USC Dornsife Magazine Spring-Summer 2018

F O R A L U M N I A N D F R I E N D S O F U S C D A N A A N D D AV I D D O R N S I F E C O L L E G E O F L E T T E R S , A R T S A N D S C I E N C E S

MAGAZINE

SPRING / SUMMER 2018

he Travel Issue

GLOBE-

TROTTING Exploration enriches life and learning, expanding our world view.

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CON T R I BU T OR Peter Mancall Divisional Dean for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the Early Modern Studies Institute

“He’s eaten a toad and a half for breakfast,” is one of no less than 228 popular — and often colorful — descriptions of drunkenness used by colonialists in 18th-century North America.

“This is a sign of just how common excessive drinking was in North America during this period,” Peter Mancall, told a German television crew.

The professor of history and anthropology was being interviewed for Terra X, a weekly series on Germany’s biggest public broadcast channel, ZDF. The program attracts some 5 million viewers.

Mancall was answering questions on the impact of alcohol trade on native cultures in North America — a ield in which he has long been a leading expert.

Comparing Native Americans’ radically diferent relationship with alcohol to that of European settlers, Mancall concluded that it is an inescapable fact that alcohol was an agent of empire building in North America, harming Native American communities and leading to accidents, violence and even murder.

“No one can claim the Europeans were unaware of what was happening,” he said, “but the forces of colonialism overpowered the indigenous voices of protest.”

MANCALL PORTRAIT BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU INTERVIEW PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

A Mind for Travel SENIOR ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR STRATEGIC INITIATIVES AND COMMUNICATION

Lance Ignon

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Darrin S. Joy

MANAGING EDITOR

Susan Bell

ART DIRECTOR / PRODUCTION MANAGER

Letty Avila

WRITERS AND EDITORS

Michelle Boston Emily Gersema Jim Key Laura Paisley DESIGNER

Matthew Savino VIDEOGRAPHER AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Mike Glier

COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT Deann Webb CONTRIBUTORS Orli Belman, Ian Chafee, Joanna Clay, Bill Dotson, Greg Hardesty, Dan Knapp, Stephen Koenig, Eric Lindberg, Maria Budisavljevic Oparnica Simic, Zen Vuong

Travel is education. We seek distance from our everyday lives not only to ind new experiences, but to view from a diferent vantage the world we think we understand. Whether the journey leads to hidden ruins or towering skyscrapers, we learn something new and valuable about ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Each year, dozens of USC Dornsife undergraduates embark on Problems Without Passports, Maymester and other travel experiences that complement their coursework.

Engaging directly with diferent people and cultures, these students explore themes such as peacebuilding in Colombia or contemporary art in Senegal, among many other opportunities.

At USC Dornsife, travel doesn’t require a boarding pass. We continually make the journey to the frontiers of knowledge. Our faculty push the limits of convergent bioscience as they develop ways to predict and prevent diseases. Our historians guide us back in time to provide a means of critically informing the public discourse of the 21st century. Our social scientists bring us into diverse communities, helping us work with them on relevant issues including immigration and economic inequality. And all of our scholars set out searching not only for answers, but for deeper questions.

Exploration is what the liberal arts and sciences are all about. We challenge assumptions.

We make surprising connections. We learn to pave our own paths through the great unknown.

And at the end of our travels, we return to the comfort of homes we know so well.

But new parts of our minds have been opened — and that opens new possibilities.

Amber D. Miller Dean of USC Dornsife Anna H. Bing Dean’s Chair

USC DORNSIFE ADMINISTRATION Amber D. Miller, Dean • Stephen Bradforth, Divisional Dean for Natural Sciences and Mathematics • Steven Finkel, College Dean of Graduate and Professional Education • Lance Ignon, Senior Associate Dean For Strategic Initiatives and Communication • Andrew Lakof, Divisional Dean for Social Sciences • Peter Mancall, Divisional Dean for the Humanities • Eddie Sartin, Senior Associate Dean for Advancement • Andrew Stott, College Dean of Undergraduate Education USC DORNSIFE BOARD OF COUNCILORS Robert D. Beyer, Chair • Wendy Abrams • Robert Alvarado • William Barkett • Leslie Berger • Susan Casden • Richard S. Flores • Shane Foley • Lisa Goldman • Jana Waring Greer • Pierre Habis • Yossie Hollander • Janice Bryant Howroyd • Martin Irani • Dan James • Stephen G. Johnson • Suzanne Nora Johnson • Bettina Kallins • Yoon Kim • Samuel King • Arthur Lev • Kathy Leventhal • Robert Osher • Gerald Papazian • Andrew Perlman • Lawrence Piro • Kelly Porter • Michael Reilly • Harry Robinson • Stephanie Booth Shafran • Carole Shammas • Kumarakulasingam “Suri” Suriyakumar

IL L U S T R AT I O N BY M AT T H E W S AV IN O

USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE Published twice a year by the USC Dornsife Oice of Communication at the University of Southern California. © 2018 USC Dornsife College. he diverse opinions expressed in USC Dornsife Magazine do not necessarily represent the views of the editors, USC Dornsife administration or USC. USC Dornsife Magazine welcomes comments from its readers to magazine@dornsife.usc.edu or USC Dornsife Magazine, 1150 S. Olive St. T2400, Los Angeles, CA 90015.

Contents

SPRING / SUMMER 2018 2

From the Dean

4 COVER STORY Luggage stickers are the classic symbol of a well-traveled person.

5 SOCIAL DORNSIFE Flags of many nations adorn the Von KleinSmid Center colonnade, a reminder that USC plays home to students from all around the globe.

6 FROM THE HEART OF USC Science and cinema join forces; Your weight may be tied to where you live; Sexism in sports persists; Course aims to make Los Angeles more elder-friendly.

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Curriculum

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Archive

THE TRAVEL ISSUE

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Proile

Educational Voyage

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Lexicon

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In he Field

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Our World

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Legacy

Personal and cultural legacy meets cutting-edge research technology, enabling the documentation and preservation of Byzantine murals in Eastern Orthodox churches. By Laura Paisley

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Faculty News

Traveling Home

Family secrets shed light on a inancial crisis; Alumna helps refugees read; Discarded pulp makes for tasty nutrition; Math grad wields the power of numbers.

Bookpacking in Louisiana. Examining culture in Cuba. Excavating artifacts in Greece. Exploring hip hop in Paris.

Students reap travel’s educational rewards — beneiting from a tradition stretching back to ancient times. By Susan Bell

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Digital Humanity

Immigration is central to the roots of the American experience. So what does it mean when we make our home across borders, learning a new culture while honoring where we come from? By Michelle Boston

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PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

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50 DORNSIFE FAMILY

A Final Farewell

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Faculty Canon

Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter’s inal visit to his homeland is a haunting reminder of family lost and a life he might

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Alumni News

have lived. He captures his personal saga in virtual reality for future generations. By Michelle Boston

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Alumni and

From Whence We Came

Student Canon Remembering

Intrepid explorers of the modern age, marine scientists travel the world’s oceans to understand the mysteries of — and threats to — Earth’s fount of life. By Darrin S. Joy

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he Man Who’s Been Everywhere

NFL Hall of Famer gives his thoughts on winning leadership.

Alumnus William “Bill” Altafer has visited every country in the world — many not just once. From North Korea to the North Pole, Sweden to the Sahara, Tipperary to Timbuktu, he’s seen it all. By Susan Bell

60 IN MY OPINION

Cover Story “I WAS THERE” In days gone by, travelers collected commemorative stickers from each stop along the way to their destination, adorning their luggage with them. The practice kept an easily visible record of their journey and silently proclaimed that the bag’s owner was a worldly-wise person.

Luggage stickers arose in the mid-19th century as a way for hotels to ensure travelers’ bags weren’t lost on their way from the train or shipyard to lodgings. Beginning sometime around the turn of the 20th century and carrying through to the early 1960s — the so-called “golden age of travel” — hotels used the stickers as advertisements, often designing them to mirror travel posters of the day and eagerly aixing them to the sturdy suitcases and trunks in use at the time.

As luggage makers began to use lighter, softer materials, the stickers began to fade from mainstream use. Their adhesive properties and paper composition proved less than ideal for use on the lexible, synthetic surfaces of the newer bags. In their stead, airlines and other travel suppliers turned to austere identiication tags, forgoing creative design in favor of a strictly utilitarian motif.

And yet, to this day nothing speaks to the idea — the romance — of travel quite as clearly as the luggage labels of old aixed to a classic leather suitcase. Though time may have made their use impractical, and selies become the new marker stating “I was there,” the legacy of the luggage sticker as a symbol of global travel and a cosmopolitan view remains steadfastly intact. —D.S.J.

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SOCIAL DOR NSIFE On Campus

Twitter @KUSCGail: A very proud moment for @ClassicalKUSC: our beloved former intern is @USC Valedictorian! Congrats Rose Campion! Commencement about to begin in Alumni Park. #KnockEmDead @cheltfestivals: If you love the @Marvel, you’ll love The Science of Marvel. Join #IninityWar scientiic advisor @asymptotia as he explores what happens when the worlds of science and comic books collide. @JodyAVallejo: Felicidades to my compa and @CSII_USC @PERE_USC Director @Prof_MPastor who was awarded the @USC Associates Award for Creativity in #Research for “his courage in addressing societal challenges & his unlagging commitment to #greatergood.” @MortezDehghani: RT NatureHumanBehaviour: So cool that we got the cover! @JoeEHoover @MarlonMooijman @USC_Research

@USCDornsife @uscwrigleyinst: Thank you to the 500+ divers who retrieved about 2 TONS of marine trash in today’s Avalon Underwater Cleanup. It was a great day. #catalina #uscdornsife @SFeakins: on how University leadership can set the stage for public engagement from @USCDornsife Dean Amber Miller via @ConversationUS @_scicomm #SciEngage #Leshner Fellows

Strolling beneath the colonnade of the Von KleinSmid Center for International and Public Afairs on the University Park campus serves as a powerful reminder that you don’t necessarily have to leave USC to travel — at least metaphorically. Simply look upwards to the more than 100 international lags that proudly hang there to relect on the fact that the university is home to students from all over the world.

PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

he tradition dates back to 2006, when USC began using the center’s lagpoles to display banners from the countries represented by the university’s international students. he building’s 107 lagpoles, however, haven’t always been enough — in Fall 2013, for example, USC admitted students from 115 diferent countries.

By sharing their ideas, scholarship and culture, including their food, music and traditions, international students add diversity and enrich the experience of others on campus, increasing understanding and inspiring empathy in ways similar to those we encounter when we travel. he friendships sparked by these precious exchanges can be lifelong, breaking down borders and sparking the desire to explore other cultures that we may otherwise never have dreamed of visiting.

CONNECT WITH USC DORNSIFE Check us out on your favorite social media sites. We welcome your posts and tweets for possible inclusion in the next issue of USC Dornsife Magazine. dornsife.usc.edu/facebook Become a fan and get updates in your news feed.

dornsife.usc.edu/twitter Follow our tweets for the latest USC Dornsife news.

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dornsife.usc.edu/instagram Follow our feed for snapshots of the #DornsifeLife.

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FROM THE HE ART OF USC Viewpoint EXPERT OPINIONS

“One in four U.S. women returns to work within two weeks of delivering an infant, a statistic that boggles the mind: hat is not enough time to fully physically recover even from the most uncomplicated of deliveries, let alone establish a caretaking routine and bond with a newborn.”

DARBY SAXBE, assistant professor of psychology, in a Jan. 23 Slate op-ed on the lack of mentalphysical health care integration to support new parents.

“Such behavior was not considered unlawful or wrong in the medieval period unless one powerful man harassed a woman who belonged to another powerful man.”

LISA BITEL, Dean’s professor of Religion and professor of religion and history, in a Jan. 16 op-ed in The Conversation on the common occurrence of sexual harassment in medieval times.

JODY AGIUS VALLEJO, associate professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity, in a Nov. 6 op-ed in The Conversation on the ways that American Latino elites are actively involved in growing a Latino middle class.

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USC science and cinematic arts students join forces to ind answers in biology. By Darrin S. Joy Raymond Stevens looks for opportunity — particularly any that may improve the human condition.

To encourage collaboration and hasten scientiic advances, Stevens, director of the Bridge Institute at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, challenged experts from a wide variety of ields to work together and propose projects bridging those ields and addressing intractable problems in bioscience.

One proposal in particular stood out — the Bridge Arts and Science Alliance. he brainchild of Kyle McClary, a fourth-year Ph.D. student studying chemistry in Stevens’ lab, and Evan Tedlock, an MFA student in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, the project brings cinematic arts students together with science and engineering students — both undergraduates and graduates — to encourage them to develop collaborative ventures. he initiative has spawned nearly a dozen projects, from a virtual reality met hod of ma nag ing pa in to a doc u menta r y on the opioid crisis, and from animation shorts — including two produced in the Bridge Undergraduate Science program — to an interactive 3D exploration of human cells. “he core of our mission is that we want artists to learn from scientists and scientists to learn from artists,” McClary said.

As the teams work together, they teach each other the ins and outs of their ields. he objective is a better understanding of the science and to make science more comprehensible.

“One of the biggest eforts … is to break down some of this language that is just so inaccessible and to reframe it in a way that is more intuitive, using metaphor and storytelling,” McClary said. hat’s true not just between scientists and

artists, but between specialists in diferent ields. “he Bridge Institute is trying to bring all of these multiple disciplines together, not just art and science, but diferent sciences as well as science and engineering,” said Tedlock.

Stevens, himself something of an embodiment of convergent science — he is Provost Professor of Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Neurology, Physiology and Biophysics, and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science — sees the joint eforts of artists and sciences as not just helpful, but necessary.

“At irst I thought this initiative was going to be about teaching scientists to use digital art tools for data integration analysis,” he said. But the summer gave him an “aha moment” when he heard an artist describe science in a completely new and clearer way.

“I now ask the cinema students, ‘Why just make another ilm when you can do both – make a ilm and help to understand a disease or develop a new medicine?’ ”

PHOTO COURTESY KYLE MCCLARY

“Latino elites’ eforts to infuse their communities with resources are important, but they alone cannot solve widespread social and economic inequalities.”

Lights! Camera! Science!

Curriculum

GESM 120

ILLUS TR ATION COURTESY OF CHARLES S TE WART SMITH COLLEC TION, GIF T OF MRS. CHARLES S TE WART SMITH, CHARLES S TE WART SMITH JR., AND HOWARD C ASWELL SMITH, IN MEMORY OF CHARLES S TE WART SMITH, 1914; CULBERT SON PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

HEAD FOR THE HILLS Instructor: Ian Culbertson, lecturer

In the age of smartphones, USC students are reconnecting with nature by hiking every weekend in the Santa Monica Mountains for a new Department of Physical Education course taught by USC Dornsife lecturer Ian Culbertson, a former marine biologist and backpacking guide.

Culberston, who also teaches a course on exercise and stress management, emphasizes being present not only on the hikes, but also in our everyday lives.

Hiking can be a way for students to manage their stress and anxiety. Research shows that being connected with nature can have spiritual beneits that may transcend that treadmill run.

Students also gain outdoor skills. Culbertson teaches navigation, preparing for emergencies and what to do when lost.

With all the required coursework, hiking might seem like a curious addition to a schedule, but Sarah Van Orman, USC’s associate provost of student health, says don’t write it of.

“I hear from students that it’s hard to give themselves permission to take time away from ‘important stuf’ like studying,” she said. “This gives students permission to take care of themselves.” —J.C.

Although made in 1800, this ink drawing of a tranquil mountain landscape by Japanese artist Kawabata Gyokusho evokes the more recent Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku — literally “ forest bathing” — which may be regarded as a form of nature therapy.

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Archive

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The Valks created the illustration of North and South American continents for inclusion in their atlas, Nova Totius Geographica Telluris Projecto.

Their illustration was based on previously published maps by renowned cartographers Nicolas Sanson and Hugo Allard.

Other famous mapmakers of the time — including John Speed and Vincenzo Coronelli — published similar maps containing the same error.

Many scholars trace this cartographic error to the 1592 claims by navigator Juan de la Fuca that

he had extensively explored the western coast of North America and possibly located the legendary Northwest Passage.

Prior to de la Fuca’s boasts, California had been correctly identiied as mainland.

Even after Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Francisco Kino walked from what is now New Mexico to the Northern California coast in the early 1700s — thereby proving that the area was part of the mainland — many cartographers refused to depict California as anything other than an island.

“What I ind interesting about the 1714 Valk map relates to the methods used for data collection and analysis and how dramatically these techniques have changed since 1714,” explains Darren Ruddell, associate professor (teaching) of spatial sciences. “In a mere 300 years, the methods used to capture data and create maps have changed in unprecedented ways.

“While the origins of the Valk map are attributed to a friar that sketched notes in a journal while sailing along the West Coast

from 1602–03, today, data about features on the surface of the Earth are collected with great precision and accuracy using a variety of sensors and satellites, often referred to as geospatial technologies,” Ruddell said.

It took an edict from Spain’s King Ferdinand in 1747 to convince the world that California was not an island and put an end to the publication of maps supporting the theory of an insular California.

The Valk map was reproduced for more than a decade; however, only a few copies survive. —D.K.

IL L U S T R AT I O N BY G E R A L D O A N D L EO N A R D O VA L K

VALK MAP Holland, 1714 For millennia, maps have captured the imagination of people intrigued by thoughts of adventure, travel and discovery.

Throughout history, however, certain maps have been known to be seriously lawed.

The Dutch mapmaking team of Geraldo Valk and his son Leonardo perpetuated one of the most notable cartographic mistakes in history by depicting California as an island on their 1714 map, America aurea pars altera mundi.

S PAT I A L S C I E N C E S

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Recognition

Sustainable Success Prize winners turn ideas to protect the planet into growing businesses.

Institute for Environmental Studies, says she’s proud of the competitors’ successes.

“We launched the competition to support the institute’s goal to not only deepen understanding of our environment, but to develop practical solutions for preserving it,” Puentes said. “So we’re incredibly proud and grateful to hear stories of success … from students in programs throughout the university.” —J.K.

S O N G B IR D IL L U S T R AT I O N BY L E T T Y AV IL A ;K U K AV I C A P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F I G O R K U K AV I C A ; L E W I S P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F R O B IN C O S T E L E W I S; N G U Y E N P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F V IE T T H A N H N G U Y E N

Birds, Brains, Babble Songbirds learning to sing may give clues as to how babies learn to speak.

Since being named a inalist in the USC Wrigley Sustainability Prize competition last year, USC Dornsife alumnus Kevin Kassel received $100,000 in early funding to help change the way people access clean water. His company, Aqus, will soon have vending machines in drought-stricken areas of sub-Saharan Africa that will disperse water for a quarter of the price elsewhere.

And Noah Snyder, the head of Interphase Materials — the team that won last year’s competition — received a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support his ledgling company’s work to improve power plant eiciency. he company has a second contract with the U.S. Navy and is working on a project in Canada, as well.

Both entrepreneurs credit their participation in the irst USC Wrigley Sustainability Prize, an entrepreneurial competition supporting environmental ideas with market potential, as a key factor in their successes.

