USC Dornsife Magazine Spring/Summer 2022

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 2022

The Water Issue

LIFE FORCE

USC Dornsife scholars quench our thirst for solutions to global water challenges.

Under Pressure

From planting sustainable native gardens to baking to bidets, USC Dornsife scholars share their personal water-related sustainability tips.

“It is estimated that about 50% of residential water use in California goes toward outdoor water use such as watering our gardens. Switching to more Californiafriendly drought-tolerant plants will therefore make a big difference. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has various other tips about how gardeners can save water at ladwp.cafriendlylandscaping.com.”

WÄNDI BRUINE DE BRUIN, Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science

“In the anthropology department, we try to be more sustainable in the workplace — opting for water pitchers with paper cups instead of individual plastic water bottles and plastic cups.

“I have a drought garden with California native plants and save all the falling leaves to mulch. A bidet attachment on the toilet saves on paper.”

ERIN MOORE, professor (teaching) of anthropology

DARREN RUDDELL, associate professor (teaching) of spatial sciences

WILLIAM BERELSON, professor of Earth sciences, environmental studies and spatial sciences

“Growing up in rainy England, we always line-dried our clothes and ran out to collect them between frequent cloudbursts. In typically warm and dry Los Angeles weather, hanging your laundry on a folding rack — even inside, for those of us without yards — is an easy energy saver. And your clothes will last longer!”

SARAH FEAKINS, professor of Earth sciences

IMAGES: ISTOCK

“We have made numerous water conservation design interventions to our home by following municipal water conservation and rebate guidelines. These have included turf removal, installing a drip system, rain barrel water capture, permeable driveway, dry riverbed garden and downspout redirect, in addition to planting droughttolerant landscaping. We have fun implementing water conservation efforts and look for additional ways to reduce our residential water consumption.”

“There is good reason to make incremental changes in water consumption around the house. Fixing even small leaks is important — for instance a leaky toilet.

Usually the plunger/stopper becomes unseated and that’s why a jiggle of the handle often stops the leaking. But a more permanent approach might be to replace the stopper or, what I like to do, add a little weight to it so it seats and seals more securely.

I make a small weight out of stainless steel washers (regular ones will rust) strung to a piece of string or monofilament. Works like a charm.”

M ESSAGE F ROM T H E D E A N

A Glass Half Full

The looming impacts of climate change often bring to mind record-breaking temperatures, intensified hurricane seasons and wildfires, and unrelenting droughts.

The common thread running through essentially all of these difficult-to-predict impacts is the complex water cycle. As the planet warms, it draws more water into the atmosphere and renders longstanding climate patterns unpredictable.

“How we use water in and around our homes is based largely on habit and routine. And as everyone knows, once you have an established habit or routine, they’re hard to break. But in these years of severe drought, break them we must. Making these changes is easier when we modify our environment, and not how we think.

That means doing things like xeriscaping and, when appliances and fixtures wear out, installing water efficient replacements.”

JOE ÁRVAI, Dana and David Dornsife Chair, Wrigley Institute Director and professor of psychology and biological sciences

This uncertainty sparks challenging questions not only about our weather — rising temperatures and extreme events — but also the way our species fundamentally functions.

Nearly every major population center on the planet is situated along a major waterway. From the most ancient cities that arose along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to modern coastal metropolises like Shanghai and Los Angeles, civilization is built on our capacity to predict and leverage water systems.

What happens when our relationship with water is no longer reliable? Already climate migrants flee lands rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels or dried-up rivers that once enabled agriculture. Those who work in the fishing industry hoist empty nets from warmer, more acidic oceans. And heavy rainfall events cause erosion and runoff, adding more pollutants into the water supplies from which millions of people drink.

If all this sounds alarming, that’s because it is.

And that is why we at USC Dornsife are bringing new ways of thinking to society’s water challenges. Our researchers pursue a wide range of mitigation and adaptation strategies, allowing us to cautiously see the future as a glass half full. You’ll find some of their insights in this issue of USC Dornsife Magazine, along with a variety of perspectives on the theme of water — from its ability to surface creative inspiration to L.A.’s long and tempestuous relationship with this crucial natural resource. I hope you enjoy the read.

AMBER D. MILLER Dean, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Anna H. Bing Dean’s Chair

IMAGES: IS TOCK; SOURDOUGH PHOTO BY MOH EL-NAGGER

“The pandemic turned me into a sourdough baker!

I have enjoyed cooking for years but thought baking too prescriptive for my taste. After all, when your lab weighs and measures things all day, do you really want to do that at home? In March 2020, finding baking yeast was hard, and I turned my biophysics and microbiology knowledge to bread. With an active microbial culture (lovingly called ‘Bucky’ in our house) collected by a neighbor from an English barley field, I can now turn water, wheat and salt into better tasting bread than most loaves transported by fossil fuels to stores. And the early ‘practice’ loaves? We ate those delicious mistakes, too.”

MOH EL-NAGGAR, Dean’s Professor of Physics and Astronomy and professor of physics and astronomy and chemistry and divisional dean for the physical sciences and mathematics

Spring / Summer 2022 | 1

COVER STORY

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Susan Bell

ART DIRECTOR / PRODUCTION MANAGER

Letty Avila

SENIOR DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND MEDIA RELATIONS

Jim Key

WRITERS AND EDITORS

Margaret Crable Darrin S. Joy Meredith McGroarty

VIDEOGRAPHER AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Mike Glier

SENIOR WEB SPECIALIST

Michael Liu

SOCIAL MEDIA SPECIALIST

Michael Silver

COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT

Deann Webb

CONTRIBUTORS Andrea Bennett, Michelle Boston, Maddy Davis, Emily Gersema, Magali Gruet, Greg Hardesty, Stephen Koenig, Eric Lindberg, Paul McQuiston, Jenesse Miller, Rhiannon Montelius, Nick Neumann, Gary Polakovic, Kathryn Royster

USC DORNSIFE BOARD OF COUNCILORS Kathy Leventhal, Chair • Wendy Abrams • Robert D. Beyer • David Bohnett • Jon Brayshaw • Ramona Cappello • Alan Colowick • Richard S. Flores • Shane Foley • Vab Goel • Lisa Goldman • Jana Waring Greer • Pierre Habis • Yossie Hollander • Janice Bryant Howroyd • Martin Irani • Dan James • Suzanne Nora Johnson • Bettina Kallins • Yoon Kim • Samuel King • Jaime Lee • Arthur Lev • Roger Lynch • Robert Osher • Gerald Papazian • Andrew Perlman • Lawrence Piro • Edoardo Ponti • Kelly Porter • Michael Reilly • Carole Shammas • Rajeev Tandon

Our dramatic cover image, made by legendary landscape photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams around 1948, captures the raw majesty and power of water — the life-giving force that sustains our planet and is the subject of this issue of USC Dornsife Magazine.

Adams’ photograph — which he considered one of his finest — is of Vernal Fall in California’s Yosemite National Park.

Although it stands just 317 feet tall, Vernal Fall is among the most powerful of Yosemite’s celebrated waterfalls.

Its thundering grace has succeeded in captivating many visitors, including Adams, who wrote of his beloved Yosemite Valley, “I know of no sculpture, painting, or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of … the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters.”

It’s not hard to share Adams’ admiration. Our joy and fascination with water is lifelong. We love to be near it, to play in it and on it, and above all to look at it. Water delights our senses.

And nowhere more so than on a baking hot day, as captured in the photograph below of a New York streetscape, where the cooling spray from a fire hydrant provides welcome relief to children playing in the summer heat.

Look at their sheer joy!

But water can also inspire many other — often diverse — emotions, ranging from fear to awe. Afterall, water has the power to soothe and terrify us, amuse and challenge us, and to both nourish us and harm us.

In this issue of USC Dornsife Magazine, we explore water though many lenses — from our scholars’ innovative work to find solutions for global challenges related to water to the real-life Los Angeles “Water Wars” that inspired the neo-noir movie Chinatown — one of the greatest films about L.A. ever made.

We also look at how water in all its many forms has served as artistic inspiration since before the written word. And for those of you who may, on occasion, read this publication in your bathroom (you know who you are!), we have a special treat: a feature devoted to the amusing — and often astonishing — history of plumbing through the ages.

We hope you enjoy the issue and that it leaves you with a new appreciation for this truly remarkable element that is, as our first feature demonstrates, “Simply Complex.” — S.B.

COVER PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COLLECTION CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ©THE ANSEL ADAMS PUBLISHING RIGHTS TRUST

USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE Published twice a year by USC Dornsife Office of Communication at the University of Southern California. © 2022 USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The 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, SCT-2400, Los Angeles, CA 90089.

Children escape the summer heat by playing in the refreshing water spray from a fire hydrant in this 1943 photograph taken on New York City’s East Side.

2

VERNAL FALL PHOTO BY ANSEL ADAMS; PHOTO BY ROGER SMITH / COURTESY OF LIBR ARY OF CONGRES S

USC DORNSIFE ADMINISTRATION Amber D. Miller, Dean • Jan Amend, Divisional Dean for the Life Sciences • Emily Hodgson Anderson, College Dean of Undergraduate Education • Stephen Bradforth, Senior Advisor to the Dean for Research Strategy and Development • Moh El-Naggar, Divisional Dean for the Physical Sciences and Mathematics • Kimberly Freeman, Associate Dean, Chief Diversity Officer • Stephen Koenig, Senior Associate Dean for Creative Content • Peter Mancall, Divisional Dean for the Social Sciences • Renee Perez, Vice Dean, Administration and Finance • Eddie Sartin, Senior Associate Dean for Advancement • Sam Steinberg, Interim College Dean of Graduate and Professional Education • Sherry Velasco, Divisional Dean for the Humanities

Water, Water, Everywhere

Contents

SPRING / SUMMER 2022 UNDER PRESSURE USC Dornsife faculty offer their personal water sustainability tips.

4 FROM THE HEART OF USC New literary prize; High-tech earthquake research; Schizophrenia’s origin; How memories are stored; Debate team triumph; Psychologists’ climate change role.

Curriculum

5

Profile

6

Lexicon

9 12

14 38

Academy in the Public Square

Our World Legacy

39 DORNSIFE FAMILY

Sri Narayan elected to National Academy of Inventors; Alumna serves as California state senator.

39 39 40 Ocean magic: Pacific jack mackerel and other fish school above purple California hydrocoral and green southern sea palm at Farnsworth Bank, Santa Catalina Island.

THE WATER ISSUE

16 Simply Complex

The formula is simple, but H2O is one of the most remarkable substances in the universe. By Darrin S. Joy

18 Dirty Water

The history of Los Angeles is inextricably intertwined with the city’s insatiable thirst for water. The early-20th-century “Water Wars” that made L.A. possible also mired the city in a shadowy saga of corruption and lies. By Meredith McGroarty

22 Water Works

42 43

Faculty News

Alumni News

Faculty Canon

Alumni Canon Remembering

44 TROJAN CLEAN Trojan Clean: Volunteers from USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and Scientific Diving Program help at the 40th annual Avalon Harbor Underwater Cleanup.

USC Dornsife scholars make a splash as they address challenges — from local to global — centered around water.

Compiled by Margaret Crable and Darrin S. Joy. Original stories by Michelle Boston, Emily Gersema, Nick Neumann, Gary Polakovic and Kathryn Royster

PHOTO BY VICTORIA SPEROW

28 The Creative Flow

Water, simultaneously vital to human life and one of our deadliest foes, has inspired the human imagination in compelling ways since before the written word. By Margaret Crable

32 Pipe Dreams

From the communal baths of ancient Rome to the Great Stink of London and the fortuitously named Victorian sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper, USC Dornsife scholars trace the history of plumbing through the ages. By Susan Bell

CONNECT WITH USC DORNSIFE Facebook.com/USCDornsife Instagram.com/USCDornsife Twitter.com/USCDornsife LinkedIn.com/school/USCDornsife YouTube.com/USCDornsife

dornsife.usc.edu/magazine Spring / Summer 2022 | 3

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Viewpoint EXPERT OPINIONS

“We think we’re in charge of everything, which gives us a sense of control. So, most of our attempts to change our behavior focus on us being in charge, that all we have to do is convince ourselves that this is the right thing to do.”

WENDY WOOD, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business, in an April 22 Forbes article on how willpower and self-control affect ability to achieve goals.

“Harbor commerce and harbor development can encourage cities to build right alongside whatever ocean they’re up against. Los Angeles doesn’t have that in any particular sense until later.”

WILLIAM DEVERELL, professor of history, spatial sciences and environmental studies, in a Jan. 26 Los Angeles Times article on why L.A.’s iconic skyline is so far from the beach.

DARBY SAXBE, associate professor of psychology, in a Jan. 26 LAist article on pandemic parenting.

4

Acclaimed Greek writer Christos Ikonomou wins USC Dornsife’s inaugural Chowdhury Prize in Literature.

By Susan Bell This spring, USC Dornsife’s Department of English St. John praised the jury as “one of the most distinlaunched the annual Chowdhury Prize in Literature, an guished judging panels one could create.” They include three international mid-career prize for writers — and the first USC Dornsife professors of English: Ulin, a California literary award of its kind on the West Coast. The $20,000 Book Award winner; National Book Critics Circle prize is awarded by the English Department through the Award winner Maggie Nelson; and Pulitzer Prize winner auspices of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Foundation and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Other members of the panel are in collaboration with Kenyon College and the Kenyon Review. poet, playwright and essayist Claudia Rankine, former University Professor David St. John, professor of Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; and poet, English and comparative literature and chair of English at translator and editor Arthur Sze, recipient of the 2021 USC Dornsife, said the Chowdhury Prize in Literature “is Shelley Memorial Award and the 2019 National Book certain to be recognized as one of the most distinguished Award for Poetry. international prizes in the world.”

All five are former Guggenheim Fellows and three — Greek author Christos Ikonomou is the inaugural winner Nelson, Nguyen and Rankine — are MacArthur Fellows. of the prize, which was presented to him during a gala at USC on April 21.

Born in Athens in 1970 and hailed by critics as a “visionary social observer,” Ikonomou has published four collections of short stories, including Something Will Happen, You’ll See (Polis, 2010), which won Greece’s prestigious Best Short-Story Collection State Award.

Ikonomou’s dystopian tales are set within the political and economic climate of austerity in Greece and recount its devastating effect on working people.

The Chowdhury Prize administrator, David Ulin, professor of the practice of English at USC Dornsife and former Los Angeles Times book editor and book critic, noted that the new prize is not a retrospective award but seeks to identify and encourage authors with significant future potential.

Ulin said the jury’s decision to award Ikonomou the prize was unanimous.

“We thought he was doing remarkable work creatively, and that his work had a remarkable social component,” Ulin said. “But the most important aspect for us was the power of the writing, which made us really interested in supporting this writer in what Inaugural winner of the Chowdhury Prize in Literature Christos Ikonomou speaks at the award ceremony at USC’s Town and Gown as David Ulin, professor of English and prize administrator, looks on. comes next.”

PHOTO BY ILIANA GARCIA

“When everything sort of falls apart at the same time, there’s opportunity for reflection and new beginnings.

And I think we’re at this sort of critical moment where if we don’t invest in our care infrastructure, if we don’t support families with things like paid family leave, with better education funding, with better child care infrastructure, we will collapse.”

New Literary Prize

CUR R ICULU M

School’s In, Surf ’s Up!

THE ENDLESS SUMMER POS TER BY JOHN VAN HAMERSVELD; CULBERT SON PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

SURFING (PHED 115) Instructor: Ian Culbertson, lecturer of physical education

It’s Friday at 8 a.m., class is in session, and Ian Culbertson is explaining how tides work and their relationship to the phases

of the moon. Students nod along as he spins a model of the moon alongside one of the Earth.

It sounds like a pretty typical day in the classroom. Except, this classroom is located on the sand near Lifeguard Tower 24 in Santa Monica, California.

Culbertson — an experienced surfer — is wearing a wetsuit and his models of the Earth and moon are a water bottle and a can of coconut water.

Offered by USC Dornsife’s Department of Physical Education and Mind Body Health, this surfing course enables students

to learn the basic skills of Southern California’s most iconic sport. By the end of the semester, students will be able to paddle out, stand up on a board and glide along the coast.

On the way to mastering how to “hang ten,” students learn the terminology of surfing.

The mysteries of “off shore” versus “on shore” wind, the etiquette of catching a wave, wind dynamics, the risks (pro tip: the most dangerous thing in the water isn’t a shark, it’s another surfer’s wayward board), and the history and

culture of the sport are all explained.

Culbertson’s students are also learning resiliency. On one cloudy morning, they fought through cold, thumping waves searching for a ride. Boards popped into the air as students were dunked again and again.

They crawled out from under the white water, located their boards, shook water from their eyes and paddled off for another round.

Back on the beach, Culbertson gives his students a pep talk, reminding them of Kathrine Switzer, the first

woman to run the Boston Marathon despite physical attacks from the sidelines.

“Use the challenges as motivation to get out there and just get a wave,” says Culbertson — lessons that last long after wetsuits have been hung up to dry. —M.C.

California’s iconic sport is immortalized in this poster image for the 1966 surfing documentary The Endless Summer.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 5

PROF ILE

The War Chief Who Became a Peace Chief Serving as a U.S. Army scout during World War II, Joseph Medicine Crow was rounding a corner in a small French town when he collided with a strapping, young German soldier. Medicine Crow, who was wearing war paint beneath his uniform and had a yellow eagle feather concealed inside his helmet, was not a big man, but he didn’t shoot the enemy.

Instead, he disarmed the German with a boot thrust.

Throwing his own rifle aside, he overpowered the larger man in hand-to-hand combat. While Medicine Crow was choking him, the German’s eyes rolled back in his head and he gasped “Mama, Mama.” Recounting the tale many years later, Medicine Crow said the soldier’s plea brought him to his senses.

“I let go of him and got my rifle back and he became my prisoner,” he told his son, Ronald Medicine Crow. “We sat down, away from all the shouting and fighting, and I shared a cigarette with him.”

