USC Dornsife Magazine Spring-Summer 2017 (spreads)

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

SPRING / SUMMER 2017

The Visionaries Issue

SHOOT

THE MOON

Vision is the driving force behind change. USC Dornsife’s world-class scholars demonstrate the power of vision to make a better community, country and world.

MAGAZINE

CON T R I BU T OR Dieuwertje Kast ’11, ’14 JEP STEM Program Manager

Dieuwertje “DJ” Kast is still haunted by two unforgettable sounds.

The first is the glassy tinkle made by shards of candle ice in a thawing Arctic lake. “It’s a strange and beautiful music,” she said.

The second is the whining of giant mosquitoes swarming the Arctic in summer.

“They’re called the Alaskan state bird for a reason.”

Kast spent three weeks using underwater robots to collect specimens from the deep sea off Canada’s western coast, followed by 24 days at an Arctic research station in Alaska.

Kast earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and a master’s degree in marine environmental biology from USC Dornsife in 2011 and then a Master of Arts in Teaching from USC Rossier School of Education in 2014. She is now USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project (JEP) STEM program manager.

She hopes to inspire the teachers she works with at the USC Family of Schools to apply for similar programs.

“Sharing these experiences with their students enables teachers to tie science to the real world,” Kast said. “And that makes it more relevant to the challenges we face today.”

KAST PHOTO COURTESY OF DIEUWERTJE KAST ARCTIC SKY PHOTO BY ROEE FUNG

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Contents

The Bold Journey INTERIM ASSISTANT DEAN FOR COMMUNICATION

Mira Zimet

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS / ART DIRECTOR

Dan Knapp

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Darrin S. Joy

WRITERS AND EDITORS

Susan Bell Michelle Boston Laura Paisley DESIGNERS

Letty Avila Matthew Pla Savino VIDEOGRAPHER AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Mike Glier

COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT

Deann Webb

CONTRIBUTORS Ian Chaffee, Joanna Clay, Emily Gersema, Beth Newcomb USC DORNSIFE ADMINISTRATION Amber D. Miller, Dean • Stephen Bradforth, Divisional Dean for Natural Sciences • Peter C. Mancall, Divisional Dean for the Humanities & Social Sciences • Steven Lamy, Vice Dean for Academic Programs • Donal Manahan, Vice Dean for Students • Stephen Mackey, Vice Dean for Administration and Finance • Eddie Sartin, Senior Associate Dean for Advancement

When we think of a visionary, we are quick to admire his or her capacity to see a new opportunity and affect great change in the world. But the effort involved — the rigorous process of turning dreams into reality — often goes unnoticed.

That oversight pushes a critical piece of the story into the background — the part where ambition is channeled into action, where setbacks are combatted by resilience. Here is where the visionary deconstructs the abstract ideal and rebuilds it as a concrete strategy. This is among the most defining elements of a dynamic liberal arts mindset.

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From the Dean Life Line

Political science alumnus named Rhodes Scholar; Dornsife Dialogues series launches; Alumnus appointed to USC trustee board.

5 SOCIAL DORNSIFE Rallying for inclusion; Light pollutes; First-gen students convene.

At USC Dornsife, we prepare tomorrow’s leaders to both imagine new possibilities and to excel in a journey that brings these to fruition. Whether it is a fresh perspective on global ecology that Professor Jan Amend inspires through his studies of the deep ocean floor, or the artistic innovation of literary talents such as Professor Aimee Bender, USC Dornsife is creating pipelines through which every member of our academic community can contribute to society in a visionary way.

I have the great pleasure of engaging with our talented faculty and students every day.

And every day it becomes more clear to me that USC Dornsife has something unique to offer the world. We know that a vision cannot simply unfold — it must be earned.

Our leading thinkers today make the bold journey to transcend the status quo and lead the way in developing knowledge that will inspire tomorrow’s solutions. I hope you will follow the evolution of these visionary ideas with me in the coming years.

6 FROM THE HEART OF USC Study illuminates gender-related stress differences; Students share art history lessons; Scientists seek out the reasons for political stubbornness.

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

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USC DORNSIFE BOARD OF COUNCILORS Robert D. Beyer, Chair • Robert Alvarado • William Barkett • Leslie Berger • Susan Casden • Richard S. Flores • Shane Foley • Lisa Goldman • Jana Waring Greer • Pierre Habis • Yossie Hollander • Janice Bryant Howroyd • Martin Irani • Dan James • Stephen G. Johnson • Suzanne Nora Johnson • Peter YS Kim • Yoon Kim • Samuel King • Arthur Lev • Robert Osher • Gerald Papazian • Lawrence Piro • Kelly Porter • Michael Reilly • Harry Robinson • Stephanie Booth Shafran • Carole Shammas • Glenn A. Sonnenberg • Kumarakulasingam “Suri” Suriyakumar

51 THE VISIONARIES ISSUE

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LEUTHOLD PHOTO COURTESY OF GETGLOBAL/UNICORN PRODUCTIONS

USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE Published twice a year by the USC Dornsife Office of Communication at the University of Southern California. © 2017 USC Dornsife College.

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, 1150 S. Olive St. T2400, Los Angeles, CA 90015

SPRING / SUMMER 2017

The Creative Eye

How do writers bring their creative vision to the page? Five of USC Dornsife’s leading authors, writing across genres of fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism and narrative nonfiction, unlock the mystery. By Susan Bell

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The Unconventional Visionary

Alumnus Julian Leuthold, founder of the first conference on how to succeed in foreign markets, attributes his success to the approach to life and business he learned from the country he calls his second home. By Susan Bell

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Pattern Recognition

At the USC Image Understanding Laboratory, pioneering research into vision and the mind seeks to reveal how our brains can recognize new scenes, objects or faces in a fraction of a second. By Susan Bell

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Ripple Effects

More than 40 USC Dornsife centers and institutes play home to faculty, staff and students who aim to impact the global community through intensive, innovative scholarship. By Susan Bell, Michelle Boston and Laura Paisley

Curriculum Archive Profile

Lexicon

In the Field

Our Community Legacy

52 DORNSIFE FAMILY Noted faculty recognized; Rare craft offers unique research tools; Alumnus turns games into a career.

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Faculty News

Faculty Canon

Alumni News

Alumni Canon

Remembering

60 IN MY OPINION Entrepreneurs

ON THE COVER

From deepest ocean to farthest space, exploration is at the core of human nature, and every journey of discovery begins with a vision.

11.21.16

“I want to use this visibility to champion progressive policy reform and anti-racist consciousness.”

11.3.16

12.4.16 DECEMBER

The USC DORNSIFE OFFICE OF COMMUNICATION receives four awards from the Los Angeles Press Club at the 9th annual NATIONAL ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT JOURNALISM AWARDS ceremony in Downtown L.A.

Alumnus OSCAR DE LOS SANTOS (B.A., political science, ’15) is named one of 32 American recipients of the 2017 RHODES SCHOLARSHIP, which provides all expenses to study at the University of Oxford in England.

12.8.16

1.2.17

efisnroD APRIL

Globally renowned scholars gather for THE FIRST MODERN ECONOMY: GOLDEN AGE HOLLAND AND THE WORK OF JAN DE VRIES, a Linda and Harlan Martens Economic History Forum presented by the USC-HUNTINGTON EARLY MODERN STUDIES INSTITUTE.

MARCH

3.24.17

2.24.17

“It is … relentless curiosity that leads to a genuine understanding of the world.”

USC DORNSIFE DEAN AMBER D. MILLER delivers the university greeting at the 9TH ANNUAL USC WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE.

4.22.17-4.23.17

5.4.17

MAY

JOSÉ SARUKHÁN KERMEZ, emeritus professor, National University of Mexico, and national coordinator of the Mexican Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity, receives the 44TH TYLER PRIZE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACHIEVEMENT.

3.16.17

For the sixth year, USC hosts THE LOS ANGELES TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS, the largest book festival in the nation featuring two dozen USC Dornsife faculty and alumni.

@cassandrapye: What a powerhouse group of young people.

I refuse to be cynical about our future. #hope #Cerrell2017

The inaugural event in the DORNSIFE DIALOGUES series features a discussion of the tenor and evolution of political discourse. Learn more at dornsife. usc.edu/dornsifedialogues.

@adelaidemcga: @USCDornsife excited to attend the young women’s leadership conference this weekend! Can’t wait to hear all of the speakers and training! @drchrisisfree: Thanks to @WarrenZanes for speaking to my class at @USCDornsife @usc_english about @tompetty and writing and such JacobChackoMD: Thanks @USCDornsife for hosting us to watch @USC beat #ND. Was confused by liquid falling from grey puffy objects in the sky, but still fun! @PBandJacque: There’s no one I could thank more for helping me make my poli sci dreams a reality! @christiangrose #MVProfessor @mridleythomas: TY 4 #Fight4Homeless discussion w/ @BobShrum & Marylouise Oates last night at @USC @GroundZeroUSC!

N G U Y E N P H O T O B Y M I K E G L I E R ; L I G H T P O L L U T I O N P H O T O B Y B E N B A N E T; A M K H AV O N G P H O T O B Y M I K E G L I E R

USC hosts the second annual FIRSTGENERATION COLLEGE STUDENT SUMMIT to discuss building community in higher education. More than 300 participants from universities across California attended the event on the University Park campus.

FREDERICK RYAN JR. (B.A., political science and speech communication, ’77; J.D. ’80), publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, is elected to the USC BOARD OF TRUSTEES.

FEBRUARY

2.3.17-2.4.17

Professor Emeritus of International Relations ABRAHAM LOWENTHAL is one of several speakers at OUTLOOK FOR THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S FOREIGN POLICY, a roundtable discussion hosted by the USC DORNSIFE SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS.

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GEORGE LUCAS and MELLODY HOBSON are named AMBASSADORS FOR HUMANITY by the USC SHOAH FOUNDATION – THE INSTITUTE FOR VISUAL HISTORY AND EDUCATION. The award recognizes those who embody the institute’s values and mission to promote tolerance and mutual respect.

2.1.17

“The main aim of the Trump administration and the Western hemisphere ought to be that of the physician: Do no harm.”

Twitter

INTERSECTIONS OF HUMAN SECURITY AND GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE features STEVE LAMY, vice dean for academic programs, retired Army Col. STEVEN FLEMING, professor of the practice of spatial sciences, retired Army Gen. DAVID PETRAEUS, Judge Widney Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy and former CIA director, and MICHAEL OROSZ, assistant director of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute discussing geospatial intelligence and its role in optimizing human security.

LO S A N G EL E S PR E S S C L U B AWA R D S PH O T O BY MIK E G L IER; RYA N PH O T O C O U R T E S Y O F FR ED ER I C K RYA N ; K ERME Z PH O T O C O U R T E S Y O F J O S É K ER ME Z

1.25.17

JANUARY

USC triumphs over Penn State in a last-minute, 52-49 win in the 103RD ROSE BOWL. More than 30 USC DORNSIFE STUDENTS fill the roster, including JUJU SMITHSCHUSTER, who made seven catches for 133 yards.

Instagram @USCDornsife

NEWS AND EVENTS

NOVEMBER

Life Line

SOCIAL DOR NSIFE

IN THIS TOGETHER Viet Thanh Nguyen, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity, speaks at a rally for inclusion and tolerance led by USC professors demonstrating their solidarity with students and staff feeling vulnerable in the current political climate.

Add your ‘like’ to this image and more at Instagram.com/USCDornsife.

@sjrodriguez_: I studied poetry with [David St. John] while I was at ’SC! Great dude, great poet. @DornsifeDC: First students arrive in DC tomorrow morning!

Looking forward to a great semester in Washington. @DebHarkness: Celebrating #nationallibraryday in my happy place @USCSpeCol CONNECT WITH USC DORNSIFE Check us out on your favorite social media sites. We welcome your posts and tweets for possible inclusion in the next issue of USC Dornsife Magazine. dornsife.usc.edu/facebook Become a fan and get updates in your news feed.

YouTube Light Pollution BIG CITY, BRIGHT LIGHTS Travis Longcore of architecture and spatial sciences and undergraduate Ben Banet are pointing a high-powered camera at the night sky to understand how light pollution affects marine species along Southern California beaches. Learn more about their work at dornsife.usc.edu/light-pollution.

YouTube A Student’s Story FIRST IN HER FAMILY When Alina Amkhavong read her letter of acceptance to USC, she cried. She would be the first in her family to attend college.

“This is something new for our whole family and something we’re going to go through together,” she said. Learn how USC supports first-generation students like Amkhavong at dornsife.usc.edu/first-gen.

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

dornsife.usc.edu/youtube Watch the latest videos from the USC Dornsife community.

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

Spring / Summer 2017 5

Curriculum

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Spotlight

Stressing Differences

CORE 102GP LOVE AND ITS REASONS Instructor: David Albertson, associate professor of religion

Findings from a study led by USC Dornsife’s John Tower of biological sciences may explain how Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s affect men and women differently. By Emily Gersema and Beth Newcomb

HARLAN MARTENS ’70, J.D. ’74 LINDA MARTENS ’69 Martens Scholars Program

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ALBERTSON PHOTO BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU

Harlan Martens ’70, J.D. ’74 and his wife, Linda ’69, pledged $15 million in 2016 for an endowed fund to support scholarships and fellowships at USC Dornsife.

Their donation launches the Martens Scholars Program, which will help top students come to USC and support current and future generations of students.