Kassel, who founded Aqus to change the way people access clean water and to eliminate the need to boil it or purchase it in a bottle, says the insight he gained from competing for the prize helped his victory in an even bigger, international competition for entrepreneurs last year.

Aqus was one of just nine startups, selected from about 300, to receive $100,000 in equity investments — and coaching from Silicon Valley professionals — through the Vatican-sponsored Laudato Si Challenge, a global initiative to ind, fund and incubate companies that are solving the world’s biggest problems.

“Getting the awesome insight and feedback on our business model and strategy — from such an incredible group of people — was a rare opportunity,” says Kassel, who earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from USC Dornsife in 2017 and another in business administration this year from USC Marshall School of Business.

Chase Puentes, program assistant for the USC Wrigley

A study of songbirds by USC Dornsife scientists might help explain how people learn complex behaviors, such as speech.

“One hypothesis to explain speech development is that the sound of a word creates a memory, or mental template,” says Sarah Bottjer, professor of biological sciences and psychology. “hat template becomes the internal recording a baby uses, as its goal, to say the word.”

While attempting to speak, a baby’s brain may compare the sound it utters to its mental template of the word. he outcome of that evaluation may be relayed to neural circuits responsible for generating motor commands (mouth movement and breathing) to produce sound. When the sound is a match, the neural circuitry to make that sound is strengthened. When it’s not, it’s recognized as an error that corresponds with an attempt to correct the neural circuitry. he study supported the hypothesis, inding that when young zebra inches produced sounds that mimicked the sounds they had memorized, the part of their brains responsible for learning motor skills saw an increase in neural activity.

“Perhaps the way people learn how to make other precise skilled movements can be explained by the same process,” said Bottjer, who plans to conduct more research to address that question. —J.K.

IGOR KUKAVICA Fellow, American Mathematical Society Kukavica, professor of mathematics, has been elected a fellow of the American Mathematical Society for his many contributions to nonlinear partial diferential equations, as well as his mentoring of Ph.D. students and his general service to the mathematical profession.

ROBIN COSTE LEWIS Fellow, Ford Foundation Lewis, writer in residence, was named an Art of Change fellow by the Ford Foundation. Lewis, poet laureate for the City of Los Angeles, is one of 25 visionary artists and cultural leaders to receive the honor.

VIET THANH NGUYEN Fellow, MacArthur Foundation Nguyen, University Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Comparative Literature, and Aerol Arnold Chair of English, was one of 24 fellows selected by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which recognizes “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” The fellowship is known informally as the “genius grant.”

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Proile

ARIANNA OZZANTO

Arianna Ozzanto ’99 is chief inancial oicer of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

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FROM THE HE ART OF USC

For Arianna Ozzanto, a college education was never an option — it was a certainty.

Her baby boomer mother and her father, a irst-generation Italian American who grew up in Chicago during the Great Depression, instilled in Ozzanto the idea that she could be or do anything, as long as she took the right steps.

“My parents were great proponents of inancial responsibility and independence,” she said, and in their minds, education was a sound means to achieve that. “College was never a choice for me. It was inevitable.”

Now Ozzanto, who earned her bachelor’s degree in economics from USC Dornsife in 1999, is making her own inancial decisions — and on a much larger scale. She is chief inancial oicer of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the union representing actors, broadcast journalists, recording artists, stunt performers, voiceover artists and other media professionals.

PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

THE NATURAL Ozzanto followed her interest in inance, starting as a business major at USC. But, she found the focus of the program wasn’t quite right for her.

“I initially thought that I’d be interested in marketing and then igured out that it wasn’t for me. The creative juices weren’t lowing as much as I thought that they would need to in order to make a career out of that,” she said.

So, the second semester of her junior year she made a decision to alter her path and switched her major to economics. She was inspired by a class she had taken on business economics — the study of issues faced by corporations such as business organization,

management and strategy.

“I was always kind of terriied of economics because I was in Advanced Placement economics in high school and I didn’t really have a grasp of it,” Ozzanto said. But, her college class struck a chord with her.

“I fell in love with economics. It came easily to me. I had an understanding of it and I couldn’t really tell you why. It felt like it was this natural it,” she said.

The change so close to her senior year meant she had to make up for lost time.

So, while her peers were taking less intensive electives, Ozzanto was taking calculus and advanced statistics. “But, that was what I needed to get me through in four years,” she said.

NUMBERS GAME Throughout her time at USC, Ozzanto worked in a campus oice that administered research grants. It helped her get a sense of what working in accounting and inance was all about. That experience coupled with her economics degree served her well, she said.

Out of college, Ozzanto worked her way up through a few positions as a inancial analyst, including stints at 20th Century Fox and at an insurance company. Then a budget analyst position opened up at the Screen Actors Guild.

“At the time, those jobs were kind of a luxury to have. A lot of companies weren’t really hiring people who just focused on the budget,” Ozzanto said.

It was a perfect it. Ozzanto steadily made her way up through positions at the company, expanding her role from inance and accounting to real estate, residual processing and union membership, among other responsibilities. In 2009,

she took on the position of chief inancial oicer, and was in the role when the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists voted to become one organization in 2012.

quality of students and faculty expertise — in the business community.

She is also helping to launch a new Women in Economics group to ofer support for undergraduate and graduate

“I fell in love with economics … I couldn’t really tell you why. It felt like it was this natural it.”

The merger gave Ozzanto the opportunity to work through the process of bringing the unions together, integrating policies and procedures as well as the cultures of the two organizations, which she said was a rewarding and challenging experience. After 14 years, she still inds her position to be satisfying.

“I really like the fact that I’m a piece of the pie that helps contribute to the betterment of people. We’re ighting for performers, broadcasters, for better wages and working conditions. Although I don’t get directly involved with the negotiation process, part of what I do helps the organization move that forward,” she said.

THE NEXT GENERATION Ozzanto has also been active back on campus. She is a member of the Economics Leadership Council at USC Dornsife, which supports the mission of the Department of Economics. Made up of economics professionals, the group provides mentorship and internship opportunities for majors and helps to raise the proile of the department — already known for its high

women majoring in economics at USC Dornsife. As a woman in the inancial world, Ozzanto has seen irsthand how the landscape is dominated by men, though she said she’s never let that get in her way.

However, she wants to support the next generation of women interested in entering the ield.

“We have some really great women involved in the group,” she said. “We’re thinking back to when we were students — what we would have beneited from.”

She has been delighted to see a large turnout of young women at the economics department events she has attended on campus recently, and she is happy to ofer her advice to them, or to anyone starting out in a new industry.

Find something you like, she said. That will carry you through. There’s nothing worse than having to go to a job, day after day after day, that you don’t like, or doing something that you’re not completely satisied with, she added.

“You’re going be working for 40 years, at least, and you should like it,” she said. “If you ind something you like, everything else will fall into place.

I’m living proof of that.” —M.B. Spring / Summer 2018 11

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Word IN THE NEWS QUOTABLES

“I want students today to … appreciate the importance of the issues around the constitutional tension between national security and civil liberties.”

Genetic Ringleader USC Dornsife scientists studying genes linked to memory loss ind that one may play a more important role than previously understood. By Emily Gersema

SUSAN KAMEI, managing director of the spatial sciences institute and lecturer, in a Feb. 19 Los Angeles Times feature about her history course, USC’s irst, on internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans by the U.S. government.

“Fires are something that are recurring in California and are likely to get more common with future climate change. …

So, it’s something that we need to study now in order to assess how … any future ires may be impacting the local ecosystem and isheries.”

SETH JOHN, associate professor (research) of Earth sciences, in a Jan. 17 KPCC-FM interview about a research team he led that is investigating how the devastating ires in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties will afect marine life.

“If we’re going to create integrated schools across L.A. County, they need to relect what L.A. County looks like.”

ANN OWENS, assistant professor of sociology and spatial sciences, in a Dec. 3, 2017, KPCC-FM interview about racially isolated schools in Los Angeles County.

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he notorious genetic marker of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, ApoE4, may not be a lone wolf.

A team of USC researchers, including USC Dornsife’s Carol Prescott, John McArdle and Margaret Gatz, all of psychology, and scientists from he University of Manchester in the United Kingdom have found that another gene, TOMM40, complicates the picture.

Although ApoE4 plays a greater role in some types of aging-related memory ability, the researchers believe that TOMM40 may pose an even greater risk for other types.

TOMM40 and APOE genes are neighbors, adjacent to each other on chromosome 19. At times, scientiic research has focused chiely on ApoE4 as the No. 1 suspect behind Alzheimer’s and dementia-related memory decline. he literature also considers the more common ApoE3 as neutral in risk for Alzheimer’s.

USC Dornsife researchers believe their new indings raise a signiicant research question: Has TOMM40 been misunderstood as a sidekick to ApoE4 when it is really a mastermind, particularly when ApoE3 is present?

“Typically, ApoE4 has been considered the strongest known genetic risk factor for cognitive decline, memory decline, Alzheimer’s disease or dementia-related onset,” said T. Em Arpawong, research assistant professor bioinformatician and the study’s lead author.

“Our study found that a TOMM40 variant was actually more inluential than ApoE4 on the decline in immediate memory — [that is] the ability to hold onto new information,” he said. he team suggested that scientists further examine the association between ApoE3 and TOMM40 variants and their combined inluence on decline in diferent types of learning and memory.

“Other studies may not have detected the efects of TOMM40,” Prescott said. “he results from this study provide more evidence that the causes of memory decline are even more complicated than we thought before, and they raise the question of how many indings in other studies have been attributed to ApoE4 that may be due to TOMM40 or a combination of TOMM40 and ApoE4.”

Lexicon

GENDER STUDIES NONBINARY nän'bīnərē/ adjective / 1. Not relating to, composed of, or involving just two things.

1.1 Denoting or relating to a gender or sexual identity that is not deined in terms of traditional binary oppositions such as male and female or homosexual and heterosexual.

2 Relating to, using or denoting a system of numerical notation that does not have 2 as a base.

Origin: From the French nonand Latin nōn, and the Latin <bīnārius, < bīnī Usage: “In the realm of gender, nonbinary is used to indicate an identity and an embodiment of that identity that exists outside of the perceived binary of male and female. The term emerged in American popular culture around the mid-1990s and was popularized by anthologies like GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, published in 2002. Nonbinary identity sometimes overlaps with transgender identity, and people who identify as nonbinary may use any pronoun under the sun. It’s always a good idea to ask folks what pronouns they like used on their behalf.”

WHITNEY PHOTO COURTESY OF EMERSON WHITNEY

Emerson Whitney, lecturer in gender studies, investigates gender variance, selfhood and emergence through theories of alterity, non-mastery and otherness. Whitney is particularly interested in the intersection of trans identity and disability and has a practice that is based in experiments with creative noniction, autobiography and poetics.

Spring / Summer 2018 13

In he Field

CENTER FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

21%–38%

Obesity rates among U.S. counties range from 21 percent to 38 percent.

The old real estate adage of “location, location, location” may also apply to obesity.

A study by USC Dornsife and the RAND Corp., published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, suggests that people who move to an area with a high obesity rate are likely to become overweight or obese themselves. The researchers say this may be due, in part, to social contagion.

“Social contagion in obesity means that if more people around you are obese, then that may increase your own chances of becoming obese,” said Ashlesha Datar, senior economist and director of the program on children and families at the Center for Economic and Social Research at USC Dornsife.

Research shows that living in certain communities carries a higher risk of obesity than living in other communities.

One possibility may be simply that people with similar interests and backgrounds tend to locate in similar areas.

Another explanation may be that people living in the same community are all inluenced by the shared environment, and the presence or lack of things such as opportunities for exercising and healthy eating.

A third explanation may be that obesity is transmitted through social inluence.

“Assessing the relative importance of these explanations has been a challenging task and yet is important for designing efective policies to address obesity,” Datar said.

14

In the United States, obesity increases medical costs by $1,429 per person over costs for someone with normal weight (in 2008 dollars).

17 percent of children in the U.S. are obese.

17%

½

$1,429

1 in 3 One in three adults in a typical U.S. county is obese.

2x

One half of children who are obese in kindergarten remain obese in their teens.

30% Americans consume on average 22 teaspoons of sugar sweeteners per day — twice the limit recommended by the World Health Organization.

30 percent of U.S. elementary school kids, ages 5 to 14, experience obesity.

Obesity cost the U.S. $147 billion each year (2008 dollars).

$147 BILLION

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

SOCIAL CONTAGION Datar and co-author Nancy Nicosia at RAND studied military families to assess whether living in communities with greater obesity increased their risk of being overweight or obese. Military families, they reasoned, cannot choose where they live — rather, they are assigned to installations.

“We found that the families assigned to installations in counties with higher obesity rates were more likely to be overweight or obese than those assigned to installations in counties with lower rates of obesity,” Datar said.

To assess whether shared environments could explain these results, the researchers accounted for extensive data on the food and activity opportunities in the county and neighborhood such as gyms, restaurants and grocery stores.

“We cannot say for sure that we accounted for everything that might inluence eating and exercise behaviors,” Datar explained. “But we did account for things that researchers in this ield typically measure and found that shared environments did not play a critical role in explaining our results.”

Nicosia concurred. “Although we could not measure social contagion directly,” she said, “our indings support a role for social contagion in obesity.”

HIGHER RISK OFF BASE The scientists also found that the link between the county’s obesity rate and overweight or obesity in military families was stronger among families living of base and those who had lived there longer.

“This inding suggests that families with greater exposure to obese communities face increased risk,” Datar said.

Sexism Anew?

Despite surging participation, women’s sports still receive markedly less media attention than men’s.

care about women’s sports, who can and will express genuine enthusiasm, rather than gender-bland sexism, when they report on women’s sports.” —I.C.

Energy Mini-Storage USC Dornsife chemists ind eicient hybrid molecules that could support renewable energies.

Tennis great John McEnroe recently claimed that women’s champion Serena Williams wouldn’t even be a “top 700” men’s player. His comment exempliied how women’s sports receive little attention unless it is iltered through a dismissive male gaze.

While mainstream broadcast coverage now treats women’s games more seriously, much of that coverage is still being relegated to the sidelines, according to an ongoing, decades-long study by USC Dornsife researchers.

Led by Michael Messner, professor of sociology and gender studies, the research team found that airtime for women’s sports on Los Angeles-based network ailiates has remained lat or declined since the study began tracking in the late 1980s.

Even of-season men’s sports received more airtime than in-season coverage of women’s sports. he sexism is now subtler, too, said study lead author and Ph.D. student Michela Musto. “It seems at irst that it’s respectful, but if you compare the framing with men’s sports, women are talked about in a much more boring way.” he researchers noted that the sparse coverage of women’s sports is out of step with another simultaneous trend: a surge of female athletes since the 1970s, when Title IX became law, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex for programs that receive federal funds. he study found there are few women in sports media roles that may inluence coverage decisions: 95 percent of the anchors, co-anchors and analysts covered by the research were male.

“I do believe that part of the move toward greater respect and equity for women’s sports in the media will involve getting more women into newspaper sports desks, radio and TV commentary,” said Messner. “However, I also think that employers, when they hire new people, should seek to hire reporters and commentators — women or men — who really

Scientists have long searched for the next generation of materials that can catalyze a revolution in renewable energy harvesting and storage.

One candidate appears to be metal-organic frameworks — small, lexible, ultra-thin, super-porous crystalline structures. Unfortunately, their biggest drawback has been their lack of conductivity.

Now, however, USC Dornsife scientists have found that metal-organic frameworks can conduct electricity in the same way metals do. his inding opens the door for these molecules to one day eiciently store renewable energy at a very large scale. “he natural porosity of the metal-organic framework makes it ideal for reducing the mass of material, allowing for lighter, more compact devices,” said Brent Melot, associate professor of chemistry.

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Chemistry Smaranda Marinescu pointed to the promise inherent in the material’s multifaceted nature. “Metallic conductivity in tandem with other catalytic properties would add to its potential for renewable energy production and storage,” she said.

Earth receives more energy from one hour of sunlight than is consumed in one year, but much is wasted for lack of storage. he same is true for most other renewable energies. he intermittent nature of these energies — no solar energy at night or wind energy during periods of calm — also requires eicient storage to overcome.

If scientists and industries could one day regularly reproduce the capability demonstrated by Marinescu, it would go a long way toward making solar energy an enduring and more permanent resource. —I.C.

Spring / Summer 2018 15

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Numbers CLIMATE CHANGE GAME-CHANGER? USC Dornsife scientists at the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute have unlocked a new, more eicient pathway for converting methane — a potent gas contributing to climate change — directly into basic chemicals for manufacturing plastics, agricultural chemicals and pharmaceuticals. This simple method of converting methane directly to olein would replace what are traditionally diicult, expensive and ineicient processes that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Found in Translation USC Dornsife Brain and Creativity Institute scientists map brain responses to stories in three diferent languages, inding some common responses. By Ian Chafee

60%

The amount of global growth in human-caused atmospheric methane emissions during this century that the United States may be solely responsible for.

The number of steps it originally took to convert methane to olein. The number has since declined to two steps, and now the Loker Hydro-carbon Research Institute team is the irst to make it happen with a single catalyst based on a class of crystals called zeolites.

1985 The year USC’s irst Nobel Prize winner, George Olah, initially converted methane to olein.

86x

The number of times more than CO2 that methane traps heat and warms the planet over a 20-year horizon.

16

In what appears to be a irst for neuroscience, USC Dornsife researchers have found patterns of brain activation when people ind meaning in stories, regardless of their language.

Using functional MRI, the scientists mapped brain responses to narratives in three diferent languages — English, Farsi and Mandarin Chinese. he study reveals the possibility that narrative storytelling can trigger better self-awareness and empathy for others, regardless of the language or origin of the person being exposed to it.

“Even given these fundamental diferences in language, which can be read in a diferent direction or contain a completely diferent alphabet altogether, there is something universal about what occurs in the brain at the point when we are processing narratives,” said Morteza Dehghani, assistant professor of psychology and computer science, a researcher at

USC Dornsife’s Brain and Creativity Institute. he researchers sorted through millions of blog posts of personal stories using software developed at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. he posts, all in English, were narrowed down to 40 stories about personal topics such as divorce or telling a lie. he stories were then translated into Mandarin Chinese and Farsi, and read by American, Chinese and Iranian participants in their native languages while their brains were scanned using MRI. Using state-of-the-art machine learning and textanalysis techniques, the researchers were able to reverse engineer the data from these brain scans to determine the story the reader was processing. In efect, the neuroscientists were able to read the participants’ minds as they were reading.

In the case of each language, reading each story resulted in unique patterns of activations in the “default mode network” of the brain, an interconnected system of various brain regions. he default mode network was originally thought to be a sort of autopilot for the resting brain, only active when someone is not engaged in externally directed thinking.

Ongoing studies, including this one, suggest that the default mode network actually is working behind the scenes to continually ind meaning in narrative. It may serve as an autobiographical memory retrieval function that inluences our thinking and understanding of the past, the future, ourselves and our relationship to others.