This exploit is a perfect illustration of not only Medicine Crow’s bravery, but also his profound humanity — a quality that brought him some of the world’s highest honors, as well as the respect of all who met him.

6

d’Honneur — France’s highest order of merit — for his service in World War II. According to Crow tradition, a warrior must fulfill four

requirements to be named a war chief. Medicine Crow accomplished all four during WWII: leading a successful war party, touching an enemy

soldier without killing him, disarming an enemy soldier, and capturing an enemy’s horse. Indeed, among his war exploits, Medicine Crow

is credited with capturing 50 horses from a Nazi SS camp and successfully leading a team of soldiers to dynamite German artillery.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MEDICINE CROW ART

A LIFETIME OF HONORS One of USC Dornsife’s most distinguished alumni, Joseph Medicine Crow was a renowned Native American historian and writer, the last war chief of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation and its first member to earn a master’s degree. In 2009, President Barack Obama honored him with the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in recognition of his military service and contributions to Native American history. The previous year, he was awarded a Bronze Star and the Légion

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

He also claimed to be the first Allied soldier to land in Nazi Germany after his captain ordered him to leap over the narrow stream that marked the Siegfried Line separating the country from France — a feat for which he was later congratulated by General Omar Bradley, one of General Dwight Eisenhower’s right-hand men.

“AN ALL-ROUND MAN” Born into the Whistling Waters clan on the Crow Reservation in Lodge Grass, Montana, in 1913, Medicine Crow came from a distinguished lineage: His paternal grandfather was the eminent Chief Medicine Crow and his step-father was the son of White Man Runs Him — one of George Armstrong Custer’s four personal scouts at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Medicine Crow was raised by his grandparents, who immersed him in Crow traditions, inculcating stamina and tribal skills.

“His Grandfather Yellowtail trained him in the old warrior ways,” Ronald Medicine Crow says. “In wintertime, they chopped a hole in the ice and took a refreshing morning plunge. Then Yellowtail told him to run a hundred yards in the snow barefoot. In summer and fall, Dad learned hunting and tracking skills.

“My father was raised as a farm boy, rancher, outdoorsman, hunter, cowboy, jockey and exercise boy — he was an all-round man.”

During his formative years, Joseph Medicine Crow was also absorbing the history of his tribe. When elders gathered at the sweat lodge, telling stories of intertribal warfare and mythological heroes, Medicine Crow, who served as their water boy, was listening and taking mental note.

This early knowledge forged a lifelong love of Native

American history. Widely recognized as the last person to have heard accounts of the Battle of Little Bighorn directly from participants in the 1876 conflict and a naturally gifted storyteller in his own right, Medicine Crow grew up to be revered as one of the most influential and knowledgeable carriers of his people’s oral history.

After WWII, he became tribal historian for the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribal Council, documenting his people’s traditions and daily life in several books, including From the Heart of the Crow Country: The Crow Indian’s Own Stories (Crown, 1992).

PERSEVERANCE PAYS OFF Unable to speak English as a young child, Medicine Crow’s formal education got off to a rough start when he struggled to pronounce “excuse me” to his teacher’s satisfaction after suffering a bout of hiccups on his first day. She made him don a dunce’s cap and sent him to the sand box to play with wooden blocks. This treatment continued for his first two years of school.

From eighth grade through his first two years of college, Medicine Crow attended Bacone College in Oklahoma, becoming a star pitcher for the baseball team and excelling at javelin. He became an accomplished musician, learning to play six instruments — saxophone, clarinet, flute, piano, accordion and the Indian hand drum.

In high school, he also began to study seriously, competing with a friend to get top grades.

“That’s how he came from being in the sandbox with a dunce’s cap to being an A student and making the honor roll,” Ronald Medicine Crow says.

Joseph Medicine Crow pursued his studies at Linfield College in Oregon before arriving at USC Dornsife in 1938 on a scholarship. He earned his master’s in anthropology with an archaeology minor in 1939.

His thesis, “The Effects of European Culture Contacts Upon the Economic, Social and Religious Life of the Crow Indians,” is regarded as the

pretty soon we were more than welcome to come into town and do business,” says Ronald Medicine Crow.

Joseph Medicine Crow showed a lifelong commitment to education, teaching in the Department of Crow Studies at Montana’s Little Big Horn College. A middle school in Billings, Montana, was named after him.

This year, on April 16, USC honored the USC Dornsife alumnus by officially naming a historic campus building after him. The Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow Center for International and Public Affairs is located at the heart of USC’s University Park campus, its tower topped by one of the university’s most visible and recognizable landmarks — the stylized

“Dad was a humanist who loved all people, even his enemies.” seminal scholarly work on the topic.

By the early 1940s, Medicine Crow had completed the coursework to earn a PhD at USC Dornsife, but determined to serve his country, he joined the U.S. Army in 1942. USC awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters in 2003 — one of four honorary doctorates he received during his lifetime.

Upon returning home from WWII, Medicine Crow started a successful career as a land appraiser for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There he put his archaeology training at USC to good use, surveying land to ensure no sacred burial sites or artifacts were disturbed by development.

PEACE CHIEF Saddened by the anti-Native American discrimination he witnessed, he hit upon the idea of creating a Miss Indian America pageant to help promote unity between the white and Indian people. Held during the AllAmerican Indian Days — an annual celebration of Native American culture and another initiative of Medicine Crow to foster positive relations — the pageant was a success.

“It changed the climate, and

And in 2000, the war chief — who was also a devout Baptist who taught a men’s Sunday school class — performed the opening song for the United Nations summit conference for spiritual and religious leaders.

Ronald Medicine Crow says his father was profoundly influenced by Christianity and did his best to live a good life and be a role model for young and old alike.

“My father said, ‘I live in two worlds: the Indian world and the white world. There is a middle line that joins those two worlds together. … I walk that line and take what’s good from both.’

“Dad was a humanist who loved all people, even his enemies, He was a man of dignity, but a humble man. He didn’t hold grudges. He was forgiving and positive. And people loved him for that.”

A TRAILBLAZER AND A ROLE MODEL Medicine Crow died on April 2, 2016, at age 102. State officials attended his funeral, and tributes poured in from all over the world, including from Obama.

The tributes continued even after Medicine Crow’s death.

globe. The center is home to many USC Dornsife departments, including anthropology, art history, international relations and political science.

A scholarship program for Native Americans will also be established in his name.

In her speech at the naming ceremony, USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller paid tribute to Medicine Crow, describing him as “a bridgebuilder.”

“He connected new generations with stories of their past, helped communities overcome intolerance toward indigenous peoples, and found ways to link the Crow people’s cultural traditions with the opportunities of modern society,” she said.

“Joe Medicine Crow was also known for being a generous mentor — he was patient and encouraging and eager to invest in others. Most importantly, he showed how to live through his actions.”

—S.B.

In April, USC honored USC Dornsife alumnus Joseph Medicine Crow (pictured here in 2015) by officially naming a historic campus building after him.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 7

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Recognition

Shaking up the research High-powered computers, sensors and simulators are giving scientists fresh insight into earthquakes.

COMMUNICATOR OF THE YEAR The inaugural Communicator of the Year Awards honor five USC Dornsife scholars for their exemplary efforts to share their expertise and engage with the public in 2021. Their efforts improved public understanding of issues, influenced policy or raised levels of public discourse.

HUMANITIES SUSAN KAMEI, managing director of the Spatial Sciences Institute, emerged as one of America’s most prominent and visible scholars on Japanese American incarceration during World War II. NATURAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS ANNA KRYLOV, professor of chemistry, warned of the dangers of political ideology influencing science, sparking a national conversation.

CENTER OR INSTITUTE LEADER MANUEL PASTOR, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity, Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change, and director of the USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute, shared his expertise and sharp analysis on equity and social change.

PHD STUDENT KIERSTEN FORMOSO, doctoral candidate in Earth sciences, improved public understanding of dinosaurs while inspiring young people to study paleontology.

8

Mapping Memory

Using glowing fish and a microscope, researchers produce the first snapshots of memory in a living animal.

Earthquakes are an omnipresent source of anxiety in California, where the San Andreas fault threatens to erupt at any moment into the dreaded “Big One.” Since 1991, USC Dornsife’s Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) has been working to better understand this phenomenon and to help assuage earthquake fears.

High-performance computing (HPC) uses powerful supercomputers to simulate and analyze data, producing much faster results than a standard desktop computer.

SCEC uses this technology to clarify how often earthquakes of varying magnitudes are expected in different regions.

It also determines how factors such as the direction a fault ruptures and wave resonance in sedimentary basins — where loose rocks and soil settle over millions of years — all combine to increase ground motion at certain locations.

Recently, SCEC’s use of HPC won the 2021 HPCwire Editor’s Choice Award for Best Use of High-Performance Computing in the Physical Sciences.

SCEC is working on other high-tech initiatives, as well, such as installing sensors where tectonic plates converge. This will greatly boost the available data on what happens close to the source of earthquakes. The center is also developing a “Next-Generation Earthquake Simulator” that will address key questions, such as which physical processes produce the conditions for large earthquakes to occur.

“Progress in research computing and earthquake simulators will improve our understanding of the processes that lead to large earthquakes. This, combined with future improved data and advanced analyses of signals, has a high potential for improving our ability to forecast large earthquakes,” says Yehuda Ben-Zion, director of the center and professor of Earth sciences at USC Dornsife.

In addition to advancing earthquake science, SCEC helps people prepare for the next earthquake.

The center’s “Seven Steps to Earthquake Safety” guide, available in 14 languages, explains what to do before, during and after earthquakes. SCEC also helps coordinate the

What physical changes occur in the brain when a memory is made?

A team of researchers from USC Dornsife and USC Viterbi School of Engineering has, for the first time, answered this question by inducing a memory in a larval zebrafish and then mapping changes in its transparent head with the fish’s brain cells lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. After six years of research, the researchers discovered that learning causes brain synapses — the connections between neurons — to proliferate in some areas and disappear in others rather than merely changing their strength, as commonly thought. These changes in synapses may help explain how memories are formed and why certain kinds of memories, including those associated with PTSD, are stronger than others.

The study was made possible thanks to a new type of cell labeling and a custom-made microscope invented at USC that enabled researchers to observe changes in living animals and get before and after pictures of the changes on the same specimen.

The researchers were able to determine for the first time the strength and location of synapses before and after learning occurred in the brain of a living zebrafish, an animal commonly used to study brain function. By taking the unprecedented step of keeping the fish alive, they were able to compare synapses in the same brain over time — a breakthrough in the neuroscience field.

“Our probes can label synapses in a living brain without altering their structure or function, which was not possible with previous tools,” says Donald Arnold, professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife and biomedical engineering at USC Viterbi. —M.G.

EARTHQUAKE RESEARCH IMAGE SOURCE: ISTOCK; MAPPING MEMORY IMAGE BY DON ARNOLD

SOCIAL SCIENCES KYLA THOMAS, associate sociologist with USC Dornsife’s Center for Economic and Social Research, emerged as a popular and authoritative media source on Los Angeles County’s changing social and economic conditions.

annual Great ShakeOut Earthquake Drill, which encourages people to “drop, cover and hold on” each October. Millions have participated worldwide.

The center is also training the next generation of earthquake scientists. More than 700 undergraduates have participated in SCEC’s Internships Program, which pairs students with Earth science researchers. —M.C.

LE X ICON

Go with the Flow

PSYCHOLO GY FLOW 'flo / noun, verb (1) Smooth, continuous movement, as of water; (2) the mental state of being completely absorbed in what one is doing.

Origin: From German and Old English flowan, meaning “flood.” The word’s psychological meaning was coined in 1990 by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, whose research subjects used water metaphors to describe states of highly focused, joyful productivity.

Usage: Used literally, flow refers to the movement of water and other fluids. But water is an essential human and environmental need, and it is a universal part of the human experience. So, the idea of flow is also very popular as a metaphor.

“In psychology, flow refers to a mental state where someone is so happily immersed in an activity that they lose all sense of time. As Csíkszentmihályi said, ‘The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow.’”

N Y M P H É A S B Y C L A U D E M O N E T ; A´R V A I P H O T O B Y M A R C - G R É G O R C A M P R E D O N

Joe Árvai, Dana and David Dornsife Chair and professor of psychology and biological sciences, is the first behavioral scientist to serve as director of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies.

He studies how people formulate beliefs and make decisions about environmental issues. On his days off, he makes documentary photographs, rides motorcycles and climbs mountains.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 9

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Numbers SUSTAINABILITY AND RESILIENCE Adverse environmental conditions are impacting a growing number of Angelenos, according to an LABarometer survey.

“The startling increase in the percentage of Angelenos who didn’t want to leave their homes because of unsafe air resulting from wildfires really speaks to the growing threat wildfires pose to quality of life in Los Angeles.

Compared to just a year ago, our results suggest that more Angelenos are feeling the impact of climate change on their daily lives and plans,” says Kyla Thomas, director of LABarometer. The quarterly survey is designed and administered by the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research and made possible by the financial support of Union Bank.

75 & 77

Percentage of Angelenos who say climate change is mostly caused by humans and percentage who say it threatens their well-being.

1.3X

Factor increase in the number of L.A. County residents who avoided going outdoors due to wildfire-related air quality concerns.

⅔

Fraction of Angelenos who say their actions can make a difference in reducing the effects of climate change.

4 IN 10

Ratio of Angelenos who expect their next car to be zeroemission — a 24% increase from 2020.

10

Climate change isn’t an inevitable death sentence, and the discipline of psychology must strengthen its ability to act on the issue, a new report says. By Greg Hardesty

Doom and gloom tend to dominate when it comes to news about climate change. Unfortunately, what many articles and reports likely won’t emphasize are the things you can do to keep climate change from getting worse, or how people can build psychological and social resilience to better cope with its impacts.

Enter the American Psychological Association (APA), which recently released a 64-page report recommending steps psychologists can take to address climate change and collaborate with other disciplines to make a meaningful impact.

The report, “Addressing the Climate Crisis: An Action Plan for Psychologists,” is the result of 15 months’ work by a task force led by Gale Sinatra, professor of psychology at USC Dornsife and professor of education at USC Rossier School of Education.

“If there’s too much doomsday information in media coverage about climate change, then people will tune out, and that’s exactly the opposite of what we need,” says Sinatra, who holds the Stephen H. Crocker chair at USC Rossier.

“It’s not true that we’re completely doomed. We can make a difference.”

The report contains 12 recommendations — six for strengthening the field of psychology and six for broadening psychology’s impact — while focusing on action. Such steps include building psychologists’ capacities to support people in working against climate change and making changes to live with its effects, and promoting the engagement of psychologists with policymakers, practitioners and the community at large.

Joe Árvai, Dana and David Dornsife Chair and professor of psychology and biological sciences, is an expert on risk

assessment and communication who has done work aimed at helping people adopt more sustainable behaviors.

He praised the APA report.

“It’s one of the first early steps in mainstreaming behavioral science around climate change,” he said. “I hope it gets the conversation started so others can build momentum to move us from ‘the sky is falling!’ mode to ‘how are we going to prop it up?’ mode.”

Sinatra notes that addressing climate change on a broad scale cannot exclude focusing on its psychological effects.

She uses the analogy of developing vaccines for COVID-19, noting that while there was great effort to create and distribute the vaccine, very little was done to address the psychological aspects of vaccine hesitancy.

“Many people are aware of the changes we need to make in how we live and work regarding energy use and consumption to address climate change, but I don’t think people are as aware of the psychological impact,” Sinatra says. “We need to prepare for the massive displacement of people, changes in working and living lifestyles, and how we’re going to adapt psychologically as well as physically.”

Wändi Bruine De Bruin, Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science, who has joint appointments at USC Dornsife and the USC Price School of Public Policy, notes that the APA report is in line with other work USC Dornsife is doing aimed at helping people change their climate-harming ways.

“Psychologists are trained to conduct carefully crafted research and test theories of what drives behavior change,” Bruine De Bruin says. “If you apply psychology to realworld problems, that can be very powerful.”

IMAGE SOURCE: IS TOCK /SIMON SK AFAR

59%

Portion of L.A. County residents who say their next car is likely to be electric or hybrid.

Rejecting Climate Change Fatalism

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Spotlight

Winning Arguments

Trojan Debate Squad partners persevere through Zoom era to win USC’s biggest title in 30 years.

D E B AT E T E A M P H O T O BY G U S R U E L A S / U S C ; S C H I Z O P H R E N I A I M AG E BY Y U N I K AY; D H A R A N I P H O T O C O U R T E S T Y O F A M M A R D H A R A N I

USC’s recent debating dominance in the Texas Open, a national debate tournament hosted by the University of Texas at Austin, was the biggest win for the Trojan Debate Squad in at least 30 years.

It was especially sweet for debate partners Julian Kuffour and Kevin Sun, who brought home the victory in their final tournament together after surmounting the challenges of Zoom debates for the last two years.

“Debate is a partner activity, and it’s very difficult to communicate with your partner when I’m in Kansas and he’s in California, and we’re debating on Zoom,” said Kuffour, a senior majoring in law, history and culture at USC Dornsife. “We had to text a lot and learn how to communicate nonverbally and learn each other’s patterns.”

But Kuffour and Sun, a junior computer science major at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, are seasoned competitors who spent the last three years joining forces to debate everything from space collaboration to antitrust laws.

They were able to adjust to the challenges of the Zoom era and weren’t afraid to put in extra hours to prepare.

After a year perfecting every argument both for and against monopolies, the USC team competed in 22 hours of elimination rounds the weekend before the final debate.

Nearly three dozen teams were winnowed down to USC and University of Michigan, the defending champions.

Kuffour and Sun’s historic win — 2 to 1 for USC — was also the culmination of their three years as debate partners, and was Kuffour’s final debate as a Trojan.

“It was a relief to win,” Kuffour said. “There are no words to describe the importance of the win for my career, for Kevin’s career and for the team.” —A.B.