The Martenses, who met in a comparative religion class at USC Dornsife in 1967 and married five years later, have kept USC a central part of their lives. They’ve supported the university through membership in USC Associates, the naming of Martens Plaza, the Linda and Harlan Martens Endowed Director’s Chair for the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, and the Linda and Harlan Martens Economic History Forum.

The Martenses hope their latest gift will transform lives.

“We see this gift as a way to invest in these students’ hopes and dreams,” Linda Martens said.

disease affect more women than men, while Parkinson’s disease and cancer affect more men than women.”

This may be due to differences in the Lon protease between the sexes. Female flies expressed an extra version of the protein, which “may help regulate sex-specific stress resistance,” Tower said.

The authors offered a few possible reasons for the differences in male and female responses to hydrogen peroxide.

For instance, because mitochondria are inherited from the mother, females may have evolved to better respond to hydrogen peroxide because it is a normal signaling molecule produced by mitochondria.

As for males’ adaptation and resistance to paraquat?

Males express greater dopamine receptor levels, which may have helped them adapt to oxidative stress from the herbicide. While that response may help them adapt to low stress, however, it may make them a more vulnerable target to toxic stress, such as Parkinson’s disease.

M A R T E N S E S P H O T O B Y S T E V E C O H N ; F R U I T F LY P H O T O B Y C H R I S T O P H E R S . N E W H A R D , R E N S S E L A E R P O LY T E C H N I C I N S T I T U T E

“We have focused in on USC Dornsife because it’s something that is common to both of us, and so it’s something that we feel strongly about. There is such a broad spectrum there of how people can develop their talents and skills that the College came to be a natural place for us to invest in USC.”

The differences in how male and female fruit flies resist and adapt to oxidative stress may shed new light on how age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s affect men and women differently.

USC Dornsife researchers found that female fruit flies were better able to respond to stress caused by a common oxidant, hydrogen peroxide (produced naturally in the body), than males. However, males were better able to adapt to another oxidant, the common herbicide paraquat.

Both oxidants have been implicated in human diseases.

Elevated levels of hydrogen peroxide are found in patients suffering from stroke, heart attack or Alzheimer’s disease.

Paraquat can damage the neurons involved in Parkinson’s disease.

Oxidative stress occurs when unstable, uncharged molecules called free radicals overwhelm the body’s antioxidants, then react with other substances to damage cells or generate abnormal ones. The damage from this stress accumulates with age.

The male and female responses to the stress seem to differ in part because of a protein called Lon protease that is found in mitochondria, the researchers revealed. “The Lon protease breaks down proteins that are damaged by oxidative stress,” said John Tower, professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife.

Mitochondria, the cell’s energy generators, contain their own DNA and are inherited from the mother.

Increasingly, they are the focus of age-related research.

“Many human diseases involve chronic oxidative stress, and mitochondria are the main source,” Tower said.

Also, many of the illnesses related to oxidative stress have different prevalence rates between men and women, he said. “For instance, Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes-related heart

The mysterious experience of love has occupied a central place in western art and literature for centuries.

David Albertson’s new Thematic Option course, “Love and Its Reasons: Eros and Transcendence,” challenges preconceived ideas about love, romance, eroticism and religion.

“Our course tries to broaden students’ thinking about love and their conceptual vocabulary about different experiences of love, desire and ecstasy,” he said.

Students chart the evolution of changing beliefs about love and religion through the ages by exploring seminal texts.

Are there many kinds of love or just one? How does love alter the boundaries of self? Is sexual desire a property of body or soul? How can love be both joyful and painful? These are some of the questions students pursue through extensive reading of texts, both ancient and modern, including works by Plato, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kierkegaard, as well as a range of medieval women mystics.

“I doubt many USC students think of love as something with a history that can be studied in faculty research and taught in the classroom,” Albertson said, “but we’re doing both.” —S.B.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s iconic 17th-century sculpture, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Ávila, shows the saint in the midst of a mystical, ecstatic experience.

Spring / Summer 2017 7

Archive

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Recognition

C R E AT I V E W R I T I N G A N D L I T E R AT U R E

City of the Future

L. FRANK BAUM’S OZ BOOKS Chicago, 1900 If you’ve ever wedged your feet into sparkling ruby red slip-ons and whimsically clicked your heels together, you clearly relate to the film The Wizard of Oz (1939).

But fans of the original book — The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900 — know that heroine Dorothy Gale’s shoes are actually silver. The addition of color is one of those slight changes in the cinematic adaptation process that results in an iconic slice of pop culture.

Although the movie version is arguably better known than the book to contemporary audiences, L. Frank Baum’s story captivated the imagination of scores of children, and also delighted older readers.

“Baum and his wife moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1912,” says Leo Braudy, University Professor and Bing Professor of English and American Literature. “A little north of Hollywood Boulevard, not far from where The Musso and Frank Grill now stands, they built a home they called Ozcot. There, Baum dabbled unsuccessfully in the movie business and wrote more Oz books as well as other works of fantasy.”

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written as a standalone book, but pleas from children for further Emerald City adventures compelled Baum to write additional volumes — 14 in all.

After Baum’s death in 1919, other writers invented new Oz stories, but for many avid readers, all of the Wizard’s magic is contained within the covers of Baum’s timeless books. —D.K.

A new algorithm for analyzing images could make tracking biomolecules easier and cheaper.

FLUOROSCOPY IMAGE COURTESY OF FR ANCESCO CUTR ALE; FORSBURG AND L AI PHOTOS BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU; GUR ALNICK PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

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Imaging Insight

PHOTO BY JOHN LIVZEY

Published in 1917, The Lost Princess of Oz is the 11th Oz book penned by L. Frank Baum. It centers on Dorothy’s attempt to locate Princess Ozma, the rightful ruler of Oz.

Los Angeles has long served as inspiration for some of the best science fiction ever produced.

“Hollywood embraced science fiction storytelling in a less marginalized way than the publishing industry,” Ulin said, “so there were financial and creative opportunities for sci-fi writers in Los Angeles that didn’t exist elsewhere.” —S.B.

Its urban landscape and iconic architecture have served time and again as backdrops for dystopian visions of the future. The long list of leading science fiction writers who have called the city home includes such stars of the genre as Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Octavia Butler.

The place — of course — is Los Angeles, a city long hailed as one of the world’s great science fiction capitals.

“Science Fiction L.A.: Words and World Building in the City of Angels,” a two-day conference organized by William Deverell, professor of history and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and David Ulin, assistant professor of the practice of English, explored how Southern California’s particular blend of high and pop culture made L.A. an incubator of the form.

“Los Angeles can be seen as the ‘City of the Future’ because so much of the futurism of science fiction is set against the backdrop of the city, or written here,” Deverell said. “The sheer decentralization of Los Angeles sets it apart as unusual in the world lexicon of cities. Add to that its reputation for being at the cutting edge of popular culture and its iconic architectural landscape, and all those things suggest that Los Angeles is, and can be, a trendsetter.”

L.A. architectural landmarks have played key roles in science fiction films, among them Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile block Ennis House and the 19th-century Bradbury Building, both of which featured prominently in the movie Blade Runner’s vision of a ruined future.

Hollywood was also a major draw for science fiction writers, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, when mainstream publishers looked down their noses at genre fiction.

Researchers use fluorescent imaging to locate proteins and other molecules in cells and tissues within organisms.

It can help scientists understand which molecules are involved in cancer or other diseases, which in turn may be useful in diagnosis or in identifying drug targets.

A new imaging process, called Hyper-Spectral Phasor analysis (HySP), makes the process faster, less expensive and more reliable.

Postdoctoral fellow Francesco Cutrale and Scott Fraser, Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Convergent Bioscience and Provost Professor of Biological Sciences, developed HySP through USC’s Translational Imaging Center, a joint venture of USC Dornsife and USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

So far, they’ve used HySP in lab studies. The scientists hope to test it soon in the clinic with the help of soldiers whose lungs have been damaged by chemicals and irritants they may have encountered in combat. It may one day help these soldiers and other lung patients receive more targeted treatment.

Cutrale and Fraser see the technology as a giant leap forward for both research and medicine.

“Better, faster, cheaper,” Cutrale said. “That’s the payoff here.” —D.S.J.

SUSAN FORSBURG Mentoring Award, Nature Forsburg, Gabilan Distinguished Professor in Science and Engineering and professor of biological sciences, was awarded the 2016 Nature Award for Mentoring in Science.

The annual award, which includes a $10,000 prize, goes to an outstanding mentor who is nominated by his or her mentees.

ROBERT GURALNICK Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science The world’s largest general scientific society elected Guralnick, professor of mathematics, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The election honors AAAS members whose efforts to advance science or its applications in service to society distinguish them among their peers and colleagues.

RONGDAO LAI Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies The American Council of Learned Societies awarded Lai, assistant professor of religion, a Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies for her new research project on transnational lineage networks in 20thcentury Chinese Buddhism.

Spring / Summer 2017 9

Profile

FROM THE HE ART OF USC JACQ U ELLE A M A N KO NA H

PHOTO BY DAN CLARK WITH WEINBERG-CL ARK PHOTOGRAPHY

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WHERE THE FUTURE IS When it comes to her career, Jacquelle Amankonah has been known to go above and beyond. The first thing she does when she wakes up is check her work email before getting out of bed.

“I’m guilty of working on a 24/7 clock,” she admits with a laugh. “Even though it’s such a terrible habit, if you have that burning desire and passion, why not send an email and get things done?

It’s a great indicator that you’re doing something that really drives you.”

Amankonah’s passion and determination are what drive her career as a global program manager at YouTube.

That same laser focus helped propel her to a professional life that she first envisioned for herself as a freshman in college.

She has always been ahead of the curve. Amankonah began college at age 16, having graduated early from high school. She was intent on pursuing a business career in the entertainment industry.

As an undergraduate, Amankonah was accepted into USC’s highly selective Business Cinematic Arts Program, offered jointly through the USC Marshall School of Business and the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she focused on entrepreneurship and the music industry. Amankonah decided to continue her education at USC by pursuing a progressive master’s degree in philosophy and law at USC Dornsife, two disciplines she knew would serve her well.

“When you’re in business, you’re faced with a number of decisions that call for you to break down a problem, look at it clearly, and then derive a logical conclusion,” she said. “That’s what philosophy

provides you with the ability to do, and I use that lens now when I’m faced with a problem or a decision.”

As a student, Amankonah plunged into professional experiences that rounded out what she was learning in the classroom. She interned for Universal Music Group, a music label, and later worked with an entrepreneur helping to form a number of startups including a digital music label.

“That helped me understand how to go from an idea through execution,” she explained.

After earning her master’s degree in 2012, she began working for BET Networks in the mobile technologies department to build applications for music fans. During her 2½ years there, she helped to launch five different mobile apps that focused on celebrities and music.

“This was a time when mobile was the new thing that people were experimenting with, and I completely immersed myself in that world,” Amankonah said.

However, she realized that while she enjoyed working in the television industry, she really wanted to be part of a company on the cutting edge of technology.

“I said if I could work anywhere where the future is, there’s this one online video site called YouTube that I believe is the future.”

Amankonah applied for a job with the company and told herself she would consider changing jobs only if she could work for YouTube. She was invited to interview with Google, which owns YouTube, and, after an intense interview process, was hired. She was elated.

Amankonah started by working with the team that provides support to video

creators. Her critical thinking skills were an asset.

“This is where the strategic thinking came in — we had to think of ways to proactively offer help to millions of users

the rollout of new products for the YouTube platform. She has since become a product manager and is now driving the vision and execution of YouTube products that better

Amankonah offered this piece of advice: Plan out your route to the career that you want and build relationships with people who currently work in that field.

“When you’re in business, you’re faced with a number of decisions that call for you to break down a problem, look at it clearly, and then derive a logical conclusion. That’s what philosophy provides you with the ability to do.” at scale including a help center of topics to address common issues and tutorials.”

After a year, she transitioned to the development side of operations at YouTube, where she created the strategic plan to help popular video creators continue to grow their success. That included rethinking how YouTube communicated with those creators, formulating best practices for starting a YouTube channel and finding ways to showcase successful YouTubers.

But during the process, Amankonah realized she missed the product development side of technology that she had been involved in at BET and with her work at startups.

“I missed starting from scratch with an idea, coming up with solutions for customers and seeing those products through their launch,” she said.

So she made what’s considered a big career jump at YouTube, moving from business to product at the company. She began as global program manager, overseeing

connect video creators and their fans.

Amankonah also heads up YouTube’s Creator Love program, in which YouTube’s staff collaborates with aspiring and top YouTube video creators all over the world. Her travel has taken her to Zurich, Colombia, London and many places in between. She and her staff learn how best to meet the needs and desires of these YouTube stars, and take that information back to the office so they can take action.

“It’s really interesting working in a job with a level of responsibility where you’re impacting so many lives,” she said. “The decisions that I make in the office can affect millions of people. It’s all on your shoulders. You want to make sure you’re making the right moves.”

That large-scale influence is also what drives Amankonah.

“The scope of responsibility and the level of impact makes this job extremely enlightening and that’s what I love about it,” she said.

For students who are working toward their dream career,

“Break down the specific steps you need to follow your path,” she said. “Don’t sit on an amazing dream you have because you think it’s unachievable.”

Plus, she added, as a student you have a great excuse to reach out to people in the profession you’re aiming for to request an informational interview. “Pick their brains and find out how they got to where they are. That’s a great way to start if you’re not sure where to begin.” —M.B.