“One of the biggest mysteries of neuroscience is how we create meaning out of the world. Stories are deep-rooted in the core of our nature and help us create this meaning,” said Assistant Professor (Research) of Psychology Jonas Kaplan, also of the Brain and Creativity Institute.

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Spotlight

Working Toward an Elder-Friendly L.A. Students in spatial sciences course map out ways to make the city a friendlier place for an aging population.

“We can harness the power of maps and geography to tell the stories of the needs of older adults in Los Angeles,” Swift said. —O.B.

Community Cohort Community college students learn research skills to better understand the ecology of the subsealoor.

QUINTERO PHOTO BY SEBERO QUINTERO

Which bus stops have benches? Where can I get a free lu shot? What is my emergency evacuation plan?

Students in the new course “Age-Friendly L.A.,” a Wicked Problems Practicum sponsored by USC Provost Michael Quick, aim to provide answers to these questions and others in the hopes of making Los Angeles a better place to grow old. Using interactive maps, they’re developing a website and mobile app to tell layered stories about aging in Los Angeles that can serve as a valuable resource for community leaders and residents.

Los Angeles County is home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of older adults, a population that is expected to almost double by 2030.

City oicials, students, professors, seniors and other stakeholders gathered for this irst-of-its-kind charrette, a solution-design practice common in the ield of architecture, to address housing, transportation, engagement and other measures that afect quality of life for older adults.

“We are going to be able to use all this information and the incredible interdisciplinary work here to be able to actually think of real, meaningful actions that will make diferences in the lives of Angelenos going forward,” said Ashley Stracke, director of neighborhood services for Mayor Eric Garcetti. he goal of the semester-long course is to gather students from USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute, the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the USC Price School of Public Policy to examine life-span aging, health and social policy problems using graphic and visual representations that policymakers, professionals and researchers can understand and use.

Jennifer Swift, associate professor (teaching) of spatial sciences, co-leads the course with Caroline Cicero, instructional assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School.

Community college student Raquel Diaz jumped at the chance to help grow and describe a recently discovered life form. he opportunity was part of the Community College Cultivation Cohort (C4) program ofered by USC Dornsife’s Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI).

In the C4 program, Diaz was part of a team of community college students learning state-of-the-art scientiic techniques ranging from DNA sequencing to analytical chemistry. heir mission was to use the methods they learned to characterize a new bacterial species isolated in 2013 by USC Dornsife postdoctoral fellow Roman Barco.

Students in C4, who hail from community colleges around Los Angeles and the United States, are tasked with learning everything there is to know about this new marine microbe. heir indings will help scientists better understand the ecology of the ocean’s subsealoor, a little understood ecosystem.

Jan Amend, C-DEBI director and professor of Earth sciences and biological sciences, oversees the C4 program.

For many community college students, getting scientiic lab experience can be a challenge, negatively inluencing their prospects for studying science down the line, he said.

“One of the big hurdles that community college students face when they try to transfer to four-year schools is they don’t have the research experience,” he said.

Connecting with mentors who followed a path similar to hers helped Diaz cement her future plans. Admitted to Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, she began emailing professors about working in their labs. She’s also thinking ahead to the possibility of attending graduate school.

“Before C4, I didn’t understand everything that went into grad school,” she said. “Now it’s more concrete because I can see how I can actually get there.” —M.B.

SEBERO QUINTERO ’18 Economics and Italian major

“I would have been making good money, but it wasn’t really what I wanted to do.

I wanted to go to college.”

Sebero Quintero inds his own way.

Heading straight into the United States Air Force when he inished high school, Sebero was the irst in his family to join the military.

He was deployed in Afghanistan and Kuwait as a mechanic, then built runways, hospitals and bridges as part of the Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineer squadron.

When he inished his Air Force commitment, Quintero was ofered a training slot in military contracting with a six-igure signing bonus. He chose instead to become a irst-generation college student at USC Dornsife.

Known around campus as “Sabbi,” Quintero enrolled at USC Dornsife as a junior in Fall of 2016. Now he leads the USC Veterans Association as president.

Quintero’s aspirations include law school and possibly the USC Marshall School of Business Master of Business for Veterans program. He sees entrepreneurship in his future, and said his USC VA presidency may be another “Sabbi irst” that leads to greater things.

“People tell me I’m a good politician,” he said. “Down the road I may run for elected oice.

We’ll see.”

Spring / Summer 2018 17

Our World STUDENTS Brazil

FACULTY France

Afro-Brazilian Culture Students learn about the cultures of Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Africa.

18

Nicholas Warner wants to igure out how matter behaves at the most extreme frontier of the universe. he professor of physics and astronomy and mathematics at USC Dornsife received a prestigious grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to study the black hole information paradox, a problem irst revealed by Warner’s friend and former mentor the late Stephen Hawking.

Black holes are deined by their immense gravitational ields — ields that are powerful enough to trap light as well as matter. Since black holes collapse upon themselves, everything gets so compressed that modern understandings of physics also collapse.

“When you make a black hole, you’ve essentially erased from the outside any information about how you made it,” Warner said.

According to the current laws of physics, however, information must always be conserved, even in black holes. his includes information about matter, such as its composition, mass and position. In the 1980s, Hawking realized that black holes evaporate through a process known as Hawking radiation. But, this process would destroy the information that the black hole conserved. his discrepancy is called the black hole information paradox.

Warner likens the problem to forensic science — trying to reconstruct a crime scene from blood spatters and ingerprints. he formation and evaporation of a black hole erases everything from the crime scene, something quantum mechanics forbids.

Warner started working on the problem in 2007 using string theory. he new ive-year ERC Advanced grant will help him move his studies forward.

“I think we have a huge chunk of the puzzle in our approach,” he said.

BRAZIL PHOTO COURTESY OF EDER MUNIZ

Students traveled to Brazil to learn about its shared history with Portuguese-speaking Africa by immersing themselves in Brazil’s language, literature, religion, arts and food through the Maymester course “Cultures of Brazil and Lusophone Africa.”

“Culture is hard to understand just by reading about it,” said Ellen Oliveira, associate professor (teaching) of Spanish and Portuguese, who led the course. “I wanted students to live the culture — to see it, taste it, smell it. To experience everyday life rather than sit in a classroom and talk about it.”

The students began their journey in Salvador, Brazil’s irst capital under Portuguese rule.

Serving as a slave port in the colonial era, Salvador has a heavy African inluence and is a center of Afro-Brazilian culture. Slaves from Africa brought their traditions, including the Candomblé religion, which is still part of the fabric of Salvador today.

Students visited two Candomblé temples in the city and spoke with one of the church mothers to learn more about the religion’s signiicance.

Students also toured the city and took classes in Brazilian cooking and capoeira, a style of martial arts that combines acrobatics, music and dance. They studied Brazilian music, attended the Balé Folclórico da Bahia, a troupe that performs folk dances of African origin, and took a walking tour of Salvador street art with artist Eder Muniz, whose vibrant murals color the streets of Salvador.

The students stayed with host families in Salvador. Psychology major Jazmin Lopez had studied Portuguese for a year at USC Dornsife prior to the trip, but living with a host family ramped up her luency.

“My Portuguese was so much better toward the end of the trip,” she said, “because we were actually living, breathing and sleeping Brazilian Portuguese.”

For the second leg of their tour in Brazil, the class travelled to São Paulo, one of the world’s most populous cities. Students explored diferent neighborhoods including downtown São Paulo and the Japanese district, home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan.

They also visited the Immigration Museum and Abraço Cultural, a nongovernmental organization that supports refugees through cultural exchange.

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

PA K I S TA N P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F K AY L A S O R E N; V I E T N A M P H O T O BY P H U O C VA N N G U Y E N

STUDENTS London Darkness fell and a chill descended over the cobbled streets of London’s East End as the group of 10 undergraduates retraced the last steps of the female victims of notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.

Led by Lindsay O’Neill, assistant professor (teaching) of history, the cohort had travelled to the the city for a seven-day stay as the culmination of her course “Sex and the City, Constructing Gender in London, 1700 to 1900.”

The students explored how changing fashions and public and private spaces structured, expressed and deined gender expectations.

Exploring places that were the purview of the female sex, the group visited London department stores and took afternoon tea at The Orangery.

To gain an understanding of typically male settings, they toured Eton College, the elite boys’ boarding school, and lunched at Simpson’s Tavern, an 18thcentury chophouse that remains a bastion of masculinity.

O’Neill noted that 18th- and 19th-century London is a rich source of inspiration for gender studies. As the United Kingdom’s capital experienced unprecedented growth, its burgeoning suburbs meant men were increasingly moving outside the home as they traveled into the city to work.

“This transformed expectations for each gender, inluencing people’s family lives, work experiences, and sense of self,” she said.

STUDENT Pakistan

FACULTY Vietnam

ALUMNI Los Angeles

Converging on a Cure Tech solutions target cancer globally.

Sophomore Kayla Soren founded the International Student Environmental Coalition (ISEC), a network spanning 30 countries that helps young people raise awareness about our planet. ISEC supports representatives, shares their ideas, gauges their success and sees if positive results can be replicated.

To Soren, it’s exciting to see the unexpected enthusiasm from developing nations.

For example, Pakistan’s ISEC chapter has more than 300 members at 15 universities.

They’ve already shown progress, planting 25,000 trees in the capital, Karachi. In June, the Indo-Pak Climate Peace Action Conference in Pakistan, organized by ISEC, brought Indian and Pakistani environmentalists together to collaborate, aiming to overcome long-held tensions between the neighboring nations.

Soren, an environmental studies and international relations major, tries to weave ISEC into her studies. She’s hoping to do a semester in Washington, D.C., pursue social entrepreneurship and study in South America.

“Without the environment, nothing else matters,” she said.

Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences Peter Kuhn, a founding member of the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, told an international oncology conference in Vietnam how internet-based technologies being developed at USC can connect and help patients globally.

Speaking in Ho Chi Minh City at the irst Vietnam Multidisciplinary Oncology Conference, hosted by the Salt Cancer Initiative, Kuhn, professor of medicine at Keck School of Medicine of USC and professor of biomedical engineering, and aerospace and mechanical engineering at USC Viterbi School of Engineering, explained how USC’s Convergent Science Initiative – Cancer (CSI-Cancer), a multidisciplinary project that quantiies how cancer evolves over time, forecasts how an individual’s cancer will progress and measures health.

CSI-Cancer project CancerBase, an international cancer-mapping initiative that enables patients to use social media to securely and anonymously share their cancer data, helps patients better understand the progression of their own treatment and cancer, and compare their journeys. It also enables researchers to gather basic cancer data in real time, potentially speeding up cancer research.

When freelance journalist and alumnus Dan Johnson began teaching a literacy course for adults at The Midnight Mission in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, the reading materials he was given to use for instruction were designed for middle-schoolers.

Johnson got the idea to retool them and reached out to writers he knew and writers he admired. He pulled together a collection of essays, short stories and other texts that he thought would be more relevant to his students because they touch on the neighborhood where they live and experiences that mirror their day-to-day lives. The result is The Skid Row Reader.

Johnson’s wish is that the textbook can help his students ind dignity — and hope — in their struggle.

“It just seemed like an obvious choice to work towards creating a body of work these men could really sink their teeth into,” said Johnson, who earned his bachelor’s in history in 2008.

Spring / Summer 2018 19

Educational

Voyage

20

Bookpacking in Louisiana. Examining art and culture in Cuba. Digging up ancient artifacts in Greece.

Exploring hip hop culture in Paris. USC Dornsife students reap the educational rewards of travel — beneiting from a tradition that stretches back as far as ancient times. By Susan Bell Max Novak will never forget the moment he pulled a bronze Hellenic sword out of the ground.

“It’s one thing to see it cleaned up … in a museum,” the classics and art history major said, “but another to pull it out of the ground … covered in dirt and thousands of years old.”

Novak, who graduated in 2017, achieved this remarkable feat last summer during an archaeological dig in the Greek city of hebes where a sanctuary to the Greek god

Poseidon once stood.

He was able to travel to Greece as one of the irst recipients of three annual $5,000 Kallins Hellenic Studies Summer Fellowships, which ofer a new opportunity for undergraduate and graduate research and travel through the Classics Department. he award is open to anyone who has taken a course in classics, regardless of their declared major, as a way to encourage students to study Greek history where it unfolded.

Spring / Summer 2018 21

VIBRANT CITY Students on Edwin Hill's Maymester course “Global Ciphas — Hip-hop Circles Around the World” discover an unexpected side to Paris culture.

Novak’s participation in archaeological digs reinforced his interest in archaeology and material culture, he said.

He’s now studying for his master’s in a program combining classical art and archaeology at the University of Oxford.

After spending a year in Greece as a graduate student, Greg halmann, professor of classics and comparative literature, knows irsthand the value travel brings to education.

“It was a transformative year, traveling all over Greece, then working on an excavation,” he said. “I really understand how enriching this kind of experience can be for students because of what it did for me.” halmann believes that having that visual and tactile experience with history helps students become better scholars, better citizens and better human beings.

“One of the things that humanities do best is give students an understanding of people who are not them, who are diferent, whether it’s through literature, arts or history,” he said. “It makes us more ready to be empathetic with people diferent from ourselves.” he idea that travel plays a vital role not only in a wellrounded education, but in creating a well-rounded human being, is not new. In fact, we can trace it as far back as the Roman Empire, when elite Romans serving as governors of distant provinces took young aristocrats with them to gain experience. By the second century B.C., powerful and wealthy Romans were traveling to Athens to study philosophy.

By 400 A.D., the value of travel in expanding the mind is so widely accepted that Saint Augustine of Hippo makes the still oft-quoted quip that “the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” Skip to 17th-century Europe and we see the dawn of the Grand Tour — a widely-practiced custom that will endure for two centuries in which young members of the European aristocracy and members of the wealthy landed classes embark on lengthy and lavish voyages to explore the cultural patrimony of classical antiquity and the Renaissance.

Fast forward to the 21st century. he desire to help students reap the rich rewards of travel sparks the development of USC Dornsife’s innovative Problems Without Passports (PWP) and Maymester programs, which take students on learning experiences across the globe. Here, USC Dornsife faculty and students describe the beneits of these programs and trace the historical antecedents that inspired them.

Travel teaches us to respect other people and cultures and creates a fuller education for our students, making them responsible world citizens, argues Peter Mancall, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and professor of history and anthropology at USC Dornsife.

“While we recognize that we can provide a great education on campus in Los Angeles, there’s a much wider world out there,” he said. “Travel opens the mind, not just intellectually, but in ways that will help students handle the challenges they’ll encounter for the rest of their lives.”

THE GRAND TOUR

A noted authority on travel in the early modern era, Mancall points to 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century Europe and the legacy of the Grand Tour as the deining historical example of a travel-based educational rite of passage.

“No British person, for instance, could claim to be educated during this period unless they had seen Italy, France and Greece, had gone to the places where the ancients walked, 22

had seen the Colosseum,” said Mancall.

Indeed, travel became a prerequisite for holding any position of power and prestige within the British Empire — power, Mancall noted, that was not just about economic or military might, but about cultural superiority.

“One had to prove one knew the world in order to come home and be part of the class of people that would govern and shape the world,” he said.

While the ostentatious displays of wealth associated with these voyages no longer play a role in modern-day educational travel, in many other ways the Grand Tour was a precursor to USC Dornsife’s PWP and Maymester courses: Young people were accompanied by tutors, or well-informed guides, just as USC Dornsife students travel with their professors while also drawing on the knowledge of local experts. he Grand Tour also ofered participants the opportunity to perfect a foreign language or to learn a new one. he opportunity to cultivate contacts — what today we call networking — was another draw.

“One expanded one’s circle of associates, which invariably brought advantages later in life,” Mancall said. “hose bonds are powerful, and you still see this in the modern world — with our own Trojan family, for instance.”

In return, there was an expectation that those on the Grand Tour should record their observations and experiences, which could then be passed on to society at large to improve its welfare. his seeing, recording and sharing with others is, as Mancall points out, the basis of modern scholarship.

Young people on a Grand Tour didn’t even behave so diferently from students today. Just as 21st-century students snap selies next to tourist landmarks, young men on a Grand Tour had their portraits painted against backdrops of iconic monuments. And just as modern explorers bring back souvenirs from a trip, those on the Grand Tour brought back cultural artifacts to display in their stately homes. he popularity of the Grand Tour declined with the democratization of travel in the mid-19th century, but its inluence persists today.

However, Mancall notes, while modern study abroad programs share similarities with the traditions they grew out of, there are also important diferences.

“Unlike the time of the Grand Tour, where it was almost always those from an elite class traveling abroad, at USC Dornsife we are trying to broaden the beneits of a liberal arts education to as wide a population as possible,” he said. “With our extensive inancial aid, we want to make it possible for those who might not otherwise be able to aford to see a diferent place, to go there as part of a class. hat opens up new opportunities that are good for our students and good for society.”

PARIS THROUGH ANOTHER LENS

Most irst-time visitors to Paris focus on the French capital’s much-romanticized tourist triumvirate: the holy grail of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Champs-Élysées.

Edwin Hill, associate professor of French and Italian and American studies and ethnicity, introduces his students to a very diferent side of the City of Lights.

Students on Hill’s Maymester course “Global Ciphas — Hip-hop Circles Around the World” venture of the beaten track to discover the vibrant creativity of Paris street art and the French capital’s unexpectedly dynamic hip-hop scene.

It is a side of Paris that Hill says is hidden in plain sight, but which tourists usually miss because they are so focused on seeing the established landmarks.

As well as examining the history of cultural movement within the larger framework of the African diaspora, students are invited to think about how hip-hop culture, cultural objects and artifacts, and practitioners, move back and forth between the United States and France.

Hill traces this exchange back to the Jazz Age and the many African-American musicians, dancers and writers who traveled to Paris, which was viewed as a space of refuge, creativity and growth. “here’s deinitely a lineage there, a special relationship that exists between African Americans and France,” said Hill, whose book Black Soundscapes White Stages: he Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) explores this period.

“What’s interesting today is that you discover that hiphop is its own international global language that allows people to communicate across countries, across oceans, across continents,” he said. Visiting bastions of the Paris hip-hop scene like Djoon, a small club a stone’s throw IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY A N D R E A C O B B F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

“Travel opens the mind, not just intellectually, but in ways that will help students handle the challenges they’ll encounter for the rest of their lives.” from the august towers of the National Library of France, helps students begin to identify diferent genres, inluences and styles.

“People might dance in the cipha, or exchange rhymes and pass the mike around the circle,” Hill said. “It’s something that you see a lot in African diasporic cultural forms, that coming together to form a circle and that being a special, even spiritual, place for the performance and shared creation of culture.”

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A irm believer in the importance of travel, Hill says the experience of being able to live and study abroad as a student changed his life.

“We live in a very divided world, in a very divided nation, and only by stepping into other peoples’ cultures can we break out of the molds we have set for ourselves.”

“It altered my understanding of the world, and my understanding of my place in the world,” he said. “It transforms your understanding of other people and it makes you care about the world in a new and really personal way. You read the news diferently because you know people, and you know how events are going to afect their lives.”