Schizophrenia Source?

Study of a mysterious brain protein points to a possible source of the psychiatric disorder.

AMMAR DHARANI ’23 NEUROSCIENCE AND HISTORY

The dentate gyrus appears as a thick, mostly yellow, C-shaped body at center-left in this cross section of a rat hippocampus.

Schizophrenia affects about 20 million people around the globe. USC Dornsife scientists recently identified a specific location in the brain where schizophrenia may originate, a breakthrough that could help identify those at risk and lead to new diagnostic, preventive and treatment measures.

USC Dornsife scientists led by Bruce Herring, assistant professor of biological sciences, studied a protein called synapse-associated protein 97, or SAP97, which is found in neurons in the brain. The normal function of SAP97 — what it does and where it does it — has remained a mystery for years. At the same time, research has shown that mutations that inhibit SAP97 are linked to a large increase in the risk of developing schizophrenia.

SAP97 belongs to a family of proteins that regulate glutamatergic signaling — communication between neurons through the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate — and influence how memories are created and stored. Until now, experiements have failed to show that SAP97 plays any significant part in regulating glutamatergic signaling in the brain.

So, Herring chose to look at a different region of the brain, called the dentate gyrus. Studying rats with mutated SAP97, the researchers looked for changes in activity in the dentate gyrus. They found them.

Neurons in the dentate gyrus with reduced SAP97 function showed extremely large increases in glutamatergic signaling. This increase suggests SAP97 normally helps dampen glutamatergic signaling within the dentate gyrus. Also, these large increases produced symptoms of schizophrenia.

The results are the first to confirm where in the brain SAP97 is active and to directly link alterations in dentate gyrus function to the development of schizophrenia.

“Our study reveals where SAP97 functions in the brain and shows exactly what schizophrenia-associated mutations in this protein do to neurons,” said Herring. —D.S.J.

“Neuroscience could be used to approach fundamental philosophical questions and societal issues involving free will, altruism and political polarization.”

The recent winner of a soughtafter scholarship from the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, neuroscience major Ammar Dharani sees his work as being at the crossroads of several fields that can help advance medicine.

Neuroscience lies at the intersection of biology, psychology, philosophy and even history, he says, and studying the workings of the brain is useful as a context for understanding many of the larger issues in medicine and society.

In fact, during his sophomore year, Dharani added a history minor to his studies because, he says, it aids his scientific research, enabling him to “imagine alternative ways that people have understood the world.”

Dharini’s research at USC Dornsife aims to track the structural and connectivity changes following traumatic brain injury and how these alterations may lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

“I am most interested in mapping the biological basis of complex behaviors and how they may be altered in neuropsychological disorders,” he says. —M.M.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 11

ACA DE M Y I N T H E P U B L I C S Q U A R E

Public Exchange Explained TM

Today’s way of life would not exist without the contributions of creative scholars pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

Public Exchange™, an initiative headquartered at USC Dornsife, is designed to reinvigorate collaboration between the university research community and public and private sector leaders.

Conceived by USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller, Public Exchange officially launched in 2020. The first-of-its-kind office streamlines access to subject experts, enabling partners beyond the university to tap a dizzying range of expertise when grappling with complex problems — in a way that’s easy to navigate and affordable.

“Public Exchange provides the connective tissue that not only identifies appropriate expertise within the university to solve a particular problem, but also takes care of the contracts, project management and other hurdles that have traditionally made collaboration with researchers challenging,” Miller says.

VISION INTO ACTION Miller’s experience serving as chief science officer to the NYPD for two years while she was an experimental astrophysicist at Columbia University gave her the idea for a new way of bringing academic expertise to bear on practical problems. But it wasn’t until 2016, when she was appointed dean of USC Dornsife, that she was able to put her vision into action.

“The most relevant challenges affecting society are tremendously complex,” Miller says. “In addition to scientific innovation, research universities can provide insights from fields such as history, psychology, political science, economics and spatial science.”

12

WHAT IS PUBLIC EXCHANGETM?

We connect our partners with USC researchers.

We make it simple and fast to access deep expertise across many fields.

We define the scope and keep the project on track. publicexchange.usc.edu

FUTURE OF CITIES USC URBAN TREES INITIATIVE

90,000+ The number of trees the city of Los Angeles aims to plant citywide under L.A.’s Green New Deal.

Led by Public ExchangeTM, the USC Urban Trees Initiative is a partnership between USC Dornsife and the city of Los Angeles that provides a science-based approach to guide the growth of an urban forest of shade trees in communities vulnerable to heat waves and air pollution in a warming global climate.

“The data generated by our team will provide a detailed scientific road map to help the city and the community plant an urban forest that maximizes benefits to our environment and human health,” says Kate Weber, director of Public Exchange.

+

PUBLIC HEALTH THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON FOOD INSECURITY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY Under a strategic partnership with the Los Angeles County Emergency Food Security Branch, Public ExchangeTM assembled a team of researchers to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food insecurity in Los Angeles County.

>1 IN 4 +

low-income households remained food insecure in 2021, and racial and gender inequalities in food security persist.

+

Public ExchangeTM also partnered with Yelp to integrate novel data sources and paint a better picture of the resiliency and failures of the local food system in L.A. County.

17%

The increase in food outlet closures during the pandemic, revealed by Yelp data. The impact of closures in under-resourced neighborhoods could be detrimental to food and nutrition security levels.

ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF CLIMATE CHANGE TERMINOLOGY In partnership with the United Nations Foundation, Public ExchangeTM assembled a team of behavioral scientists and qualitative interviewers to determine how well non-scientists understand climate change terminology.

Study participants were asked to rate how easy or hard it was to understand eight terms drawn from publicly available reports written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. People thought many of the terms were too complex and did not always understand them in the context of climate change.

“Scientists need to replace jargon with everyday language to be understood by a lay audience,” says Wändi Bruine de Bruin, the study’s lead author and Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Sciences at USC Dornsife and USC Price School of Public Policy. “In several cases, the respondents proposed simple, elegant alternatives to existing language. It reminded us that, even though climate change may be a complex issue, there is no need to make it even more complex by using complicated words.”

+

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

Since most organizations trying to create positive social impact lack a dedicated research team, she believes that universities are an obvious, albeit often untapped, resource. Their unique approach to problem-solving also differs from those taken by large consulting firms. Academic researchers, by nature of their rigorous training, are adept at defining research questions, challenging assumptions and interpreting information.

And they’re at the forefront of new knowledge. Leading experts in their fields, scholars are uniquely qualified to provide insights about where technology or trends are headed well into the future.

R E D U C I N G W A S T E P H O T O B Y M A U R I C E R O P E R ; M O R E Y P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F Z U M A P R E S S , I N C .I M / AG L AE M S YB YS TDOECNKN PI SH LOAT N O

SOLVING COMPLEX PROBLEMS Miller recruited Kate Weber, a leader at the United States Agency for International Development, to serve as the inaugural executive director of Public Exchange.

“Our partners in the public and private sectors are facing so many complex questions, from how to design cities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to making public transit more accessible,” Weber notes. “Our researchers have the deep expertise to dig into these problems and provide real solutions.”

Public Exchange has already received widespread attention in Southern California and is generating growing awareness on the national and global stage.

Miller is enthusiastic that her idea could spread to other research universities.

“Imagine how much collective impact can be made when every other university adopts our model,” Miller says. “Tens of thousands of faculty experts around the country engaged in the same way, helping to solve problems and driving progress.” —S.K.

Reducing Waste

Researchers aim to replace plastics and batteries with more sustainable, degradable resources for the future.

studies. She advises consumers to choose nonplastic alternatives and opt for clothing made with natural fibres.

“This problem will also require larger scale changes only possible through new policies and regulations, so lobbying your representatives to support plastic source reduction legislation is key,” she says. —P.M.

Riding the Wave

USC Dornsife alumnus created a surf device that became a smash hit with beachgoers.

USC Dornsife scientists are developing biodegradable replacement materials to end global dependency on plastic and come up with more sustainable alternatives for fuel sources and solar cells.

Skyscrapers’ limited roof space doesn’t offer enough room for solar panels to generate sufficient power to achieve zero carbon using current silicon solar technology. Covering the sides of the building with solar panels could produce enough electricity, but silicon can’t be made transparent — a major drawback as the panels would block natural light.

Mark Thompson, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering and materials science, is working with collaborators at the University of Michigan on a cutting-edge, organic-based solar cell window coating that’s 50% transparent and still 10% efficient. “It’s a promising solution to achieve zero carbon,” says Thompson, Ray R. Irani, Chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Chair in Chemistry.

Hydrogen-fueled cars promise zero greenhouse emissions with water as the sole byproduct. However, a lack of infrastructure has limited widescale adoption of this alternative fuel source.

One major challenge in California is the lack of hydrogen available between Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to Travis Williams, professor of chemistry. Williams is developing new technology using catalysis to store hydrogen in a liquid carrier, and then release it onsite.

“We’ve got a demo fuel unit which we’re developing — you could probably fill a little golf cart with it, but the proof of concept is there,” he says.

Motivated by the destructive accumulation of plastics in the oceans, Megan Fieser, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Chemistry, is unlocking safe, environmentally friendly ways to break down plastics and other non-biodegradable materials using catalysts.

“Not only can we successfully recycle these plastics, but we can potentially create the plastic into a higher value product,” she says.

Microplastics have emerged as a concerning pollutant of coastal California waters.

“The best way to reduce the impact of plastics in L.A.’s waters is to prevent the use of plastics in the first place,” says Jill Sohm, associate professor (teaching) of environmental

Next time you catch a wave, spare a thought for the inventor of the ubiquitous Boogie board: USC Dornsife alumnus Tom Morey ’57.

Surfer, musician and inventor extraordinaire, Morey was born in 1935. Growing up in Laguna Beach, California, he quickly became an avid bodysurfer, riding waves on his father’s back at age 8 and winning second place in a paddleboard competition as a preteen.

Morey’s bachelor’s degree in mathematics from USC Dornsife, combined with knowledge from several engineering and manufacturing jobs, helped him invent a steady stream of unusual surfing-related items. None captured the public’s imagination quite like the Boogie.

The squat foam board revolutionized the surfing industry in the 1970s, turning the tricky task of wave riding into an accessible sport for the beachgoing masses. Millions of boards based on Morey’s original design have been sold, creating one of the world’s most popular watersports and spawning professional competitions.

Morey also hosted the Tom Morey Invitational Nose Riding Championships in Ventura, generally recognized as the world’s first professional surfing contest.

In 2005, he earned a star on the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, California, and was inducted into the Surfing Hall of Fame.

A decade later, Morey, who died last year on Oct. 14 at age 86, was still at it. At age 81, he was helping with a decades-long project to honor surfboard shapers by carving ancient sequoia wood into their trademark shapes. He then used a hot branding iron to char his name into the finegrained redwood, a symbol of his lasting imprint on the surfing world. — E.L.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 13

Our World FACULTY/STUDENTS Ukraine, Russia

Breaking Down the Conflict Faculty discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This spring, many Americans watching distressing images of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wanted answers. Why is Russia waging war on Ukraine? And how can other countries help?

To examine the issues at stake, the USC Global Policy Institute — a student-run foreign affairs think tank and education institute — teamed up with USC Dornsife’s Department of Political Science and International Relations, Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures to present three crisis briefings on the situation in Ukraine.

Thomas Seifrid, professor of Slavic languages and literatures, explained that although many countries have accepted Ukraine as an independent state since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Vladimir Putin and other Russians have continually regarded the country as culturally, historically and geographically tied to the former USSR. “Putin has now made a clear decision to go for it at all costs, which is why this fear of a Grozny-like outcome is well-founded,” said Robert English, associate professor of international relations, Slavic languages and literatures, and environmental studies, referring to the damage Putin inflicted on Chechnya when the republic sought independence in the 1990s.

The experts agreed that sanctioning Russia and opening borders to Ukrainian refugees are good first steps in terms of countermeasures, but that time will tell whether these initiatives will prove sufficient. —M.M.

For years, Steve Swerdlow, associate professor of the practice of political science and international relations at USC Dornsife and a human rights lawyer, has been researching and advocating for the release of political and religious prisoners in many former Soviet states, including Uzbekistan. Now, he is giving his students an insight into human rights work through his international relations courses by providing them with profiles of prisoners and encouraging students to investigate their cases.

“There are thousands of nameless, faceless religious prisoners out there who we know were largely innocent and not connected to terrorism,” he says. “They need someone to advocate for them.”

Swerdlow recently presented a report to Congress on the state of religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. He hopes that his classes will impart to students the necessity of human rights work.

“My students are the next generation of human rights defenders,” says Swerdlow. “I hope these experiences will inspire them to fight for an end to the phenomenon of the political prisoner, or at least to ensure that political prisoners around the world will always have an advocate.” —M.M.

ALUMNUS California The indigenous Patwin people have lived in California for more than 1,500 years, but after decades of forced assimilation, their language is nearly extinct. Thanks to Lewis Lawyer ’05, the Patwin language finally has its first grammar book.

Lawyer’s love of linguistics was first sparked in an undergraduate class at USC Dornsife.

It inspired him to switch from jazz studies to a linguistics and music major.

While working on his PhD at the University of California, Davis, Lawyer realized his dissertation topic felt too esoteric. “I really wanted to take all these years of linguistics training that started at USC Dornsife and write something that people could actually use,” says Lawyer.

He reached out to the UC Davis Native American Studies Department and discovered that the university was situated on the site of a former Patwin village.

The tribe’s language was severely endangered and tribe members were working to revitalize it.

Using archival records, Lawyer wrote the first book on Patwin grammar. It’s work that reflects his belief in the power of linguistics, first sparked at USC Dornsife.

“Language is an essential part of the cultural fiber of a people,” says Lawyer. —M.C.

IMAGE SOURCE: ISTOCK

14

FACULTY/STUDENTS Uzbekistan, Worldwide

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

ALUMNUS/FACULTY Southwestern Los Angeles County

Giving Poetry a Home

IMAGE SOURCE: © CAN STOCK PHOTO / HOFMEESTER

The first poetry library in the state of California exists today thanks to the efforts of alumnus Hiram Sims.

Located in a small building in Inglewood, the Sims Library of Poetry opened in 2020 and features 7,250 books of poetry, several computers with internet access and a small, private writing room.

“I wanted to give poetry a home, a space where people from the neighborhood could come to read and write, to think,” says Sims, who graduated from USC Dornsife with a bachelor’s degree in English in 2005 and a master’s degree in professional writing in 2007.

Most of the books in the library are by poets of color to reflect the diversity of the neighborhood.

Sims wants the library to serve as a neighborhood resource — a place for community and creativity.

His idea for a poetry library came while teaching lowerincome students who couldn’t find poetry books at local libraries.

“So, I decided to put 80 of my own books in a suitcase and brought it to class every week,” Sims says. “Students brought a book in and took one out.”

When one student referred to the bookbag as the “Sims Library,” the idea was born.

An adjunct assistant professor of the practice of English at USC Dornsife, Sims is now working on expanding programs at his library, including after-school and children’s workshops. —M.M.

FACULTY Bolivia Two indigenous groups in the Bolivian Amazon have among the lowest rates of dementia in the world, a new study led by USC Dornsife’s Margaret Gatz has revealed.

The international team of researchers found that only about 1% of older Tsimane and Moseten people suffer from dementia.

In contrast, 11% of people age 65 and older living in the United States have dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

The research adds to evidence that healthier, preindustrial lifestyles may hold clues to preventing Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

“Something about the preindustrial subsistence lifestyle appears to protect older Tsimane and Moseten from dementia,” says Gatz, professor of psychology.

Researchers used computed tomography (CT) brain scan images, cognitive and neurological assessments and culturally appropriate questionnaires to diagnose dementia and cognitive impairment among the Tsimane and Moseten.

The roughly 17,000 Tsimane remain physically very active throughout their lifespans as they fish, hunt and farm with hand tools and gather food from the forest. The 3,000 Moseten also reside in rural villages and engage in subsistence agricultural work.

Unlike the more isolated Tsimane, they live closer to towns and have schools, access to clean water and medical services, and are more likely to be literate.

Higher rates of dementia among indigenous populations in other parts of the world may be due to more contact with — and adoption of the lifestyles of — their nonindigenous neighbors, the researchers said. —J.M.

ALUMNA India, Middle East, North Africa Madina Zermeño, a Muslim who is Latina and Filipina, draws on her multifaceted identity to promote societal change.

Zermeño, who graduated this year, majored in political science at USC Dornsife.

Her passion lies in education, equity and access — identifying ways American youth can use education as a tool to break societal patterns that have adversely affected minority groups.

She has volunteered abroad several times. She spent winter break of her sophmore year in Rajasthan, India, where she tutored children in the impoverished Dalit community. She says that her experience revealed many similarities between the historical factors preventing the Dalit community and United States minority groups from emerging from poverty or climbing the social ladder.

She spent spring semester of her sophmore year interning for the nonprofit Jossour Forum des Femmes Marocaines. Founded and led by women, the organization works on behalf of women and youth in the Middle East and Northern Africa region.

Zermeño hopes to attend law school and become either a civil rights attorney or a criminal defense lawyer. Her ambition “comes from a love and a passion for societal change,” she says. —M.D. Spring / Summer 2022 | 15

Simply Complex

The formula is simple, but H2O is one of the most remarkable substances in the universe.

By Darrin S. Joy

It’s something of an enigma: a compound composed of just two chemical elements, one of which is the simplest in the known universe. A pair of hydrogen atoms, holding firmly to a single oxygen atom, create a deceptively minimalist arrangement that belies its enormous versatility and importance.

The value of water, as a resource, is commonly understood. Without a steady supply, civilization as we know it wouldn’t exist.

But as a substance — as a molecule — water tends to elude most people’s sense of wonder. Which is too bad, really, because it’s quite remarkable.

