sell their asset for a high price.”
Meanwhile, experts on science communication are investigating how political affiliation may distort understanding of climate terms.
Gale Sinatra, professor of education and psychology, says personal emotions and motivations play a large role in an individual’s receptivity to climate-related messaging. For instance, the term “climate crisis” can prompt a different emotional response than “climate justice” or “global warming,” she notes.
“The goal is to leverage emotions in a positive way — in other words, not to get people upset or angry, but rather to elicit emotions that heighten concern and engagement with the topic. Then we can move to heighten their motivations to pay attention to messages around climate change and to perhaps take actions in their own life to mitigate its effects by adopting more sustainable practices,” Sinatra says. —P.M.
Risky Behavior
Watching TV might be relaxing but research shows sedentary inactivity may increase risk of dementia.
Adults aged 60 and older who sit for long periods watching TV or engaging in other passive, sedentary behaviors may be at increased risk of developing dementia, according to a new study by researchers at USC Dornsife and the University of Arizona.
The study used self-reported data on sedentary behavior for more than 145,000 participants aged 60 and older in the United Kingdom — all of whom did not have a diagnosis of dementia at the start of the project. After an average of nearly 12 years of follow-up, the researchers used hospital inpatient records to determine dementia diagnosis, and after adjusting for certain demographics (such as age and gender) and lifestyle factors (such as smoking and alcohol use), they arrived at their findings.
Researchers found the link between sedentary behavior and dementia risk persisted even among participants who were physically active. However, the risk is lower for those who are active while sitting, such as when they read or use computers.
“It isn’t the time spent sitting, per se, but the type of sedentary activity performed during leisure time that impacts dementia risk,” says study author David Raichlen, professor of biological sciences and anthropology at USC Dornsife. He adds that sitting for long periods has been linked to reduced blood flow in the brain, but intellectually stimulating activities may counteract some of these negative effects.
“What we do while we’re sitting matters,” Raichlen adds. “This knowledge is critical when it comes to designing targeted public health interventions aimed at reducing the risk of neurodegenerative disease from sedentary activities through positive behavior change.” — N.R.
Our World
FORMER POSTDOC/STUDENT Megiddo, Israel
Armageddon’s Amphitheater
USC Dornsife scholars uncover region’s first-known Roman amphitheater, yielding clues about lives of ancient Roman soldiers stationed outside fabled city.
In 1902, the archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher conducted the first survey of the ancient city of Megiddo in northern Israel. The area is better known as Armageddon, where the Christian Bible prophesizes that the armies of the world will clash in a final battle.
Schumacher uncovered evidence of occupation by the Roman army and a large, circular depression in the earth that he guessed was an ancient amphitheater. In July, an excavation led by historian and archaeologist Mark Letteney, a former postdoctoral fellow at the USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Program, finally proved his hypothesis correct.
The amphitheater was built for the local military base, occupied by Legio VI Ferrata (the 6th Ironclad Legion), which protected Rome’s holdings in what was then the Province of Judea. It’s the first Roman military amphitheater uncovered in the Southern Levant, which encompasses Israel, Jordan and Palestine.
Assisting Letteney was Krysta Fauria, a doctoral student in religion, who found a gold coin that helped the team more accurately date the structures. The coin, which has lost none of its brilliance over the centuries, dates from 245 AD, during the reign of Emperor Diocletian.
Research on the site will continue next summer, with Letteney back in the trenches. He’s hoping to uncover more of the east and west gates of the amphitheater, enabling the team to achieve more precise dating and better understand Roman construction style of nearly 1,700 years ago. —M.C.
STUDENTS Tulum, Mexico
Balancing Body and Mind
A new health-focused minor teaches students how to tackle stress and stay fit.
Some 800 years ago, the Maya worshipped the god of honey in the sacred town of Tulum on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. The town’s importance as a site of spiritual practice remains, with thousands of people visiting the area each year to attend yoga and meditation retreats.