With unwavering commitment and a background in philosophy, law, music and business, Jacquelle Amankonah has achieved her ultimate career goal. She is a product manager at YouTube and is driving the vision and execution of products that better connect video creators and their fans.

Spring / Summer 2017 11

Lexicon

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Viewpoint EXPERT OPINIONS

“Business success became a sign of God’s favor, and nowhere more than in America did this ethos achieve such florid expression.”

Cultivating Arts Experts

ELLEN WAYLAND-SMITH, assistant professor (teaching) of writing, in a Dec. 14 op-ed in The Conversation examining how the United States has conjoined business success and piety.

“Fake news is not a new phenomenon.

It has been around since news became a concept 500 years ago with the invention of print — a lot longer, in fact, than verified, ‘objective’ news, which emerged in force a little more than a century ago.”

JACOB SOLL, professor of history and accounting, in a Dec. 18 Politico commentary on the long history of fake news.

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JOSHUA WEST PHOTO BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU

HENRIKE MOLL, assistant professor of psychology, and ALLIE KHALULYAN, Ph.D. student, in a Nov. 17 op-ed in The Conversation sharing their research, which suggests children can understand others’ views and prefer reciprocity and mutual engagement between individuals, contrary to previous presumptions.

A small group of students gathered around a portrait of a modestly dressed woman, carefully inspecting her likeness. Painted in 1841 by French artist Jean-François Millet, the subject — clad in a simple black dress with a delicate, white lace collar — stands with her arms crossed, looking squarely at the viewer.

“What strikes you immediately about this portrait?”

Arielle Murphy asked. Murphy is a senior art history major honing her docent skills in “Art History 490: Docents at the Getty Museum,” taught by Hector Reyes, assistant professor (teaching) of art history. The course offers students a chance to become experts on a single room of art at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

“Her eyes are her most expressive feature,” noted Aurora Morandi, a double major in business administration and art history.

“That’s very interesting that you would point that out,” Murphy said. The portrait was painted in the 19th century, when painters were looking back to Dutch portraiture of the 17th century, she explained. Some of the features that Morandi called out, such as the rendering of the eyes,

MUSEUM PHOTO BY MICHELLE BOSTON

“On the contrary, their insistence on mutual regard is remarkably mature and can be considered inspirational. Adults may want to turn to these preschoolers as role models when it comes to perceiving and relating to other humans.”

INCLUSION /in’kluʒ(ə)n/, /iŋ’kluʒ(ə)n/ noun / 2. b. Geol., Metall., etc. A solid fragment, globule of liquid, or gas bubble enclosed within a mineral, rock, etc.; a discrete body or particle recognizably distinct from the substance in which it is embedded.

Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymons: Latin inclūsiōn-, inclūsiō.

Usage: Inclusions are small particles, liquid droplets or bubbles of gas that have been trapped inside mineral formations. Inclusions often record information about the conditions when the mineral that encloses them formed, encoded in features such as their shape and chemical makeup. Studying inclusions can provide clues that help Earth scientists recreate the geological past — whether that be unravelling the history of mountain building, reconstructing past climate and seawater chemistry, or even searching for signs of early life.

Students develop their knowledge of artists and artwork at the J. Paul Getty Museum to share stories about the masters and their works with art lovers. By Michelle Boston matched the techniques that were used by Dutch masters.

Throughout the course, students studied the artists and paintings featured in a room of their choosing at the museum. Through research and exchanges with their classmates, they learned how to tell the story of the artwork in the collection. They alternated between meeting on campus at USC and at the museum to get acquainted more closely with their subjects, and to practice their docent presentations, which they put to use for the public during the Getty’s College Night this spring.

Peter Tokofsky, senior public programs specialist at the Getty who worked with the students in the course, sees a huge benefit for both the students and the community when local universities engage with the museum’s collections. In addition to connecting with museum goers and learning how to present to a wide range of learners, the interaction nurtures critical thinking.

“Aside from the beauty of the art, and that it provides a window onto the past, great art provides us material that is good to think with,” he said. “Art confronts some of our basic human concerns — storytelling, recording the past, visualizing mythologies, issues of what humanity chooses to preserve, and so on. Engagement with art, when thoughtfully cultivated, can help us build a better society.”

While gaining specialized knowledge through research is an important part of the process, Reyes hopes students will also find joy in great works of art — which is what the museum-going experience is all about.

“That to me is always such a great experience, and I want students to start to have that kind of relationship to the paintings and the art. This is about reorienting their research focus to think about what a collaborative viewing experience would be with people,” Reyes said. “After all, there’s no single authoritative way to interpret a painting.”

GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Joshua West, Wilford and Daris Zinsmeyer Early Career Chair in Marine Studies and associate professor of earth sciences and environmental studies, researches the chemical processes operating at the Earth’s surface — an area known as low-temperature geochemistry. Understanding these processes is fundamental to answering questions ranging from how the planet’s carbon cycle works to what determines the characteristics of important natural resources.

Spring / Summer 2017 13

In the Field

FROM THE HE ART OF USC EARTH SCIENCES

Boosting Literacy

New partnership helps fifth-graders polish their dramatic reading skills.

Belief and the Brain

CARBON ISOTOPES

During photosynthesis, the lighter and most common of carbon’s two stable isotopes, carbon 12, reacts faster and is more likely to be used than heavier carbon 13. Dry climates force plants to be less picky and use both.

LEAF LEGACY

O

Nonacosane OH N-Octacosanoic Acid

TIME TRAVELING

HYDROGEN ISOTOPES

Of hydrogen’s two stable isotopes, the lighter protium is more likely to evaporate from the ocean surface, while heavier deuterium is the first to fall as rain. Studying resulting hydrogen isotope patterns in rainfall worldwide allows researchers to track water cycle movement.

LAYER CAKE As erosion is a key element in landscape formation, the best place to extract that sediment 14

is not from the forest floor, but beneath the oceans our rivers run into.

“Erosion means we don’t get a continuous record of the past when we look on land,” Feakins said. “But if we go out into the ocean, this gentle rain out of sediments over time captures beautifully those leaf waxes.

It’s like a layer cake. We can go back through time and read layers of history through tens of millions of years. We can see how the landscape has shifted as the monsoon rains changed in intensity, and we can see whether the landscape was forest or grassland and what it was like as it became wetter or drier over time.”

The 25 million-year-old samples that Feakins is currently studying were extracted from the Bengal Fan, a vast deposit of graded sediments in the Indian Ocean, by postdoctoral researcher Camilo Ponton and graduate student

Hannah Liddy, both of whom participated in an international drilling effort to collect sediment cores.

EVOLUTIONARY ANSWERS In the laboratory, Feakins and her team extract all organic matter from the sediments by pumping solvents through them to dissolve the leaf waxes and other molecules. They then purify compounds that come from marine algae and land plants to build a picture of the ancient climate system.

“We take those purified leaf waxes and analyze their isotopic composition,” Feakins explained. “We look at their carbon isotopes, which tell us about the types of plants that were present. We can also measure the hydrogen isotopes, which tell us about rainfall. We can tease all that information out of these sediment cores.”

Feakins’ research challenges long-held beliefs that humans’

early ancestors began walking on two legs in response to Serengeti-type open grasslands encroaching on the forest.

“There’s long been an idea that grasslands were linked to human evolution,” she said.

“But actually we find grasslands appeared much earlier than our ability to walk upright.”

DAYS OF FUTURE PAST? Feakins’ research also shows that during a period of global warming in the middle Miocene when carbon dioxide levels were high, ancient Antarctica was warmer and wetter than previously thought. This provides clues about how the climate system will operate and vegetation will respond when the planet warms up and has less ice than today.

“You might wonder: Why does the middle Miocene matter?”

Feakins said. “It’s a good analog to where carbon dioxide levels are headed. It shows what kind of dramatic changes are in store.”

PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

Sarah Feakins is a climate detective. Her research allows her to travel back millions of years to understand how our climate has evolved through time and then use that knowledge to predict how climate change will affect weather and vegetation in the future.

Feakins, associate professor of earth sciences, is able to do this by studying the waxy molecules that coat plant leaves, protecting them from cold temperatures, bright sunlight and heavy rain.

“The remarkable thing about these molecules is that they’re preserved in soils and in sediments under lakes and in the oceans for millions of years, thus allowing us a window into past ecosystems,” she said.

4,000 ft.

LEAF WAX MOLECULES:

Remarkably resilient, leaf wax molecules persist for millions of years. Their legacy, preserved in soils and sediments, reveals climate history, including information about past climates that serves as a guide to the future.

Researchers drill down through 4,000 feet of mud on the ocean floor to extract core sediment samples. Up to 100 grams of sediment are required to purify 1/1,000 of a gram of leaf waxes that can then be analyzed for clues to past and future climate evolution.

literature come alive for young students — a benefit she believes won’t end with the competition.

“These students will now look at reading in a different light and have a different kind of attachment to stories,” she said. “They’re going to read silently to themselves in a different way. The voices in their heads will be more expressive and they’re going to understand more. That will go with them throughout their lives.” —S.B.

Challenging political beliefs triggers brain regions that govern personal identity and responses to threats.

Ten-year-old Joseph Vega had always struggled with reading. But, the shy fifth-grader was about to embark on a daring mission that required him to summon as much courage as it would take to perform any of the intrepid feats undertaken by his hero, James Bond.

Gripping his text tightly in both hands, Joseph walked to the microphone at the front of the stage at USC’s Galen Center and took a deep breath. There, before a panel of judges and an audience of more than 100 teachers, mentors, students and family members, he began reading aloud a lengthy passage from J.K. Rowling’s beloved novel Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Joseph was among a dozen fifth-grade students from John Mack Elementary near USC’s University Park campus participating in a Magical Reading Competition held on Nov. 12. The event was organized by USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project (JEP) ReadersPLUS program in partnership with United Voices of Literacy (UVOL), a nonprofit that uses a research-based literacy program to teach basic reading and writing skills using phonics and music.

The joint effort offered students instruction and practice in dramatic oral reading during a four-week, after-school course. UVOL volunteers joined USC ReadersPLUS staff to coach the students as they read aloud from Rowling’s bestseller.

Melanie Alvarez, a senior majoring in cognitive science and psychology and the JEP ReadersPLUS coordinator at John Mack Elementary, said she was proud of the students’ progress.

“As a second-grader, Joseph would barely want to read with me one-on-one, so to see him read in front of an audience today was wonderful,” she said. “I think it’s great for him and all the other fifth-graders to start developing that fearlessness and those reading skills now … before they transition to middle school.”

Christina Koneazny, associate director of administration and educational outreach at JEP, said reading aloud helps

USC Dornsife scientists confirm it: People are hardheaded about their political beliefs, even when provided with contradictory evidence.

“Political beliefs are like religious beliefs in the respect that both are part of who you are and important for the social circle to which you belong,” said Jonas Kaplan, an assistant professor (research) of psychology at USC Dornsife’s Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI).

To determine which brain networks respond when someone holds firmly to a belief, USC Dornsife neuroscientists compared whether and how much people change their minds on nonpolitical and political issues when provided with counterevidence.

They discovered that people were more flexible when asked to consider the strength of their belief in nonpolitical statements — for example, “Albert Einstein was the greatest physicist of the 20th century.”

But when it came to reconsidering their political beliefs, such as whether the United States should reduce military funding, they would not budge.

The study found that people who were most resistant to changing their beliefs had more activity in the amygdala and the insular cortex, compared with people who were more willing to change their minds.

“Understanding when and why people are likely to change their minds is an urgent objective,” said Sarah Gimbel, a research scientist at the BCI. “Knowing how and which statements may persuade people to change their political beliefs could be key for society’s progress.” —E.G.

Spring / Summer 2017 15

Our Community STUDENTS DTLA

Crime Finders

Using Los Angeles’ innovative GeoHub, researchers visualize where violent crimes take place to improve safety for residents.

Community, Conflict and Commonality

Report examines the region’s evolving identity and the coalitions that are leading efforts to improve social, economic and political conditions in the area.

Katie Bolton stood before a high school classroom at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles.

“What are some of the reasons people immigrate?” the USC Dornsife junior asked.

A girl raised her hand. “Better economic opportunities?”

“Right,” Bolton nodded. The lesson was part of USC Dornsife’s Teaching International Relations Program, or TIRP. Bolton, a double major in NGOs and social change and environmental studies, is a veteran participant in the servicelearning program, in which undergraduates visit local high schools to teach interactive lessons on complex global issues.

Lesson topics range from ethics and human rights to globalization, climate change and election issues. For their teaching, undergraduates use a combination of analytical tools, case studies and activities developed by the Center for Active Learning in International Studies (CALIS).

CALIS Director Teresa Hudock said TIRP provides an excellent opportunity for students of all majors to refine their skills in presenting, teaching and engaging an audience.

“That’s the bigger picture of what TIRP is — service learning and community engagement,” she said.

MUR AL PHOTO BY L AUR A AVOC ADO

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FACULTY AND STAFF South L.A.

STUDENTS Mid-Wilshire

WA R R I O R C H O R U S P H O T O B Y J O H N F L A N D R I C K ; B O LT O N P H O T O B Y M I K E G L I E R

When the mayor of Los Angeles considers your research on crime data and public safety so valuable that he invites you to work with his team, it’s pretty exciting.

Last December, six undergraduates plus Postdoctoral Research Associate Noli Brazil and GIS Project Specialist Beau MacDonald from USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI) presented findings from the research they had undertaken that fall to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Data Team and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).