BRIDGE BUILDING IN CUBA

One such trip was USC Dornsife’s Maymester “Visualizing Cuba: Arts, Politics and Society in Today’s Cuba,” which enabled USC students from diverse majors to see through stereotypes about the island nation and its people.

Led by Ivette Gomez, assistant professor (teaching) of Spanish, the course allowed students to immerse themselves in Cuba’s vibrant culture while analyzing its visual arts, literature and music. he students explored Old Havana, rode in vintage American cars along the Malecón, Havana’s fabled seafront promenade, and experienced the beauty of the country’s architecture. hey visited Ernest Hemingway’s house, discussed Cuba’s upcoming elections with a Cuban political science professor and met a female Afro-Cuban rap duo.

Meeting journalists, artists, doctors, religious leaders, faculty, writers and musicians, students were able to explore issues related to international relations between Cuba and the U.S. and to learn more about Cuba’s universal health-care system and high literacy levels.

Staying in casas particulares (private homes) with Cuban families enabled students to get to know their hosts and familiarize themselves with the Cuban way of life. “hey immediately experienced the friendliness and hospitality of the Cuban people,” said Gomez, who grew up in Havana. “Many students told me, ‘his is not what I expected.’”

Indeed, the students were shocked to discover that the reality of Cuba is very diferent from the way it is often portrayed by politicians and media.

Economics major Nicholas Mockabee ’17 was struck not only by the lack of any visible military presence, something many students had expected to see, but also that Cubans embraced their American visitors with open arms.

“I had this preconceived notion that the Cuban people didn’t like Americans, that we just didn’t get along because of the whole Cold War situation, but it wasn’t like that at all,” he said.

Indeed, Gomez said the students were surprised to ind they had so much in common, especially with younger Cubans.

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hey formed a close bond with Ollie, their young scubadiving, Afro-Cuban guide, who spoke perfect English, which he learned from listening to rap music. “he students noticed how well-informed and political he was,” Gomez said. “hey asked, ‘Will you ever leave Cuba?’

And he replied, ‘No, this is the moment to be here.’ ” BOOKS IN THE BIG EASY

Another groundbreaking Maymester takes students to Louisiana for “Bookpacking ‘he Big Easy’: A Cultural and Literary Journey.”

Award-winning British ilmmaker and presenter Andrew Chater of English is the creator of the bookpacking concept, an innovative form of literary travel in which novels serve as portals through which participants explore regional history and culture. he idea — a new, holistic approach to studying the humanities — grew out of something Chater has been doing all his life: traveling with novels that are set in, or somehow strongly linked to, the places he visits.

“What I ind as I travel with books is that the book informs the place and the place informs the book,” he said. Chater, who picked Louisiana as the destination for his irst USC Dornsife bookpacking course because of its extraordinarily vibrant and diverse literary culture, encourages students to use novels almost as guidebooks, so that literature, history, geography, politics, and social studies combine into a uniied course of study.

Chater’s selection of novels for the course relected a cultural gumbo, including works that addressed the region’s Creole, Cajun, rural white Protestant, Catholic and African-American roots. In New Orleans, the students read Walker Percy’s existential novel he Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole’s rambunctious comedic romp, A Confederacy of Dunces. Students visited Baton Rouge, where they studied Robert Penn Warren’s tale of a corrupt Southern politician in All the King’s Men. hey then spent time in Lafayette and Cajun country, where they met Ernest J. Gaines, author of the classic A Lesson Before Dying, set in the rural black South. he course began in Grand Isle, an island of southern Louisiana that is the setting for Kate Chopin’s late 19thcentury novella he Awakening. Students stayed in a traditional wooden isherman’s house on stilts overlooking the Gulf and followed in the steps of the book’s unorthodox heroine, Edna Pontellier, as they ambled along the sandy path that leads through the dunes and down to the sea.

English major Olivia Jones described how, when the students reached New Orleans, bookpacking informed a deeper understanding of the city, its history and its culture.

“We had become part of that dialogue, part of the story of New Orleans,” she wrote in her course blog, “our books shedding light in corners of the city that would have otherwise been overlooked.”

If there is one thing Chater says he wants students to develop from this bookpacking experience, and indeed all USC Dornsife’s travel programs, it is a spirit of empathy.

“We live in a very divided world, in a very divided nation, and only by stepping into other peoples’ cultures can we break out of the molds we have set for ourselves,” he said. “It’s only by walking alongside people of diferent cultures, whether ictional characters or people we meet on our journeys, that we are able to appreciate their lives and learn to truly engage with each other.”

he Allure of Travel

by Susan Bell

AUTHOR AND ACCIDENTAL GLOBE-TROTTER GEOFF DYER TALKS ABOUT WHY TRAVEL HAS BEEN SO CENTRAL TO HIS WRITING.

DYER PHOTO COURTESY OF GEOFF DYER

Ironically for a writer whose highly successful literary career is so largely inspired by travel, Geof Dyer got of to rather a slow start in exploring the world.

Nothing predestined Dyer, USC Dornsife writer in residence, to be a traveler. In fact, the reason travel has been so important to his writing life, he says, is because it was not in his nature, or indeed his genes, to travel.

Dyer’s working-class parents, a sheet-metal worker and a school lunch lady, barely left their hometown of Cheltenham, England.

“My parents both died without ever having been on an airplane,” he said. “I didn’t get on an airplane until I was 22. We just never went anywhere, except occasionally on one of those dismal English seaside holidays. We never liked them.”

However, at the age of 8 or 9, Dyer’s parents did take him on a memorable outing to Heathrow, “not to catch a plane, but just to look at them” — an experience he found thrilling. Did he dream about boarding one and lying away?

“It was just so out of the question. I loved planes, but it never felt within grasp, really. So, it wasn’t a frustrating thing, this trip; it was just a completely satisfactory end in itself.”

His other early exposure to travel came from a maternal aunt, a beauty who married a self-made millionaire and sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2’s maiden voyage to America, then sent her young nephew brochures from Arizona’s Grand Canyon and Painted Desert.

“So, some sense of another world was there,” Dyer said.

But it wasn’t until he arrived at what is known in Britain as his “gap year” — the period many British, and now an increasing number of American, students take of between high school and university to travel overseas — that Dyer inally set foot on foreign soil. That he did so at all was only because a horriied high school English teacher pushed him to venture beyond British shores after discovering Dyer intended to spend the entire year working in an oice in Cheltenham, his hometown on the edge of the Cotswolds.

The result was a somewhat arduous tour of Europe, squeezed into a Mini Cooper with two friends.

“I only went away for three weeks, so I really didn’t make the most of it,” he says regretfully of his own gap year — a rite of passage he is now convinced is highly beneicial.

“Despite it now being fashionable to deride it, if I were an employer and heard somebody had spent their gap year in Southeast Asia, I would still think it’s quite an impressive thing to do,” he said. “It requires a certain amount of intelligence and common sense, and in terms of broadening the mind, it’s just fantastic.”

His own experience may have been too brief, but it served to give Dyer the travel bug. The following year, he tackled Greece. Since then he hasn’t looked back, describing travel as “an unalloyed positive.”

His desire to travel is, he says, intimately bound up with being a writer.

“After The Color of Memory [Jonathan Cape, 1989], my irst novel, I didn’t really have that much more to say about Britain. So, travel has given me the experience to write about,” he said. “I want to have been everywhere in the world at least once by the time I die.”

While Dyer’s dryly humorous writing is inspired by travel, he’s quick to point out that he would never describe himself as a travel writer, per se.

“I’m more of a writer about places,” he demurs from his spartan oice in the USC Dornsife English Department. “I can’t think of anything that’s been more important to me as a writer than place.”

But Dyer concedes that the journey can be as important as the destination.

“Quite often, it might happen that some incidental experience you’re having in the course of getting to a place is more important than what happens in the place itself,” he says.

This is the central conceit that informs the collection of essays about trips to diverse, exotic destinations contained in Dyer’s book White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (Pantheon, 2016). It is often the act of getting there that turns out to provide the fascinating insight, the humorous anecdote, the philosophical revelation, while the inal destination, more often than not, ends up being something of a disappointment.

Nevertheless, Dyer admits that he still loves the feeling associated with a sense of arrival.

“Not just that ‘Phew, I don’t have to carry my bags anymore,’ but that sense of convergence that makes you feel this is what makes life worth living.”

Our planet is a pretty sensational place, he argues. It would simply be an incredible waste not to explore it.

Dyer warns against living as if we’re immortal, with endless time to travel, without awareness that things change. Once accessible destinations may become impossible to visit (Syria, for example), and our tolerance and endurance for challenging travel conditions usually diminishes with age. (One can imagine that Dyer, who is very tall, might no longer willingly tolerate the cramped conditions of the economy seats of his youth.)

“But the major danger of not traveling, I think, is that kind of narrow-mindedness and suspicion of the larger world, because actually, one of the amazing things, given the huge disparities of income, is just how honest people are,” Dyer said.

“Generally, we don’t actually have that much to fear from each other, and travel alerts you to that. It cannot but be a good thing.”

A WRITER’S GUIDE TO TRAVEL • Be responsible — take care of your travel documents.

• Give yourself to the place as much as possible — be fully present.

• Take notes so you don’t forget your experiences.

• Don’t waste time taking selies.

• Ideally, learn another language.

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Personal and cultural legacy meets cutting-edge research technology, enabling the documentation and preservation of Byzantine murals in Eastern Orthodox churches. By Laura Paisley

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DIGITAL HUMANITY Nestled among the cedar forests of the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus is an enchanting collection of Greek Orthodox churches and monasteries dating from the late Byzantine Empire. Most of the dozen or so medieval churches seem modest from the outside â&#x20AC;&#x201D; small, stone structures supporting pitched timber roofs with lat-hooked tiles. he real treasure is revealed inside, where, beneath low ceilings and bathed in muted light, the walls are adorned with richly colored paintings and beautifully ornate murals. Containing some of the best preserved examples of Byzantine and post-Byzantine art, 10 of these churches have been deemed a UNESCO World Heritage site.

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Panos Vasiloudes has clear memories

of visiting the churches as a boy in Cyprus.

He grew up mere miles away, in a small village in the center of the island called Pera Orinis.

“All the churches in the Troodos Mountains, they were a destination and an emotional pilgrimage place for all of us,” he said. “here was always a certain pride that we had these old, historic places to visit.”

Little did he know back then that he and his future wife, Helen, who now live in Florida, would reconnect with the painted churches of his childhood in a personal way nearly four decades later.

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CULTURAL PRESERVATIONIST

Bruce Zuckerman also has a connection to the holy sites.

A professor of religion and linguistics at USC Dornsife, he has devoted a 38-year career to preserving ancient artifacts and cultural history, worldwide. As director of USC Dornsife’s West Semitic Research and InscriptiFact Projects, he and his team of researchers have painstakingly documented hundreds of precious antiquities, including ancient biblical texts and Dead Sea Scrolls.

Two years ago, Zuckerman’s team went to Cyprus to work on a pilot project in collaboration with he Cyprus Institute. hey visited a few of the painted churches in the Troodos Mountains to investigate how to document their remarkable interiors and powerful iconography using specialized cameras.

Zuckerman and his colleagues have pioneered the use of sophisticated digital photography to uncover and preserve the past. One novel imaging technique they

have mastered is called Relectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). By synthesizing multiple images taken from a ixed camera position at diferent light angles, RTI creates a dynamic digital version of an object, rendering even the most subtle of textures in microscopic detail. Another innovation involves making spherical images with a Panoscan camera. he digital camera sits on a tripod in the middle of the room and captures 360-degree, loor-to-ceiling images. he camera’s isheye lens creates images that convey relational space, as if the viewer is actually standing in the room. One spherical panorama photograph requires a pass of seven to 15 minutes, resulting in an extremely high-resolution image.

“It really redeines how you look at this stuf,” Zuckerman said, adding that his research team was the irst to apply these techniques to cultural heritage targets. “he RTI images are transformed into textures that reveal artistic brush techniques, individual brush strokes and other details impossible to see in any other fashion,” he said, “while the Panoscan images put you inside the churches, allowing you to turn and look in any direction and see the many images and the physical relationships they have with one another.”

MEETING OF MINDS

Helen and Panos Vasiloudes learned of Zuckerman’s research in Cyprus through their connection to USC, where two of their four children are enrolled. Panos Vasiloudes, a physician, said learning about Zuckerman’s work had touched him deeply because of his own childhood visits to those churches many years ago. he couple began communicating with Zuckerman, and the three soon agreed to meet. Zuckerman told them about his intention to document the remainder of the painted churches and showed the couple some of the images he had already taken.

“I thought it would be interesting to hear what [Zuckerman] did,” said Helen Vasiloudes, an artist with a background in education. “But once Bruce showed us the scale of what he was working on — the level you can take it to — we thought, ‘How impressive!’ ” he images on Zuckerman’s computer allowed them to see what kinds of paint were used, and the style of particular painters and iconographers, she said. It was even possible to see how original paintings had been painted over.

“It was so fascinating to us,” Helen Vasiloudes said.

“It took that entire religious, cultural background for us to a totally diferent level.”

For the Vasiloudes family, helping to fund this research seemed only natural.

“What was important for us is the ability to connect P H O T O S C O U R T E S Y O F M A R I LY N L U N D B E R G

with our past and our traditions, going back to our roots in Cyprus,” Panos Vasiloudes said. “We felt it was a project where we can relate, and it could help us as a family connect our history and religion to our lives right now.” heir funding allowed Zuckerman and his team to return to Cyprus for three weeks last summer to undertake the laborious but exciting task of documenting the church interiors. His team included Marilyn Lundberg, associate director of USC’s West Semitic Research Project, his brother Kenneth Zuckerman, also an associate on the project, and two undergraduate student researchers: Alleluia Tyus, who graduated from USC Dornsife in Fall 2017, and homas Zhang, then a sophomore at USC Viterbi School of Engineering. hey were also joined by a team of researchers and imaging specialists from he Cyprus Institute’s Research Center for Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture led by Nikolas Bakirtsis, the Director of the Andreas Pittas Art Characterization Laboratories, and including Ropertos Georgiou, hanasis Koutoupas and Mia Trentin. In the project, made possible with the collaboration of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, the groups made both Panoscan spherical images and RTI details. “he advantage of a Panoscan image is that the imagedata is recorded in a continuous pass as a single image,” Zuckerman said. “he image is, for the most part, seamless and therefore far more accurate than other spherical panoramas, which are tiled from individual frames that need considerable interpolation. We like it because what you see is what you get, and what you get is what you saw — it’s not overly tweaked.” he team captured a combination of RTI pictures and more than 100 Panoscan images from nine diferent churches and one cave shrine. he student interns focused on using the RTI technology to illustrate particular details of the paintings but participated in all aspects of the work.

“To my knowledge, our USC/CI team is the irst to apply these imaging approaches to any of the churches in Cyprus — or to churches anywhere else, for that matter,” Zuckerman said.

able to combine all this over generations.”

Working in the painted churches was also a very personal experience for Tyus, whose degree is in archaeology.

“It’s kind of magical because they are religious sites,” he said. “And you don’t have to be religious to understand what I’m talking about because if you visit enough of them, you realize how important they were to the culture, through religion.”

Upon entering a new church, Tyus would wonder to himself how many people it took to build, how many important people must have spoken there, how many lives were changed in those rooms.

He would begin to feel an energy that made the church come alive for him.

“It wasn’t just a building anymore — they weren’t just sites. hey were people’s lives and heritage,” he said.

STUDENT RESEARCH CONTINUES

Back at USC last fall and spring, the students helped process all the images from Cyprus and built a website and database to display their work. he results were entered in the university’s Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work. he project, which included another undergraduate intern, Rachel Kartin, is a great pairing of technology and directed student research, Zuckerman said. For instance, Zhang’s computer engineering skills are enabling him to use the images to build three-dimensional models of the churches. he project won the Interdisciplinary Award in the Humanities for Zhang and Kartin last April.

A MORAL OBLIGATION

HISTORY’S HUMAN FACE

One day, the Vasiloudes family joined the researchers at one of the churches. Visiting as an adult, Panos Vasiloudes experienced what he described as a humanistic and emotional journey back to his roots.

“It was a diferent feeling, especially going back with our children and walking through the stones and the church,” he said. “I felt a sense of pride, honor and privilege, being

Last Christmas, the Vasiloudeses felt the call of their Mediterranean home and returned to spend 10 days in Cyprus. hey strolled through the old streets of Nicosia, the island’s capital, and visited monasteries, wineries and an olive oil mill.

“We enjoyed the old traditions, and we connected with our friends and our roots,” Panos Vasiloudes said. “And that made us even more irm believers that we have a moral obligation to preserve our culture and our heritage.” hough it’s also about more than Cypriot history, Helen Vasiloudes pointed out. It’s about human history, and preserving cultures and artifacts of the past around the world. “here are so many other cultures that people need to be exploring and understanding,” she said. “I think what Bruce is doing is just the tip of the iceberg.”

PRESERVATION Ultra-high resolution imaging techniques create a richly detailed digital record of ancient Cypriot church artwork.

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Immigration is central to the roots of the American experience. So what does it mean when we make our home across borders, learning a new culture while honoring where we come from?

By Michelle Boston

Traveling Home

AMONG THE RUINS In his childhood home in Libya, Moh El-Naggar, associate professor of physics, biological sciences and chemistry, would play among the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna.

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As a Palestinian child growing up in Libya, Moh El-Naggar would play among the ruins of Leptis Magna on the coast. Anywhere else, the ancient Roman city — a UNESCO World Heritage site perched on the Mediterranean Sea — would undoubtedly have been a tourist draw. But in the mostly closed country ruled at the time by Muammar Gaddai, it was the backdrop for kicking around a soccer ball or playing hide-and-seek with friends.

El-Naggar remembers that despite the challenges of the ruling regime, he had a very happy childhood. With seven people under one roof in his hometown of Tripoli, everyone was either laughing or arguing. “Either way, it was always exciting,” he said.

When the time came for college, El-Naggar traded one bustling city for another, leaving Tripoli for Cairo. But after one semester, the Egyptian government denied his visa to study for reasons that were never made clear to him.

So, he weighed his options and decided to move to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to attend Lehigh University.

With family friends nearby, his parents felt safe sending of their youngest where loved ones could look after him.

However, the sleepy college town with a population that barely pushed 70,000 was a shock to his system.

“It was a wonderful place, but I was used to dense, urban areas with millions of people,” El-Naggar said.

It was also nothing like the images he had seen of America in the movies.

Despite the jolt of an unfamiliar setting, the move was also a dream come true — he was living in America and studying science and engineering.

Some people pack a bag and head out across borders in search of discovery. For many, that journey means inding home. Sometimes it’s in the spirit of adventure. Or often, as with El-Naggar, the move is guided by necessity.

Whether their motivation stems from politics, civil unrest, economic instability, a natural disaster or sheer adventure,

a common thread remains — creating a better life for themselves and their families.

Nearly 20 years later, El-Naggar, Robert D. Beyer (’81) Early Career Chair in Natural Sciences and associate professor of physics, biological sciences and chemistry at USC Dornsife, continues to call the United States home.