This year’s visitors included a group of USC students on a week-long Maymester course. Led by Isabelle Mazumdar, senior lecturer in physical education, the students took yoga lessons, meditated and explored the region’s history.
The trip was part of USC Dornsife’s new Mind-Body Studies minor, which aims to help students tackle stress and stay fit by teaching them the fundamentals of good health, from sleep to physical exercise.
For neuroscience and cognitive science major Christina Maineri, the new minor also connects directly with her career interests. “I hope to use what I learn from the Mind-Body Studies minor, particularly in regard to how we train our brain, to assist dementia patients,” she says. —M.C.
FACULTY Los Angeles
Greener Research Labs
Pioneering researchers forge path to more sustainable laboratory practices.
At USC Dornsife, two chemistry professors have recently implemented techniques to make their respective research labs greener.
In 1998, the American Chemical Society developed 12 principles of green chemistry, which include measures such as energy efficiency, pollution prevention and the proper disposal of wastes.
In her freshman laboratories, Jessica Parr, professor (teaching) of chemistry, has nearly eliminated the use of mercury in experiments. Her students now also use waste containers, rather than a drain, for water and salt disposal.
“If we introduce students to these practices early, they hopefully will retain some of these ideas and sustainable processes as they go on to other laboratory experiences,” Parr says.
Meanwhile, Travis Williams, professor of chemistry, says his lab has cut energy use.
“We upgraded to a new microfocus diffractometer, which is not only a much better scientific instrument, but uses a fraction of the electricity,” Williams says. “Then we put some blinds on the windows to keep the solar heat out, and now we’ve nearly halved the amount of electricity we use.” —G.S.
AMPHITHEATER PHOTO COURTESY OF JEZREEL VALLEY REGIONAL PROJECT; YOGA PHOTO COURTESY OF ISABELLE MAZUMDAR MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED D.C. MEMORIAL PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. WWI CENTENNIAL COMMISSION; SEABED PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ALUMNUS Washington, D.C.
Memorial to Those Lost
Alumnus helps finally establish a national World War I memorial in the nation’s capital.
Although the United States mobilized more than 4 million troops and lost nearly 120,000 soldiers during World War I, no official memorial had been built at the nation’s capital in the ensuing century since the conflict.
It took a years-long effort from people like alumnus and former Navy captain Chris Isleib, who served as director of public affairs for the World War I Centennial Commission, to secure land and funding to build a memorial. Finally opened in April 2021, the memorial is inscribed with the words of poet and WWI veteran Archibald MacLeish: “We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.”
The memorial is a fitting accomplishment for Isleib. After graduating with a degree in creative writing in 1985 and serving on the USS Iowa, he spent his career in communications telling stories of the military, from Hollywood to the Pentagon, to ensure they are not forgotten. —M.C.
FACULTY/STUDENT South China Sea
Undersea Resilience
Which ocean creatures were first to recover after history’s largest mass extinction?
More than 90% of the Earth’s ocean species died off in a mass extinction caused by global warming and ocean acidification at the end of the Permian period, some 252 million years ago. USC Dornsife paleobiologist David Bottjer and PhD student Alison Cribb, along with an international team of researchers, have found ancient clues on the seafloor that show how life bounced back.
By studying trace fossils and ancient seabed burrows and trails, they discovered that shrimps, worms and other bottom-burrowing animals were among the first to recover after the catastrophic event. The research team — which included scientists from China, the United States and the United Kingdom — were able to piece together the revival of sea life by analyzing samples representing 7 million years and that showed details at 400 sampling points.
“One of the most remarkable aspects of the data is the breadth of ancient environments we could sample,” says Bottjer, professor of Earth sciences, biological sciences and environmental studies.
Trace fossils mostly document soft-bodied sea animals with little to no skeleton. But the data can indicate how the behaviors of these animals also affected the evolution of other species, including those with skeletons.
It is estimated that it took about 3 million years for the ecological recovery of soft-bodied animals to match pre-extinction levels.