Using data from GeoHub — Los Angeles’ new public platform for exploring and visualizing location-based open data — the student researchers created a mapping application that brought together information about crime occurrences with social and built-environment features. They incorporated variables like unemployment rates, the presence of street lights and proximity to public transportation, and then visualized this data by specific street segments.

In their presentation, the SSI team members shared their analysis, which underscored the importance of connecting place and space to improve public safety. They also showed how their mapping application can uncover important patterns of crime.

“We were so impressed with the high quality of work that SSI has done. They have brought us an innovative approach that will be tremendously useful as the Mayor’s office, LAPD and other city stakeholders work to develop policies and strategies to improve community safety,” said Brian Buchner, Garcetti’s policy director for public safety.

Richard Windisch, an L.A. native, is a junior at USC Dornsife majoring in GeoDesign. He relished putting his learning into practice through this project.

“The opportunity to present a semester’s worth of research to city officials and partners was a unique experience,” he said. “I was able to see the importance of my degree in spatial sciences and how it can benefit an entire city as well as improve the understanding of Los Angeles’ working parts through the lens of different city departments.”

FACULTY University Park USC participated in the national Warrior Chorus – Arts and Humanities in Action program, which trains U.S. Armed Forces veterans to present performances based on ancient Greek literature.

Veterans partnered with university scholars to study classical texts and connections between the ancient world and contemporary America as they relate to veterans and the public. Then, the veterans prepared performances inspired by scenes from classical plays and Greek tragedies.

U.S. Navy veteran John Pistone said that studying classical Greek works showed just how universal and timeless the war experience is.

“What fascinates me is that you look at these stories, they were written thousands of years ago, and the morals and the questions that they pose are still very relevant today,” he said. “I think as long as there’s going to be war, there’s going to be those questions.”

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

South Los Angeles and its people have been in a state of transition for more than a century.

The area is the site of an immense demographic shift, from majority African American to majority Latino. Researchers at USC Dornsife’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) documented the impact of this change in a recent report, “Roots|Raíces Latino Engagement, Place Identities and Shared Futures in South Los Angeles.”

The integration of Latino immigrants in the community has exposed points of conflict and commonality for both populations on a range of issues.

“The new narrative recognizes not just the poverty, history and tensions of the past, but the area’s evolving identity and the successful black-brown coalitions that are leading significant social, economic and political improvements in the area,” said Manuel Pastor, co-author of the report, co-director of CSII, Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change, and professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity.

Racial tensions at times in this recent history of South L.A. have defined the relationship between blacks and Latinos, but both groups have much in common, as they cope with issues such as job availability and access to education. Such challenges could unite rather than divide residents.

The researchers said many cities around the country are experiencing similar demographic shifts. They hailed South L.A. as a potential model.

“Similar population changes have taken place — or are presently taking place — in other U.S. cities such as Oakland, Calif., Jackson, Miss., and Orlando, Fla.,” Pastor said. “The results of our effort to assess the impacts and lessons of these transformations can help Los Angeles and other cities develop and implement strategies that engage residents, reduce conflict, connect them with organizations and services, and provide support that improves equity and opportunity.”

STAFF Santa Monica If climate change patterns hold, the world famous Santa Monica Pier might begin to resemble the lost city of Atlantis in just 30 years.

The USC Sea Grant program, based at USC Dornsife, in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey and the city of Santa Monica, let people see what this would look like last fall through a virtual reality installation called the “Owl” at the Santa Monica Pier.

Through the viewer, which resembled the coin-operated binoculars regularly seen at beach piers, beachgoers could witness in the blink of an eye a century’s worth of elevated tides advancing on the shore.

A 180-degree perspective showed total flooding wrought by a combination of both sealevel rise and changing weather patterns.

“While we can’t stop the inexorable changes to our beaches, we do have cuttingedge science that helps us plan today and adapt to the future,” said Phyllis Grifman, associate director of USC Sea Grant. “It’s important to have a communitybased discussion about how to adapt, and the Owl helps start this conversation.”

Spring / Summer 2017 17

By Susan Bell

ow do writers bring their creative vision to the page?

Five of USC Dornsife’s leading authors, writing across genres of fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism and narrative nonfiction, unlock the mystery.

Early in her writing career, best-selling author Aimee Bender followed the widely accepted wisdom of the day by diligently jotting down ideas whenever — and wherever — they came to her.

The theory, expounded by celebrated writing coaches, was that these notes would work as memory aids, recording inspirational

moments, unlocking creativity and making writer’s block a thing of the past. Index cards (small, easily portable) were deemed the perfect tool for the job.

Bender, however, bucked the trend.

“I tried jotting down notes on index cards for a while,” she

confides, “and it was almost shocking to me, when I’d sit down to write, how much they didn’t give me.”

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Spring / Summer 2017 19

LITERARY SWEET SPOT

TUNING OUT, TUNING IN Tuning into creativity sometimes involves tuning out surrounding distractions.

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Renowned for her surreal plots and characters, Bender, Distinguished Professor of English and director of the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing and Literature, is the award-winning author of five magically off-kilter novels and volumes of short stories, many imbued with an almost fairy-tale quality. Her best-known work, the 2010 novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Doubleday) features a heroine, Rose Edelstein, who discovers at age 9 that she is endowed with the ability to taste the emotions of the cook in everything she eats.

So how does Bender come up with her curious and distinctive creative vision?

Certainly not by thinking about writing, something she finds most unhelpful, she says.

“It’s actually counterproductive,” she added. “I want to remove the thinking part from the process as much as possible.”

Instead, she believes that her best material lies just below consciousness in what she describes as a very sweet spot between the tip of awareness and out of awareness.

“I have a really strong belief that that is where the work lives and the work is not necessarily anything that I can predict or know about in advance. I can’t plan it and I can’t impose on it.”

A MYSTERIOUS ALCHEMY

In almost 30 years of writing literary criticism, author David Ulin, assistant professor of the practice of English and former book critic of the Los Angeles Times, has talked to hundreds of writers about their creative vision. What struck him most is that there is no one, agreed-upon path. Moreover, some writers, he found, are adept at talking about their process, how they develop a story and the ideas they’re writing about, while others are reticent.

“For instance, Zadie Smith is very articulate about what she’s doing and wants to engage in that conversation, whereas Philip Roth doesn’t want to unpack the mystery of the process,” he said. “My understanding is that Toni Morrison maps out everything scrupulously before she begins to write, so the discovery occurs as much in the

pre-writing stage as in the actual writing.”

Bender takes the path opposite to Morrison’s, eschewing notebooks, outlines and — especially — index cards, indeed, planning of any sort.

Rather, Bender says she tries to be as open, present and receptive to the world as possible. How that vision is processed onto the page is the mysterious alchemy that becomes the act of writing.

“What I’m always hoping to do is surprise myself and therefore the reader,” Bender said. “I don’t do surrealism to be strange or odd. I do it because it’s the best way I know to get an emotion.”

For Bender, the essence of creative vision can be distilled into two words: “structure” and “surrender.”

“You create a structure so that you can surrender,” she said.

“Language provides that structure. It is the holder of what is underneath: that inexplicable force that brings artistic impulse into being.”

Indeed, unlike many novelists whose writing focus is largely character or plot, Bender’s fiction is primarily driven by language.

“I love words and how they relate to each other, how the combination of certain words creates a state of mind or feeling, or an idea that you haven’t thought of before, and that’s also a big part of how I teach — how certain words create a kind of energy, and how remarkable that is.

“In my view, language is actually your guide to where the good material is. If the language has life in it, then that’s probably where your story is.”

To channel her unique creative vision, Bender relies on a self-enforced structure that gives her room to surrender.

“My writing improved a lot when I started working on a fairly rigid schedule,” she said. “Previously I’d just written whenever I felt like it and it had this kind of boundless, daunting feel. Now there’s a discipline to it and I find so much comfort in the idea that I don’t have to write a single word.

All I have to do is sit there and it does become so boring, and so dull, that some kind of resource kicks in and eventually I’ll start making something up.”

For this to work, Bender acknowledges, a certain degree of faith in one’s creative abilities is necessary.

“The main thing is the confidence to sit down and to create and to believe that it’s worth my time to sit down, even if I get nothing done for days on end. That’s the hurdle — to think it’s worth that investment in my own imagination, in my own creative process, to sit here.”

DEFYING CLASSIFICATION

Ulin, who in addition to his prolific career as a literary critic is the author or editor of nine books, also prefers to figure out his vision during the writing process rather than mapping it out beforehand.

“For me, that moment of discovery in the act of writing is what pushes me forward,” he said. “That sense of mystery is important to me. I get bored if I know too much.”

Ulin believes that his career as a critic plays into his personal creative vision as a writer of fiction, poetry and narrative nonfiction, where he is interested in the places in which genres blur.

“I think they all come from the same well,” he said.

“There’s a great F. Scott Fitzgerald quote to the effect that all writers have a couple of shattering transformative experiences that they keep returning to because that’s what they’re I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY J O N AT H A N C A R L S O N F O R U S C D O R N S I F E M AG A Z I N E

trying to figure out. I keep cycling back to issues of identity, place, time, memory and mortality because I can never resolve them and I don’t think I ever will.”

Maggie Nelson, who will join USC Dornsife as professor of English in Fall 2017, is another genre-busting writer who

“

hat moment of discovery in the act of writing is what pushes me forward.

That sense of mystery is important to me.

I get bored if I know too much.”

defies easy classification — at once poet, cultural critic, art writer and autobiographer. The author of five nonfiction books and four books of poetry, her work spans a wide range of topics that includes the murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer; the color blue; queer family; violence in art; and a history of women poets and painters in 1950s New York.

“My process is probably a bit different from other writers in that I typically don’t know what the genre of what I’m working on is going to be until I’ve done a lot of research and taken a lot of stabs at writing,” she said. “There’s research and then there’s the discovery process once you start putting words together on the page.”

For instance, she began her latest book, The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), in a personal idiom, but after writing for some time noticed she preferred passages where she had veered more toward cultural criticism and decided to weight the book in that direction instead.

Nelson shares Bender’s obsession with language.

“I think because I started as a poet, I have a very hard time reading things with sentences I don’t find lovely,” she said.

“In my own writing, I’m impatient with prose that has no rhythm or music, even if it’s critical writing. In the land of poetry, sound and content are one, and I’ve taken that message to all kinds of writing that I’ve done.”

A SENSE OF PLACE

Nelson, who hails from the Bay Area and moved back to California after living in New York for many years, says living in Los Angeles has a strong influence on what she terms “the metabolism” of her writing.

“I’ve watched how the spaciousness of the place has made its way into my intellectual life,” she said.

“When I first moved here from New York and stopped taking the subway and started driving, I noticed that instead of thinking in fragments — which is how the subways work, where you catch conversations and see different things every minute — I found myself plotting the arc of my books and imagining their form as I drove. That has allowed me to take on larger projects because I’ve had the mental and physical space to lay them out.

“In New York there’s a lot of talking. I’m a loquacious person and I loved being with all that speech, but in a strange way it never allowed me to be quiet enough to hear what was going on in my head. Since I’ve been here, I learned how Spring / Summer 2017 21

“

to pay more attention to following my interests in a more expansive way.”

Nelson’s sensitivity to place is echoed by New York Times best-selling novelist Marie Lu ’06. Lauded by critics, Lu has already established herself as a bright star in yet another genre: young adult fiction.

Her creative vision finds expression in her remarkable ability to take the darker elements of real life, either current or historical, and project them into the dystopian fantasy worlds she builds in her fiction — worlds that offer the possibility to hold up a mirror to reality.

well-crafted image can convey anything. It can convey pain, violence or joy. It can say the thing without saying the thing, by showing you.”

“Writing is my own form of therapy,” Lu said. “It’s my way of making sense of the world.”

Lu credits her first job in the video game industry for kick-starting her creativity and motivation as a writer.

It also inspired her latest novel, Warcross, due out from G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers in fall 2017.

The book explores a dystopian universe dominated by a video game that becomes a way of life for its millions of fans.

Warcross is set in Tokyo, a city Lu visited last spring and found mesmerizing — a quality she was determined to recreate in her novel, in which her characters wear contact lenses that overlay another reality on top of the real world.

“I wanted to play with the idea of changing our environment so we’re all living in a different reality,” she said.

“Whatever you want to see can be downloaded into your vision, so not only do you see looming skyscrapers, you also see dragons flying in the sky or stardust raining down.”

That might sound like harmless fun, but Lu is intent on exploring the darker side of the moral ambiguities arising from such technological advances. “For instance, those who walk through a poor neighborhood full of broken windows and homeless people could download a different virtual reality overlay, so instead they see clean streets with beautiful sidewalks swept clean of problems and suffering. That’s disturbing for obvious reasons.”

SOWING THE SEEDS

WELL OF CREATIVITY Writers may have widely different processes, but most agree that their vision springs from a deeper place than logical thought.

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Lu studied political science and biology and says those subjects still inform her writing today.

“The courses I took at USC Dornsife sowed the seeds for the topics that I choose to write about now,” she said.

Her first series, Legend, envisions what our future might be like a hundred years from now by taking current issues and extrapolating from them.

“I thought, ‘What if our two political sides were pushed to such extremes that we figured we can’t live with each other anymore, and the United States splits into two different countries.’ ”

Set in a futuristic vision of L.A., now under martial rule, Legend depicts USC as a military university.