After earning his bachelor’s degree, he moved west, where the climate was more like that of his hometown, and the population was more in tune with his image of America. He earned a Ph.D. in engineering and applied science from Caltech.

He now runs a lab at USC Dornsife studying, among other things, the potential for microbes to enable new renewable energy technologies. In 2013, President Barack Obama acknowledged El-Naggar’s innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology by bestowing on him the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

El-Naggar’s immigration to the United States from Africa embodies the ideals of the American Dream: coming to a country founded on democracy where citizens are encouraged to pursue success under a banner of idealism that advocates for liberty, equality and opportunity.

And that, of course, is the main draw for many immigrants who want to make the U.S. their home, said Manuel Pastor, Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change and professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity.

Pastor directs the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) at USC Dornsife, which studies how to support newcomers to America by inding ways to encourage their economic mobility, civic participation and positive social reception.

“People come to the United States because it’s a place of economic opportunity,” he said. “here’s also traditionally a sense that you can become American not just because of blood and soil, but by accepting a certain set of principles and values around democracy, accountability and responsibility.”

IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY D O U G L A S J O N E S F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

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IMMIGRATION BY THE NUMBERS

SPLIT CITY

As a sociologist and self-proclaimed “data nerd,” Pastor spends a lot of his time looking at immigration statistics.

What he has noticed in the past few years is that much of what he hears in the news does not relect what the data actually shows. “he national debate about immigration is, for anybody who knows the numbers, really misplaced,” Pastor explained.

As someone who has made a home in both the U.S. and Mexico, USC Dornsife student Enrique Licon has been inspired to help lip the narrative by pursuing a career in politics.

Licon was born in the Texas border town of El Paso to an American mother and a Mexican father. Shortly after his birth, Licon, currently an economics and political science major, moved less than 10 miles south into Juárez, Mexico.

He spent the majority of his youth making the drive across the border to attend school in El Paso. He would leave the dense metropolis of Juárez before sunrise. His commute would take him through the Chihuahuan Desert along the border of Texas up to the international crossing, where he could make out El Paso’s cityscape carved into the basin surrounded by low mountains. he experience of growing up in Juárez and attending school in El Paso has given Licon a valuable perspective on the current issues surrounding the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. With the negative depictions of Mexicans emanating from Washington, D.C., he said he works hard to be a positive representation of Mexicans as a reminder that there are real people being afected by the harsh rhetoric and unforgiving immigration policies.

Licon sought an education at USC because he found programs that would help him achieve his goals, particularly through the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, where he is currently on staf. He has taken full advantage of the institute’s internship programs, working at two diferent political consulting irms and participating in a civic engagement teaching internship. here, he and other USC Dornsife students led Los Angeles-area high-school students in a program designing a community improvement plan. He has also interned in U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Washington, D.C., oice, working with her education and drug caucus teams.

“Since I’ve been at USC, I’ve been taught by people who have worked on presidential campaigns and a very famous economist. I appreciate the opportunity, and plan to make the most of it,” he said.

Now in his senior year, Licon is considering attending law school — after a stint working a full-time job after graduation. His ultimate goal is a career in politics, either in Mexico or the U.S. “If I run for oice in Mexico or the United States, it would be to help out the community,” Licon said, “to be a voice for the people.”

Community and culture are enduring elements of childhood that help construct who we become and how we shape the course of our lives. his is especially true for those like Licon who crossed borders at a young age.

Indeed, nothing could be truer for Karen Tongson, who continues to explore what cross-cultural experiences mean for immigrant communities — and for herself.

“If I run for oice in Mexico or the United States, it would be to help out the community.”

DAILY COMMUTE Student Enrique Licon traveled daily back and forth across the border between his home in Juárez, Mexico, and his school in El Paso, Texas, where he was born.

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A large part of the conversation has centered around the idea that illegal immigrants are coming in droves to the U.S., taking jobs and resources from citizens. he reality, Pastor said, is that the undocumented population declined in the United States from 2007 to 2009 and has been pretty much stable since then. A Pew Research Center study estimates that around two-thirds of the undocumented population has called the U.S. home for at least a decade. his group also tends to boost the economy in a number of ways, Pastor said. For instance, they pay more in taxes than they receive. “Undocumented immigrants pay about $6 billion a year into Social Security, which is money that they will never be able to get back.

“So the image of somebody who just crossed the border needs to be shifted in favor of reality, which is someone who probably has pretty deep roots in the United States,” Pastor said. Further, when it comes to immigrants from Mexico, more Mexicans are actually leaving the U.S. than arriving. “he fact is that the era of mass illegal immigration is over,” Pastor said.

With the current national debate, he sees a parallel to the rhetoric on immigration that took place in California in the early ’90s, when voters passed Proposition 187. he ballot initiative sought to strip undocumented people of social and educational services (although virtually all of it was eventually struck down in court). He connects Californians’ unease then to a shift in demographics, which mirrors the current shift in the U.S. population.

Between 1980 and 2000, minorities became the majority in California, he explained, which is roughly the same demographic change that the U.S. is slated to go through between 2000 and 2050.

“If you think about demographic anxiety, economic uncertainty and polarized politics, California was the poster child for what you see going on in the United States as a whole right now,” Pastor said. “Indeed, you could say that the U.S. just had its Prop 187 moment.” he dual narratives of immigrants at once taking jobs and using up welfare resources doesn’t really add up.

“It’s hard to do both of those things at the same time,” Pastor said. “hese ideas are being driven by an emotional reaction to the change in our country.”

A POP OF CULTURE

Two experiences were pivotal in shaping Tongson’s childhood and possibly the trajectory of her career.

At the age of 10, she and her mother and stepfather moved from the Philippines to Riverside, California, at the time a predominantly white community. Her unfamiliar appearance and darker skin tone piqued the interest of the children in her neighborhood.

Spring / Summer 2018 33

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She remembers very distinctly one afternoon when a large group of kids surrounded her on her lawn.

“What are you? What’s your religion?” they probed.

Tongson, who is now associate professor of English, gender studies and American studies and ethnicity at USC Dornsife, explained she was from Manila, a large city in the Philippines. “Do they have toilets there?” one child asked.

An academic from the start, she set of for the public library to procure a picture book that showed the megalopolis with its skyscrapers, which, she pointed out, were of course equipped with toilets. he other signiicant experience was her own personal entrée into American popular culture. hough she already spoke English in addition to her native Tagalog, and grew up watching American television in the Philippines — “CHiPs, Charlie’s Angels, Little House on the Prairie, you name it,” she said — once she was in the U.S., those programs became a signiicant cultural translator for her.

“Sesame Street. he Electric Company. hose shows helped me learn how to read,” Tongson said. “For me, the sense of education, of knowledge, of worlds being opened up came through popular culture as a conduit.”

Now, Tongson studies and teaches popular culture, examining how it relates to immigrant communities.

Her research also extends to race, gender and sexuality studies; literature and critical theory; Los Angeles, the Southern California region and the Paciic Rim; and contemporary food cultures.

But it was her early interactions that heavily inluenced her approach to her academic examination of pop culture.

“I never sensed that these popular objects were trash or less than signiicant, especially because they were so formative to my own educational experiences and my own capacity to move through diferent worlds,” Tongson explained. “Pop culture reveals, in many respects, our desires in ways that the documents of oicial culture don’t.”

In fact, Tongson’s irst name has its own pop culture origin. Hailing from a family of musicians going back several generations in the Philippines — including her mother — she was named after Karen Carpenter. Many said Tongson’s mother’s singing voice resembles that of the musical icon.

Tongson has a forthcoming book about Carpenter and her music as part of the brother sister duo the Carpenters. heir Southern California sound holds a special place in the musical culture of the Philippines to this day, Tongson said. “he Carpenters’ music was incredibly popular when I was a child, but it’s remained enduringly so, especially in the Philippines,” she said. “I’m never there for longer than 24 hours without hearing a Carpenters song on the radio or having it play somewhere publicly with people singing along. It taps into my earliest memories of sound, of music, of being with my family and my extended family in the Philippines.”

It also connects her to her life as an adolescent transported from Manila to L.A.’s suburbs, not far from where the Carpenters made their music. he experience of music crossing cultures to bring together immigrant communities is the topic of another book Tongson is currently at work on. he book examines karaoke culture.

“Karaoke draws out for us the connections between places in the Paciic Rim and the cultures and communities of big cities on the West Coast where many immigrants from those

countries eventually settled,” Tongson said. “Karaoke gives us a sense of the connection that people who have left home forge with one another through the music they miss and want to perform again to conjure those feelings of home, as well as new bonds.”

“I never sensed that these popular objects were trash or less than significant, especially because they were so formative to my own educational experiences …”

BEYOND THE MELTING POT

Looking at these spaces where immigrants allow the cultures of their birth countries and their adopted cultures to overlap reveals what it means to be American, Pastor posits.

Intrinsic to CSII’s deinition of immigrant integration is the encouragement of integration over assimilation — a new take on the traditional idea of America as a cultural melting pot.

“Assimilation means disappearing into the melting pot like crayons becoming one color,” Pastor explained.

“Increasingly that’s not what communities want to do. And it’s not what young people want to do.”

Rather than a place where newcomers are absorbed into American society, instead their diferences are celebrated and woven into the fabric of American culture to create something much more dynamic. “hink of it like this,” Pastor said. “Hamburgers are good, but do we want everyone to just eat hamburgers?

Or, do we want to make sure that we encourage a phenomenon like the Korean taco truck?” referring to the L.A.-bred Korean-Mexican taco sensation. “hat is a phenomenon of fusion, and not of assimilation.”

Encouraging diversity also breeds innovation, especially when it comes to scientiic discovery, El-Naggar points out. His own experience allowed him to work with top researchers in the U.S., which has been a longtime leader in the ields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

But that position has been fueled by the free low of information — that is, scientists who move to the U.S. to work in labs — and federal support of scholarship.

Right now, restrictions on immigration are weakening one of those pillars.

“Many talented scientists are choosing to stay where they are or going to other countries that they might perceive as being friendlier,” El-Naggar said. “hat’s fantastic for those countries but it also could mean that it would have a negative impact on the quality of our scientiic production over the next few years.” he United States gains tremendously from the innovation, the hard work, and the energy of immigrants, agreed Pastor. “he U.S. has this tremendous advantage of being a place where people feel like they can experiment and realize their dreams.”

SING A SONG Karen Tongson, associate professor of English, gender studies and American studies and ethnicity, found that Karaoke and pop culture helped her transition to life in the United States after migrating from the Philippines.

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A FINAL

FAREWELL For Pinchas Gutter, visiting his homeland is a haunting reminder of the family he lost and the life he might have lived. He returns one last time to say goodbye and capture his personal saga in virtual reality for future generations.

By Michelle Boston

HAUNTING MEMORY The poster for The Last Goodbye features a golden braid — the inal memory Pinchas Gutter has of his twin sister, Sabina, killed at Majdanek death camp.

remain unedited to ensure the integrity of the accounts. his was partly a safeguard against Holocaust deniers, who often pounce on the slightest opportunity to sow unreasonable doubts, explained Stephen Smith, the institute’s Andrew J. and Erna Finci Viterbi Executive Director Chair at the USC Shoah Foundation — he Institute for Visual History and Education.

“We ilmed he Last Goodbye in this same spirit of idelity,” said Smith. “We made sure, for instance, that Pinchas narrated his experience while physically on site at Majdanek, rather than just in front of a green screen, and we agonized over how to accurately capture the sinister essence of the camp, mindful that it has since been turned into a museum.” he technical elements of the ilming were incredibly detailed. Scenes were shot in one of two ways, either using a 360-degree camera allowing viewers the ability to stand and look around a space, or using photogrammetry, a technique in

PRE VIOUS PAGE PHOTO COURTESY OF GE T T Y IMAGES

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As an 11-year-old boy in Poland, Pinchas Gutter’s world was blown apart.

His early years were idyllic. He was born in the bustling city of Lodz in 1932 to a deeply observant Jewish family of winemakers. As a child, Gutter remembers joyfully playing in the park with his twin sister, Sabina. In their family’s apartment, his grandfather would set aside coins for him to give to the hungry who might knock on their door, observing the Jewish tradition of tzedakah, charity for those who are less fortunate. hen, in 1939, the German army occupied his hometown during an invasion that marked the beginning of World War II. So Gutter’s father sent him, his mother and his sister to safety in Warsaw, where he would soon join them.

But instead of inding relief from the Nazi threat, they were made to live in the city’s Jewish ghetto. In 1943, after surviving years of hardship that included the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Gutter and his family were rounded up and taken to the Majdanek concentration camp.

Gutter recounts the experience of being crammed into a boxcar with his family and hundreds of other Jews for the hours-long train trip from Warsaw to Majdanek in the virtual reality ilm he Last Goodbye. he documentary was co-produced by USC Shoah Foundation — the Institute for Visual History and Education at USC Dornsife. he ilm chronicles Gutter’s inal visit to the camp, which is now a museum with well-preserved remnants from its darkest days. By wearing a special audio-visual headset, the audience experiences the trip — and most important, Gutter’s testimony as he tours Majdanek’s barracks, showers, crematorium and more — in roomscale, 360-degree virtual reality.

“My father found a space for us [where] we were reasonably safe, and he kind of surrounded us with his hands,” Gutter, now 86 years old, explains in the ilm as viewers are invited to inspect a train car that was used to bring Jews to the concentration camp. “I always imagined that [his arms were the] wings of an angel because he kept us together. My mother, my twin sister and I, we were like one, and I don’t remember how long we rode.” heir small circle of safety was severed once they arrived at the camp, recalls Gutter as he stands near a barbed-wire fence on the camp grounds. Men, women and children were separated. Gutter remembers spotting his sister in the distance as she made a beeline for their mother.

“As she was running, I was watching the beautiful gold braid that she had. She made it to my mother and she hugged her,” Gutter said. hat was the last time he saw his family. hey perished in the gas chambers of Majdanek.

Gutter shares his story because he believes it is important for others to hear about these painful episodes in human history irsthand from the people who experienced them.

“It cannot be left to academics and historians to try and cut it up and then give their subjective view of what actually happened,” he said. Individual stories illustrate the nuance of events as they unfolded for each person and for each family, in keeping with USC Shoah Foundation’s mission.

USC Shoah Foundation is committed to preserving interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides so they can be used for education and action. he institute’s Visual History Archive holds about 55,000 testimonies, which in their full-length forms

P H O T O A N D P O S T E R C O U R T E S Y O F U S C S H OA H F O U N DAT I O N — THE INSTITUTE FOR V I S U A L H I S T O R Y A N D E D U C AT I O N

which tens of thousands of individual high-resolution photos capture a space and are then digitally stitched together so that the viewer can actually walk around and explore it in virtual reality. he results are striking and deeply emotional. To hear Gutter describe his plight as the viewer walks by his side in the stark location where it took place is heart wrenching.

When he stands next to the barbed-wire fence, a brilliant green ield stretching into the distance, we can imagine that last moment of seeing his mother and his sister in what must have been an endless sea of unfamiliar faces.

He tries to conjure his sister’s face, but it is something that has long ago escaped his memory. “I cannot remember anything about her except for that golden braid,” he said. he Last Goodbye premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017 and screened at the Venice Film Festival and the Future of StoryTelling Festival. In February, the Advanced Imaging Society honored it with a Lumiere Award Special Jury Prize.

he institute is currently considering where the ilm might be made available to viewers as part of a permanent installation. he ilm expands on the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony initiative, a collection of interactive biographies that allow people to have conversations with pre-recorded video images of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide. Gutter was the inaugural survivor to provide his likeness and life story for Dimensions in Testimony.

Gutter, who lives in Toronto, has led university students on tours of Majdanek as a Holocaust educator for many years.

But the trip in 2016 to share his story for the ilm is the last time he will return, he says, though the power of the place in his memories can never be erased.

“To say farewell to Majdanek would be impossible,” he tells viewers in he Last Goodbye. “Majdanek is part of me.

My family is here. My father, my mother, my sister, Sabina, they are here. And I will always be here. Majdanek lives in me.”

FILMING AT MAJDANEK Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter stands in front of a green screen as USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith (in a gray hoodie) works with the ilm crew during the shooting of The Last Goodbye.

The crew is on the sorting grounds of the Majdanek death camp in Poland, where Gutter lost both parents and his only sibling.

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FROM WHENCE WE CAME

Intrepid explorers of the modern age, marine scientists travel the world’s oceans to understand the mysteries of — and threats to — Earth’s fount of life.

By Darrin S. Joy

As animals began to leave Earth’s oceans about 400 million years ago to conquer dry land, they carried with them some of their ancestral homeland. Millions of generations of diverse lifeforms that followed, evolving across the eons, preserved that remnant of the seas as a vital part of their physiology.

It was, quite literally, in their blood — the life-sustaining luid mirrors the ocean’s composition in many ways.

When humans emerged onto the evolutionary scene, perhaps it was this vestige of life’s crucible coursing through their veins, combined with an overdeveloped sense of curiosity, that led them back to their familial home to explore, understand and, perchance, conquer once again the seas.

For some, their sense of purpose and adventure is fueled by their need to understand the complexities of the ocean, pulling from it answers that may help humans hold their place on the planet. hat need also requires a love of — or at least a tolerance for — travel.

JOURNEY TO THE SEA

Douglas Capone’s interest in the ocean dates from his childhood. “I grew up in a coastal town in New Jersey,” he said, “and so all my young life, I was ishing and swimming and suring.”

But his professional relationship with the sea would ripen when he ventured to college and graduate school. he son of irst-generation immigrants who encouraged him to pursue medicine, he spent three years at Seton Hall as a pre-med student — until he realized the health profession was not for him and dropped out to hitchhike across the United States. He next traveled to Hawaii and surfed, then returned to the mainland and hitchhiked from California to Panama, where the money dried up.

“My parents helped me out and I came back home,” said Capone, who is now William and Julie Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y G R E G M A B LY F O R U S C D O R N S I F E M A G A Z I N E

He worked for a year before inding his true direction, enrolling at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, to inish his bachelor’s degree in biology. While there, he gained his irst experience performing research at sea, taking weekend oceanographic cruises of the Atlantic coast of South Florida with a graduate student mentor.

“He would drag me along to do all his routine analysis while he was out playing in the sea-grass beds,” Capone said.

“I’d be doing Winkler titrations,” a method for measuring dissolved oxygen in water. But he loved the science. “It was fascinating.”

After completing his undergraduate studies, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. While there, he met Linda Duguay, who would become his life partner and spouse of nearly 40 years. (Duguay is associate professor (research) of biological sciences, director of the USC Sea Grant Program and director of research for the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at USC Dornsife.)

Over the years, Capone has participated in numerous oceanographic research cruises, taking samples from points around the globe to study the biogeochemistry and ecology of microscopic algae called phytoplankton.

He has become a renowned expert on the role these organisms play in nitrogen ixation — the process of pulling nitrogen gas from the environment and converting it to a biologically useful form. Nitrogen is often the nutrient in lowest supply in many of the world’s ocean surface waters.