SHAPED AND BONDED

The basic molecular formula for water, H₂O, suggests a simple structure of three atoms in a straight line. But the physical properties of the three atoms force another arrangement — a “V” shape with oxygen at the point.

This nonlinear shape transforms water into a remarkable substance with astounding abilities.

The “V” shape arises from the arrangement of electrons in the molecule, which causes an imbalance in electrical charge, with the oxygen point of the “V” slightly more negative than the opposite end near the hydrogen atoms.

This slight separation means the water molecules are polarized — one pole positive and the other negative.

Polarity of electrical charge is at the root of water’s fascinating properties. The slightly negative end of one water molecule attracts the slightly positive end of another and vice versa in what scientists call hydrogen bonding.

Hydrogen bonds between water molecules are exceptionally strong, giving them a propensity to cling to each other, a behavior that manifests most commonly as surface tension. For instance, water in a container that is filled to the brim appears to bulge out of the vessel in a convex shape when viewed from the side due to surface tension.

16

And some creatures, such as water striders, can take advantage of surface tension to skim across the surface of ponds.

Hydrogen bonds also enable water to adhere to foreign substances. This adhesive quality enables plants to draw water from the ground, through their roots and up to the tips of their leaves, defying gravity’s pull.

The polar nature of water and its resulting shape cause it to be lighter as a solid than as a liquid. That’s because the molecular Vs form airy crystal structures as they freeze, making ice less dense than its fluid form. So, ice floats on rivers and lakes, forming a shield against the cold air above and keeping the water below from freezing, which allows fish and other aquatic species to survive in colder climes.

Water’s hydrogen bonding also results in another critical characteristic — a higher than expected boiling point, explains Jessica Parr, professor (teaching) of chemistry.

Parr earned her PhD in chemistry at USC Dornsife in 2007 and has taught general chemistry to undergraduates ever since. Her dissertation research centered on understanding how hydrogen bonds react under exposure to intense light.

“If water wasn’t capable of such strong hydrogen bonding, it would boil at minus 200 degrees Celsius,” Parr explains, far below its actual freezing point of 0 degrees Celsius. That means it would exist on Earth by and large as a gas, making life as we know it impossible. Instead, our planet sloshes with water, about 366 million-billion gallons in all.

A UNIVERSAL SOLVENT

Water’s polar nature also makes it an exceptional solvent, capable of dissolving a wide variety of substances.

“We refer to it as the ‘universal solvent’ because it can dissolve, not everything, but so much stuff,” Parr says. “A lot IL L U S T R AT I O N BY T R AC I DA B E R KO F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

of other molecules are choosy about what they interact with and how they work together, but water will interact with just about anything.”

For example, its positive and negative centers attract and easily coax apart charged atoms, called ions, that make up salts such as sodium chloride, commonly used in cooking. The positively charged sodium and negatively charged chloride atoms find a comfortable home drifting among water’s polarized molecules.

But water can also dissolve substances that aren’t composed of ions, such as sugars. Rather than separating individual atoms of a sugar molecule, however, water molecules work their way between each sugar molecule, finding lightly charged parts to hydrogen bond with. This loosens the connections between the sugar molecules, drawing them away from one another and eventually into a solution.

“As long as there’s one atom present that makes the other molecule want to interact with water, water will do that,” Parr says.

IT GETS WEIRD

Water doesn’t always behave as expected. While it most often transitions from solid (ice) to liquid to gas (steam or vapor) and vice versa as its temperature rises and falls, it can make the leap straight from ice to vapor under the right conditions.

“If you’ve ever noticed that your ice cubes get smaller over time, it’s because they’re sublimating in your freezer — the ice turns straight into a gas,” explains Parr. This sublimation is due to the low humidity within the freezer, which allows a few water molecules to escape from the ice into the air without melting first.

In the reverse process, called deposition, gaseous water suddenly freezes without ever becoming liquid. This is how snow forms. And when conditions are right, snow may skip the melting stage and sublimate right back into the

atmosphere, a particular conundrum for drought-prone areas such as California, which rely on melting snowpack as a water source.

But water can be even weirder.

“Ice has lots of different crystal forms, but it can also exist in a form that resembles glass — an amorphous solid that is somewhere between liquid and solid and which can still flow,” Parr says. When water molecules coalesce at very low temperatures and pressures — think outer space — the resulting ice also can behave like glass, Parr says. Scientists suspect this may be among the most common forms of water in the universe.

THE MYSTERY AND WONDER CONTINUE

Despite its prevalence in the universe and on Earth, and humans’ long familiarity with it, water continues to surprise.

Scientists recently discovered a form called “superionic ice.” Existing at extremely high pressure, such as in the core of planets, it appears to play a role in maintaining Earth’s magnetic fields.

And though water in pure form is not an electrical conductor, it behaves unexpectedly when exposed to an electric field. USC Dornsife’s Alexander Benderskii, associate professor of chemistry, and Stephen Cronin of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering recently found that water molecules near an electrode line up differently than those farther away.

“We were able to see how the molecules interacted with the electric field in a way no one had previously understood,” Benderskii said. The finding could change how chemists control reactions, including processes for making medicines and for purifying water for drinking.

As researchers continue to explore this versatile, unexpected substance, potentially revealing more strange characteristics, water may just prove to be the most complex simple molecule in the universe.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 17

18

The history of Los Angeles is inextricably intertwined with the city’s insatiable thirst for the water it desperately needed to sustain its growth. The early 20th-century “Water Wars” that made L.A. possible also mired the city in a shadowy saga of corruption and lies that inspired one of the most celebrated noir movies of all time: Chinatown.

By Meredith McGroarty

In Los Angeles, the historians know the truth: The water here is anything but clean.

Like many areas with relatively high temperatures and paltry precipitation, water has always been a matter of life and death for L.A., a city that sits on a semi-arid coastal plain with desert on three sides and the Pacific Ocean on the fourth. The city resorted to drastic, at times deeply unethical — and occasionally even criminal — means to secure the vital resource that enabled it to grow into a major world metropolis.

“Water invites all kinds of shenanigans in the American West. It invites all kinds of deals: smoke-filled room deals, quiet deals, corrupt deals. And people need to know these histories,” says William Deverell, professor of history, spatial sciences and environmental studies at USC Dornsife.

The conflicts over water were waged on two fronts.

There was the freshwater battle that involved, among other skirmishes, the struggle over procuring drinking water and irrigation. And there was the saltwater battle, involving the development of the Port of Los Angeles and control over its lucrative shipping and trade potential.

DARK HARBOR

If you watch enough television and movies, you might get the impression that nothing good ever happens down at the docks. Of course, that’s not true, but thanks to its depictions in popular culture, from On the Waterfront to The Wire, the American port has gained a reputation as a place associated with graft, dead bodies and illegally trafficked goods. And the Port of Los Angeles is no exception — from its origins as a site of some highly questionable land-grabbing to its lowest point in the 1960s, when bribery scandals and the mysterious death of its board president blackened its reputation.

The history of the port, located in San Pedro Bay, is the tale of a muddy tideflat that during the course of the 20th century grew to become the largest shipping container port in the Western Hemisphere. Alumna and former executive director of the port Geraldine Knatz chronicles the battle to control the waterfront in her book Port of Los Angeles: Conflict, Commerce, and the Fight for Control (Angel City Press and the HuntingtonUSC Institute on California and the West, 2019).

“For L.A. to become an important city it needed a harbor, and so it was the water’s edge, what we call ‘the Tidelands,’ that was the focus of the struggle,” says

Knatz, who holds a joint appointment as professor of the practice of policy and engineering at USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Knatz earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering from USC Viterbi in 1977 and a doctorate in biological sciences from USC Dornsife in 1979. Her book traces the port’s history, from the 1890s, when several railway barons saw its potential to yield lucrative freight shipping contracts, to its dominant role today. Dubbed “America’s Port,” the Port of Los Angeles now occupies 7,500 acres of land and water along 43 miles of waterfront.

In the late 19th century, Southern Pacific Railroad agreed to link L.A. to its transcontinental railway in exchange for a monopoly on transporting goods from the port to the city, a move that brought an influx of tourism and business to the fledgling town. But around the turn of the 20th century, a dispute arose as to whether the state of California had been authorized to sell the land around the harbor to private individuals and companies, including Southern Pacific. Thomas Gibbon, a member of the first Board of Harbor Commissioners for the port, argued it had not. He used his position — as well as his media muscle as publisher of the Los Angeles Daily Herald — to fight for the city’s right to reclaim the land in order to expand the port.

“The city of L.A. was aggressive, ruthless,” Knatz says.

“They would blackball people who did business with the private property owners and tried to undermine those businesses because, from the city’s perspective, the property should be in public ownership. When it was privately owned, the city got no rent.”

After gaining control of the surrounding land, the city expanded the port to meet the needs of a growing nation.

Although whispers of corruption and underhand dealings plagued its rise in the early 20th century, it was in the ’60s that the Port of Los Angeles “really hit rock bottom,” Knatz says.

“There was a scandal over leasing — without competitive bids — a large portion of the port’s Terminal Island for construction of a World Trade Center to a developer whose only assets were liens against his failed projects,” Knatz says. “Los Angeles Harbor commissioners were indicted, and in 1967, the Harbor Commission president was discovered floating facedown in the main channel.

No evidence of foul play or suicide was found, however, and his death was ruled an accident.”

Spring / Summer 2022 | 19

A TALE OF THREE RIVERS

IS ALSO THE TALE OF THREE RIVERS. THE STORIES OF THESE RIVERS — THE LOS ANGELES, THE OWENS AND THE COLORADO — ARE INTERWOVEN WITH THE FABRIC OF THE CITY’S HISTORY.

”

If L.A.’s battles to control its waterfront were comparable to the plot of a noir movie, then so were the city’s legendary struggles to obtain sufficient freshwater to secure its expansion.

“The tale of L.A. is also the tale of three rivers,” says Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. “The stories of these rivers — the Los Angeles, the Owens and the Colorado — are interwoven with the fabric of the city’s history.”

The rivers also serve as a handy yardstick to measure the city’s expansion, Deverell notes. The Los Angeles River, the smallest, was adequate for a small pioneer town but quickly proved insufficient for the city’s aspirations.

“It supplied the city’s fresh water needs until about 1900, but it was a temperamental little river that was prone to flooding,” Deverell says. By the early 20th century, the city had decided to solve the problem by creating a concrete channel that whisked water from the mountains to the ocean as speedily as possible.

“We wouldn’t do that quite the same way today, because we’d be worried about sending all that water out to the ocean without trying to capture it. But back then they didn’t think that way,” Deverell says.

The Owens River powered the city’s rise in the early 20th century. The population of L.A. more than doubled in size from 1920–29, reaching 1.2 million by 1930. This dramatic population explosion prompted local officials to turn to another, larger source of water: the Colorado River. That aqueduct was completed in 1939.

“L.A.’s history with water is that of chasing a bigger river each time,” Deverell says. “The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is dependent on the Colorado River, now has about 19 million customers. It’s an absolutely gargantuan water delivery, storage and distribution system.”

But it was the scurrilous behavior involved in the pillaging of the Owens River to feed the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the first decades of the 20th century that has been immortalized in film. It provided the inspiration for Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir masterpiece Chinatown, acclaimed as one of the best films ever made about L.A. “LOS ANGELES IS DYING OF THIRST!”

This doomsday warning is discovered by private eye Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) in an early scene in the movie, when he returns to his car after spying on Hollis Mulwray, the fictional chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), and finds a note tucked under his windshield wiper. It prophesizes drought and ruin for the citizens of the city.

A classic noir movie, Chinatown features all the usual suspects, including a femme fatale, as well as the familiar tropes of the genre: corruption, murder, a gumshoe and a dark secret. Though it is set in the 1930s (an artistic decision to showcase that era’s visually striking cars and clothing), the movie’s central theme has its roots in the real-life scandal that took place decades earlier when a rapidly expanding L.A. needed to secure more water to power its industries and provide for its burgeoning population.

“The conflict in the film, as in real life, is about water being taken away from the Owens Valley to be used in L.A.,” says University Professor Leo Braudy, Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature.

As early as the late 19th century, L.A. was experiencing growing pains as it found its expansion hampered by a lack 20

of water. In 1905, LADWP Chief Engineer William Mulholland, Mulwray’s real-life counterpart, oversaw the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which diverted water to L.A. from the Owens Valley, more than 190 miles north of the city.

The rights to the water and land in the valley had been acquired through some less than ethical maneuvers on the part of L.A. officials and other investors. The aqueduct, which was completed in 1913, ended up sucking the valley dry, devastating the lives of its residents, who were mostly farmers and ranchers. Yet the aqueduct project was expanded several times over the following decades.

“Basically, L.A. sticks a giant straw in the Owens River and sucks the water down to L.A.,” Deverell says. “Then it puts another straw in it, and another. The Owens Lake dries up, and not only have the people lost their water but the dust in the lake bed is kicked up and gets into the air, causing a lot of health problems for residents.”

THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-NOTS

In both L.A.’s saltwater and freshwater battles, the city’s politicians exhibited a ruthless single-mindedness that left many casualties in its wake — both human and environmental. In the early 20th century, the Owens Valley was transformed from fertile farming land into a parched, arid region where little would grow. Starved of water, local farms and ranches failed. Since the mid-20th century, air pollution from ships and cargo trucks has plagued neighborhoods around the Port of Los Angeles, with health consequences for local residents and workers.

An early scene in Chinatown warns of the humanitarian costs, showing L.A. officials gathered at a town hall meeting to discuss a water project. An angry farmer walks down the center aisle with his sheep, yelling at the bureaucrats that he no longer has enough water for his livestock and asking what they plan to do to help him. He is quickly shooed out of the building.

“Owens Valley is a situation where big, brawny L.A. decided they would push around a small community,” Deverell says. “And before L.A. came, white Americans had seized the land from the Paiute Indians. So, there’s this recurring story of the powerful snatching up water resources.”

Braudy, professor of English and art history, agrees, noting that L.A.’s so-called “Water Wars” illustrate the city’s loss of innocence, foreshadowing its rapid rise to become a major metropolis with all the power, corruption and lies that entailed.

He points to one particularly symbolic scene in Chinatown that encapsulates the growing divisions in class and privilege in the city. After the disrupted town hall meeting during which the embattled farmer’s pleas for water for his livestock are dismissed, Gittes drives to Mulwray’s house in Pasadena.

The shot pans out as his car enters the long driveway, flanked on either side by a carpet of bright green grass. Gittes walks past a man hosing down one of Mulwray’s cars to reach the backyard, where well-tended plants and trees surround a rock pool with a running waterfall.

“We need to grapple with the fact that water is obviously critical to our survival, but it invites people who want to monopolize water resources,” Deverell says. “We have to make sure that the decisions we make about water in the 21st century are as democratically derived as possible. We’ve got to push water out of its dark past in L.A. and into the sunshine.”

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

Spring / Summer 2022 | 21

Water Works

USC Dornsife scholars make a splash as they address challenges — from local to global — centered around water.

Compiled by Margaret Crable and Darrin S. Joy

Original stories by Michelle Boston, Emily Gersema, Nick Neumann, Gary Polakovic and Kathryn Royster

22

Water is the great primordial home; the incubator of all life on the planet. It has been and continues to be the single most important resource for all known living things.

So, it’s not surprising that water is the focal point of an array of efforts by USC Dornsife researchers, students and alumni to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. From building resilience in farmed marine species to charting the ocean floor to ensuring homeless Angelenos get the water they need to survive, USC Dornsife scholars are finding innovative ways to quench the world’s thirst for solutions.

STRONGER MUSSELS

In March, USC President Carol L. Folt cut the ribbon at the opening of USC Dornsife’s Nuzhdin Lab in San Pedro, California.

The lab focuses on regenerative aquaculture — the breeding, rearing and harvesting of macroalgae and shellfish — that can help produce seafood resilient to climate change. It also centers on commercializing new green technologies such as biofuels, made from kelp, that could reduce fossil fuel demand.

“Our research has the potential to reduce global warming, produce biofuels from the ocean, restore kelp populations, and provide a natural solution for the security of the California shoreline,” says Sergey Nuzhdin, professor of biological sciences.

Nuzhdin started with a handful of tanks on USC’s University Park campus in 2007. Now he has 6,000 square feet of laboratory space at Altasea, the West Coast’s largest center for researching the development of ocean resources.

PhD student Jordan Chancellor is already working at AltaSea, growing mussels and oysters under stressful conditions to identify the genes that make them resilient to the impacts of climate change or pollution.

Researchers at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies based at USC Dornsife may have unlocked kelp’s potential as a major biofuel source.

Raising and lowering the kelp on a “kelp elevator” dramatically accelerates its growth, demonstrating the potential for mass-produced seaweed to power vehicles with biofuel harvested from the ocean.

QUENCHING THIRST

In 2020, Catherine Cummings ’21, then a law, history and culture major at USC Dornsife, spent an afternoon handing out burritos to people experiencing homelessness in downtown Los Angeles. Frequently they also asked her for water.

Cummings learned there were few public water fountains downtown and many of the unhoused didn’t have money to buy water from stores. The COVID-19 pandemic had also closed the cafes where many had turned for a free drink.

Cummings and Kate Montanez ’20, who majored in environmental studies and political science at USC Dornsife, and Aria Cataño ’20, who majored in public policy and law at USC Price School of Public Policy, founded Water Drop LA two years ago. The organization distributes 2,000 gallons of water to the unhoused from a church parking lot each week.

Hundreds of fellow USC students have volunteered for the cause, which is still going strong.

SEAFOOD SAVIOR

Dungeness crab meat and uni, the soft innards of sea urchins, are coveted seafood delicacies. They’re also big business in California — crabbing alone brings in up to $80 million a year. Both industries are threatened by climate change.

As oceans warm, the water becomes more acidic with less oxygen. This makes it harder for crabs and urchins to form their protective shells.

“There are ocean conditions so caustic that the animals’ shells are essentially liquified as soon as they form,” says Andrew Gracey, associate professor of biological sciences.