“Downtown is half-flooded, and steel skyscrapers like the U.S. Bank Tower rise out of a vast lake. They’re abandoned, but people swim over to them to sit on the sides and dangle their feet in the water,” Lu said. “It was fascinating to take what was familiar to me, the streets and buildings that I knew so well from living in L.A., and tweak them to fit a dystopian vision.”

Lu also taps into her background as an artist to make detailed drawings of her characters before she starts writing about them.

“If I don’t draw them I have trouble understanding who they are. This physical exploration of character also helps me figure out the rest of the story.”

Music is also key to Lu’s creative process.

“I have a lot of trouble writing in silence,” she said. “It’s too distracting, too loud.”

She overcomes that loudness by curating playlists tailored to each novel. She wrote Warcross to electronic music and soundtracks from video games and sci-fi movies interspersed with mood music to help her get into the right frame of mind to write certain scenes.

Lu also travels extensively. A trip to Canada to see the Northern Lights resulted in a rich haul of sensory detail that she used to good effect in The Young Elites.

“There’s just no replacing the feeling of actually standing in a place to understand it with all my senses,” she said.

“In Canada, it was 50 below zero and I could feel the surface of my eyeballs freezing. Ice crystals formed on my lashes, and when I took a breath, it hurt because the air was so cold.

I don’t think I would have been able to write those scenes so successfully without having actually experienced that kind of cold.”

EXILE AND IDENTITY

Place also occupies a central role in the creative vision of Safiya Sinclair, a doctoral student in creative writing and literature at USC Dornsife. An award-winning poet, Sinclair earned a prestigious 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award for her first full-length collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

Born in Jamaica into a Rastafarian household, Sinclair says she always felt like an outsider in her native land where Rastafarians — a minority — suffer discrimination.

“My siblings and I always felt some sense of otherness, of being an outsider, something akin to a kind of exile, feeling like a stranger in your own home, your own body, your own country.”

For Sinclair, writing poetry was a saving grace, a way to reason through feelings of exclusion and make sense of them.

Using her poetry to shatter stereotypes and engage social issues, her work explores themes of identity, race, misogyny and exile.

As part of her thesis, Sinclair is writing a prose memoir about growing up as a young Rastafarian woman under a strict patriarchy. “I realized I wanted to interrogate why I was being treated differently than my brother or other boys I knew. This idea of womanhood as a place of exile is a constant source of interest for me.”

Sinclair’s research also focuses on the violence of language.

“So many words and expressions in our everyday vernacular are rooted in violence against women,” she said, “from

describing a singlet as a ‘wife-beater,’ to saying ‘knocked up’ instead of pregnant. I’m interested in how these words come down to us and how they contribute to furthering violence against women because the language we use shapes the world we live in.”

Imagery is crucial to Sinclair and her poetry uses recurring images of the sea and of the bougainvillea and hibiscus that bloom freely in Jamaica.

“A well-crafted image can convey anything,” she said.

“It can convey pain, violence or joy. It can say the thing without saying the thing, by showing you. It’s a way to subtly give the reader an invitation into the poem and the meaning of the poem or the ‘why’ of the poem without being pedantic.

It’s an opportunity for the poet to be painterly.”

The sea is always in the background of Sinclair’s poems, even if it’s never named or mentioned. “The sea is the lyric landscape that I find my mind wandering to when I’m entering into a poem,” she said. “I was born in a fishing village right on the beach and the sea is always something I’m trying to echo, whether rhythmically or metrically, in my work.

“The landscape of memory, of growing up in Jamaica with its wild and impenetrable tropical vegetation, is also a rich place for me to frame many of my poems. I’m interested in trying to mirror this natural world on the page.”

As she writes, Sinclair reads her poems aloud because — as she notes — “this is where the words and music combust, and the poem’s energy emerges.”

KEEPING THE FAITH

If Sinclair grew up under a strict patriarchy, Bender’s youth was strongly influenced by the liberating qualities of modern dance. The daughter of a psychoanalyst and a choreographer, her childhood resonated with poetry, fairy tales, theater, and the intimation from her father that the exploration of feelings through words was worth pursuing.

“That combination of psychology and theater was potent and compelling to me,” Bender said. “As a result, the conflict between what’s on the surface and what’s underneath is endlessly interesting to me in terms of how we navigate each other and ourselves.”

She has participated in many community outreach projects, from teaching creative writing to underserved elementary students at the USC Family of Schools, to doing theater improv with psychiatric patients.

“It’s been a pleasure for me to try to loosen up the restrictive thinking around fiction in any way I can with my own work and as a teacher,” she said. “It’s exciting for students to write something that shocks them or makes them laugh.

I think that’s an incredible sense of discovery and openness, so I try to do as much as I can to facilitate that.”

Bender tells her students to keep faith with the process, that if the story is starting to work it will develop on its own terms — if they can let it. Too often, she says, a student writing an interesting story will introduce a major twist because of anxiety over a perceived lack of plot.

“Suddenly the police will arrive, or there’ll be a car crash,” she said. “It’s ludicrous and almost funny, but you can feel that it comes from this impulse to make something happen in this false way. My wish for my students would be for them not to make choices that feel contrived, but to make choices that feel organic.”

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Writing Their Truth

STEPHANIE BOWER, associate professor (teaching) of writing

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“THE HOLE. THE HOLE IS NOTHING LIKE THE MOVIES OR TV MAKE IT SEEM. IT’S SO MUCH LESS AND SO MUCH MORE, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. IT IS ONE OF THE MOST BORING PLACES ON EARTH. YOU ARE IN A LITTLE CELL AND IN ISOLATION WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO. AND 24 HOURS A DAY, YOU CAN HEAR THE CRIES, SCREAMS, WHIMPERS AND CURSING OF THOSE AROUND YOU GOING SLOWLY INSANE. THAT IS, UNTIL THE SOUNDS BECOME SO FAMILIAR THEY ARE MERELY BACKGROUND NOISE. MY ONLY PROTECTION WAS TO GO INSIDE OF MYSELF AND DEEP INTO MY OWN MIND.” On a mild October evening, The Francisco Homes, a social justice nonprofit providing support to former prisoners, held its annual Night of Appreciation event. Standing before a full room of donors and friends of the organization, Paul Harrison carefully read from a page in his hands as writing teacher Ben Pack (MPW ’12) held the microphone for him. Harrison candidly reflected on his experiences in, and now out of, prison.

“I’ve never written a thing in my life before,” Harrison said.

And he never would have, he added, if not for the creative writing workshops he attended at The Francisco Homes. The classes are

GOING OUT INTO THE COMMUNITY Bower and Murray were inspired after hearing about a pop-up writing workshop for underserved populations while at a conference on community writing in Denver. They were eager to institute something similar back in Los Angeles.

“It seemed like something we’d like USC to be doing more of — going out into the community and bringing the community in,” Bower said.

She and Murray joined forces with their colleagues Pack and Emily Artiano, lecturers in the Writing Program, to team teach weekly creative writing sessions for residents of The Francisco Homes.

“The men have become wonderful critics for each other, and in that way it became a genuine writing workshop rather than just us being the teachers,” Bower said.

Eventually, the instructors are hoping to compile the men’s written work into a printed publication.

taught on a volunteer basis by Pack and several other faculty members from USC Dornsife’s Writing Program.

For the past decade, Associate Professors (Teaching) of Writing Stephanie Bower and John Murray have been working with the Catholic faith-based organization, located a mile from USC’s University Park campus. It offers holistic support, a place to live and a sense of community for formerly incarcerated individuals as they attempt to reintegrate into society after lengthy prison sentences.

Writing classes such as “Writing 340: Writing in the Community,” co-taught by Bower and Murray, partner students from USC with community organizations like The Francisco Homes, allowing undergraduates to work directly with those community partners to tell their stories.

Each spring, the professors bring to their classes a few men from The Francisco Homes to speak about their experiences. Bower said this has been “tremendously impactful for students.”

“The men are very generous with our students and have always made such an effort toward them and us,” Murray said. That is why he and his fellow faculty members wanted to donate their own time and expertise to do something for the men.

A NIGHT OF APPRECIATION … AND THEN SOME Culminating the six-week workshop with a live reading at the Night of Appreciation was, by all accounts, a successful innovation.

“We recognized what the men were really interested in was telling their story for an audience,” Bower said. “They talk a lot about the process of rehumanization, so telling their stories gives them the ability to see themselves in a different light that’s not defined by the prison identity.”

Murray agreed.

“These guys all have really unique stories,” he said. “And I think it’s a population that gets totally demonized in the general population, so to get out the humanity from behind their stories is really interesting.”

For some of the readers, it was their first time sharing their writing outside of the workshop. David “Smitty” Smith was among them.

Smith, who served more than 28 years in state prison, began attending the creative writing sessions early on. He appreciated the insights the workshops gave him on how to transfer some of his feelings into language.

“I’ve benefited from the opportunity to release, or put down in words, things that usually just spin around in my head,” he said.

“But most important is the opportunity to learn and use the lessons to refine a writing process.”

Murray reflected on how valuable the act of writing can be.

“I think [working with these men] is a great reminder of what a luxury it is to write, to be able to articulate and process your experience and understand yourself better through writing.”

PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

“One of the guys talked about how he’s involved in making the journey from a prison mentality to that of a citizen, a human being. And he’s recognized the way that writing plays an essential role in that journey.”

by Laura Paisley

BUILDING A NEW IDENTITY After joining the USC faculty last year, Artiano jumped at the chance to participate when Bower contacted a few colleagues about the creative writing workshops at The Francisco Homes.

Once she began working with the former prisoners, Artiano quickly observed that they were most interested in talking about their individual transformations.

“I wasn’t expecting their commitment to wanting to make sure

it was clear that transformation is possible, in spite of all the difficulties and the system being stacked against them,” she said.

Many of the men say that the experience of writing is cathartic for them.

“Watching this in action is really moving,” Artiano said. “They’re always eager to hear critiques and at times resist what they feel is excessive praise of their work.”

Bower has observed how meaningful it is for the men to talk about their experiences and to explore their shifting sense of identity.

“One of the guys talked about how he’s involved in making the journey from a prison mentality to that of a citizen, a human being.

And he’s recognized the way that writing plays an essential role in that journey.”

The notion of restorative justice is an important aspect of the mission of The Francisco Homes. In the context of crime, restorative justice strives to bring reconciliation between the parties, working to provide healing and unity to all affected — as individuals when possible, but ultimately as a community.

“This work has made me much more aware of restorative justice,” Murray said. “I see how much of the general population doesn’t consider this approach to crime, and the notion of healing as opposed to retribution, but it’s a really interesting idea.”

IMPACT THAT GOES BOTH WAYS It’s certainly not just the participants for whom the writing workshops are meaningful. For Murray, working with this community has impacted him both personally and intellectually.

“I think that to be out there with these guys — to understand and be comfortable and connect with them — humanizes how I read research and understand current events now. It’s made me aware of my own lens, of someone with my education and background.

“I thought I was unbiased, but I realized I was very comfortable with how I compartmentalized people. For me as a person, that realization is really important, and it’s a reminder of how easy it is to lapse into thinking you know who it is you’re talking to or reading about.”

Though Bower sometimes dreads the long drive between her house and The Francisco Homes, the journey always pays off.

“Every day I feel so glad that I’m there,” she said. “There’s just something about being in that space and seeing how appreciative they are — seeing the way that words give life to new realities and new ways of being in the world, and being the audience and the listener for that.”

Harrison’s words reflect the process of rehumanization that he and his peers have embarked upon. For him, it is ultimately a message of hope and gratitude.

“I believe I will spend the rest of my life changing into the man I am supposed to be. Every day is not an adventure — it holds triumphs and defeats. To me that is called life. Now I live a life of firsts. The first time I walked down the street a free man; the first time I ate out; the first time I saw a child; and so many more, each one more precious than the last. … What all this means to me is that this is not the ending of my story but just the beginning. Each day is a gift, and I must always give thanks. And never forget how I got here.”

“I’ve benefited from the opportunity to release, or put down in words, things that usually just spin around in my head. But most important is the opportunity to learn and use the lessons to refine a writing process.”

DAVID “SMITTY” SMITH, former prisoner

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T H E

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V I S I O N A R Y

Alumnus Julian Leuthold, the visionary founder of GetGlobal — the first conference on how to succeed in foreign markets — attributes his success to the open-minded approach to life and business he learned from the country he now calls his second home: India. By Susan Bell

Sandwiched between a group of Afghan goat herders and a Sikh businessman, Julian Leuthold inched forward in the long customs line at Delhi airport. It was New Year’s Day 2010, and inside the teeming terminal, Christmas carols were still blasting over the loudspeaker system.

Leuthold had come to explore the country’s nuclear policy as part of a study abroad program. It was his first trip to India and the culture shock was intense. However, the senior, who graduated later that year with a bachelor’s in international relations from USC Dornsife and marketing from USC Marshall School of Business, kept an open heart and mind as he plunged into this unfamiliar new world. That generosity of spirit has repaid him a thousand times over, most notably in his successful career as the founder and CEO of Geoskope, the company behind GetGlobal, the first conference on how to succeed in foreign markets.

Leuthold traces the germ of the idea for GetGlobal back to some unexpected observations he made during that study abroad program.

Two factors helped him adapt to his new life. First — unusually for an expat — he didn’t hang out with many Americans.

“All my friends were Indian and I started to feel very comfortable because I left behind all my assumptions,” he said.

“I tried to live my life in India the way Indians live theirs.”

Second, although no one in his family had ever been to India, his mother and grandmother both had Hindu gurus and Leuthold spent his childhood surrounded by Indian books and artifacts.