His research has shown that nitrogen ixation may also afect how well some marine microbes are able to remove carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere and produce oxygen in exchange.

“You know, 50 percent of the oxygen that’s in the atmosphere is coming from photosynthesis in the oceans,” Capone said. And since oxygen production and carbon dioxide ixation are “two sides of the same coin,” he notes, understanding

TESTING THE WATERS Scientists aboard research vessels sample the ocean to gain clues to the interplay of climate, chemistry and life.

Spring / Summer 2018 41

how nitrogen ixation works — and how humans are afecting that process through pollution and other factors — could lead to answers about how to better reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thereby limit climate change.

“There is something majestic about being out on the open water.”

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY

MENAGERIE The “rainforests of the sea,” coral reef systems play home to diverse life forms of all shapes and sizes.

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Studies such as Capone’s require voyages to various regions in the open ocean and around coastal and reef systems to pull samples of water and sediments. Despite being referred to as “cruises,” these travels do not include time relaxing in deck chairs.

“I think it’s really amusing that we call them ‘research cruises’ because there’s deinitely nothing cruise-like about them,” said Naomi Levine, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences and Earth Sciences at USC Dornsife.

As an undergraduate at Princeton University in New Jersey, Levine was a self-described “hard-rock geologist,” a term more literal than whimsical, as it refers to her studies in geological sciences. A course in the biogeochemistry of the oceans sparked her interest in marine geology, but it wasn’t until her doctoral work through Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s Joint Program in Oceanography with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that she sailed on her irst scientiic cruises.

For about two years, she would ly to Bermuda, prepare her work and head out to sea for a week of sample collection, return to Bermuda to analyze samples, and ly back to Massachusetts for two weeks.

“So, it’d be two weeks in Bermuda, two weeks at home, two weeks in Bermuda, two weeks at home,” she recalled.

“Everyone would say, ‘Wow, you have the most glamorous Ph.D., you’re going to Bermuda,’ but I didn’t actually have time to enjoy the island.”

Adding to the challenge of the grueling schedule, Levine is prone to seasickness.

“My irst [cruise] was in February, and February in the Atlantic is not a particularly fun time. So, it was throw up in the sink, analyze samples, throw up in the sink, analyze samples,” she said, the memory drawing a leeting look of discomfort to her expression.

Despite this, Levine loves going to sea. “here is something majestic about being out on the open water. he experience of being on research boats and experiencing the ocean up close is such a formative and crucial experience for an oceanographer,” she said.

Her graduate research centered on developing computational models of how the ocean changes over time and how microbes are afected by climate change, particularly with respect to the cycling of carbon throughout the environment. he work, ongoing in her USC Dornsife lab, earned her prestigious and highly competitive grant awards from the Simons Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

As the work she and Capone are doing demonstrates, the biology of marine microbes and climate change are intertwined. Levine’s models could help researchers better understand how the two are interconnected, which may

help scientists who are working to ind solutions to the mounting problems stemming from climate change.

RAISING REEFS

Carly Kenkel’s research takes her to the sites of some of Earth’s most stunningly diverse and vibrant biological communities, coral reefs — where she is witness to tragedy.

Few ecosystems show the disastrous results of global warming more clearly than these “rainforests of the sea,” as she calls them.

Kenkel, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at USC Dornsife, irst felt the call of the sea as an undergraduate at Southampton College in Long Island, New York City (later absorbed by the State University of New York at Stony Brook). She worked for a while at a marine mammal rescue facility but wanted something “more intellectually challenging.”

After interning in a few labs, she landed at Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida, where she made her irst foray into the biology of corals, studying the ecology of microbes that live among them. But there was so much more. “he analogy is that reefs are like the rainforests of the sea,” she said. “hey’re the foundation of the biodiversity because you need that three dimensional structure to have habitat for all of the animals that live on the reef.”

She later enrolled in a Ph.D. program at he University of Texas at Austin and has since taken research cruises to reef systems such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Micronesian atolls, systems of the Florida Keys and the Flower Garden Banks in the Gulf of Mexico.

Reef spawning counts among her favorite experiences.

Like most immobile sea organisms, corals must release their reproductive cells, called gametes, into the water and hope they ind counterparts from the same species. “hey have to synchronize their reproductive time, and it’s done according to lunar cycles and temperature,” she said.

Some release their gametes in a trickle, others “like a nuclear explosion,” Kenkel said. “he entire colony just knows, and it’s just like a sneeze or something and they just all release. It’s stunning to see.”

But these marine gardens are experiencing a phenomenon known as “bleaching” caused by rising ocean temperatures driven by global warming. Bleaching turns the coral white and can lead to their complete die of, leaving behind dead white skeletons.

Kenkel and other scientists are ighting back, looking for ways to farm corals in controlled environments and transplant them into the wild. By studying coral genetics, their relationship with various microbes and other factors, Kenkel hopes to understand how some species handle changes in temperature better than others. he work will help these coral farmers raise and transplant specimens that survive and even thrive despite increasing environmental stresses.

FOUNT OF LIFE

Kenkel’s work, and that of Levine, Capone and other scientists studying the world’s oceans, may prove crucial to the persistence of life as we know it. Species such as corals and phytoplankton, and their interaction with the chemistry of the sea and atmosphere, lie at the foundation of Earth’s global ecosystem. hey are the keystone to the future. As goes their health and that of the oceans — the ancestral home to all life on Earth — so goes the health of the entire planet.

Spring / Summer 2018 43

he Man Who’s Been

One of the world’s most traveled people, alumnus William “Bill” Altafer has visited every country in the world — many not just once, but multiple times. From North Korea to the North Pole, Sweden to the Sahara, Tipperary to Timbuktu, he’s seen it all.

By Susan Bell In the 1990s, when alumnus William “Bill” Altafer hadn’t quite inished visiting all the countries of the world, he traveled to French Guiana. After a trip to Devil’s Island, he and a friend decided to check out the iercely guarded Guiana Space Center, a French rocket-launching base at Kourou.

Pulling of the main road, Altafer turned down into a grassy clearing surrounded by impenetrable jungle. Looming up ahead was a guard tower topped by a machine gun.

Altafer, a retired high school teacher and movie extra who has appeared in more than 120 ilms, recounts what happened next.

“I look at my buddy, Kevin, and say, ‘Do you have a Costco card?’ So, he gives me his Costco card and we pull up to the gate, and the guard comes down with the AK-47, sticks it in our faces and says, ‘Yeah?’ And I go, ‘We’re members of Costco,’ and I hand him both our cards. And so he looks at them and then he turns them over and there are our names and our pictures. And I said, ‘You know, we’re both members of Costco.’ hen he leans in and he goes, ‘Pull on in.’ And we went on in and we gave ourselves a tour of this missile base.”

One of the world’s most traveled people, Altafer is an accomplished raconteur. He tells this story with polished insouciance at the slide shows he gives across Southern California to rapt audiences eager to hear the adventures of a man who has spent his life journeying to the farthestlung corners of the globe.

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Altafer has feasted on boiled cobra washed down with warm snake’s blood from a street stall in Bangkok.

He’s polished of a plate of baked crocodile skewered on a Masai sword at the open-air Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi. And, he has sampled stir-fried dried yak with mint leaves, a local delicacy, in Shangri-La, Tibet.

He has returned from dinner to his hotel room in the Gobi Desert to ind it invaded by thousands of yellow butterlies, spent a wakeful night peering through slits in the walls of a cave to observe lions and elephants drink at a watering hole in Kenya, and been lulled to sleep by the sound of yak grazing outside a Mongolian yurt.

When Altafer’s son asked him recently whether there’s a country that he’s only been to once, Altafer said he had to think about it. During the last century, he visited every country. Since then, he has been to every territory, enclave, exclave, colony and disputed area, as well as more than 900 islands. He has surfed and skied on all seven continents and has exhausted 12 passports and 130 visas. He’s been to North Korea a dozen times and has visited all 92 of Russia’s states, made three trips to Antarctica and voyaged to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker. “he world’s my house,” he said. “And I can’t imagine somebody having a house where they haven’t been up in the attic or down in the cellar. But now I’m getting into the closets. I’m getting into the drawers. I’m going into all

Spring / Summer 2018 45

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the little nooks and crannies of the world.”

A longtime member of the he Adventurers’ Club of Los Angeles and the Travelers’ Century Club, Altafer has twice topped MostTraveledPeople.com’s list (he is currently ranked fourth) and holds the world record for visiting the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

“Nobody’s even close to this,” he boasts of the latter achievement. “I think that shows more of how much you’ve traveled the world than if you just hit an airport and left.”

Altafer frowns on those who he says “treat travel like a grocery list,” just checking countries of.

“Unfortunately, these country collectors, or ‘touchand-goers’ as they’re sometimes called, just put their foot down from a train and then say they’ve been in Mongolia,” he said. “hat’s pretty pathetic.”

Instead, Altafer visits places repeatedly, meeting people, writing articles about his experiences and trying to hit every UNESCO site, until, as he says, “I get it right.”

Altafer says the initial inspiration to become a world traveler came from his father, an L.A. dentist beset by wanderlust who took his family on world trips.

Altafer’s irst taste of adventure came at age 6, when the cruise ship on which he was traveling with his parents hit an iceberg in fog and sank of the coast of Alaska.

Such a disaster at a tender age failed to deter him from a life of travel, however.

“It didn’t bother me much,” he says phlegmatically about the doomed cruise, in which all passengers and crew were safely rescued from the shipwreck. “We just got into the lifeboats.” he following year, at age 7, he sailed down the Panama Canal on a freighter.

By the 1960s, he had traveled to Russia. In the ’70s, he was one of the irst tourists admitted into China. In the ’80s, he landed on the Forbidden Isle of Niihau in Hawaii.

In the 1990s, he was the irst American, he believes, to lead a tour to the remote Yemeni island of Socotra, a tiny prehistoric archipelago that shelters 700 species found nowhere else on Earth.

In 2005, he made the front page of the Los Angeles Times as one of the irst ive American tourists to enter North Korea.

More recently, he traveled to Mount Athos, site of a Greek Orthodox monastery from which women have been banned for more than a thousand years.

Altafer says he doesn’t have a favorite country, but he does have two lists of favorite places. One he dubs “he Swim-Up Bar List.” It includes Mauritius, the Maldives, hailand, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and Mexico. His “Historical/Cultural List” includes Russia, China, Libya, India, Peru, Egypt, Greece, and the United Kingdom.

Despite all the traveling he did as a youngster, Altafer says he didn’t really appreciate travel until his late teens.

By then he was majoring in history at USC Dornsife, where an anthropology class he took with Professor Ivan Alexievich Lopatin inspired him to travel the world.

Altafer was so inspired by Lopatin’s tales of living with indigenous tribes in Siberia that he has made 25 trips of his own to Russia, visiting every tribe featured in his professor’s lectures.

Another mentor was USC Dornsife alumnus and legendary traveler John Goddard ’55. he anthropology graduate was the irst man to explore the entire length of the River Nile and the River Congo. he pair met when Goddard gave a talk at Altafer’s high school. At USC, Altafer joined Sigma Chi, Goddard’s fraternity.

IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY M AT T H E W S AV IN O F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

“Goddard would come down to the fraternity house and climb this 100-foot-tall palm tree in the backyard with his bare hands, and then he’d sit there in the fronds at the top, swaying about,” Altafer said. “he guy was amazing. He went down the Nile for a year in a kayak by himself. I’m a tourist compared to him.”

e all have something in common.

People just want to feed their children, give the best they can to them and take care of the Earth.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in history in 1967 and his master’s degree in 1970, Altafer moved to Mammoth, California, where he taught skiing for three decades and joined luxury L.A. travel agency Hemphill Harris as a tour manager.

Now, Altafer creates his own tours. His “Hero Cities of the Soviet Union” takes World War II bufs to all 13 so-called “Hero Cities” of the former Soviet Union (“I don’t even think Putin’s been to all of them,” he says). He escorts lovers of the bizarre to Tuva, Russia, the site of a national throat-singing contest and ofers a trans-Paciic trip on a Russian freighter from Chile to New Guinea, while his journey across the North Caucasus takes travelers on a pony express of 30 taxis from Sochi to the Caspian Sea. he only travel-related jitters that Altafer will admit to are triggered by the parking at Los Angeles International Airport.

“If you’re afraid of traveling somewhere, well then you might as well just stay home,” he says. “If you’re scared, a dog will bite you, but if you’re not afraid, it won’t. hat’s the way you’ve got to be with people. You can’t fake it.”

Altafer believes that working as a teacher in innercity schools in L.A. while attending USC as a graduate student helped him develop the street smarts he uses when traveling.

“I could probably walk into a group of ISIS soldiers sitting around a campire and make it work.” he key is respect and recognizing the common humanity in people no matter where you are or whom you’re talking to.

“We all have something in common,” he said. “People just want to feed their children, give the best they can to them and take care of the Earth.”

Travel, Altafer says, broadens one’s understanding and increases empathy. “here isn’t a person alive in the world today whose country I haven’t visited. I could be at the supermarket checkout and I ask the guy bagging groceries where he’s from and he’ll go, ‘Ethiopia,’ and I’ll say, ‘Where in Ethiopia?’ and he’ll say, ‘Gondar,’ and I’ll say ‘I’ve been to Gondar,’ and suddenly he’s got a big smile on his face.

“Not to travel is to miss out on the good fortune of being alive,” Altafer said. “We live on this Earth, we might as well go out and see it.”

OFF THE BEATEN TRACK Bill Altafer’s travels have taken him from the world’s iconic landmarks to the most obscure corners of the planet, from the Great Wall of China to the fabled Mount Athos monastery in Greece; from witnessing thousands of butterlies in the Gobi Desert to eating baked crocodile in Nairobi.

Legacy

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Silva-Corvalán’s original ield recordings. They are freely accessible online via the USC Digital Library’s Spanish Sociolinguistics Collection.

Previous support from USC Dornsife’s Del Amo Fund and the USC Libraries’ L.A. Murillo Hispanic Heritage Endowment, plus a grant from the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project, made the process possible.

The recordings, which had been preserved on 40-year-old audiocassettes, complement previously digitized audio

recordings made by SilvaCorvalán during visits to the homes of Spanish speakers and bilingual adults and children in East Los Angeles and other Southern California neighborhoods.

The 93 hours of Chilean recordings feature 36 speakers spanning many age groups and social backgrounds. They ofer a rich record of daily experiences and ways of speaking in neighborhoods and communities throughout Santiago.

Silva-Corvalán collected a irst set of recordings in 1978

then returned in 1992 to record follow-up conversations with many of the original speakers.

The 63 hours of West Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley recordings capture the perspectives of MexicanAmerican adults and teenagers from these areas in the late 1970s. Silva-Corvalán’s research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and USC Faculty Research grants, ofers particular insights into code switching between English and Spanish, as bilingual teens discuss

everything from friendships and dating to their experiences at L.A.-area schools.

In addition to ofering a fascinating record of how Spanish was spoken in Mexican- American communities during this time, the recordings also ofer tantalizing glimpses of many facets of daily life for groups like bilingual teens and recent Mexican-American immigrants.

—B.D and S.B.

Carmen Silva-Corvalán (left) conducting ield research in East Los Angeles in 1983.

PHOTO COURTESY OF USC UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

From the 1970s to the early ’90s, Professor Emerita of Spanish, Portuguese and Linguistics Carmen SilvaCorvalán, then a doctoral student and later a professor at USC Dornsife, visited the homes of Spanish speakers and bilingual adults, children and teens in Los Angeles, recording their everyday conversations. As part of her ield research, she also traveled to Santiago, Chile, and to Covarrubias, Spain, to do the same.

Now, the USC Libraries has digitized 156 hours of

C A R M E N S I L VA - C O R VA L Á N

HONORS

Faculty News University Professor ANTONIO DAMASIO, David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, was awarded the irst international Freud Medal by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Breukvlakken Foundation, the Dutch Psychoanalytic Association, the Dutch Association of Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy and the Psychoanalytic Funds Foundation.

JAHAN DAWLATY, associate professor of chemistry, received the 2018 Journal of Physical Chemistry B Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Physical Chemistry and Physical Chemistry Division.

SARAH FEAKINS, associate professor of Earth sciences, was named a 2018–19 AAAS Alan I. Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Feakins also was named one of six Ocean Discovery Lecturers for the 2018–19 academic year by the International Ocean Discovery Program.

CHEN BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU;CHRISTE PHOTO COURTESY OF CHRISTE

JENNIFER GREENHILL, associate professor of art history, was named a Winterthur Research Fellow for her project “The Commercial Imagination: American Illustration and the Materialities of the Market, 1890-1930.”

WOLF GRUNER, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, professor of history and director of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research, was awarded the Sybil Halpern Milton Book Prize from the German Studies Association for best book on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust published in either 2015 or 2016.

He received the honor for Die

Judenverfolgung im Protektorat Böhmen/Mähren. Lokale Initiativen, zentrale Entscheidungen, jüdische Antworten 1939-1945 (Wallstein Verlag, 2016). The book also received a prize for most outstanding German studies in humanities and social science in 2017 by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the VG WORT and the German Foreign Oice. Gruner was also named to the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

ROBERT GURALNICK, professor of mathematics, was awarded the 2018 Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra from the American Mathematical Society.

BRUCE HERRING, assistant professor of biological sciences, was awarded a 2018 Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience.

PIERRETTE HONDAGNEUSOTELO, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology and professor of sociology, was named a 2017–18 Weatherhead Fellow by the School of Advanced Research.

CLIFFORD JOHNSON, professor of physics and astronomy, was awarded the 2018 Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award by the American Association of Physics Teachers.

ARIE KAPTEYN, professor (research) of economics and director of the Center for Economic and Social Research, was awarded the 2017 Pierson Medal by the Mr. N. G. Pierson Foundation for his work on individual welfare and for contributions to policy and the establishment of high-quality institutes for economic research and doctoral education.

VITALY KRESIN, professor of physics and astronomy, was elected a fellow of the American Physics Society.

IGOR KUKAVICA, professor of mathematics, was elected a fellow of the American Mathema tical Society.

ROBIN COSTE LEWIS, writer in residence was named an Art of Change fellow by the Ford Foundation.

STEVEN LOPEZ, professor of psychology and social work, was awarded the inaugural Martha Bernal Award for the Advancement of Diversity Training and Education in Clinical Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

JESSICA MARGLIN, Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies and assistant professor of religion, was awarded the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture for Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016). The book also earned an honorable mention for the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History.

VIET THANH NGUYEN, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English, American studies and ethnicity and comparative literature, was named a 2017 fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, known informally as the “genius grant.” He also received the 2017 Soitel Prize for Best Foreign Book.

Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies GLORIA ORENSTEIN received a 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art. Continued on page 52.

Esteemed Elections for Two Scientists USC Dornsife professors are recognized by their peers, who elect them to prestigious fellowships.

Two USC Dornsife scientists have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an honor awarded to AAAS members by their peers.