In research funded by USC Sea Grant, based at USC Dornsife, Gracey and Nina Bednarsek of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Program are finding out how the species are impacted by these conditions at their most vulnerable point of development, the larval stage.

If they can pinpoint the “tipping point” at which larvae fail to thrive, fishery managers will have more success monitoring the sea creatures’ health — and, hopefully, keeping our tables supplied with delicious and nutritious seafood.

UNCOVERING HISTORIC WATERWAYS

Much of the Los Angeles Basin’s original water pathways, from the once grand Los Angeles River to its seasonal arroyos, have been altered by concrete and rerouting.

In recent years, a movement to restore segments of the L.A. River to its original state, with a focus on preserving local ecology, have renewed interest in the basin’s natural ecological environment.

Researchers from a variety of institutions, including USC Dornsife, are working on a 3D map that draws from old aerial photos, indigenous knowledge and historic maps to synthesize the first complete model of the basin’s natural landscape, before urbanization.

Blue-line streams and contour lines from old maps, along with input from indigenous groups, help researchers like Beau MacDonald, a GIS project specialist at USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI), find out where water once flowed, pooled and flooded across the basin.

“Our research can inform thoughtful restoration efforts, map potential patterns of vegetation and allow us to better

Spring / Summer 2022 | 23

“The goal of our program is to open doors for students who otherwise may not have considered or pursued science, technology, engineering or math careers that involve scientific diving.”

understand human resource use,” says MacDonald, who is working on the project alongside fellow USC scholars John Wilson, professor of sociology, civil and environmental engineering, computer science, architecture and preventive medicine and director of SSI; Phillip Ethington, professor of history, political science and spatial sciences; and William Deverell, professor of history, spatial sciences and environmental studies and director of the HuntingtonUSC Institute on California and the West.

DIVERSIFYING THE WATERS

A large majority of professional divers are male and white and many are over the age of 40. A new program hosted by the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, based at USC Dornsife, aims to diversify the field of diving by providing training to people from historically marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds.

This summer, program participants will head to USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island, where they will receive training, mentoring and equipment. The program is designed to help participants work toward earning an American Academy of Underwater Sciences diving certification.

“Scientific diving has a lot of barriers to entry. The goal of our program is to open doors for students who otherwise may not have considered or pursued science, technology, engineering or math careers that involve scientific diving,” says John Heidelberg, director of the Wrigley Marine Science Center and professor of biological sciences and environmental studies.

The program is funded by an Ocean Exploration Education Mini-Grant from the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

IN UNCHARTED TERRITORY

There’s still so much we don’t know about our planet. The ocean covers some 70% of the Earth’s surface. But more than 80% of the ocean floor remains unexplored.

In October 2021, USC Dornsife alumnus Nick Foster, an environmental studies major who minored in GIS and sustainability science, boarded the E/V Nautilus to help change that. Foster was part of a small crew that spent 10 days sailing from California to Hawaii to map a portion of the ocean floor. The group worked around the clock, processing data in pairs. On breaks, Foster would sit on the ship’s deck, rocked by the waves and looking at the stars.

The excursion was led by the Ocean Exploration Trust, a nonprofit devoted to uncovering the ocean’s mysteries.

For Foster, a scuba diving enthusiast, it was the dream outcome for his educational journey.

“This experience has given me an actual physical connection to the mapping of the seafloor,” he says. “It’s something I learned about in school, and now I’m a part of it.”

CARBON CRUNCHERS

An international team of scientists led by researchers at USC Dornsife has found that the speed of carbon transfer in the ocean — the rate at which carbon dioxide moves from the atmosphere to the water — is influenced by the size and type of bacteria that latch onto the carbon particles.

The discovery sheds greater light on how carbon — including CO2 generated by cars and other human activities — moves from the atmosphere into the ocean and ultimately 24

makes its way into the deep ocean, says Naomi Levine, associate professor of biological sciences, quantitative and computational biology and Earth sciences.

“This is the first time that we’ve been able to build a model to predict ocean-scale carbon-cycle dynamics that account for these microscale processes that have been observed in the lab,” Levine says. “We show that the processes matter a lot.”

Healthy colonies of bacteria raise the likelihood that the carbon — released when these hungry hitchhiking bacteria munch on particles — will stay on the ocean’s surface and then return to the atmosphere.

Knowing which bacteria live in which ocean locations, and whether they’re thriving or not, could also help scientists better predict local rates of carbon transfer or release.

CLEANING HOUSE IN THE HARBOR

Santa Catalina Island’s Avalon Harbor, 22 miles off the Southern California coast, receives upward of a million tourists each year. Visitors enjoy kayaking, paddleboarding and other water-centric activities.

What’s not allowed in the harbor? Scuba diving — with a single exception.

Each year, divers flock to the bay and spend one day removing debris from the harbor during the annual Avalon Harbor Underwater Cleanup.

This year marked the event’s 40th undertaking, with USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, USC Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber and Catalina Conservation Divers co-hosting.

Nearly 100 volunteers catalogued more than 2,700 pieces of debris — totaling nearly 1.7 tons — taken from the harbor by divers, according to Avalon Environmental Services.

Participants in USC Dornsife’s Scientific Diving Program were among 561 divers who also freed nearly 130 creatures that were entangled with debris, including 18 crabs, 15 sea urchins, 10 brittle stars and three octopuses, according to event officials from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors’ PADI Aware Foundation. (For photographs of the event, see page 44.)

SPILL PATROL

Early last October, the United States Coast Guard received an alarming report: An oily sheen was floating on the water off Huntington Beach, California. By the following day, tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil had spilled from an offshore pipeline in the area, contaminating the surrounding waters and much of the Orange County coastline.

As officials and conservationists scrambled to respond to the spill, they leaned heavily on data supplied by USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies.

The institute is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Integrated Ocean Observing System, a 24/7 monitoring program that uses radar and other sensors to track ocean currents and the color of the water along the U.S. coastline.

The Wrigley Institute maintains six of the program’s high-frequency radar installations.

“The data we get goes directly into supporting the decision-making process,” says Wrigley Institute Project Manager Matthew Ragan.

“The oil is going to be on the surface, so wherever the current is going is where the oil is going to go,” he says.

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

Spring / Summer 2022 | 25

“The oil is going to be on the surface, so wherever the current is going is where the oil is going to go”

Officials use this data to decide which beaches to close and where to send boats to deploy booms, the floating barriers that corral the spilled oil.

According to Ragan, the Wrigley Institute’s radar data also delivers benefits beyond oil spill warnings. The Coast Guard uses the information in search-and-rescue operations, and the city of L.A. uses the data to help determine the safest times to perform maintenance on outfall pipes, where treated wastewater is discharged into the ocean. The information is also important for safely piloting large vessels to shore, tracking blooms of toxic marine algae that may make beachgoers and wildlife sick, and finding the source point of illegal dumping in the ocean.

FIXATED ON FIXATION

Nitrogen constitutes about 78% of the Earth’s atmosphere, where it exists mainly in its most stable form, a gas made of two atoms, or N2. A significant amount also resides in the oceans as dissolved nitrogen.

Most animals and plants can’t use N2. They need the nitrogen to be converted into a more biologically useful form through a process called nitrogen fixation. But only certain microorganisms can do that, and many of them live in marine environments.

The process is crucial to life on Earth, so understanding its role in the ocean and the organisms that perform it is essential, according to Doug Capone, professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife.

“The oceans are becoming an ever-increasing source of food for humanity, and nitrogen fixation is critical in maintaining many marine food webs,” says Capone, who holds the William and Julie Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies. His research includes studying how ocean microbes affect the movement of nitrogen through plants and animals and from land to sea to air and back.

A thorough understanding of the factors involved in nitrogen fixation in the oceans could help future generations safely and sustainably farm the seas, Capone says.

Capone co-wrote Marine Nitrogen Fixation (Springer, 2021), which summarizes the extensive research and current understanding of marine nitrogen fixation.

Primarily intended to help scientists and students as they advance the field of study, the book gives a detailed overview of topics such as which marine microorganisms are fixing nitrogen, where they live and what environmental factors — including human-caused changes such as ocean warming and acidification — affect microbial activity including nitrogen fixation.

BEQUEATHING RESILIENCE

Scientists have long known that coral and algae live in mutual harmony. The coral provides algae safety and supports photosynthesis; the algae produce oxygen, help remove wastes and supply the coral with energy (as well as beautiful color).

They live together amicably — until environmental stress, such as climate change, disrupts the partnership. When this happens, some coral lose their algae and become bleached.

But others are capable of “shuffling” their algae, meaning they change the environment within their cells to favor some algae over others, depending on water conditions, competition or available nutrients. Shuffling algae within their cells can help the coral cope with the changes in the surrounding water.

26

USC Dornsife biologists who study coral’s ability to shuffle the algae in their cells have shown that adult coral can pass along this ability to their offspring.

“What we’re finding is that corals can pass their shuffled complement of algal partners, or symbionts, to their offspring to bestow a potential survival advantage, and that’s a new discovery,” says Carly Kenkel, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences.

Kenkel traveled to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and Orpheus Island as part of a team studying a particular coral, Montipora digitata, during two spawning seasons: one under normal conditions and the other during a global mass coral bleaching event.

Montipora digitata coral can package algae in their eggs when they reproduce. In looking at the eggs between the two seasons, the researchers discovered that rearrangements of the algae communities in the adults were also reflected in the coral’s eggs, indicating that they could be passed down to offspring from the parents.

The findings show coral may be more adaptable than thought, but will that be sufficient for survival?

“Corals have more mechanisms than we thought to deal with climate change, but they’re fighting with a tiny sword against a foe that’s like a tank,” Kenkel says. “Their adaptability may not be enough. They need time so they can adapt.”

IMMEDIATE RESULTS

While traveling the world in 2008, three years after graduating with a degree in international relations from USC Dornsife, Justin Arana visited Morrungulo, Mozambique, on the southwest coast of Africa. A fateful walk accompanying a local family to collect drinking water altered the course of his travels — and his life.

After an hour on foot, the group arrived at the family’s water supply — dirty, shallow pools of water around which cows had defecated. “The experience was a stark eye-opener,” Arana says. “I was really confronted with the lack of access to clean water.”

A day later, Arana passed by the local hospital where long lines of women and children were waiting to be examined.

“They couldn’t keep any supply of medicine in the hospital because people just kept coming in with ailments from unclean water,” he says.

That evening, he contacted former colleagues, describing the situation and suggesting a solution: The village needed a water well. For about $6,000, Morrungulo residents could tap into freshwater aquifers, he says. Children who previously stayed home from school to help their mothers collect water could be back in class learning. Diseases could be prevented.

The next morning, a donor came through with the funds, and before long, a new well located at the local school allowed families easy access to clean water.

“When you bring clean water to a community, you see results right away,” says Arana.

That project has since grown into Water Underground, a nonprofit that installs wells in places where they are desperately needed and helps communities learn to maintain them and distribute the water equitably, establishing selfreliance and dignity in the community.

“We have the capacity to touch people’s lives in a very powerful way,” Arana says.

“Water is a wonderful example of that.”

Spring / Summer 2022 | 27

A

28

Water, simultaneously vital to human life and one of our deadliest foes, has inspired the human imagination in compelling ways since before the written word. By Margaret Crable In the summer afternoons of 1869, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir set up their easels overlooking La Grenouillère (The Frog Pond), a picturesque outdoor floating bar and restaurant on the River Seine, not far from Paris.

In short, quick brushstrokes, the two artists captured the play of sunlight on the water and Parisians enjoying the idyllic surroundings.

The water changed minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour as the sun sank and shadows dappled the river’s surface.

Monet and Renoir painted the same subject from almost the same perspective, but their canvases showed very different depictions.

This was the start of a groundbreaking artistic movement eventually dubbed “impressionism,” which tossed out long-cherished rules about precision and realism in art and ushered in an era that instead valued an artist’s individual perception.

It was such compelling work that the formerly allpowerful French art institution L’Académie des Beaux Arts, which initially rejected these paintings, saw its influence decline as the impressionist movement eventually gained enormous popularity, leaving its detractors in the dust. Water was the catalyst for this emerging technique.

Monet’s depiction of water reflections heralded a new way to think about brushwork and painting.

“When a painter paints water, they are studying the in-between of things. Water helps you to understand

B

a new vision, a fresh way of understanding your own particular perspective,” says USC Dornsife’s Hector Reyes, associate professor (teaching) of art history. “Water complicates what we think we know about the world.”

STURM UND DRANG

Humanity’s relationship with water has never been easy, which perhaps explains why it has played such an outsized role as a creative muse.

“Water is ambiguous. We need it to live, but too much of it can kill us,” says USC Dornsife’s Kristiana Willsey, lecturer of anthropology and folklore expert. Good rains make for fertile harvests. Too much rain and seeds, homes — even people — can be washed away.

This duality has inspired storytelling and art for millennia.

“Our earliest work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contains a great flood. The Bible’s Book of Genesis tells of a universal flood in which humanity gets washed away,” says Anthony Kemp, associate professor of English at USC Dornsife. Modern works like the 1995 film Waterworld or J. G. Ballard’s science fiction novel The Drowned World depict post-apocalyptic civilizations choked by rising water levels.

We’re equally gripped by the threat of water scarcity. In Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune, water shortages help spark a planetary revolution while the neo-noir film Chinatown dramatized the heated fight for water rights in Los Angeles.

C

D

Spring / Summer 2022 | 29

E

LEGENDS OF THE DEEP

Stories about water can be found in some of our earliest legends and folklore.

A substance that is often believed to have a mind of its own, water is also mysterious, cloaking what swims beneath its surface and reflecting and distorting faces in confusing shimmers. So, it’s hardly surprising, Willsey says, that water — and the weird creatures that inhabit it — have often inspired stories of disguise and impish independence.

The Scottish “kelpie,” a mythical river-dwelling horse whose hooves face backwards, is believed to be able to shape-shift into human form, perhaps taking the guise of a beautiful young woman who then seduces a man to follow her into the depths.

In Celtic and Norse mythology, “selkies” are seal-like creatures who can turn into women if they shed their sealskin and it’s stolen by a man looking for a bride. The selkie may marry the man and bear him children, but if she ever finds her skin again, she will turn back into a seal and return to the sea.

And, of course, there are mermaids, which appear in the folklore of many cultures and are believed to either warn sailors of impending disaster or lure their ships to run aground on rocks.

“Water is more than just a purely positive or purely negative force,” says Willsey. “Mermaids, for example, were sometimes playful and sometimes evil.”

THE BARREN SEA

Ambiguous relationships with water are also found in the culture of the ancient Greeks who, despite their vast maritime achievements, surprisingly never felt fully at home on the sea. In his epic poem The Odyssey, set as a nautical voyage, Homer describes the ocean as “barren,” “boundless” and ominously “wine-dark.”

“The Greeks’ idea of the worst death was a shipwreck.

It was considered a horrifying death, especially the fear of being eaten by fish,” says Vincent Farenga, professor of classics and comparative literature at USC Dornsife.

Despite their fears, the ocean still called powerfully to the Greeks. They constructed a vast fleet of ships and explored the Mediterranean, building colonies and empires that stretched from Russia to Egypt to Spain.

30

“The Greeks felt most at home on land, but the sea was the medium of their expansion and, in many ways, of their wealth and power,” says Farenga. “It’s also why their ideas could travel so rapidly and why they could absorb ideas from other cultures.”

The sea for the Greeks was also a place of passage, of moving from one zone to another. “Sometimes it represents going from one place that is very real and concrete and then arriving at another which is otherworldly,” says Farenga.

In The Odyssey, the entrance to the underworld was believed to lie beyond the sea. Thus, a passage over the ocean could also transport one from the living to the dead.

“We also see in the heroic stories male figures who grow from adolescence and immaturity into a mature hero, and it’s a sea voyage that is necessary in order to achieve that transformation,” says Farenga. “Poems like The Odyssey and Argonautika manage to utilize these motifs in infinite ways.

“Odysseus journeys to places that have an unreal quality, fantastic places that are inhabited by nonhuman creatures and beasts like the Cyclops. The Odyssey is the masterpiece of Greek storytelling when it comes to exploiting the symbolic potential of the sea.”

DARK PASSAGEWAYS

Fast-forward approximately 2,600 years and the ocean as passageway is still a stalwart fixture in storytelling — this time peopled with swashbuckling pirates.

The book Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, first serialized in a children’s magazine in 1881, told the story of a teenage boy who finds a map leading to buried pirate treasure and embarks on a quest.

If a 15-year-old running off to sea sounds nerve-racking to modern parents, it was par for the course in the 1880s.

Boys as young as 12 were routinely drafted to serve in Britain’s Royal Navy, and books like Treasure Island helped romanticize these voyages.

Universally considered one of the world’s greatest works of literature, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick is the sailor Ishmael’s narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of a whaling ship, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off Ahab’s leg at the knee on a previous voyage. D. H. Lawrence called it “the greatest book of the sea ever written.”

In the end, all the crew but Ishmael perish in the quest,

L A G R E N O U I L L È R E B Y C L A U D E M O N E T; L A G R E N O U I L L È R E B Y P I E R R E - A U G U S T E R E N O I R ; TA B L E T I M A G E © T H E T R U S T E E S O F T H E B R I T I S H M U S E U M ; D U N E P O S T E R C O U R T E S Y O F WA R N E R B R O S .; K E L P I E S P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F P I X A B AY; A M E R M A I D BY J O H N W I L L I A M WAT E R H O U S E

“WATER COMPLICATES WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD.”

F

G

H

O D Y S S E U S U N D P O LY P H E M U S B Y A R N O L D B Ö C K L I N ; T R E A S U R E I S L A N D B Y R O B E R T L O U I S S T E V E N S O N ; A B I G G E R S P L A S H B Y D A V I D H O C K N E Y © D A V I D H O C K N E Y C O L L EC T I O N TAT E , U. K .; T H E U N I M AG I N A B L E BY E N R I Q U E M A R T Í N E Z C E L AYA

a somber reminder of the ocean’s power to vanquish even the most courageous of men.