“Growing up, I also became familiar with the Tibetan diaspora,” he said. “So it was an easy jump for me to understand India on its own terms because the words, PHOTO BY MARC GOLDSTEIN

lifestyle and cultural materials had been so familiar to me from a very young age.”

After talking his way into a semester of graduate study at New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, Leuthold’s circle of friends expanded to include numerous Indian executives.

“They kept asking me, ‘Julian, why do American companies come here and make so many mistakes? Why do they repeat the same errors, time and time again?’ ” Leuthold didn’t have a ready answer, but couldn’t get the question out of his head.

As he pondered, he began to recognize a pattern. Companies going into India assumed there was a subcontinent full of people just waiting to buy their products. “And that just isn’t the case,” Leuthold said. “If they want to succeed, they need to stop underestimating the sophistication of the country they’re dealing with. American companies need to get to know Indian society and how it works and figure out the best way to meet it — its diverse cultures, structure and history — halfway. Instead, I realized, most business executives are just making it up as they go along and Indians easily recognize this.”

The more he explored, the more Leuthold realized this lack of cultural and institutional fluency was not limited to India.

“It’s Brazil, it’s Mexico, it’s the countries of Africa and even Canada. American companies have a really difficult time understanding how things work in most countries,” he said. “That isn’t to say that nobody gets it right, but it’s not made easy.”

A Brookings Institution report confirmed his worst suspicions. “It made plain what I’d been suspecting the entire time: Nobody was pulling together all the necessary participants of trade and investment under one roof.”

GLOBAL OUTLOOK Alumnus Julian Leuthold exemplifies many of the qualities of a visionary, among them being a nontraditional thinker.

Spring / Summer 2017 27

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feel comfortable enough to say, “I don’t know.” Because when it came to India or so many other foreign markets, he knew that most of them didn’t know.

“I thought, maybe they need some music, or a few drinks, or a lighthearted atmosphere where openness is encouraged,” he said. All those elements can be found at GetGlobal, which also owes its style in part to Leuthold’s 2½-year stint working for an online magazine owned by Track Entertainment — organizer of many of Miami’s biggest music festivals.

The gig, which he gave up after transferring to USC in Spring 2006, enabled him to gain invaluable experience in concert and event management.

“THERE’S BEAUTY IN SAYING, IT SAYS …

‘I’M READY TO LEARN.’ ”

reflection his peers are advancing in their careers.

“I want to do that too, but I wouldn’t know how to do it like they do, so I have to come up with something else,” he said.

One strategy included living for a year in Washington, D.C., where he attended think tank discussions and sought clients in the area.

“So here are the VSPs — the very serious people — sitting in these really serious places in a very serious town

PHOTO BY SARAH BROWNING

CULTURAL IMMERSION Julian Leuthold visiting the thousand-year-old temples of Khajuraho during his first trip to India in 2010.

Leuthold was determined to change that. In 2011, and later with the help of two of his former USC Dornsife professors, David Karl and Pamela Starr, he founded Geoskope, a company that grew out of his astute observation that businesses with ambitions to expand into foreign markets lacked a one-stop destination to get their questions answered.

“I realized this was a major opportunity to pull together key participants in international trade and investment and build a conversation about how to compete successfully internationally,” Leuthold said.

Held in Los Angeles in October 2016, Geoskope’s first GetGlobal conference drew almost 1,000 registered attendees, including delegations from the United Arab Emirates, Southeast Asia and Colombia, all keen to hear the insights of GetGlobal’s 150 international experts.

“This was the big experiment,” Leuthold said. “Will they mix?” The answer was a resounding yes.

“We had former Mexican intelligence officials sitting next to a virtual reality game producer and executives from an organic beverage company.”

Leuthold finds bringing people together immensely satisfying because he says it helps people to grow, question and see things from different viewpoints.

“What excites me most about what I’m doing is the possibility of being the platform for a conversation on the connection of cultures through trade that’s been going on since tribal Africa but didn’t have a venue until now. That kind of blows my mind when we could be using this conversation to build connections and move the world forward in a positive direction.”

Leuthold was born and raised in L.A., where his father worked in banking and entertainment. The family moved often, so as a child Leuthold constantly had to make new friends.

This feeling of being “forever the outsider,” Leuthold confesses, was his primary motivation for launching his earlier ventures, which later proved to be a model for starting GetGlobal.

“I did it because I felt like a loner. I was really shy.” The irony is not lost on him.

He may have been shy, but Leuthold exemplifies many qualities associated with visionaries: He thinks in untraditional ways; sees opportunities rather than setbacks; combines elements in unexpected ways to create something new; and is unafraid of failure. Plus, he thinks big.

He is also exceptionally open — to diversity, to new people and situations, and to new ideas — a character trait he attributes to his time in India.

“What I love most about India is that its diversity constantly forces you to keep an open mind. In fact, it’s a necessity to survive there.”

Yet, Leuthold says his career has been driven by a feeling of not knowing what to do next.

“To me, everybody always looks like they’ve got it all mapped out. I’ve never been that way, seldom known what I wanted to do past a couple of moves. I just have a feeling of what I like and the direction I want to go.”

Rather than panic, he possesses the rare ability to temporarily withdraw and observe.

“I go through periods in my life where I’ll take six to nine months, eat ramen, keep a low profile and think about things a lot. That sets me off on the next direction.” Taking that time out has been essential, he says, even if he admits that stoking it all is the awareness that during these periods of

and they’re there to see other very serious people talk about very serious things. Many of them didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want to look stupid. Nobody rewards an executive for saying, ‘I don’t know.’ But there’s beauty in saying, ‘I don’t know.’ It says, ‘I’m ready for more. I’m ready to learn.’ ” Leuthold said he spent time wondering, “Gosh, how am I going to ‘out-serious’ the serious people?” Instead, he started to think about what it would take to make people

“I thought I’d never use that stuff again, but it turns out I’m applying a lot of music festival concepts to GetGlobal,” said Leuthold, who isn’t shy about borrowing ideas from the rock world to inject an unexpected dose of glamour into the usually sober milieu of international business. For its launch GetGlobal shook up expectations, boasting a live art show, cool lighting design and a cutting-edge music system.

Leuthold’s decision to hold GetGlobal in his hometown is a strategic one.

“In D.C., everyone asks me, ‘Why L.A.?’ The answer is that we can get away with more in L.A.: more humor, more glamour. We can break a few rules. It might not fit in D.C., but here it makes sense and our attendees delight in that.”

Initially drawn to USC by its diversity, Leuthold now finds that the same quality in the international Trojan Family is of enormous benefit in building his business. Leading Indian economist and alumnus Ajay Shah “couldn’t have been friendlier,” for instance, when Leuthold reached out.

Asked what stood out for him in the support he received from Starr, associate professor (teaching) of international relations, and Karl, former lecturer of international relations, in developing and building his company, Leuthold didn’t miss a beat.

“They cared,” he said. “And they stuck with me. David works with me today while Pamela still lends advice.”

Leuthold remembers Starr’s class on security and economics, which he took his last semester before going to India.

“It was a political risk analysis class that tied everything together,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing now without that kind of foundation.”

Leuthold’s vision for GetGlobal is ambitious. “One day, it will draw 80,000 people to downtown L.A.,” he said with a grin.

His confidence, however, is tempered by humility.

“The standards in international business, policy and economics are exceptionally high and you can’t just BS your way through that. You have to be tremendously good — inside and out — to parade on in with a circus behind you.

Am I there? Absolutely not. It’s an ongoing struggle every day to make myself better, but I think the process of having no footholds, no place to rest anything, has helped me.”

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At the USC Image Understanding Laboratory, Irving Biederman and the late Bosco Tjan’s pioneering research into vision and the mind seeks to unlock the mystery of how our brains can recognize previously unseen scenes, objects or faces in a fraction of a second.

RECOGNITION

By Susan Bell

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Spring / Summer 2017 31

At

the end of a long day, as we put our feet up, reach for the remote control and begin watching TV, we may find ourselves confronted with images beyond our experience — such as “The Upside-Down,” the mysterious parallel dimension inhabited by a tulip-headed monster portrayed in the Netflix show Stranger Things.

This shadowy world holds up a bizarre mirror to our own, showing us a place of endless darkness and decay, where familiar infrastructure is so overgrown with twisted rope-like tendrils and webs of biological matter as to render it almost unrecognizable. And yet, even though those strange images lie in the realm of the unknown, do we struggle to recognize them? No, we do not.

In about a tenth of a second — too quickly for us to even be aware it’s happening — our brains figure out what we are seeing and make sense of it.

The extraordinary speed and mastery of interpretation that our brains exercise in such situations is the focus of pioneering research by USC Dornsife vision scientists Irving Biederman and the late Bosco Tjan.

“It’s the miracle of pattern recognition,” said Biederman, Harold Dornsife Chair in Neurosciences and professor of psychology and computer science. “People can be misled into thinking it’s a very easy, simple process because it occurs so quickly and automatically, but the fact is half of our brain is dedicated almost exclusively to vision.”

Indeed, Biederman and Tjan’s research is focused not on the eye itself — what most people think of when they hear the word ‘vision’ — but on how the brain achieves vision.

Biederman compares the way the eye works to a camera recording images.

“Like a camera, the eye doesn’t know what it’s looking at,” he said. “It’s our brain that interprets the image, not the eye.”

Biederman directs the Image Understanding Laboratory, which is researching how a scene, object or face can be recognized in a fraction of a second, even when we have never encountered that image previously.

His own research explores shape recognition, which provides the major entrée to visual cognition — the process of interpreting and understanding what we see.

“Of course, we also get color, texture and movement, but most of what we understand and remember about what we see comes from shape,” he said. “A line drawing of a scene tells us pretty much what we want to know.

The question is, ‘How is that done?’ How is it possible to achieve visual understanding of a scene we’ve never experienced before?”

First, we need to overcome a deceptively complex problem: Our retina is two-dimensional while the world is threedimensional.

Biederman invites us to think of a chair and imagine looking at it, or indeed trying to draw it, from the most unusual perspectives.

“If we rotate that chair it can present an infinite number of images, many of which — upside down and viewed from below, for instance — we’ve never experienced before.

Yet, with the exception of a few unusual projections of that image, we’ll almost always be able to appreciate its threedimensional shape.”

This ability becomes the miracle of pattern recognition: how we’re able to understand scenes never seen before, from viewpoints never viewed before.

“These scenes and objects are projecting images that are

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completely novel and yet we can instantly make sense of them,” Biederman said. “It would seem to be an impossible feat and yet we do it all the time. A child does it and we do it so easily that we’re hardly aware that it reflects an extraordinary achievement.”

THE BREAKDOWN

So how do our brains pull it off?

The answer, Biederman says, lies in the brain’s ability to decompose complex objects into simple shapes like cylinders, bricks, wedges and cones, which he calls “geons.”

“It turns out that you can model most objects in terms of a very small vocabulary of these simple shapes, numbering about 30 or 40,” he said.

“If we represent an object we’re looking at in terms of geons, then we’re able to recognize what the object is from almost any viewpoint.” That’s because the components — the geons — that make up the object are easily distinguishable from one another regardless of viewpoint.

The characteristics of an object that enable us to do this — what Biederman terms “nonaccidental properties” — are small in number. They include points where contours (the lines that mark the edges of an object and form its outline) meet and end, like the corner of a table; whether a contour is straight or curved, such as a door or a ball; and whether a pair of contours are parallel or converging, such as those on an ice cream sandwich or an ice cream cone.

A few exceptions do exist. For instance, a brick and a IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY J A M E S S T E IN B E R G F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

cylinder both look the same if viewed directly from the side. “But even then,” Biederman notes, “a slight change in orientation of the brick or the cylinder will tell you, ‘That’s the cylinder and that’s the brick.’ ” Ultimately, he says, geons and nonaccidental properties are what enable us to look at a previously unseen abstract sculpture and understand its shape. Our brain is able to break down the various parts that make up the whole into comprehensible geons and then come up with an interpretation in terms of nonaccidental properties and vertices.

When we cannot represent the object in terms of its simple parts, such as with a nebulous mass, then we will have trouble distinguishing it from another at different viewpoints.

SPARKING VISION It is our brains, not our eyes, that are responsible for achieving vision by interpreting what we see.

Spring / Summer 2017 33

MAPPING THE BRAIN

The region of the cortex that is responsible for this amazing feat of perception is the lateral occipital complex (LOC), an area of the brain at the border between the occipital and temporal lobes, just above and behind the ears. Given an image, the LOC will not only determine the geons that make it up, but also the relationships between them.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow within the brain, made identifying the LOC relatively easy, Biederman said. It clearly indicated greater activity in that region of the brain when subjects were shown intact images of objects than when shown scrambled versions of those objects. That knowledge enabled the scientists to concentrate their studies on that area.

Research by Biederman and Tjan, who at the time was professor of psychology and co-director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center, showed that the activation of the LOC does not depend on whether an object is familiar. They tested this by rearranging the geons of familiar objects so that they appeared as novel items, similar to rearranging letters of a word to make a non-word.

“We found that the LOC is activated equally by abstract sculptures and familiar objects,” Biederman said.

UNDERSTANDING SCENES

In addition to identifying objects, our brain also needs to make sense of all that we see. Often a single glance is all it takes; however, if faced with a random array of objects, we may have to look at each individually to gain an appreciation of the whole scene. For example, a quick glance at a kitchen is usually enough to immediately understand what we’re looking at, but comprehending a messy collection of items piled up in a teenager’s closet may require us to look at each object separately.