Xiaojiang Chen, professor of biological sciences and chemistry, and Karl Christe, professor (research) of chemistry, were among a total of ive USC faculty Xiaojiang Chen members elected to the prestigious fellowship.

Founded in 1848, the nonproit AAAS is the world’s largest general scientiic society. he group began its fellows tradition in 1874 and publishes the journal Science. his year, 396 members will be named fellows in recognition of their scientiically or socially distinguished eforts to advance science or its applications.

Karl Christe Christe, who arrived at USC Dornsife in 1994, was recognized for his contributions to the ield of synthetic inorganic chemistry, particularly in high energy density materials. His research encompasses both basic scientiic knowledge and advanced applications, and aims to “advance the state of the art and strive for spectacular breakthroughs, rather than settling for small incremental improvements,” according to his webpage.

Chen joined the USC Dornsife chemistry faculty in 2004. Among the reasons for his election are his contributions to the ield of structural molecular biology, particularly for understanding viral and cellular DNA replication and genomic mutations. Chen has done landmark work on tumor viruses, including HPV and Epstein-Barr virus, oncogenes, and important DNA modifying enzymes, aiming to ind answers to important questions in cancer biology and immunology. he new fellows were presented with a certiicate and a gold and blue rosette pin representing science and engineering on Feb. 17 at the 2018 AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. —Z.V. Spring / Summer 2018 49

F A C U LT Y C A N O N

D I G I TA L DNA DISRUPTION AND THE CHALLENGES FOR GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Penguin Random House / Antonio Damasio, University Professor, David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, presents a landmark relection that spans the biological and social sciences, ofering a new way to understand the world and our place in it.

PETER F. COWHEY • JONATHAN D. ARONSON

DIGITAL DNA: Disruption and the Challenges for Global Governance Oxford University Press / Professor of Communication and International Relations Jonathan D. Aronson and co-author Peter F. Cowhey examine opportunities and challenges in the fast-changing global economy and lay out strategies to promote robust growth while addressing risk.

Downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado, circa 1915, where Alice Echols’ infamous grandfather owned a building and loan association.

Family Secrets, Hidden Histories One evening years ago, Alice Echols learned some shocking news from her father: Her maternal grandfather, Walter Davis, had been a notorious white-collar criminal. he owner of the biggest building and loan association in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Davis went on the lam in 1932 before authorities discovered his business was in the red an astounding $1.25 million — nearly $22 million in today’s dollars.

Echols, Barbra Streisand Professor of Contemporary Gender Studies and professor of history and gender studies at USC Dornsife, spent 10 years uncovering the details of the scandal through an archive of family correspondence, a 200-page FBI ile, and research in archives across America.

Her book Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking (New Press, 2017) tells the story of the cratering of the building and loan industry in microcosm through the irestorm that erupted in Colorado Springs when all its building and loan agencies failed. he Depression-era failure of the industry, once a key component of America’s inancial landscape, is not well-known.

“My task was to igure what my grandparents’ story could tell me about how capitalism operated on the ground,” Echols said.

Her book uncovers the malfeasance that the building and loan industry covered up, and provides a crucial counter-narrative to the usual celebration of Main Street inance. Shortfall reveals that the supposed virtues of Main Street lending — its intimacy and small scale — were no guarantees against fraud. “he book is a cautionary tale about the perils of forgetting those episodes when capitalism runs amok.” —L.P. 50

VISUAL VOYAGES: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin Yale University Press / Through an examination of maps, illustrated manuscripts, still lifes and landscape paintings, Associate Professor of Art History and History Daniela Bleichmar establishes Latin America as a critical site for scientiic and artistic exploration, airming that region’s transformation and that of Europe as vitally connected histories.

THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

FLASH! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination Oxford University Press / In a lively history of lash photography from the mid-19th century to the present day, Provost Professor of Art History and English Kate Flint shows how lash photography has been used to reveal social deprivation and poverty, the representation of race and everyday life.

DOWNTOWN COLOR ADO SPRINGS PHOTO COURTESY OF ALICE ECHOLS; ECHOLS PHOTO BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU

Shortfall by Alice Echols peels away the layers of a hidden family history, in the process exposing a new form of inancial corruption in 20th-century America.

INLAND SHIFT: Race, Space, and Capital in Inland Southern California University of California Press / Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity Juan De Lara uses the growth of Southern California’s logistics economy to examine how modern capitalism was shaped by and helped to transform the region’s geographies of race and class.

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY

Saori Katada examines the relations between the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the United States.

THE DIALOGUES: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe MIT Press / In this graphic novel, Professor of Physics and Astronomy Clifford Johnson invites us to eavesdrop on a series of nine conversations about “the nature of the universe.”

AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY AND EAST ASIAN SECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Cambridge University Press / Maria Crutcher Professor in International Relations and Professor of International Relations, Business, and East Asian Languages and Cultures David C. Kang suggests that East Asia is in sync with the American desire to share burdens and that the region may be more stable than believed.

S TA N F O R D P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F U S C M E D I A R E L AT I O N S

THE BRICS AND COLLECTIVE FINANCIAL STATECRAFT Oxford University Press / Writing with co-authors Cynthia Roberts and Leslie Elliott Armijo, Associate Professor of International Relations

NATURE AND CULTURE IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC University of Pennsylvania Press / Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the Early Modern Studies Institute and Professor of History and Anthropology Peter Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a rapidly changing natural world in the century after Christopher Columbus’ voyages.

Primate Pedagogy Primatologist Craig Stanford challenges us to let apes guide our inquiry into what it means to be human.

Staging political coups, waging wars over territory, passing on cultural traditions to younger generations, ruthlessly strategizing for resources — including sexual partners. Sound like familiar human behaviors? Well, they are. But they’re also behaviors we share with wild chimpanzees.

Craig Stanford, professor of biological sciences and anthropology, has been studying chimps for more than 25 years. His book, he New Chimpanzee: A Twenty-First-Century Portrait of Our Closest Kin (Harvard University Press, 2018), synthesizes his own pioneering research with that of all six other major research studies done to date. In it, Stanford portrays a complex and even more human-like ape than the one celebrated British primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall popularized more than a half century ago. “he book contains what we’ve learned for the last 20 years about wild chimps,” Stanford said. “By extension, this knowledge helps us realize who we are, because we’ve always used them as a window onto ourselves.”

Recent discoveries about wild chimpanzees have dramatically reshaped our understanding of these great apes and their kinship with humans. Divided into 10 chapters, each one concentrating on a diferent theme, Stanford’s book explains what the past two decades of chimpanzee ield research have taught us about the origins of human social behavior, the nature of aggression and communication and the divergence of humans and apes from a common ancestor more than 6 million years ago. he result is a work that adds to our knowledge of chimpanzees’ political intelligence, sexual power plays, violent ambition, cultural diversity and adaptability. —S.B.

STATE OF RESISTANCE: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future The New Press / Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change and Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity Manuel Pastor makes the case for honestly engaging racial anxiety to address our economic and generational challenges.

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Big Success hrough Big Data Brett Crosby ’95 has spent nearly two decades riding the wave of information technology, originating Google Analytics and launching a startup.

In May 1995, as graduation approached for international relations and political science double major Brett Crosby, the inevitable question kept coming up among his friends: What are you going to do now? Some were applying to graduate school while others were researching companies and applying for their irst big job.

Crosby saw it a little diferently. Someone started those companies, he reasoned. Let’s be those guys. his entrepreneurial spirit helped fuel a small company called Urchin Software Corporation, which he co-founded in 1997. Urchin became so adept at analyzing web statistics that it caught the attention of Google, which scooped up the company in 2005, when Crosby was 32. Urchin’s statistical software became the basis of Google Analytics.

“My head of sales at the time said, ‘It was like we were playing Triple-A baseball and the Yankees called and said hey, we’re going to be in the World Series, do you guys know how to pitch?’ It did feel like that because we suddenly went from the backwaters of a small company to center stage at one of the largest and most important companies in the world.”

Crosby stayed on for close to a decade as Google’s director of product marketing, working on everything from the mobile advertising product to Google+, Chrome, Gmail, Docs and Drive. He watched the company grow from 2,500 people, when Google had just gone public, to upwards of 100,000 employees when he left in 2014.

Crosby, who now lives in Manhattan Beach, California, with his wife and two daughters, has moved on to FinTech (Financial Technologies) as chief operating oicer and cofounder of PeerStreet, an online platform for investing in real estate debt. He speaks at USC often, including classes in USC Dornsife’s Department of Economics and others in the USC Marshall School of Business.

Crosby emphasizes to undergraduates that the entrepreneurial environment, particularly in Los Angeles, has never been better. he city is home to venture capitalist irms that are competing with the Silicon Valley irms in a real way now, he said.

“In my view, there’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur in L.A.,” he said. —L.P.

JOHN POLLINI, USC Associates Professor in Art History and professor of art history and history, was named a Morphomata Fellow by the University of Cologne, Germany.

GEORGE SANCHEZ, professor of American studies and ethnicity and history, was elected vice president of the Organization of American Historians and will become president-elect in 2019 and serve as president from 2020–21.

DARBY SAXBE, assistant professor of psychology, received a Distinguished Scientiic Award for Early Career Contributions from the American Psychology Association for her work in health psychology.

SATOKO SHIMAZAKI, associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures, received the 2018 John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for her book, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (Columbia University Press, 2016).

RAYMOND STEVENS, Provost Professor of Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Neurology, Physiology and Biophysics, and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, received The Protein Society’s 2018 Stein and Moore Award.

ARIEH WARSHEL, Distinguished Professor, Dana and David Dornsife Chair in Chemistry and Professor of Chemistry, Biological Sciences, Biochemistry, and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, received the honorary 52

TRAVIS WILLIAMS, associate professor of chemistry, was awarded a 2018 Thieme Chemistry Journals Award by the editorial board members of SYNTHESIS, SYNLETT and SYNFACTS for his research in synthetic organic chemistry.

Alumni News 1970s MARK DARRAH (B.A., interdisciplinary studies, ’79) delivered the Carl G. and Gladys L. Herrington Distinguished Lecture at Rogers State University in Claremore, OK. His presentation was titled “Tales and Thoughts of the Extraordinary Common.”

CHRISTOPHER DEERING (B.A., political science, ’74) became interim dean at the George Washington University College of Professional Studies in February.

GERALDINE KNATZ (M.S., environmental engineering, ’77; Ph.D., biological sciences, ’79) joined the Dewberry board of directors.

DAVID JOEL TRACHTENBERG (B.A., international relations, ’78) was conirmed by the U.S. Senate to be deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.

1980s COLIN COULSON-THOMAS (M.A., international relations, ’82) received the 2018 CSR Lifetime Achievement Award at the CSR Leadership Summit in New Delhi. This award is given to those who have made signiicant contributions and exhibited noteworthy leadership in the corporate social responsibility sector.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BRET T CROSBY

Professor Emerita of International Relations JUDITH TICKNER received the Ole R. Holsti Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Studies Association.

degree Doctor of Science, honoris causa from the Chinese University of Hong Kong for his contributions to computational studies on chemistry research.

TROJANA LIT Y ROBERT ENGLISH (B.A., geography, ’89) has accepted a position as an administrative law judge for the California Department of Social Services, Los Angeles Region.

SANDRA TSING LOH (MPW, ’89) starred in the Yuletide play she penned, Sugar Plum Fairy, at the South Coast Repertory in December 2017.

KATHLEEN STERLING (B.A., political science, ’81) has been named one of the “Most Inspirational Women of the Valley” by United Chamber of Commerce.

MARC TRUDEAU (B.S., biological sciences, ’80) was ordained as the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

REBECCA UDELL (B.A., psychology, ’87) has been promoted to clinical director of The Haven at College at USC, an on-campus addiction treatment center for students.

1990s DOUGLAS COST (B.A., English, ’95) received his Ph.D. in cross-cultural education and futures studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he also began a new position as an assistant professor in the School of Education.

NICOLE FLIER (B.A., political science, ’92) was crowned Daisy Diva for the sixth consecutive year for raising more than $30,000 in rale donations for the Boca Raton Regional Hospital.

Former USC Song Girl AUDREA HARRIS (B.A., psychology, ’93) was hired as the new spirit advisor at USC in October 2017.

PHOTO BY MARK RIVARD

ERIC STURM (B.S., biological sciences, ’91) was awarded the Department of Commerce Bronze Medal by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for his

work toward improving methods of husbandry, release and life cycle monitoring of the endangered coho salmon.

AARON WILKES (B.A., political science, ’94) was promoted to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army.

A Small Act of Kindness Inspired by her Hungarian refugee grandmother’s welcome to the United States more than 60 years ago, Soia Deak ’17 is helping refugees feel at home in a foreign language.

2000s ANTHONY MARRA (B.A., English, ’08) received the Simpson Family Literary Prize, which includes a $50,000 award.

2010s ALEXANDRA “LEXI” MARTEN (B.A., international relations, ’13) has been appointed to the White House as a conidential assistant in the Oice of Management and Budget.

Marriages and Births ASHTON ARNDT (B.A., psychology, ’12) and SHERWOOD EGBERT (B.S., environmental studies, ’13) married on Nov. 4, 2017, at the Four Seasons Biltmore in Santa Barbara, CA. BRAD GORESKI (B.A., art history, ’07) married Gary Janetti on Dec. 26, 2017, in the Caribbean aboard the Seaborn Sojourn.

CHESTER BARRY FERNANDO (B.A., economics, ’04) and KATRICE FERNANDO (B.S., kinesiology, ’07) welcomed their second son, Quincy Cole, on Jan. 20, 2018.

JENNIFER GROSKY (B.A., political science and psychology, ’97) and PETER KNUDSEN (B.A., English, ’01) married and welcomed daughter Rachel Knudsen in 2017.

TIARA MARTINEZ (B.A., history, ’06) married Steven Montes on Dec. 15, 2017, in Los Angeles, CA. Continued on page 56.

Soia Deak vividly remembers the story her grandmother told every hanksgiving about what happened when she and her son, Deak’s father, arrived in the United States as refugees from Hungary. It was hanksgiving 1956, and mother and son were welcomed with a traditional holiday dinner. hat act of kindness and inclusion made a huge diference for them. “It was something they remembered for 60 years,” Deak said.

Noting that California has the largest refugee population in the U.S., Deak, who graduated in 2017 with a degree in international relations (global business), is determined to help.

As refugee numbers spiked last year, Deak launched a program with Students Organize for Syria at USC to send students to San Diego — home to the largest Syrian refugee population in the nation — to do in-home, one-on-one English language tutoring. he USC tutors tailor lessons to the refugees’ speciic needs.

Recalling her grandmother’s story, Deak notes that while doing something relatively small, like providing an English tutoring program for a couple of hours every week, might seem inconsequential, it does have an enduring impact.

“Being able to help someone feel comfortable in their new home is a long-lasting gift you can give someone,” she said.

Deak spent last summer working at a school for refugee children on the Greek island of Kyos.

“It was a very diicult job, but it was probably the best thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

“It made me know that I want to continue working with refugees in an educational setting for the rest of my life.” —S.B. Spring / Summer 2018 53

ALUMNI AND STUDENT CANON follows the lives of four young African-American girls known as the “Babies” growing up in the vortex of the turbulent change of the 1960s and becoming young adults in the decadent and destructive ’80s.

FOUR METAPHORS OF MODERNISM: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme University of Minnesota Press / Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water and home, Jenny Anger (B.A., Fine Arts and German, ’86) interweaves a historical analysis of Der Sturm and Société Anonyme with an aesthetic analysis of the metaphors that shaped their practices, reconceiving modernism itself.

San Francisco Eats Kimberley Lovato ’90 publishes a mouthwatering guide to her beloved adoptive city’s most intriguing restaurants, markets and artisanal food shops.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR BOOK Write to USC Dornsife Magazine, 1150 S. Olive Street T2400, Los Angeles, CA 90015 or magazine@dornsife.usc.edu

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WHERE THE ROADS ALL END: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari Harvard University Press / Ilisa Barbash (M.A., visual anthropology, ’92) tells the story of Raytheon cofounder Laurence Marshall and his family’s inluential anthropological expeditions to Southwest Africa during the 1950s.

CLARETTA STREET Brown Bear / Colette D. Barris (B.A., geography and planning and urban studies, ’81)

THROUGH A

TRAUMA LENS TRANSFORMING HEALTH AND BEHAVIORAL HEALTH SYSTEMS

THROUGH A TRAUMA LENS: Transforming Health and Behavioral Health Systems Routledge / Vivian Brown (Ph.D., clinical psychology, ’66) highlights examples of health, mental health, substance abuse treatment and other service delivery systems that have implemented an integrated traumainformed service model.

LOVAT O P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F R E E DY P R E S S

“Want to taste the prize-winning pie of a 12-time World Pizza Champion? Eat your homework at America’s only independent cheese school? Track down the home of the Mission-style burrito?” his is the intriguing exhortation — appetite- and curiositywhetting in equal measure — that appears on the back cover of alumna Kimberley Lovato’s new book, Unique Eats and Eateries of San Francisco (Reedy Press, 2017). Lovato, a food-lover by nature and a San Franciscan by choice, says that when the opportunity came along to write a food guide to her beloved adoptive city, she didn’t hesitate.

“What intrigued me about this project was that it was not a review of restaurants,” she said. “It’s really about the stories behind the restaurants.” he result is a nontraditional restaurant and travel guide that features a feast of delectable tidbits about the city’s most celebrated eateries, as well as many of its more secret culinary destinations. Lovato has succeeded in marinating these diverse ingredients to create a delicious smorgasbord of “90 palate-pleasing bites” of San Francisco food lore — from cioppino to hangtown fry.

Lovato, who majored in international relations with a French minor, said her USC Dornsife education helped her career as a writer.

“I had a fairly sheltered upbringing, and going to USC opened my eyes to people from all over the world — diferent cultures, music and food.”

For Lovato, San Francisco is a place where food and memory are inextricably linked.

“It’s hard,” she wrote, “not to be hypnotized by a city that buzzes at this level of culinary velocity.” —S.B.

SPINELESS: The Science of Jellyish and the Art of Growing a Backbone Riverhead Books / Blending personal memoir with distillations of research, Juli Berwald (Ph.D., ocean science, ’98) transports readers into the world of jellyish and reveals why they are more important to our understanding of the planet than we could ever imagine.

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY TROJANA LIT Y African-American girl copes while challenged to survive in a family ravaged by substance abuse.

THE

COMANCHE CAPTIVE Five Star Publishing / Combining historical iction with western adventure, D. László Conhaim (B.A., humanities, ’92) chronicles the tale of a former captive who endures forced separation from her child, unwanted psychiatric care and inally the deadly consequences of her quest.

FORGOTTEN FRONT

M O G E N TA L E P H O T O BY G U S R U E L A S

THE HOUSE AT VIRGIL STREET: A Young Poet’s Memoir of Los Angeles Xuala / Writing under the name Alice L. Malindy, Linda G. Hamilton (B.A., history, ’76) provides a road map for troubled youth, showing how a young

Pulp Noniction Kaitlin Mogentale ’15 is turning formerly discarded waste from juice bars into healthy, high-iber foods.