“The first animals to recover were deposit feeders such as worms and shrimps,” says Cribb. “The recovery of suspension feeders, such as brachiopods, bryozoans and many bivalves, took much longer.” Cribb suggests that the deposit feeders may have churned mud that prevented suspension feeders from settling on the seafloor or that prohibited them from feeding efficiently.
Understanding mass extinctions of the distant past and how soft-bodied species recovered can provide important insights relevant to the present and future.
Bottjer said the team’s findings show a variety of ways different groups of seafloor dwellers responded to changing environmental conditions over time, and how that may have played a more important role in the evolution and ecology of species as life recovered than previously understood.
The Eyes Have It
From Inuit hunters in their endless snowy landscape who have no concept of what it means to be lost to profound leaps in microscopy that enable scientists to watch an eye as it forms — sight allows us to explore our world, to orient ourselves within it and to find joy in its myriad manifestations of beauty and wonder.
By Rachel B. Levin
Though there is no consensus about which of our five senses is the most important, sight has an edge. Philosophers from Aristotle to Galileo have exalted vision above other sensory capacities, tying it to humanity’s noblest pursuits. From a neuroscientific perspective, visual processing is the most dominant sensory function in the brain. And culturally speaking, most Americans believe there could be no health outcome worse than losing their eyesight.
The perceived value of sight is reinforced by the fiercely visual nature of contemporary life. Screens are now constantly at our fingertips. They saturate us with visual information to process, and the remote social interactions they facilitate are devoid of embodied inputs like smell and touch.
Our sense of sight confers power. We use it to investigate and surveil the planet (and beyond) and take pleasure in its splendors. But sight is also a source of vulnerability. The biological processes that allow our visual system to observe the world accurately can also lead us to perceive illusions — and we don’t always know the difference.
BRAIN GAME Sight begins in the eye. Light passes through the domeshaped cornea and enters the eye’s interior through the opening called the pupil. The iris (the colored part of the eye) controls how much light the pupil lets in. Next, light passes through the lens, the clear, inner part of the eye that focuses light on the retina. This light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye contains special cells called photoreceptors that turn the light into electrical signals.
Yet even as the eye receives visual input, “seeing” actually happens in the brain. Electrical signals travel from the retina through the optic nerve to the occipital lobe, an area toward the back of the brain that contains the visual cortex. Half of the brain then becomes involved, directly or indirectly, in interpreting the signals.
There’s quite a lot that needs interpreting. Light passing through the eye is bent twice — first by the cornea, then by the lens. This double bending means that whatever you’re looking at appears upside down on your retina. Your brain makes sure you perceive it as right-side up. Likewise, you perpetually receive two images of the world, one through each eye, and your brain combines them into one.
The role of the brain in sight is most apparent when we’re confronted with visual stimuli that are ambiguous. For example, the “impossible” staircase in M. C. Escher’s Ascending and Descending appears to climb up and down simultaneously because, as your brain attempts to translate the 2D image into 3D reality, it falls back on assumptions that lines are straight and corners are 90 degrees.
Perhaps you remember the bad cellphone photo of “the dress” that went viral in 2015? Some insisted the dress was white and gold; others swore it was black and blue. Research revealed that people’s life experiences influenced their color perception.
Night owls were more likely to see the dress as black and blue, whereas early risers tended to see it as white and gold. That may be because of assumptions each group made about whether the garment appeared in bright daylight or under an indoor bulb — a difference of illumination that cues our visual system toward divergent color interpretations. Those who burn the midnight oil were more inclined to assume artificial lighting than those who rise with the sun, perhaps because of more exposure to it.
“We rely so much on our sense of sight that we trust what we see with our own eyes,” says USC Dornsife’s Norbert Schwarz, Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing. “Seeing is believing, as the saying goes. But our visual processing can be fallible.”
YOU ARE HERE Making accurate visual judgments is a core part of human survival. We evolved to rely on sight for orienting ourselves to our environment, avoiding danger and navigating through space. Jennifer Bernstein, a visiting scholar at the