“The sea becomes a testing of manliness, a place of adventure. It can be a place of horror, as in Moby Dick, or you can return again to your own realm after you’ve been through this baptism, transformed from timid to heroic,” says Kemp. “Or, as we see in the work of Joseph Conrad, the sea is the medium that takes us to colonialism.”

In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an English sailor grapples with the immorality of colonialism in Africa while working as a ferryboat captain. Conrad’s story was inspired partly by personal experience: He had been placed in command of a steamship on the Congo River after the captain fell ill.

As in ancient Greece, the conceptualization of the ocean as a passageway was also tied to the expansion of empire. Much of Europe had spent several centuries using the seas to build extensions of their nations abroad, moving ideas, goods and people through ocean routes.

This included the use of slave ships to transport captured Africans to colonies in the New World.

“The phenomenon of slavery was not possible without control of the oceanic ‘Middle Passage’ from West Africa to the United States or to the Caribbean,” says Farenga.

“This, too, was a journey from life to death — quite literally, as many did not survive passage.”

The passage has become a source of inspiration for some Black artists. The 1990s Detroit electronic duo Drexciya developed an Afrofuturist mythology tied to these watery depths.

The Drexciyans, the duo declared, were the descendants of enslaved pregnant women who had been tossed overboard. Their unborn children swam from the womb and grew into a powerful underwater civilization.

“Drexciya’s Black speculative, aquasonic concept albums were radical and transformative when they emerged in Detroit’s rich electronica scene, and have been key in Afrofuturist theorizations in art and scholarship since,” says Jonathan Leal, incoming assistant professor of English and currently a post doctoral scholar and teaching fellow.

This mythos has since been depicted in books and graphic novels, and has inspired painting, poetry and calls for proposals to memorialize the 1.8 million Africans who perished while crossing the Atlantic as a result of the slave trade.

I

J

IMAGINE THE UNIMAGINABLE

Nowadays, we’re less likely to encounter new novels about plucky young people finding maturity at sea. Authors of such tales tend to write nostalgically about the past, rather than record present cultural beliefs. Patrick O’Brian’s popular Aubrey-Maturin series, the inspiration for the 2003 film Master and Commander, is set during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century.

Perhaps in some ways this focus on the past is because, until relatively recently, we felt we had largely conquered water. Dams keep rivers contained, radar and satellites help guide us to port, and rain is tracked weeks ahead of time.

David Hockney’s 1960s and ’70s paintings of L.A. swimming pools portray water as blissful rectangles of orderly blue we can dive safely into. It is art that is more about poolside contemplation than the stormy voyages depicted in J. M. W. Turner’s dramatic 19th-century seascapes.

“For Hockney, the Hollywood swimming pool is a metaphor for our interest in reflection — the philosophical introspection at the side of a pool — and the filmic scene, made tangible and also illusory in paint,” says Reyes.

But water — one of Earth’s most powerful forces — is not so easily tamed. It now presents a greater risk to humanity than ever before. Climate change has heated our oceans, melted glaciers, intensified storms, increased the risk of tsunamis and turned once gentle streams into surging rivers.

The art world is responding. In 2014, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson transported 24 blocks of glacial ice, discovered floating near Greenland, to London, where he installed them in front of the Tate Modern to call attention to the melting ice caps. The Chinese American visual artist Mel Chin developed an app that enables users to see how New York City’s Times Square would look if it were flooded by rising seawater.

A recent painting, The Unimaginable by USC Dornsife Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts Enrique Martìnez Celaya, depicts an iceberg on fire.

Will this collision of water and art, like impressionism, help us construct a new vision of our world — one that this time will also inspire us to take the crucial steps we need to avoid disaster?

Our planet surely hopes so.

INDEX A

Bathers at La Grenouillère

by Claude Monet, 1869.

B La Grenouillère by

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1869.

C Part of a neo-Assyrian clay

tablet from the seventh century BCE, recounting the Epic of Gilgamesh D

Poster for the 2021 film Dune.

E The Kelpies, 98-ft-high steel

sculptures near Falkirk, Scotland, by Andy Scott, 2013.

F A Mermaid by John William

Waterhouse, 1900.

G Odysseus und Polyphemus

by Arnold Böcklin, 1896.

H An 1899 edition of

Treasure Island.

I A Bigger Splash by

David Hockney, 1967.

J The Unimaginable by Provost

Professor of Humanities and Arts Enrique Martínez Celaya, 2022.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 31

PIPE DREAMS From the communal baths of ancient Rome to the Great Stink of London and the fortuitously named Victorian sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper, USC Dornsife scholars trace the rocambolesque history of plumbing through the ages. By Susan Bell Today, those of us living in first-world countries mostly take plumbing for granted, barely giving it a second thought unless we encounter the inconvenience of a blocked drain or leaking tap. But throughout most of Western history, plumbing was an alien concept. People lived surrounded by filth — their own and other people’s — and rarely, if ever, bathed, preferring perfume to mask the stench over contact with honest soap and water. Many paid the price, living shortened lives as a result of poor hygiene.

Perhaps then it’s no surprise that if we do pause to think about plumbing, we tend to consider it as a relatively modern invention. And yet, sophisticated plumbing systems actually first existed more than 6,000 years ago.

AN EARLY START

32

P O N T D U G A R D I M A G E C O U R T E S Y O F W E L L C O M E L I B R A R Y, L O N D O N

Two ancient cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan and northeast India, had advanced forms of plumbing by 4000 BCE that included drainage and sewage systems, sitting toilets and underground pipes to dispose of waste.

More than 4,000 years ago, ancient Egyptians used copper pipes to transport water and waste. Archaeologists excavating ancient Egyptian tombs even discovered toilets, presumably so the dead could relieve themselves. Eternity would be an awfully long time to wait, after all.

By 2000 BCE, the Chinese were transporting water via bamboo pipes. The world’s oldest surviving flush toilet — a stone seat over a channel of water fed by pipes — dates from the same period, and can be viewed on the Mediterranean island of Crete. A full bucket would have provided the flush action. The Minoans also enjoyed the luxury of running water and bathtubs. By 1500 BCE, ancient Babylon boasted drains and a working sewage system.

But the real trailblazers of modern plumbing were — of course — the Romans. Not only did they engineer towering aqueducts to bring water to Rome and the major cities of the Roman Empire, they also instilled a vibrant culture around bathing, building monumental communal baths. Their

R EC O N S T R U C T I O N D R AW IN G O F T H E B AT H S O F C A R AC A L L A , C A E L I A N H IL L , R O M E IM AG E C O U R T E S Y O F W IK I C O M M O N S; S T R I G I L IM AG E © T H E T R U S T E E S O F T H E B R I T I S H M U S E U M

plumbing wizardry didn’t stop there. They installed latrines (also communal!) and constructed complex sewer systems to whisk away disease-causing human waste from densely populated urban areas. They even piloted sophisticated underfloor heating.

However, the Romans didn’t invent public bathing — the ancient Greeks take credit for that with their large gymnasia, where they favored energetic daily workouts followed by public ablutions in communal baths. But if the ancient Greeks enjoyed a brisk rubdown after working up a healthy sweat, it was the Romans who were responsible for turning bathing into a languorous art form.

“In terms of scale, no culture before or since has been as devoted to public bathing as the Romans,” says Ann Marie Yasin, associate professor of art history and classics at USC Dornsife.

Aqueducts delivered the equivalent of 300 gallons of water per person per day to Rome — “seven or eight times more than the average Roman needs today,” as author Bill Bryson notes in his history of private life, At Home.

One house in Pompeii was discovered to have as many as 30 taps.

And this was true not just of Rome. “Aqueduct technology traveled where the Romans traveled and was considered one of the great hallmarks of Roman civilization,” Yasin says.

SPA DAY WAS EVERY DAY

Unlike the no-nonsense ancient Greek approach, daily bathing in the Roman world was more akin to the pleasures of a modern spa experience.

A ritualized practice, it involved passing through a series of variously heated pools, including the frigidarium and the caldarium. Along the way, Romans could stop at the unctorium to have scented oil massaged into their skin or proceed to the laconicum, or steam room, to work up a sweat before the oil and dirt were scraped off with a curved metal instrument called a strigil.

There was certainly no shortage of choices of where to bathe.

Urban census documents indicate that by the end of the first century BCE, there were close to 200 small baths in Rome. That number ballooned to more than 850 by the fourth century CE, including nearly a dozen thermae, or giant public imperial baths. Some of these larger baths were truly palatial in terms of scale and grandeur, accommodating up to 3,000 bathers.

“In terms of scale, no culture before or since has been as devoted to public bathing as the Romans.”

Yasin stresses that bathing was only one part of what happened there. Larger public baths contained libraries, lecture halls, art collections, shops, brothels, gyms, snack bars, barbers and beauticians. People went to the baths to relax, socialize, conduct business, discuss politics, exchange the latest gossip, see and be seen.

“Unlike spectacle spaces, where seating was strictly segregated, at the baths all social classes may have mixed freely, from senators to slaves,” Yasin says.

A NOT-SO-PRIVATE FUNCTION

Our modern concepts of privacy weren’t shared by the Romans, who not only bathed together with joyous abandon but were also perfectly happy to use communal public latrines — often featuring at least 20 seats in intimately close proximity. Roman toilets may not have flushed, but a channel for drainage around the seating area did allow waste to be washed away.

“A very important part of the Roman concept of civilization and cities was the attention they showed to the drainage of sewage,” Yasin says. “Waste removal was frequently built into the network of a city, running alongside or under its streets. In Rome, the great drain, the Cloaca Maxima, drained the Roman Forum and ran out into the River Tiber, while other Roman cities boasted complex infrastructure systems that incorporated drainage.”

Spring / Summer 2022 | 33

PLUMBING’S DARK AGES

34

“Most of the medieval latrines I’ve seen dropped into tunnels that also served as escape routes.

That could make for rather a dramatic escape if you had to get out in a hurry.”

a very real incentive to figure out a way to get clean water in and wastewater out.

“As a result, complex water systems began to make a comeback around 1200, developed from knowledge gleaned from rural religious communities and imported to cities,” Rubenstein says. “The techniques they employed harken back to Roman plumbing. It’s just possible they were able to consult technical guides, but more probably they rediscovered the technology themselves or brought it back from Italy.”

Inevitably, as he points out, there’s a lot of guesswork involved where medieval plumbing is concerned due to the lack of poetry and great art being produced on the subject during the Middle Ages.

One exception is the Eadwine Psalter. At the back of this lavishly illustrated book of psalms dating from 1155 is an unexpected document: a detailed, two-page pullout diagram of the plumbing of Canterbury Cathedral. Showing what is probably one of the most sophisticated plumbing systems of the time, the map details how spring water was piped in, irrigating apple orchards and a vineyard, before being raised to a water tower that gave it the necessary momentum to flow through the monastery.

Water spouts from spigots decorated with dragon or animal heads, and a necessarium (latrine block) is topped with a statue of a lion. The infirmary is shown to be sensibly equipped with a separate necessarium for the sick and the monastery with a designated place to wash one’s hands before entering the choir and handling the Eucharist.

E A D W I N E P S A LT E R I M A G E C O U R T E S Y O F T R I N I T Y C O L L E G E L I B R A R Y, U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A M B R I D G E

While the Roman legacy of bathing continued to thrive in the East, particularly in the Byzantine and early Islamic worlds, the West was a different story. There, the practice was lost for centuries, replaced by a deep fear of water and mistrust of washing. The Roman emphasis on opening the pores for health and hygiene was superseded by the mistaken belief that pores should remain clogged with dirt to prevent deadly vapors from invading the body.

As the West descended into the Dark Ages, bathing became a rare, deliberately infrequent event — a lifestyle choice that didn’t bode well for peoples’ health, hygiene or olfactory receptors. As a result, life was frankly pretty grim for centuries. Only monks were fortunate enough to enjoy some respite from the ubiquitous filth.

“Plumbing went into pretty catastrophic decline as Roman infrastructure decayed,” says Jay Rubenstein, professor of history and director of the Center for the Premodern World at USC Dornsife.

The vast majority of cities lacked any kind of sophisticated plumbing and were still dependent on wells or fountains for the water they needed to drink, bathe and extinguish fires.

Why did monasteries fare better?

“Central to monastic life were rituals of purification that required access to a reliable water supply,” Rubenstein says. But questions of ritual aside, he notes, managing enclosed communities of a hundred or more people provides

This all begs the question: Why are plumbing plans included at the back of a holy book?

The simple answer is to provide a map for repairs. But Rubenstein argues that it’s there because it’s all part of God’s work.

“The church is a big community. And organizing it is a huge task,” he says. “Building a water system is part of that administrative achievement and is as much an act of piety as building an altar.”

But despite the new water systems, people remained largely steadfast in their resistance to bathing for the next 650 years.

“Wash your hands often, your feet seldom and your head never,” was a common English proverb, while Queen Elizabeth I was said to have bathed once a month “whether she needs it or no.”

Bryson notes that in 1653 the diarist John Evelyn recorded “a tentative decision to wash his hair annually,” while Louis XIII of France went unwashed “until almost his seventh birthday in 1608.” As for one of the first great woman travelers, the 18th-century aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Bryson recounts how a new acquaintance blurted out his amazement at the grubbiness of her hand after shaking it. “‘What would you say if you saw my feet?’ Lady Mary responded brightly.”

PURIFICATION AND HEALING

A F T E R T H E B AT H B Y I T Ō S H I N S U I

But if the West was wallowing in its own filth for centuries, this was not the case in the East, particularly in Japan, which has a long and illustrious history of bathing. The Korean spa culture that is so popular today can be traced back to Japan’s influence during the colonial period of the early 20th century.

One reason that Japan became so focused on cleanliness lies in its topography: Two thirds of the world’s hot springs are located in Japan, providing a convenient supply of endless hot water. These springs are traditionally believed to come with the additional benefit of healing properties due to their high natural mineral content.

The other reason for such an early focus on bathing is religious belief.

“These springs have been regarded as a sacred landscape for so long because of the Shinto tradition — the indigenous pre-Buddhist religious culture of Japan,” says USC Dornsife’s Duncan Williams, professor of religion, East Asian languages and cultures and American studies and ethnicity.

“While today we might investigate claims of spring water’s healing powers by using science, back then they were simply viewed as miraculous,” Williams says. “Throughout Japan, many of the oldest hot springs have religious connotations because of their supposed healing powers.

“There are two components to the history of bathing in Japan: purification and healing, and they go hand in hand.”

In Japanese culture, water and salt have long been the two main substances used for purification. Families who have experienced a death will pile salt outside their homes while water will be used to purify the body or the home after a disaster or unfortunate event.

Once Buddhism became established in Japan in the eighth and ninth centuries, Buddhist temples were designed to comprise seven structures, one of which was required to be a bathhouse — a concept that originated in China.

“Buddhist sutras, or sacred texts, devoted to the bathhouse would talk about the cleansing of one’s body, but also what they called the cleansing of one’s ‘moral,

“There are two components to the history of bathing in Japan: purification and healing, and they go hand in hand.”

or karmic defilement’ — an idea that also came from China,” Williams says.

Indeed, bathing was so popular in Japan that by the 17th and 18th centuries, guidebooks were published listing the country’s best bathhouses and hot springs.

By the 18th century, Japanese city planners were already thinking about how to prevent what they saw as the two biggest threats: fire or a pandemic spread through poor sanitation and lack of hygiene.

“As a result, in terms of sanitation, access to bathhouses, and technologies of cleansing and dealing with sewage, Japanese city planning was very advanced in that period compared to other parts of the world, including European capitals like Paris or London,” Williams says.

However, that didn’t mean that people necessarily had bathing facilities in their own homes, he notes.

“From as far back as the ninth and 10th centuries in Japan, when people would visit Buddhist temples to bathe, even up to when I was growing up there in the 1970s, not everybody had baths in their homes. Instead, they would visit a neighborhood communal bathhouse, or sento,” Williams says.

Today, the vast majority of Japanese homes have their own bathrooms. More than 80% are also equipped with Japan’s high-tech sanitation products that frequently include built-in bidets and heated seats. These high-end products have had a global impact, making the country a world leader when it comes to matters of plumbing.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 35

accepted miasma theory — caused considerable consternation at the time. But after Snow removed the pump handle, no new cases occurred. The pump was eventually discovered to have become contaminated when the walls of a nearby cesspit disintegrated.

MIASMA

All this is a far cry from the early-Victorian era. Before flush toilets, people were dependent upon chamber pots, outhouses, cesspits and the visits of the “nightsoil men” who disposed of human waste, often by selling it for fertilizer, in what must undoubtedly have been one of the least enviable jobs of all time.

The system worked — sort of. But as London grew, so did the city’s noxious odors and the Victorians’ concerns about disease, which they firmly believed was caused by “miasma” that floated over the city like a bad smell.

“They were convinced that something that smelled disgusting could actually produce disease,” says Lindsay O’Neill, associate professor (teaching) of history. “Indeed, leading Victorian sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick insisted to an 1846 parliamentary committee that ‘all smell is disease.’ ” Thus, cholera, dubbed “the poor man’s plague,” was attributed to miasma when it swept through Europe in the early 19th century. It wasn’t until a deadly outbreak in 1854 in London’s Soho that investigators finally discovered its root cause, thanks to the inspired detective work of one man: John Snow.

A leading anesthesiologist, Snow became suspicious that the outbreak had originated at the Broad Street Pump, source of the local water supply.

“That blows people’s minds because the Broad Street Pump was always thought to be particularly clean,” O’Neill says. “But Snow figured out that the common thread between those who got sick and died was that they had consumed its water.”

A nearby institution that suffered no cases — a brewery where workers preferred their beer ration to water — was the outlier that supported his hypothesis.

Snow’s deduction — a radical departure from the widely

“It’s a great story of trying to control the uncontrollable city through sewage.”