Patron-Client Relationships in Counter Insurgency

WALTER C. L ADWIG III

THE FORGOTTEN FRONT: Patron-Client Relationships in Counterinsurgency Cambridge University Press / Walter C. Ladwig III (B.A., economics and international relations, ’98) uses case studies to examine the contemporary and historical challenges that arise when the U.S. attempts to assist another government in counterinsurgency.

WRITING ON THE MOVE

DEAD MAN LAUNCH StarboardSide / Set in 1968, the latest novel by John J. Gobbell (B.A., humanities, ’60) follows a sole witness to the sinking of the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile submarine and subsequent inger pointing drags the world toward nuclear holocaust.

University of California Press / Rachel Middleman (M.A., art history, ’06; Ph.D., art history, ’10) shows that woman-made erotic art was integral to the profound changes that took place in American art during the 1960s, from the crumbling of modernist aesthetics and the expanding ield of art practice to the emergence of the feminist art movement.

Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy

PLAYING THE GAME: Create Your Legacy and Preserve Your Estate for Future Generations Morgan James Publishing / Paul Remack (M.A., history, ’77) prepares people for the game of wealth transfer and distribution, enabling them to pass on their fortune intact so that future generations may enjoy it.

REBECCA LORIMER LEONARD

WRITING ON THE MOVE: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy University of Pittsburgh Press / Rebecca Lorimer Leonard (B.A., English, ’02) shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle as they write among their languages and around the world.

RADICAL EROTICISM: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s

THE INFINITE FUTURE Penguin / Set in Brazil, Idaho and outer space, the latest novel by current creative writing and literature doctoral student Tim Wirkus inds an obsessive librarian, a down-at-heel author and a disgraced historian hunting for a mystical, life-changing book.

As carrot after carrot disappeared into her friend’s countertop juicer, Kaitlin Mogentale stared with her mouth agape at the growing pile of shredded pulp. he USC Dornsife environmental studies major had visited trendy Los Angeles juice bars many times, but she never realized how much of the fruits and vegetables ended up in the trash.

“What if we could use this pulp to create healthy snacks that are high in iber and nutritional value?” she asked. he moment led Mogentale to launch Pulp Pantry, a startup that uses discarded pulp to create grain-free, high-iber foods like granola, seed and veggie crisps and baking lours. he 24-year-old alumna’s products have already landed in select stores.

Another problem that inspired her vocation is the food insecurity and nutrition issues she witnessed at a local elementary school. Every meal featured highly processed food with low nutritional value. “hey weren’t used to eating vegetables,” she said. “hey’d come into the garden and they’d never seen a fresh carrot or a fresh tomato.”

Mogentale is hopeful that she can build Pulp Pantry into a sustainable brand and gateway to get kids excited about fruits and vegetables.

For now, she is focused on perfecting a handful of core products and building her presence in L.A. She is still the main engine of the operation, spending her weekends working on the business.

She feels lucky to have graduated with no student debt thanks to the Mork Family Scholarship.

“Now I can actually focus on building my business and putting money into that efort.” —E.L. Spring / Summer 2018 55

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Just Keep Swimming

STEPHEN VOSSMEYER (B.A., social sciences, ’02) married Taylor Radvany on April 21, 2018.

BRIAN EDGE (B.S., biological sciences, ’91) Alpharetta, GA (4/12/2018) at age 48; sports enthusiast.

In Memoriam

EDWARD P. GERICH (B.A., chemistry, ’47) San Luis Obispo, CA (4/10/2018) at age 92; founded Hi-Craft Metal Products; enjoyed restoring vintage cars; golf enthusiast.

Olympic hopeful Sarah Urke ’16, who sufered a serious concussion, aims to broaden awareness on addressing brain injuries.

WILLIAM ALDACUSHION (B.A., economics,’67; M.B.A.,’69) Vienna, VA (3/30/2018) at age 72; USC Trojan Marching Band alumnus; lover of music and performing arts; worked at IBM. ANTHONY LEE ASH (Ph.D., philosophy, ’66) Abilene, TX (12/6/2017) at age 86; professor for more than 60 years; completed video series Walking with C.S. Lewis; avid outdoorsman; completed 13 marathons.

CARL WARREN BAKER JR. (B.A., psychology, ’53) Las Vegas, NV (11/13/2017) at age 87; served in the Korean War and rose to the rank of Lt. Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves; an avid golfer, bridge and backgammon player; loved to travel.

BERNARD BARBER (Ph.D., philosophy, ’63) Phoenix, AZ (3/12/2018) at age 89.

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MARIAN G. CANNON (B.A., international relations, ’45) Glendale, CA (4/17/18) at age 94; worked in the State Department in Washington; accomplished writer; loving and dedicated wife, mother, grandmother and friend.

MARCIA FAN COHEN (Ph.D., psychology,’71) Los Alamitos, CA (2/26/2018) at age 86; created a school psychology program for Los Angeles Uniied School District; developed and hosted a talk radio show; worked on the early development of Sesame Street.

AMALIA KATSIGEANIS (B.A., zoology, ’46) Calexico, CA (5/13/2018) at age 92; physician; former mayor of Calexico; helped launch a methadone clinic in Calexico; former California Woman of the Year in 1991.

LAWANDA KATZMANSTAENBERG (Ph.D., psychology, ’72) Beverly Hills, CA (4/7/2018) at age 86; joined USC as an adjunct professor; established a private psychology practice.

WILLIAM R. KENNON (B.A., political science, ’70, J.D., ‘73) Santa Ana, CA (4/14/18) at age 70; successful lawyer.

FRANK R. MANZANO (B.A., international relations, ’56) of Gunnison, CO (5/5/18) at age 91; enjoyed camping, ishing and traveling; former secretary to General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

EVANGELINE MAYNARD (B.A., international relations, ’60; M.A., international relations, ’64) of Palos Verdes Estates, CA (5/10/18) at age 81; published The Rain Must Fall and Mind Your Chopsticks; loved reading, traveling, music and spending time with family.

P H O T O B Y E M I LY B E R L

A sharp kick to the head was all it took to derail her Olympic dreams.

Sarah Urke had trained for years to rise through the ranks of competitive synchronized swimming. But at age 16, a debilitating concussion knocked her out of the pool — and threatened her ability to walk and study. She dropped out of school to receive medical care and therapy.

“I wasn’t sure I’d ever get back to being a student again, let alone be able to get out of bed and work out,” Urke said.

Her persistence paid of, and after two years, Urke recovered and was accepted to USC Dornsife. She studied human biology with minors in dance medicine and health-care studies, with an emphasis on pre-physical therapy, thanks to a Mork Family Scholarship.

She graduated in 2016, and today the 24-year-old is pursuing a doctorate in physical therapy at Columbia University.

She is also a fervent advocate for concussion awareness, running an information and support website and consulting for top-light synchronized swimming teams on concussion safety. Her goal is to increase knowledge of how to prevent and respond to concussions, particularly in sports that don’t receive much attention in the current debate over head trauma among athletes.

“A concussion can really change a kid’s life,” she said.

Urke envisions a clinical career in neurorehabilitation and physical therapy.

“I love to work with patients and help them improve,” she said. “Bringing quality of life back to these people would be an incredibly fulilling career.” —E.L.

ERNEST R. BIRNBAUM (M.A., chemistry, ’58) Bronx, NY (3/21/2018) at age 84; retired chemistry professor at St. John’s University; member of American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

JOSEPH R. HENDERSON (B.A., economics, ’63) of Santa Paula, CA (5/16/18) at age 76; practiced law for 50 years; enjoyed collecting art, playing tennis, exploring the world and taking long walks with his golden retriever.

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY TROJANA LIT Y MARTIN MILLER (B.A., biological sciences, ’50) West Covina, CA (4/20/2018) at age 92; worked for the National Park Service for 25 years as a park naturalist; passionate educator of parks; merit badge counselor for the Boy Scouts of America.

JOHN WESLEY ROBB (Ph.D., philosophy, ’52) Seattle, WA (2/22/2018) at age 98; Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religion at USC Dornsife; taught at USC for 33 years; twice received Award for Excellence in Teaching; volunteered with Ethics Committee at University of Washington, Swedish Medical Center and Northwest Hospital.

ROBERT S. RODDICK III (B.A., history, ’71) San Bernardino, CA (3/10/2018) at age 68; enlisted in the California National Guard; attorney at Inland Counties Legal Services where he helped families in need of public assistance beneits.

he Numbers Ninja Bradley Rava ’16 uses math and data analysis skills to tell stories that could positively impact society.

Alumnus Bradley Rava revels in unearthing valuable secrets hidden in massive data sets.

Where others might see only reams of numbers, Rava sees a story waiting to be told, drawing inspiration from inding patterns that reveal something about the world around him.

Rava, who earned his bachelor’s degree in applied and computational mathematics, is now a irst-year Ph.D. student in statistics at USC Marshall School of Business.

He recently crunched the numbers on more than 4,000 horse races to determine whether being assigned to a speciic stall at the starting line can inluence the chances of winning. His research, part of a class project during a fellowship at Yale University, revealed that three of the four tracks he analyzed had “draw bias” — industry lingo for advantageous or unfavorable starting positions.

He has used his analytic skills to study the likelihood that a cybercriminal might target a speciic company.

He is currently considering how to reine formulas used by companies like ESPN to predict the winner of a sporting event as the game unfolds. “here is a lot of math, and the math is incredibly important, but there is also a huge element of creativity,” Rava said. “hat’s what separates people who might be good at analyzing data from those who can use data to tell a story and make some kind of meaningful impact on society.”

His ability to pull valuable information from big data sets caught the eye of the National Science Foundation, which granted him a three-year research fellowship that covers his tuition at USC and provides other perks, like conference funding and access to a powerful quantum computer.

He’s still narrowing down his interests, which include machine learning, network analysis and high-dimensional statistics. But Rava said he was drawn to applied math and statistics in general because of their usefulness in virtually every ield, from biology and neuroscience to economics and business.

“Everybody needs math,” he said. “It’s an underlying language that we can use to describe processes around us.

It’s cool to be able to jump into a new ield and ind something useful using that language.” —E.L.

LILLIAN BROWN VOGEL (B.A., zoology, ’32; M.A., psychology, ’32) Ukiah, CA (12/19/2017) at age 108; member of Mental Health Advocacy Board and American Association of University Women; avid reader and lover of poetry; published What’s My Secret: Memories and Reflections of a Long Life.

H. ELWOOD WISSMAN (B.A., sociology, ’47) Santa Barbara, CA (4/8/2018) at age 92; served as pastor to several Methodist congregations in Southern California and Arizona.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BR ADLE Y R AVA

ALVA FUMIHIKO YANO (M.A., physics, ’58) Berkeley, CA (3/13/2018) at age 84; faculty member in Department of Physics at Cal State Long Beach; enjoyed teaching and research; studied theoretical nuclear and particle physics; avid reader of Jane Austen and Shakespeare.

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REMEMBERING

An expert on Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Andrei Simic of anthropology was frequently tapped for his expertise, which he lent to several landmark court cases.

Andrei Simic, professor of anthropology, died on Dec. 26, 2017, in Phoenix. He was 87.

Simic’s primary focus was the Balkans and Eastern Europe, but he had many other areas of interest, including Latin American Studies, ethnicity and nationalism, post-communist society, Euro-American ethnic groups, popular culture, social gerontology, and visual anthropology with a focus on ilm production and ilm analysis.

“Andrei was one of a kind, an old soul, a scholar and gentleman from a world now past, but hardly passé,” said Jennifer Cool, assistant professor (teaching) of anthropology. “Beloved by generations — many of his students continued to visit him in oice hours decades after graduation — Andrei always had time for a good conversation, whether in Spanish, French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, or English.”

Simic was a proliic researcher and writer who published several books and numerous articles in academic journals and a wide variety of other publications.

In addition to his written work, he was credited and involved in the production of 27 ethnographic ilms, including his two major ilm projects, 1987’s “Ziveli: Medicine for the Heart” and 2004’s “he Children of Lazo’s Grove.”

Said Craig Stanford, professor of biological sciences and anthropology: “Above all else, he was a truly beloved teacher who served USC students for decades, and a gentleman of the irst order. His intellect, wit and kind nature will be missed by all who knew him.”

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Emeritus Professor of Political Science JOHN SCHMIDHAUSER died on Feb. 21. He was 96.

After a two-year term in Congress, Schmidhauser joined USC Dornsife in 1973 as chair of the Political Science Department.

During his 19-year career at the university, he received the USC Raubenheimer Outstanding Senior Faculty Award and the Golden Key award for comparative research.

Jeb Barnes, professor of political science, said Schmidhauser, one of the nation’s leading scholars of judicial politics, “was a major architect of the ield of judicial behavior and a model social scientist. He was decades ahead of his time.”

Bill Gluba, who worked on Schmidhauser’s successful campaign for Congress said, “He was warning those who would listen about climate change before the phrase was even coined.”

For Alison Dundes Renteln, professor of political science, anthropology, public policy and law, and scores of his other former colleagues and students at USC, Schmidhauser was a true star and “a perfect gentleman who made everyone feel that his or her view mattered.

“He was a charismatic and brilliant leader, and a great colleague and great mentor,” Renteln said. “He was just a gem.”

S I M I C P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F M A R I A B U D I S AV L J E V I C O PA R N I C A S I M I C ; R U D I S I L L P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F J A N I C E H S I A ; S C H M I D H A U S E R P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E S C H M I D H A U S E R FA M I LY

A Scholar and a Gentleman

ALVIN RUDISILL, Emeritus Associate Professor of Religion and a longtime USC chaplain, died on Feb. 21. He was 89.

Rudisill joined USC as campus pastor in 1962 before being named university chaplain in 1969. He was a counselor to four USC presidents, and his role overseeing community outreach and programs in the 1980s and ’90s reshaped USC’s relationship with its surrounding community.

When then-USC President James Zumberge asked him to oversee community relations at the university in the mid-1980s, Rudisill quickly developed three main goals: building trust with the community, creating a diverse staf and developing patience.

“If we were serious about a partnership, we had to really listen to the community and establish some rapport with them,” Rudisill said in a 1994 interview. He and his team created the United Neighborhood Council to improve the lives of people working or living near USC’s University Park Campus.

Rudisill’s primary ield of scholarship was church history, but he also developed expertise in medical ethics. He drew on his knowledge of concerns surrounding human experimentation and fetal, neonatal and child bioethics while serving on several medical review boards at USC. Throughout his career, he also explored issues involving peace, multiethnic and transnational relationships, and the role of institutions and communities in inner cities.

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY

A Life of Purpose ROBB PHOTO COURTESY OF USC UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Fondly nicknamed “J. Wesley God” by generations of students clamoring to take his popular “Human Values” course, the beloved professor of religion was instrumental in bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at USC. Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religion John Wesley Robb died on Feb. 22. He was 98.

An alumnus who taught at USC Dornsife for 33 years, “Wes” Robb was an admired teacher and mentor, twice receiving the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching. Among his most popular courses, “Human Values in a Modern Society” was dubbed by many as “Wes Robb Teaches the Truth.”

Lydia Robb said her father was a very strong supporter of academic freedom and the First Amendment. In the late 1950s, he sponsored Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at USC, despite concerns that King’s appearance might spark unrest, she said. he event was peaceful.

Many of Wes Robb’s former students helped establish the J. Wesley Robb Endowed Scholarship, which is awarded to USC Dornsife juniors who demonstrate signiicant moral leadership in the campus community, a commitment to human values and a deep concern for others. “his is Wes Robb’s legacy,” said Donald Miller, Leonard K. Firestone Professor of Religion and former chair of religion, “challenging students to … discover values that are deep rooted and live a life of purpose.”

For more than three decades.

J. Wesley Robb, seen here in the 1980s, was a revered teacher and mentor. More than 9,000 students took one of his seminars or his highly popular “Human Values in a Modern Society” course.

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IN MY OPINION

On Winning Nonproit founder and former NFL linebacker Riki Ellison ’83 inds diversity and culture are key to winning.

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Riki Ellison’s football career includes two Rose Bowls and a national championship with the USC Trojans, and three Super Bowl wins as an NFL linebacker. He founded two nonproit organizations, the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance and the Youth Impact Program, after retiring from football. He earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations from USC Dornsife in 1983.

MICHELSON CENTER PHOTO BY MIEKE GLIER

Life is competitive — it is not fair, and not everyone is a winner.

Winning requires building trust to enable diverse minds to reach beyond their limits and achieve exceptional feats. With increasing trust, varied experiences, skills and knowledge can coalesce to produce a winning culture that supports courageous decisions based on values — in other words, winning leadership.

Strong leaders were an important presence in my life, starting with my mother, who in 1968 left New Zealand as a single parent with my sister and me on a teaching scholarship to USC. A diverse array of American leaders followed, including war veterans, employers, coaches and teachers, who took leadership roles in my life and showed me that resilience, determination and faith — not entitlement or material wealth — were the source of character, of honor. It had to be earned.

For me, the world-class USC Dornsife School of International Relations and Joint Educational Project (JEP), along with the USC football program, were “competitive cauldrons” that imparted in me, my classmates and my teammates a culture of winning leadership.

USC embodies a successful culture of diversity that develops winners in life. he deans and professors, head and assistant coaches, and teaching and graduate assistants framed and shaped this remarkable culture as living examples. hese programs lit in me a passion to take a leadership role in making the world a safer place, both locally and globally. My studies with exceptional leaders in international relations led me into a second career (following 10 years in the NFL) advocating missile defense to defend over a billion people in 41 countries around the world.

My JEP experience motivated me to work with the USC Dornsife program in 2004 to create Youth Impact Program, a collaboration that has changed thousands of inner-city children’s lives throughout the United States. With hundreds of student athletes, teachers and Marines as trusted leaders, the program has raised average grade-school test scores by more than 20 percent in math, English composition, reading and vocabulary, and science. And although test results are important, the trust, relationship building and leadership development that are fostered through the program are far more valuable in changing lives and making a global impact.

We will ight on to expand our Youth Impact Program, building on the lessons learned from its beginnings at USC. We as a community, as a nation and as Trojans have a responsibility to enable winning. With our love of USC — for what it is, what it has done, and what it must continue to do to keep producing winners — we share an enduring responsibility to cherish and protect the university’s exceptional culture.

“Our Alma Mater dear, looks up to you. Fight On and win for ol’ SC!”

USC Michelson Center: From Bench to Bedside World-class scientists and engineers have moved into Michelson Hall, a new hub for research, drug discovery and device development. The collaborative minds within the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience already are developing new cancer diagnostic tests, an app that anticipates heart failure and new therapies for drug-resistant infections. Among the earliest USC Michelson Center projects, scientists and engineers are collaborating to develop the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s irst 3-D model of the pancreatic beta cell as a major step toward inding a cure for diabetes.

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Life Moment

F R E D R YA N ’ 7 7

No Fake News Here PHOTO BY SUSAN BELL

Alumnus Fred Ryan, CEO and Publisher of The Washington Post, takes a break to read USC Dornsife Magazine at the newspaper’s D.C. headquarters.