A recent experiment carried out by Tjan, Biederman and Eshed Margalit, who graduated from USC Dornsife in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in computational neuroscience and is now pursuing graduate studies in neuroscience at Stanford University, addressed this. The study showed that separating the geons of an object so they are no longer interacting — in other words, no longer making up the object but simply separated from each other — causes even less activity to occur in the LOC than for an intact object.

If we go one step further and scramble the geons into a mass of random pixels, the LOC shows still less activity.

In other words, the LOC is working to interpret both the shape of the parts and the relations between these parts.

Similarly, this sensitivity of the LOC to the relations between parts composing an object is also witnessed with the relations between objects composing a scene. Thus, the LOC shows stronger activation with an image of a hand holding a cup than an image of a hand beside a cup.

“This applies generally, not just to hands and cups but to any pair of objects,” Biederman said. “One might have thought the opposite, that two things — a hand and a cup — would cause more activity in the brain than essentially one thing, a hand holding a cup. But we found that more activity occurs in the LOC if objects are shown as interacting, rather than side-by-side.

“The LOC is an extraordinary mechanism for giving us not only the shapes of parts, but also how they relate to each other, and it does the same for scenes, giving us the shapes of the objects making up the scenes as well

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as the relations between them,” he added. “It is the area where objects become scenes.”

“HALF OF OUR BRAIN IS DEDICATED ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY TO VISION.” A PATHWAY TO PLEASURE

Biederman’s study of higher-level vision led him to explore the neural basis of the pleasure we derive from seeing and understanding, especially something new.

Visual signals travel a pathway from the retina at the back of the eye, through the optic nerve and along neural fibers and cables to the occipital cortex in the back of the brain. Activation of the LOC follows, and then regions at the back of the temporal lobe spark. This last area is where we achieve a rich interpretation of the visual input, be it a scene, object or face.

Interestingly, opioid receptors, which convey nerve signals linked to pleasure, are dispersed in a gradient along the entire visual pathway, with few receptors in the early stages building to more and more in the later stages.

“We found that being able to recognize a scene that we specifically have never seen before gives us more opioid release — and thus more pleasure — than something we can’t recognize or that we’ve seen many times before,” Biederman said.

This opioid fix explains the joy and appeal of new experiences. But why is novelty important to us? Biederman explains.

“When you have a new experience, initially many neurons are activated. But once the experience is over, the neurons that were most strongly activated inhibit the neurons that were only weakly or moderately activated by that experience.

The next time you have the same experience, you get less opioid release. This explains why we seek out new experiences.

“Don’t feel sorry for the inhibited neurons, though. They are now freed up to code different experiences. It’s a reflection of the brain’s extraordinary capacity to divvy up its own neural connections, leaving only a minimal number of neurons to code prior experiences and having lots of neurons in reserve to code new experiences.”

HUMOR AND CREATIVITY

This desire for novelty is further borne out by Biederman’s research into the links between vision and creativity. Using The New Yorker’s popular weekly cartoon caption contest, he is exploring what happens in the brain when it attempts to solve humor challenges. He opted to study humor, he said, “because it provides a practical and universal way to explore creativity that can occur in time frames sufficiently short to be amenable to fMRI analyses.

“In contrast, visual art may be able to give us the new experience we crave, but it can be debatable whether a certain work of abstract art is creative,” he said. On the other hand,

SIGHTLINES A single glance is often all that is needed to understand a familiarly ordered scene.

A random array of objects, however, may require us to look at each individually to comprehend the whole picture.

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there is no debate when humor is successful, as the end result — laughter — is pretty much universal.

A cartoon contains an incongruous element, something that doesn’t quite fit.

“The caption to the cartoon, to be funny, cannot be obvious but has to link remote concepts that resolve the incongruity in the drawing,” he said. “Because the concepts are remote, their linking will necessarily result in the activation of a great number of intervening neurons with a concomitant and sudden deluge of opioid activity, causing us to laugh. But once we’ve seen the cartoon and we’ve got the joke, the inhibition of the weakly activated cells by the strongly activated cells reduces the amount of opioid release and thus the pleasure is diminished.”

“IF WE REPRESENT AN OBJECT ... IN TERMS OF GEONS, THEN WE’RE ABLE TO RECOGNIZE [IT] FROM ALMOST ANY VIEWPOINT.” Biederman says this desire for new but interpretable information is a system that makes us “infovores” — eager consumers of information.

In earlier research, Biederman and Ori Amir ’15, a former USC Dornsife Ph.D. student now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studied preferences for viewing simple geons. When presented with a pair of dissimilar geons, say a cylinder on the left and a cone on the right, both 4-month-old infants and college students preferred looking at the geons with non-parallel sides or with curves.

This correlated with similar studies in the lab that showed how curvy or nonparallel shapes produced higher activity in visual pathway neurons than straight or parallel shapes.

“That greater activity means we get more opioid release and thus more pleasure from looking at those shapes,” Biederman said. “Our eye movements are not random but, when we are not engaged in a deliberate search, such as looking for our car in a parking lot, they are directed towards entities that will give us more opioid activity — a system that is established as early as four months.”

FOCUS ON VISUAL CROWDING

Tjan, who died on Dec. 2, 2016, was an international expert on visual crowding. Postdoctoral and doctoral students in Tjan’s laboratory are continuing his legacy of pioneering research, aimed in part at bringing hope to macular degeneration patients with impaired vision.

About 20 percent of us will find our vision degraded 36

as the macula, a region near the center of the retina, degenerates in our later years. As patients lose their highresolution central vision, many develop a preferred retinal locus (PRL). This means they have learned to compensate for their impaired central vision by looking slightly away from objects on which they wish to focus, thus using the part of the retina with the highest remaining resolution.

While PRL is helpful, it comes with a major disadvantage: visual crowding. This occurs because cells in the periphery of the retina have larger receptive fields than the tightly packed center. Patients with macular degeneration who use PRL to focus on, say, a given letter on a page, often

experience visual crowding when other nearby letters activate the same receptive field being employed to perceive a given letter. This results in mixed-up shapes, making it difficult if not impossible to interpret the shapes of letters, objects and scenes.

Tjan successfully demonstrated how a training regimen could reduce visual crowding’s deleterious effects on vision.

Tjan pioneered the study of PRL in normal subjects without macular degeneration so he could understand how the condition progresses. By deliberately occluding their central vision, he was able to train his test subjects to use a region of reasonable clarity or resolution away from the center of the

retina. Although not as good as the original central vision, this area provides better focus than more peripheral regions.

Further, Tjan and his team used fMRI to show that training actually changes the way the brain works, improving visual processing in the primary visual cortex, the starting point for visual processing in the brain.

“There are just a few really great mysteries in the world,” Biederman said. “There is cosmology and dark matter, and then there is higher-level vision and the brain. And we have come a long way in explaining how we make sense of what we see, this extraordinary achievement of the brain that had never been understood before.”

PECULIAR PLEASURES Seeing an odd or unexpected interaction between two objects stimulates our brains to release more opioids, thus giving us increased enjoyment.

Spring / Summer 2017 37

By Susan Bell, Michelle Boston and Laura Paisley

ripple effects ripple effects ripple effects

ripple effects

Ideas are the engine of change. Nurtured, refined and converted to action, they build to a critical mass, sending shockwaves through the status quo.

At USC Dornsife, more than 40 centers and institutes are home to faculty, staff and students who aim to impact the global community through intensive, innovative scholarship in the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. More important, their visionary work not only results in significant, positive change now, but sets the stage for ongoing progress by giving students the skills to think differently and find their own paths to a brighter future.

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grounded in the idea of intellectual leadership.

“My strategy has always been to have the bravery to say, ‘This is the way in which academe needs to evolve and we’re going to demonstrate that.’ I don’t think you win many accolades by copying. Rather, my vision grew out of the question: How can we build a spatial sciences institute that will be as relevant in its impact five or 10 years from now as it is today?”

His conclusion? Innovation is the key.

“Our research and teaching must be both cutting edge and actionable,” he said. “We want academic programs that provide expertise and training that people can take and apply wherever they want, more or less instantly.”

The success of this strategy can be seen in the long list of SSI graduates and faculty who are improving the world in visionary ways. Graduate student Kelly Wright, for example, is using her online training in geographic information science and technology (GIST) to fight tungiasis, a painful, debilitating and disfiguring disease that affects the lives of millions of the world’s poor.

Nathan Novak, a 2016 graduate of the GIST master’s program, completed a prize-winning thesis project that explored how new sensors can help us understand the ecology of sperm whales by using a range of geospatial data to map their movements in the Gulf of Alaska. Novak successfully turned his research into an internship and then a permanent job as a geospatial technologies manager.

A recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yao-Yi Chiang, assistant professor (research) of spatial sciences, is creating map-processing software that libraries can use to automatically catalogue map collections, thereby making the information they contain more accessible to researchers and the public.

“Maps record changes in human societies and our physical space over a long period of time. But most of these maps exist only on paper sitting in libraries, archives and museums, and technology can’t yet find them, let alone integrate them automatically,” Chiang said. “Our work can potentially unlock a world of long-term historical information for scholars across many fields.”

Wilson illustrates the relevance of spatial sciences by asking interlocutors to think of traditional disciplines as cups of coffee. Spatial science, he says, is the cream.

“We’re figuring out when to add a little to the coffee, and make the sum of the parts bigger and better than the

through space and time through space and time through space and timeand time through space

Captured by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, “The Blue Marble,” a photograph of Earth viewed from 28,000 miles above, is one of the most reproduced images in history. Its enduring popularity lies in the fact that, for the first time, it gave us the possibility of looking at Earth from afar, thus seeing it as a whole.

“It offered a totally different perspective. And that’s what spatial sciences do — they give us a whole new perspective on the world,” said John Wilson, professor of sociology, civil and environmental engineering, computer science, and architecture.

Spatial science is now an indisputable part of our daily lives, something we take for granted when we turn to

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Google Maps on our smartphones to find the nearest coffee shop, or use the GPS in our cars to navigate an unfamiliar city. The use of geospatial technology is becoming increasingly common as spatial scientists forge new contributions to our understanding of the world around us through spatial data acquisition and analysis, modeling, and mapping.

Current uses include disaster relief management, urban planning and ecology, conservation, sustainability, military intelligence, environmental and human health care outcomes — even the development of more realistic video games. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Wilson founded the USC Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI) in 2010, when the discipline was in its relative infancy. From the start, his vision for the institute was

original. In most fields — at some time, in some way — spatial sciences will add value. It’s all about collaboration.”

Rather than building a spatial sciences degree, Wilson chose to create a bachelor’s degree in geodesign in partnership with USC Price School of Public Policy and USC School of Architecture.

“Our geodesign degree focuses on collaborative decisionmaking and looks to the future rather than the present or the past. It is the first program of its kind in the world and people are now copying us.”

SSI’s research-based online master’s degree in GIST encourages students to pursue their own interests for their thesis projects, attracting people from widely varying backgrounds.

In 2014, SSI launched two online graduate certificates — in geospatial leadership and in geospatial intelligence — and added a GeoHealth track to Keck School of Medicine of USC’s online MPH degree. A year later, the institute began offering a new M.S. degree in spatial informatics with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. In 2016, SSI launched an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in population, health and place with Keck School of Medicine and USC Dornsife’s sociology department, and a new human security and geospatial intelligence minor with the School of International Relations.

“All these academic programs speak to problem solving, interdisciplinary opportunities and the future,” Wilson said. “They all speak to training young men and women, who we have every expectation will go out in the world and make a difference. That was our vision from the get-go.”

This vision is also strongly connected to service. The institute has formed relationships with a range of influential professional organizations with the view to creating a series of regular, multiday workshops around specific problems and places. Wilson’s idea? To bring citizens, experts, students and faculty together to find common ground and suggest solutions — from how to deal with the aftermath of a major storm or nuclear accident, to working toward creating green infrastructure or ending endemic poverty.

“These are major problems, but they’re also opportunities for us to engage and work with our students to help find solutions,” Wilson said. “That’s the next step: more community outreach — not just locally, but also nationally and internationally.” —S.B.

Reverberations

22%

Students educated per year by the Spatial Sciences Institute at USC Dornsife.

1,200

of students in online geospatial information science and technology (GIST) graduate programs are either active military or veterans.

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

EARTH PERSPECTIVE Spatial sciences enables us to see and understand our world in new ways, whether through the lens of the past, the present or the future.

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students and graduates of our online GIST graduate programs have won academic awards, given conference presentations or had articles published in academic journals.

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outcomes people have in their lives, and then what kinds of policies can help people do better. That is really what economics is about — and we’re trying to use genetics to do even better economics.”

Only a handful of economists are working with genetics, but this brand of research is perfectly at home at CESR. The center, founded three years ago, was conceived as a place where visionary social science could thrive and where research could be done differently than in the past.

“Being in a place where that’s the shared vision is pretty rare,” said econometrician Arie Kapteyn, professor (research) of economics and CESR director. “There’s no restriction on which way you want to go or what you want to do. It doesn’t mean that there are no restrictions on resources, but it’s the opportunity to think about your vision of what’s really exciting in social science research.

Then being able to actually implement it is absolutely fantastic.”

The mission of CESR is discovering how people around the world live, think, interact, age and make important decisions. The center’s researchers are dedicated to innovation and combining their analysis to deepen the understanding of human behavior in a variety of economic and social contexts.