This episode got Londoners thinking more critically about the cleanliness of their water supply, resulting in the creation of a Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855.

Little progress was made, however, until the advent of the wonderfully named “Great Stink” of 1858, which forced the government’s hand.

The problem for the growing city, as O’Neill points out, had always been: Where do you put all the waste?

“Especially as Londoners began to embrace the flush toilet, much of it ended up in the Thames, which went from being a relatively pleasant river to London’s cesspit,” she says.

The unusually hot, dry summer of 1858 caused the Thames to run exceptionally low. Despite dipping the curtains of the Houses of Parliament in chloride of lime in a vain attempt to protect its members from the horrendous odors rising from the refuse- and waste-clogged river, the affront to the olfactory system was so intense that Parliament could no longer work. As The Times reported on June 17, “Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench.” By Aug. 2, it had passed a bill to fix London’s sewage problems.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer at the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, was hired to construct a sewage system. “Sanitation has never had a greater champion,” Bryson notes. Between 1858 and 1865, Bazalgette oversaw the construction of more than a thousand miles of pipes to deliver London’s waste far enough down the Thames (although not quite far enough in the opinion of those living near the outfall pipes) that incoming tides wouldn’t send it back toward the city.

“A stroll along the Thames in London now entails walking along the Victoria and Albert Embankments, constructed around the Victorian period to hold those big sewers,” O’Neill says. “The physical landscape of London we’re familiar with today is actually due to these pushes to control sewage.”

Ornate pumping stations were also built at the tidal outflow.

“They were Victorian palaces, built to celebrate their control over steam power, but also their control over waste,” O’Neill says.

“It’s a great story of trying to control the uncontrollable city through sewage.”

L O N D O N S E WA G E S Y S T E M B E I N G B U I LT I N 1 8 6 0 I M A G E S O U R C E : W I K I C O M M O N S

36

THE GREAT STINK

THE GREATEST NAME IN SANITATION

S IR J O H N H A R IN G T O N , AT T R IB U T E D T O H IE R O N IM O C U S T O D I S IM AG E S O U R C E: W IK I C O M M O N S; N E E D L E S H O W E R IM AG E S O U R C E: A H R E N S & O T T M A N U FAC T U R IN G C O. 18 9 6

Victorian critical thinking about sanitation and cleanliness also created the impetus to replace cesspits with water closets.

The fortuitously named Thomas Crapper, a Victorian sanitation engineer and creator of the U-bend, has often been erroneously credited with the invention of the modern toilet.

“Crapper is probably not as important in the development of the flush toilet as we would like him to be,” O’Neill says. “But he’s there at the point when its development and plumbing for all is really exploding from the mid-1850s to the 1880s.”

In fact, the flush toilet was actually invented three centuries earlier by John Harrington, godson to Queen Elizabeth I. For centuries, latrines had existed in castles as tiny rooms equipped with a seat that allowed waste to drop into ditches or, alternatively, the moat — the latter option providing an effective additional deterrent to any enemies who might unwisely consider breaching the castle walls by swimming across.

“Most of the medieval latrines I’ve seen dropped into tunnels that also served as escape routes,” Rubenstein says.

“That could make for rather a dramatic escape if you had to get out in a hurry.”

When Harrington demonstrated his prototype to the Queen in 1587, Elizabeth was by all accounts delighted with her godson’s invention — until he made the fatal error of composing a humorous essay on the subject. Elizabeth was not amused, and without royal patronage, his invention fell out of favor. It lay forgotten for almost 200 years, until cabinetmaker and locksmith Joseph Bramah revived the idea, patenting the first modern flush toilet in 1778.

Twenty-three years later, across the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson installed three of the nation’s first flush toilets at the White House, powered by rainwater cisterns in the attic.

“Bathing … was only one part of the understanding of cleanliness.

Neatness and unadorned clothing were as — if not more — important.”

THE GREAT CLEANLINESS MOVEMENT

Victorians first encountered the novelty of flush toilets at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where more than 800,000 people patiently stood in line at London’s Crystal Palace to experience them. They proved such a resounding success that by the mid-1850s, some 200,000 had been installed in homes across the country.

But while affluent Victorians enthusiastically adopted water closets, ordinary people still lived in appalling filth.

People continued to empty chamber pots out of bedroom windows. Streets and basements were awash. Even after effective sanitation became widely available, many people continued to show considerable resistance to soap and water.

We may forget that until the 20th century, access to water indoors was rare, even in major Western cities. Bathing was not normalized and thus was often seen as unhealthy, O’Neill notes.

“Bathing was done out of the house and, especially starting in the 1500s, bathhouses were often seen as sites of sin. Even when Methodist founder and cleric John Wesley, who is commonly seen as the wordsmith behind ‘cleanliness is next to godliness,’ pushed for bathing toward the end of the 18th century, it was only one part of the understanding of cleanliness. Neatness and unadorned clothing were as — if not more — important,” O’Neill says.

Today, we think of bathing as a pleasant way to relax, but that wasn’t the case for the Victorians.

In fact, Bryson writes what finally convinced Victorians to adopt bathing was “the realization that it could be gloriously punishing.”

Showers were designed to be as ferocious as possible.

One model, he notes, required users “to don protective headgear … lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.”

America went on to lead the world in the provision of private bathrooms. Europe lagged behind, largely for reasons of space — and cost. By 1940, Americans could purchase a bathroom suite for $70 — a price within the reach of most. But by 1954, as Bryson notes, only one French home in 10 had a bath or shower, and for many worldwide, a bathroom was — and still remains — an unattainable luxury.

So, the next time you luxuriate in a hot bath, slake your thirst by drinking a glass of safely filtered tap water, or simply flush the toilet, remember our good fortune — and the billions worldwide who still don’t have access to what we in first-world countries take for granted: the comfort and lifesaving wonders of modern plumbing.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 37

LEGAC Y

“We’ll Always Have Paris”

38

America,” says Schwartz, director of USC Dornsife’s Visual Studies Research Institute.

In the late 19th century, Paris became the center of artistic and technological movements that revolutionized traditional forms of art and aesthetics. With a public hungry for new visual spectacles, the city soon also became the cinema capital of the world.

The exhibition highlights how cinema arose from this atmosphere of scientific and aesthetic change, where developments in photography, combined with a taste for artistic realism, helped create

fertile ground for the invention of movies.

The first moving pictures, a program of 10 films of less than a minute each that included mundane scenes such as workers leaving a factory, were produced by the Lumière brothers and were shown commercially in Paris in December 1895.

As filmmaking evolved into longer-form storytelling, Los Angeles, with its abundant natural light and plentiful, cheap land, took over from Paris as the center of the industry.

The Paris exhibition looks at more formal developments

between the arts, but its L.A. counterpoint will examine how the social and cultural history of Paris contributed to changes that defined the modern city: an emphasis on the circulation of people and goods, greater visual orientation of the built environment, and the democratization of access to the arts, making possible new forms of culture for the masses.

Schwartz’s Maymester course, “Paris, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life,” enabled students to explore both exhibitions. The course began in L.A., where students studied the LACMA show,

before traveling to Paris to get a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition.

Schwartz says she hopes the experience will help her Maymester students understand that “before Hollywood, there was Paris.” —M.M.

The exhibition showcases artistic and technological innovations of 19th-century Paris that fueled the modern film industry. This early photograph of the Rue de Rivoli demonstrates how Emperor Napoleon III transformed the French capital into a modern city, replacing its narrow, medieval streets with spacious boulevards.

R U E D E R I VO L I , R U E R OYA L E À PA R I S . V U E I N S TA N TA N É E C O U R T E S Y O F T H E J. PAU L G E T T Y M U S E U M , L O S A N G E L E S

Before Hollywood became the movie capital of the world, that distinction belonged to Paris.

USC Dornsife’s Vanessa Schwartz, professor of history and art history, tells the story of this pre-Hollywood cinematic legacy through an exhibition of posters, photographs, visual instruments, paintings and sculptures she helped curate for the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

“Ninety percent of movies that circulated the globe before 1914 were made in France or

by French companies in

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY Faculty News RICHARD ANTARAMIAN, associate professor of history, was awarded the Der Mugrdechian SAS Outstanding Book Award from the Society for Armenian Studies for his book Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire: Armenians and the Politics of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2020).

LAURA BAKER, professor of psychology, was awarded the Dobzhansky Award by the Behavior Genetics Association, recognizing her lifetime contributions to the field.

YEHUDA BEN-ZION, professor of Earth sciences, was awarded the Beno Gutenberg Medal by the European Geosciences Union.

JOSEPH BOONE, Gender Studies Professor in Media and Gender and professor of English, comparative literature and gender studies, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to support his book on how contemporary artists engage author Herman Melville’s literary aesthetics in various media.

DAVID BOTTJER, professor of Earth sciences, biological sciences and environmental studies, was awarded the William H. Twenhofel Medal by the Society for Sedimentary Geology, recognizing outstanding contributions to sedimentology, paleontology, stratigraphy or allied scientific disciplines.

PHOTO BY GUS RUELAS

WANDI BRUINE DE BRUIN, Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science, was named a Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis.

MARK CHAISSON, assistant professor of quantitative and computational biology, received a Faculty Early Career

Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation to support his research on a method to curate duplicated genes in vertebrate genomes using computational methods.

MELISSA DANIELS-RAUTERKUS, associate professor of English, earned a William Sanders Scarborough Prize honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for her book Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020).

PERCIVAL EVERETT, Distinguished Professor of English, received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Circle of Book Critics for his significant contributions to book culture.

STEPHAN HAAS, professor of physics and astronomy, was named one of the Outstanding Referees of the Physical Review journals by the American Physical Society.

SETH HOLMES, Dean’s Professor of Anthropology and Medical Education, was awarded the Rising Voices Award, along with his fellow filmmakers, by the Portland Film Festival for his work producing the documentary First Time Home.

ZAKIYYAH IMAN JACKSON, associate professor of English, was awarded the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association for her book Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020).

SANTIAGO MORALES, assistant professor of psychology, was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.

Economics, was named an Honorary Fellow by the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.

STEVE ROSS, Dean’s Professor of History, Myron and Marian Casden Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life and professor of history, was named a Distinguished Professor for accomplishments that have brought great distinction to USC. DUNCAN WILLIAMS, professor of religion, East Asian languages and cultures and American studies and ethnicity, won the 2022 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. The $100,000 prize recognizes ideas he set forth in his book American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019).

JOHN WILSON, professor of sociology, civil and environmental engineering, computer science, architecture and preventive medicine and director of the Spatial Sciences Institute, was named a Fellow of the American Association of Geographers in recognition of his scholarship, editorial stewardship, program building and wideranging service.

WENDY WOOD, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business, received a Career Contribution Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Alumni News 1970s

JON ESPARZA (BA, linguistics, ’72) retired from Trench Shoring Company, one of the nation’s largest shoring supply companies, after 28 years.

Continued on page 40.

HASHEM PESARAN, John Elliott Distinguished Chair in

HONORS

Inventive Fellow

Chemist Sri Narayan is named to the National Academy of Inventors.

American inventors hold a particular fascination among their fellow citizens, often recognized and lauded as the backbone of progress for the country. Election as a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow remains one of today’s most prestigious honors.

Sri Narayan, professor of chemistry at USC Dornsife, is the third USC Dornsife faculty member and one of just 21 at USC to receive this distinction.

“I am pleased to be recognized by this illustrious and creative group of academic researchers and also to be joining a talented group of NAI Fellows at USC,” Narayan said.

Narayan investigates, among many things, how to build better batteries and how sunlight and carbon dioxide can efficiently be converted to electricity. His studies aim to reduce dependence on fossil fuels by making the generation of energy from renewable sources, such as wind and sunlight, more practical.

“The goal of my research and inventions is to address the global challenge of achieving net-zero carbon emissions through the pervasive use of renewable energy in all spheres of human activity,” he said, noting that he hopes his research also helps those struggling around the globe to meet their energy needs.

His research includes the use of lithium-sulfur, which is safer than current lithium-ion materials and can hold as much as three times the energy while using abundant, less-expensive materials. He also works on iron-based batteries and liquid-based redox-flow batteries, technologies that hold particular promise for storing energy generated by renewable sources.

Narayan sees his election as an NAI Fellow as an opportunity to motivate future generations to work for the benefit of the planet. “I hope I will be able to further inspire my students to exercise their creative talents to address the hardest global challenges of our time in energy, environment, health and equity.” —D.S.J. Spring / Summer 2022 | 39

F A C U LT Y C A N O N

EDUARDO HERNANDEZ (BA, economics, ’92) cofounded EigenRisk, a technology company specializing in catastrophe and climate change risk analytics and modeling.

From Fishponds to a Nobel

Arieh Warshel intertwines personal life stories with major milestones in Israeli history and his scientific journey to the Nobel Prize.

40

GOING REMOTE: HOW THE FLEXIBLE WORK ECONOMY CAN IMPROVE OUR LIVES AND OUR CITIES University of California Press / Matthew Kahn, Provost Professor of Economics and Spatial Sciences, takes readers on a journey through the new remotework economy, revealing how people will configure their lives when they have more freedom to choose where they work and how they live. Kahn explores how the rise of telecommuting will affect workers’ quality of life, companies’ profitability and the economic geography of our cities and suburbs.

ROBERTO LARIOS (BA, Spanish, ’97) was appointed chief executive officer of the Employees Club of California, the third CEO in the organization’s 93-year history.

STEPHANIE SYLVESTRE (BA, international relations, ’93) was accepted into Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative.

2000s

MEGHAN GRAY (BS, geological sciences, ’07) was promoted to the rank of commander in the U.S. Navy in September 2021 and assigned to the USS Charleston.

She previously served 14 years in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer.

2010s

KAMERYN CRAIG (BA, sociology, ’10), an Olympic gold and silver medalist in water polo, was recognized by the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors during Dyslexia Awareness Month.

H.D. & BRYHER: AN UNTOLD LOVE STORY OF MODERNISM Oxford University Press / Susan McCabe, professor of English, explores the connection between two queer women, one a poet and the other a historical novelist, living from the late 19th century through the 20th century, who pioneered gender fluidity long before anyone was familiar with the term. The book exposes why literary history has occluded this love story of the world wars and poetic modernism.

JILLIAN (KOVLER) SKINNER (BA, philosophy, politics and law, ’15) joined Dean Mead Orlando as an associate practicing in business litigation and labor and employment law.

Marriages

TERESA CHENG (BA, political science, ’09) and JOEL ULLOA (BA, environmental studies, ’09; BS, public policy, management and planning, ’09) married in July 2021.

In Memoriam

MITCHELL ANDREJICH (BA, sociology, ’09) of Los Angeles, CA (1/23/22) at age 36; worked for

PHOTO COURTESY OF USC UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Not many Nobel laureates were born in a kibbutz and spent time there working the fishponds.

But that’s what a young Arieh Warshel did in Kibbutz Sde Nahum in Israel.

While there, he began exploring the technical world by constructing hot air balloons and parachutes. That early interest eventually took Warshel to the pinnacle in the field of chemistry.

Warshel shares many personal recollections, as well as his research, in his autobiography, From Kibbutz Fishponds to The Nobel Prize: Taking Molecular Functions into Cyberspace (World Scientific Publishing, 2021).

Warshel, 81, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and Quantitative and Computational Biology, and Dana and David Dornsife Chair in Chemistry, received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2013, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus, for pioneering work in computational modeling of biological molecules.

Warshel’s leading-edge research led to the development of new pharmaceuticals, among other breakthroughs. Using computers, he created methods and programs that describe the action of biological molecules by “multiscale models.”

Winning the Nobel Prize remains the highlight of his storied career.

“It was unbelievable — really exciting,” says Warshel.

However, his work at USC Dornsife’s Warshel Center for Multiscale Simulations continues to break ground. For example, his team identified variants of COVID-19 — including the omicron variant, a month or so before it emerged.

In April 2017, he opened the Warshel Institute for Computational Biology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong campus in Shenzhen, China. There, he plans to build one of the world’s most advanced computational biology centers.

Warshel’s autobiography also recounts his struggles.

“I never wrote an important paper that was not rejected first,” he says. “And I’m perhaps the only Nobel laureate whose paper that led to the Nobel Prize was discussed in a promotion process when I was denied tenure.”

That denial, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where Warshel earned his master’s and doctorate in chemical physics, led him to join USC Dornsife in 1976.

He’s been here ever since. —G.H.

1990s

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

family’s construction business, Tomovich & Associates; avid swimmer, competitive water polo player and skilled skier and surfer.

FRANK BESAG (BA, humanities (religion), ’57; MS, education, ’63; PhD, education, ’65) of Jacksonville, FL (4/25/2021) at age 85; professor, educator, activist, analyst and author; taught at several universities, including University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

EDRA BOGLE (PhD, comparative literature, ’69) of Denton, TX (9/13/2021) at age 87; active member of the Denton chapter of National Organization for Women; participated in Dallas Gay Alliance and Texas Gay Conference in Austin.

CHARLES BUSCH JR. (PhD, philosophy, ’77) of Rolla, MO (12/4/2021) at age 76; served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1967; taught at Arkansas Tech University for 29 years.

JAMES COBBLE (MA, chemistry, ’49) of La Jolla, CA (11/12/21) at age 95; leading scientist in high temperature water chemistry; professor of chemistry, vice president for research, and graduate division dean at San Diego State University; 1966 Guggenheim Fellow; 1970 E.O. Lawrence Award winner.

RICHARD COSWELL (BA, chemistry ’47; MA, chemistry ’51) of West Roxbury, MA (2/12/2022) at age 95; active in town government, serving on Board of Appeals and as town assessor.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SYDNEY KAMLAGER

WILLIAM EARNSHAW (BS, naval science, ’56) of Bedford, NH (2/6/22) at age 95; worked in sales and project management in the aeronautics industry at Bechtel Corporation, North American Aviation and Raytheon and in the nascent electronic publishing industry at Hendrix Electronics and Bedford Computer.

DONALD GERMINO (BA, political science, ’61) of Los Banos, CA (1/19/22) at age 82; practiced law for 50 years, serving as Los Banos city attorney for 31 years and 27 years as Dos Palos city attorney; loved playing gin rummy; avid reader and student of history.

IRVING GORDON (BS, zoology, ’46) of Carlsbad, CA (11/6/2021) at age 95; taught at LAC+USC Medical Center for 30 years; in private practice in Panorama City for nearly 35 years; chief of staff at Holy Cross and Valley Presbyterian hospitals.

BARBARA HANCOCK REYNOLDS (BA, speech, ’58) of Hilton Head, SC (6/5/2021) at age 84; member of Delta Delta Delta.

ROBERT HARMON (BA, economics, ’71) of Grand Rapids, MI (6/28/2021) at age 75; highly regarded for his expertise in commercial real estate and economic development.

RICHARD HARRINGTON (BA, history, ’70) of Sun Valley, ID (8/10/21) at age 72; born in England; captain of the USC soccer team; began his business career manufacturing waterbeds; made his first million selling Rubik’s Cubes; CEO/chairman and owner of lifestyle apparel company Mauri and Sons; loved the beach, skiing, playing soccer and golf, fishing, flying airplanes and international travel.

ROBERT HASTINGS (BA, astronomy, ’76) of Las Cruces, NM (9/6/2021) at age 67; computer programmer; worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Voyager Project; and on NASA’s TDRSS Project, military simulations and HELSTAF; finished career at NMSU’s Physical Science Lab. BRUCE HENRICKSEN (PhD, English, ’70) of New Orleans, LA (10/21/2021) at age 80; author and scholar; chair of English at

Loyola University New Orleans; editor of the New Orleans Review; recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship to Princeton University; published short stories in numerous magazines; finalist in the national Grace Paley Prize.

TROJANA LIT Y

Social Justice Senator

Sydney Kamlager ’14 is advocating for social justice as a state senator for California’s 30th District.

LAUREL HERBST (BS, biological sciences, ’65) of San Diego, CA (10/22/2021) at age 76; helped transform San Diego Hospice into a world-leading center for palliative medicine.

ELIZABETH SUMIKO ITATANI (BA, Slavic languages and literatures, ’72) of Los Angeles, CA (7/13/ 2021) at age 89; practiced law for more than 25 years.

BAILEY JONES (PhD, chemistry, ’73) of Sinking Spring, PA (12/20/21) at age 78; distinguished member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories for 34 years; enjoyed mystery novels, sports cars, and tinkering with computers.

ROGER KRAUEL (BA, political science, ’66) of Escondido, CA (6/11/2021) at age 77; retired as a Superior Court Judge in San Diego County; most proud of his role in helping establish and lead the Veterans Court in San Diego.

JAMES LAMHOFER (BA, journalism, ’60) of Long Beach, CA (1/14/2022) at age 93; served in the U.S. Air Force; wrote for the Daily Tojan while attending USC; worked in advertising for several newspapers, including the Long Beach PressTelegram for nearly 20 years, before his final position with newspaper advertising firm Sawyer Ferguson and Walker in Los Angeles.

SAM LEONETTI JR (BA, geological science, ’75) of South Egg Harbor, NJ (11/5/2021) at age 70; served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War; worked in the casino industry and for the Atlantic City Expressway.

Continued on page 42.

When Sydney Kamlager discusses her family, the women take center stage.

Her grandmother was a political organizer for Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor; her mother was active in her actors’ union; and her great-great grandmother — “Gram,” to Kamlager — was born enslaved but later freed

by President Abraham Lincoln.

“Gram had amazing stories of resilience, and she was someone who really demanded excellence. She instilled an incredibly strong work ethic in my mother, and she in turn shared that with me,” says Kamlager, who graduated from USC Dornsife with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2014.

There she studied with Michael Preston, whom she describes as having an “oversized reach and impact” on Los Angeles politics. The experience was instrumental in introducing her to the local political scene and the issues central to it.

Raised in Chicago and New York City, Kamlager credits her Jesuit high school in Chicago with instilling an early sense of service.

“I spent one particular summer in the Appalachian Mountains, working with families who were poor and you get a very real and clear sense of the haves and the have-nots, a real sense of poverty and basic human rights,” she says.

Kamlager took a break from her undergraduate studies to start on her career, holding positions at several nonprofits before shifting to politics. In 2018, she was elected to the California Assembly, and in 2021 she won her current seat in the state Senate.

Recently, Kamlager has focused on issues related to homelessness and criminal justice system reform. One piece of legislation she hopes to reintroduce next year would create an L.A. County housing authority trust fund that would develop affordable living spaces.

Kamlager is excited about her role as vice chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus, which she says will allow her to “elevate the lives of Black Californians.” It’s her way of adding to the legacy of her foremothers. —M.M. Spring / Summer 2022 | 41

ALUMNI AND STUDENT CANON “A thrilling switchback roller coaster of a collection—by turns magical and absurd, nerdy

“A book of inspiring vitality and perception.”

and punk, soulful and furious. Read it/ride it—you’ll have your hands in the air, your

— AI M E E B E N DE R , author of The Butterfly Lampshade

heart in your mouth, the wind in your hair!”

— PETE R HO DAVI ES, author of The Fortunes and A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

“This beautiful collection! Here are stories that challenge form, that attack the status quo,

JACKSON BLISS

that ask urgent questions about love and identity and meaning and demand we sit up and pay attention to our answers. I left Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments renewed

WINNER OF T H E 2020 NOE M I BOOK AWA R D I N PROSE

of experiences in other parts of the world.

and inspired. Jackson Bliss’s boundary-pushing collection is an exquisite reminder that fiction, when written with this much heart and courage, can expand our understanding of what it means to be alive. You need to read this book.”

— J U LI E B U NTI N, author of Marlena

“There’s an incredibly powerful attractive force waiting for you in every Jackson Bliss story, an irresistible magnetism powered by his energetic and welcoming voice, by his mathematical structural precision, by the wit and joy and justice that propel his fiction.

This is one of the most inviting and innovative collections I’ve read, an endlessly compelling source of righteous adventure and wonder.” — M AT T B E LL , author of Appleseed “Jackson Bliss sends the whole mixed-race, mixed-ability world spinning in these stories.

Lucky for us, he has just the right besotted dream language to share his visions and just the right koans to satisfy our need for mystery. Counterfactual Loves Stories & Other Experiments is funny, provocative, and soulful—it’s a wild ride and you should climb onboard.”

—VA LE R I E SAY E R S, author of Brain Fever and The Powers

“Energized and energizing, Jackson Bliss’s Counterfactual Love Stories posits fusion and confusion as problem and possibility, from race, gender, and wealth inequality to genre, form, and perspective, all with an eye toward exploring how we might make meaning(s) out of our illegible, hyperbolic now. Every sentence is a surprising and sometimes vulnerable, sometimes satiric bite, data-dense as a shockwave ride through some video game committed to showing us what five minutes into our future will look like.”

— L A NC E OL SE N, author of My Red Heaven and Skin Elegies

JOHN MAYNARD (PhD, history, ’88) of Bakersfield, CA (2/21/22) at age 74; served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War; history professor at California State University, Bakersfield; avid photographer of New Orleans and jazz bands; authored three books; loved pumping iron.

& OTHER EXPERIMENTS

FACT, FICTION, AND POLYGAMY: A TALE OF UTAH WAR INTRIGUE, 1857–1858 ― A. G. BROWNE’S THE WARD OF THE THREE GUARDIANS University of Utah Press / Kenneth Alford (MA, international relations, ’82) and William MacKinnon rescue from 150 years of neglect an exciting true tale of international intrigue surrounding Henrietta Polydore, a young Anglo-Italian girl spirited out of an English Catholic convent school in 1854 and transported to Utah Territory by her Mormon-convert mother and aunt to live under an alias in a polygamous household.

A LIST OF THINGS I’VE LOST Vegetarian Alcoholic Press / Tiffany Babb (BA, comparative literature, ’15) explores themes of weather, death and memory in this collection of poetry. She delves into what it means to remember the past by creating connections through elemental communion with objects, nature, family and fading keepsakes, transforming mundanity and trauma into oneness with the present.

42

COUNTERFACTUAL LOVE STORIES & OTHER EXPERIMENTS Noemi Press / Jackson Bliss (MA, English, ’12; PhD, literature and creative writing, ’13) explores mixed-race/hapa identity in the American Midwest and the infinite ways in which stories can be told, challenged, celebrated and subverted.

FIONA AND JANE Viking / Jean Chen Ho (PhD student, creative writing and literature) paints an intimate portrait of a decades-long friendship between two Taiwanese American women through a collection of 10 linked stories that explore identity, heartbreak, romance and sexuality.

POVERTY AND THE UNEQUAL SOCIETY IN HONG KONG Penguin Random House / Gary Lai (BA, economics, ’02) ascertains the extent of poverty in Hong Kong in the context

RETURN ENGAGEMENTS: CONTEMPORARY ART’S TRAUMAS OF MODERNITY AND HISTORY IN SÀI GÒN AND PHNOM PENH Duke University Press / Viêt Lê (MA, American studies and ethnicity, ’07; PhD, American studies and ethnicity, ’11) examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Vietnam, rethinking the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora and modernity in Southeast Asian art.

OWN YOUR THOUGHTS, OWN YOUR LIFE: A REVEALING GUIDE TO CLARIFY YOUR THINKING AND TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE Covenant Books / Teresa Schreibeis Neal (MA, history, ’89; PhD, history, ’94) helps readers dig down to the roots of their problems and guides them forward to healthier thinking and a better life.

MICHAEL MAYOCK (BA, psychology, ’67) of South Pasadena, CA (12/27/21) at age 77; served as a member of the Federal Criminal Justice Act Attorney Panel for the U.S. Government.

RICHARD MOGAN III (B.A., zoology, ’47) of Rancho Mirage, CA (9/9/2021) at age 97; served in the U.S. Navy in WWII; real estate developer; loved travel, art, bridge, the outdoors, sailing, skiing, tennis, golf, fishing and Trojan football.

JAMES MURR (BA, history, ’69) of Santa Barbara, CA (8/4/2021) at age 74; first juvenile home supervision officer in Santa Barbara County; volunteer chaplain at county jail; frequent contributor to Santa Maria Times.

at age 88; served as a dentist in the U.S. Army in Seoul, South Korea, then for 30 years as an orthodontist.

JOHANNES SACK (BA, philosophy, ’69) of Del Mar, CA (4/9/2021) at age 72; fled across Iron Curtain from East Germany with his family in 1952; served in Peace Corps in Jamaica; physician in internal medicine and addiction medicine; poet, violinist, pilot, scuba diver, skydiver and ranked bridge player.

JERRY SHAFER (PhD, psychology, ’68) of Concord, CA (11/21/21) at age 79; served as a clinical psychologist, helping improve the lives of many; loved playing tennis and poker.

PAUL TREJO (BS, naval science, ’47) of Newburgh, IN (9/15/2020) at age 93; served in the U.S. Navy for 40 years, retiring as a captain; earned a graduate engineering degree from the Naval Postgraduate School.

RICHARD NOLA (BA, ethnic studies, ’56) of San Jose, CA (9/2/2021) at age 89; served In U.S. Army Air Corps; founded Vacaville Fruit Co.; loved hunting, fishing, international travel and Trojan football.

THOMAS TURNER (BA, international relations, ’87) of Los Altos Hills, CA (7/17/2021) at age 83; chairman and CEO of Edwards Wood Products; president of Lumber and Mill Employers Association; founding member of Western Pallet Association.

RENALDO PARISI (PhD, dental surgery, ’63; BS, dentistry, ’68) of Pasadena, CA (1/20/2021) at age 84; served in the U.S. Air Force Dental Corps; earned a black belt in Karate Do in Okinawa, Japan; awarded a Legion of Merit; loved travel; passionate about teaching dentistry.

SHERMAN WEISS (BA, telecommunications, ’56) of Los Angeles, CA (2/10/2022) at age 86; served in the U.S. Army Reserve; broadcast on Armed Forces Radio; started an import paintbrush company in 1979; did voice-over work in retirement and volunteered at the Braille Institute.

JUNE (BARCROFT) PROWELL (BS, nursing, ’49) of Davis, CA (3/11/2022) at age 94; worked as a school nurse in San Diego and a pediatric nurse in Oakland.

BRITT WILLIAMS (BA, history, ’62) of San Mateo, CA (8/2/2021) at age 80; head football coach at Aragon High School in San Mateo for 21 seasons; coaching successes included a record of 156-65-5 and five PAL championships; elected to San Mateo County Sports Hall of

BILL RIDGEWAY (BS, dentistry, ’56) of Long Beach, CA (8/20/2021)

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

Fame in 2004 and to Aragon High School Athletics Hall of Fame in 2009.

R EMEMBER ING

LUKE WILLIAMS JR. (BA, political science, ’83) of Springfield, MA (7/27/2021) at age 59; devoted his life to working at numerous nonprofit organizations.

RAYMOND WINTROUB (BA, psychology, ’49; MD, ’55) of Rolling Hills, CA (11/15/2021) at age 96; served in the U.S. Navy as a radar specialist during WWII in some of the most dangerous spots in the Pacific theatre, including Iwo Jima, surviving kamikaze attacks and harrowing battles with enemy vessels; highly respected pediatrician in Palos Verdes for four decades.

DORIS YIP (BA, sociology, ’46) of Los Angeles, CA (2/27/2022) at age 97; enjoyed international travel, socializing and Korean soap operas.

CARLEEN ZAWACKI (BA, sociology, ’81) of Los Angeles, CA (8/23/2021) at age 80; skilled psychiatric social worker and therapist, and dedicated mental health advocate.

AHRONS PHOTO BY SUSAN O’HAVER YOUNG; BOEHM PHOTO COURTESY OF JENNY MORRIS SE Y

SUBMIT ALUMNI NEWS FOR CONSIDERATION ONLINE AT dornsife.usc.edu/alumni-news.

Information may be edited for space.

Listings for the “Alumni News” and “In Memoriam” sections are compiled based on submissions from alumni and USC Dornsife departments as well as published notices from media outlets.

dornsife.usc.edu/alumni-news

“But Can She Type?”

Prominent feminist scholar Constance Ahrons pioneered the concept of “a good divorce” that enabled former couples to “agree to disagree.”

Emeritus Professor of Sociology Constance Ahrons died Nov. 29, 2021, after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma. She was 84.

She is best known for her book The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart (HarperCollins, 1994), based on a longitudinal study of families spanning more than 20 years.

Both Ahrons’ own marriages ended in divorce — the first, she often noted, had been contentious — and she was determined to help others find a better way.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian and Polish immigrants who owned and operated a New Jersey appliance store, Ahrons dropped out of college upon her first marriage in 1956.

Finding herself caught up in a seemingly never-ending cycle of housework, laundry and child care, the former undergraduate was — like many women of that era — prescribed tranquilizers. But after reading Betty Friedan’s 1963 seminal feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique, Ahrons threw away the pills and resumed her studies.

After teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she earned her PhD in 1973, Ahrons joined USC Dornsife’s Department of Sociology in 1984, becoming director of USC’s Marriage and Family Therapy Training Program in 1996.

“The feminist poster of Golda Meir with the legend ‘But can she type?’ was the first thing I remember seeing every time she opened the door to meet with us during her office hours at USC,” said alumna Gloria González-López, now a professor of sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. “She introduced me to the world of feminist psychotherapy.”

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Professor Emerita of Sociology at USC Dornsife, said, “Connie Ahrons’ legacy lives on through the feminist mentorship she provided and her impactful scholarship on family and divorce.” —S.B.

CHRISTOPHER BOEHM, professor of biological sciences, died in his sleep at age 90 on Nov. 23, 2021.

In the 1980s, Boehm conducted research with renowned primate expert Jane Goodall in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. This work produced Boehm’s groundbreaking book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Harvard University Press, 2001), which traces humanity’s dual nature, both egalitarian and despotic, from primates to the present era.

Boehm was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Antioch University in Ohio, then completed a PhD at Harvard University. His dissertation made him an expert on Montenegrin blood feuds.

He taught for nearly a decade at Northern Kentucky University before beginning his research work with Goodall in 1983.

In 1991, Goodall helped establish the Jane Goodall Research Center at USC Dornsife. Researchers at the center built a database of the social and moral behavior of hunter-gatherers. Goodall brought Boehm on as director of the center. He remained with USC Dornsife up until his death.

He was at work on several book projects the night before he died.

“We should all hope to be as engaged in ideas and scholarship for so many years as Chris was,” said Craig Stanford, professor of anthropology and biological sciences. —M.C.

Spring / Summer 2022 | 43

TROJA N COMM U NIT Y

TROJAN CLEAN Volunteers from USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and Scientific Diving Program helped pull garbage from Santa Catalina Island’s Avalon Harbor during the 40th annual Avalon Harbor Underwater Cleanup. More than 2,700 pieces of trash — totaling nearly 1.7 tons — were removed, and some 130 sea creatures entangled with debris were freed by divers. For full story, see page 24.

L E F T C O L U M N P H O T O S BY N I C K N E U M A N N; R I G H T C O L U M N P H O T O S BY J AC K F I S H M A N / PA D I AWA R E F O U N DAT I O N; B O T T O M P H O T O BY K E N C U R T I S /C ATA L I N A C O N S E R VAT I O N D I V E R S ; E V E N I N G R E F L EC T I O N P H O T O BY M EG H A N M AC G R EG O R

44

EVENING REFLECTION A dramatic sunset is reflected on the water near USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island.

Spring / Summer 2022 | IBC

CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage

PAID

University of Southern California

University of Southern California SCT-2400 Los Angeles, California 90089

Life Moment

LIVE FROM LOS ANGELES!

Saturday Night Live star Ego Nwodim ’10 waves to the cheering class of 2022 before delivering the USC Dornsife commencement address on May 13.

PHOTO BY ILIANA GARCIA