“What we try to do is mold a disciplinary science in a very broad sense,” Kapteyn said. “Because today’s problems in society, they’re really all multidisciplinary.”

Case in point: Benjamin’s work combining genetics and economics.

The flagship research effort for Benjamin’s CESR research group deals with genes and education. In a 2016 study, the team identified variants in 74 genes that are associated with educational attainment. In other words, people who carry more of these variants, on average, complete more years of formal schooling.

Benjamin hopes to use this data in a holistic way to create a predictive tool. “Rather than just identifying specific genes,” he said, “we’re also creating methods for combining the

Reverberations When Daniel Benjamin was just beginning his Ph.D. program in economics in 2001, he attended a conference with his graduate school advisers. They took in a presentation on neuroeconomics, a nascent field dealing with how the human brain goes about making decisions.

Afterward, as they took a stroll outside, they couldn’t stop talking about what they had learned, how novel and intriguing it was. What would be next, they wondered.

What would come after neuroeconomics?

“The human genome project had just been completed, and we decided that even more fundamental than the brain would be genes, and that someday this was going to matter a lot for social science,” said Benjamin, associate professor (research) of economics at USC Dornsife’s Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR). Indeed, his excitement that day was the foundation of a visionary academic path.

Fast forward to today. Genoeconomics is now an emerging

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area of social science that incorporates genetic data into the work that economists do. It is based on the idea that a person’s particular combination of genes is related to economic behavior and life outcomes such as educational attainment, fertility, obesity and subjective well-being.

“There’s this rich new source of data that has only become available recently,” said Benjamin, also co-director of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, which facilitates cooperation among medical researchers, geneticists and social scientists.

Collecting genetic data and creating the large data sets used by economists and other social scientists have become increasingly affordable, and new analytical methods are getting more and more powerful as these data sets continue to grow. The big challenge, he said, is figuring out how scientists can leverage this new data to address a host of important policy questions.

“We’re ultimately interested in understanding how genes and environments interact to produce the kinds of

GENETIC ANALYSIS Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Economic and Social Research projects a vision of how analyzing the big data of genetics may improve social policy intervention and life outcomes.

of commitment to a candidate, ranking their certainty of choice on a scale of 0 to 100. The Daybreak Poll was also notable for making its raw data sets available to the public. During the election, each day’s updated results could be downloaded from the poll’s data site.

ELECTION FORECAST 50 47.5 PERCENTAGE

bigbig data, big impact data, impact bigbig data, bigdata, impact big big impact

Part of CESR’s Understanding America Study, and conducted in partnership with the Los Angeles Times, the Daybreak Poll was one of very few to correctly predict the winner of the 2016 presidential election.The poll’s methodology focuses on respondents’ intensity

information in a person’s entire genome into a single variable that can be used to partially predict how much education a person’s going to get.”

The young field of genoeconomics is still somewhat controversial, and Benjamin is careful to point out that individual genes don’t determine behavior or outcome.

“The effect of any individual gene on behavior is extremely small,” Benjamin explained, “but the effects of all the genes combined on almost any behavior we’re interested in is much more substantial. It’s the combined information of many genes that has predictive power, and that can be most useful for social scientists.”

While the cohort of researchers actively using the available genome-wide data in this way is still somewhat limited, Benjamin says it is growing quickly.

“I think across the social sciences, researchers are seeing the potential for the data, and people are starting to use it in their work and getting excited about it, but right now it’s still a small band of us trying to lay the foundations.

“We’re putting together huge data sets of hundreds of thousands of people — approaching a million people in our ongoing work on educational attainment — because you need those really big sample sizes to accurately detect the genetic influences.”

As CESR works to improve social welfare by informing and influencing decision making in the public and private sectors, big data such as Benjamin’s is a growing part of that process, according to Kapteyn.

“What big data reflects is the fact that nowadays there are so many other ways in which we can learn about behavior,” he said. “As a result, I think we’ll see many more breakthroughs and gain a much better understanding of what’s going on in the world and in social science than in the past.

“I think we’re really at the beginning of something pretty spectacular. What we are doing is really only scratching the surface — there’s so much more that can be done.” —L.P.

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“But most of the ocean is not close to the coasts, and most of it is not at the surface.”

The ocean covers roughly 70 percent of the Earth, reaching down an average of two miles. At the bottom, the sea floor measures another six miles or more deep at its thickest points, making it one of the largest habitats on Earth — and one of the most difficult to explore.

“It’s a large operation akin to a NASA mission, really,” Amend said.

And like NASA, C-DEBI has, from its founding in 2010, sought to expand humanity’s reach into this unexplored frontier. The center’s researchers have made it their mission to understand this ecosystem, from the muddy sediment to the microorganisms that call the subseafloor their home.

“We want to find out what kind of organisms inhabit those spaces. How are they similar or different to organisms that we know about from the open ocean or the surface world?

How many are there? How are they distributed? How diverse are these communities?” Amend said.

Because the subseafloor ecosystem is so large, it almost certainly affects the world’s climate, according to Julie Huber, C-DEBI associate director and an associate scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts.

“We’re trying to understand the role these microbes play in some of the most basic geochemical processes and how they affect the environment of our planet,” she said.

C-DEBI is a National Science Foundation–funded Science and Technology Center led by 10 scientists, including Amend and Huber, representing eight institutions across the United States. It’s also the flagship hub for scientists who study the deep biosphere. The center offers grants and fellowships, as well as a robust “K to gray” education program that fosters STEM education for professionals and novices alike.

Since its launch, research produced by C-DEBI scientists has resulted in groundbreaking discoveries that lay the foundation for understanding life below the ocean.

A recent study published by Doug LaRowe, assistant professor (research) of earth sciences at USC Dornsife, characterized marine sediments on a global scale for the first time. His work produced an estimate of the total amount of marine sediment in the oceans, the average thickness of the sediment blanket, an estimate of how

thethe world below thethe blue world below blue the world below thebelow blue the blue the world

Bundled in layers of blankets for warmth, Laura Zinke settled in for a two-hour ride to the bottom of the ocean.

The temperature dipped significantly once she and her colleagues passed the depth still touched by sunlight, and it would continue to drop as an engineer maneuvered the Alvin submersible research vessel deeper and deeper toward the seafloor. Through a small porthole, Zinke saw fluorescent creatures flit by.

“Looking out the window was like staring into the night sky, but the stars are moving,” said Zinke, who is working toward her Ph.D. in marine biology and biological oceanography at USC Dornsife.

Her descent to the deep biosphere — a habitat comprising the ocean floor made up of sediment teeming with

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much water is trapped in those sediments, and the temperature of the sediments and water at the ocean floor.

These numbers are incredibly helpful for researchers because they provide foundational scientific information that helps establish basic understandings of the deep biosphere, explained Amend, who collaborated with LaRowe. For instance, they found that the amount of water estimated to be trapped in marine sediments is almost three times as much as that in all glaciers and ice sheets across the continents.

“Marine sediments turn out to be the second largest reservoir of water after the ocean,” Amend said. “They’re a distant second — about five percent of the amount of ocean water — but now we can start asking questions about the exchange of water from the ocean to the sediments as well as the exchange of mass, nutrients, energy, organisms. It’s huge for us scientists.”

In another important study, C-DEBI researcher Steve D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island discredited a long-held understanding of marine sediments. Scientists believed that ocean sediments contain no measurable oxygen below a few centimeters. Looking at samples from a wide range of locations, D’Hondt found that oxygen was, in fact, still measurable all the way to the rocky basement in some locations, though not all.

That’s important because it means the organisms living in those sediments may be oxygen users. “The type of metabolism they perform is different than what we used to think,” Amend said. “That was a really, really big find.”

Looking ahead, Amend said that C-DEBI researchers will focus their work on understanding the microbial life of the deep biosphere.

These steps are critical for scientific discovery, but also for another reason, said Huber.

“It’s the type of science that captures people’s imaginations and that is so important in training the next generation of scientists.” Those like Zinke.

“Before C-DEBI there wasn’t a central body saying that the deep biosphere is important, and we need to go forth and study it,” Zinke said. “But we’re looking at the really basic science questions that mean a lot in terms of how life evolves, and how ocean chemistry affects our world.

“It’s been really fantastic getting to be part of this research structure.” —M.B.

DEEP DIVE Have you ever imagined what is living beneath the ocean floor?

The deep biosphere is one of the largest — and least understood — ecosystems on the planet.

Researchers at the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations have set their sights on understanding its depths.

Reverberations microbes and the underlying rocky subseafloor — was part of a scientific research cruise to the Dorado Outcrop. The rocky ridge lies 125 miles off the west coast of Costa Rica, approximately two miles below the ocean’s surface. Her mission was to collect water and sediment samples to take back for testing and to gather data on the microbes living around the site.

As a research assistant affiliated with the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), headquartered at USC Dornsife, Zinke’s research will help build scientists’ understanding of the deep biosphere.

“When we think about the ocean, most people think about the surface of the ocean and the coastal environments close to the shores,” said Jan Amend, director of C-DEBI and professor of earth sciences and biological sciences.

3X1029 The estimated number of microbial cells present in marine sediments

20% Proportion of marine sediments that make up the ocean’s volume Spring / Summer 2017 45

“We are devoted to building a thriving student community that is interested in applying humanities and ethics to their academic work as well as engaging with civic and global ethical issues,” explained Boyd-Judson, who is also executive director of the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights and was recently named UNESCO Chair in Global Humanities and Ethics.

She aims to carry the USC Levan Institute’s vision even further as it enters its second decade. She is creating more opportunities for students across the university to engage with ethical issues through curricular expansion and new initiatives.

The institute will affirm its global partnerships with the University of Oxford, RAND Corporation and Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

For students searching for value and meaning in their educational experience, such collaborations will create new platforms for scholarship of consequence through the global humanities.

“My goal is to create more opportunities for students from the humanities and beyond to see that they can make a difference in their world,” Boyd-Judson said. “I think it’s something that’s very important for this generation.”

Hickman appreciates the opportunities the institute provides for enacting positive change.

“With the mosque-cathedral, it seemed like there was a very clear goal,” said Hickman. “The humanities has an unwarranted reputation of people just discussing stuff without anything ever happening. But when we left that meeting, we started coming up with a plan.”

Hickman partnered with fellow Oxford Consortium Seminar attendee Mazen Loan, who is Muslim, to address the issue.

“There was a time when [Córdoba] served as a nexus for Muslims, Christians and Jews, and for centuries they lived together peacefully,” said Loan, a philosophy major. “The

humanities in in action humanities action humanities in action in action humanities

It was late in the afternoon on the last day of the trip, and Lyn Boyd-Judson and Mary Cate Hickman were sitting in the back of a cab. Frustrated and a little riled up, they wound through the ancient, impossibly narrow streets of Córdoba, Spain, talking about the meeting they had just left.

“Despite the fact that it’s a mosque and a cathedral and a UNESCO World Heritage site, Muslims still aren’t allowed to pray there,” Hickman said, utterly perplexed.

She was referring to the historic Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, a marvel of Moorish architecture built in the 8th century, that she had visited two days earlier. The junior, who is majoring in religion as well as cinema and media studies, was in Europe as part of the Oxford Consortium Seminar — a human rights-oriented educational collaboration between the USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics and the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford in England.

Led by Boyd-Judson, director of the USC Levan Institute and lecturer in the School of Religion, the summer course brought 15 USC undergraduates to Oxford, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and finally Córdoba, to attend lectures and meetings on human rights and conflict, humanitarian action and peacemaking.

Hickman had accompanied Boyd-Judson to a meeting

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with a Muslim rights organization that has been trying to secure permission for Muslims to pray at the mosque, which was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral in the 13th century. Unfortunately, 15 years of grassroots efforts have been rejected both by the church authorities in Spain and the Vatican under the former pope.

It was in the cab that the lightbulb went on.

“As someone who is a religious minority, or maybe just as someone who’s interested in human rights, it makes me physically uncomfortable that this is happening,” said Hickman, who is Mormon. “I think that this is something worth spending time on fixing.”

Boyd-Judson agreed. The grassroots approach was not working. They needed to go through the United Nations.

Boyd-Judson has directed the USC Levan Institute, housed at USC Dornsife, for the past 10 years. The late USC alumnus Norman Levan — professor emeritus and former chief of dermatology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC — contributed a major gift that inaugurated the institute in 2007.

Levan’s original vision for the institute was to promote engagement and multidisciplinary dialogue surrounding the common humanity of USC students, and to create a forum in which students could explore different modes of thinking and responding to the world.

current global political climate is one that is extremely conducive to Islamophobia, and in my opinion undertaking projects such as this one is the first step toward demonstrating that it is possible for people of different backgrounds to live together peacefully — as they did in medieval Córdoba.”

Hickman and Loan spent their winter break writing a research paper they hope to publish in an academic journal.

Backed by Boyd-Judson’s influence as a UNESCO chair, they want to eventually present their work to U.N. officials — and even Pope Francis. “[The students] are trying to come up with a strategic way to take this issue back to the Vatican now that there’s a new pope who might be more open,” Boyd-Judson said.

This is exactly the kind of global impact she is committed to helping students bring about.

“We couldn’t do anything if LBJ [Boyd-Judson] wasn’t a UNESCO chair,” Hickman said. “But because it seems like we have a path to actually make a change, we have to take it.”

Hickman said Boyd-Judson has played a big role in inspiring her to take action.

“I honestly think [the inspiration came from] meeting a professor who wanted to do something and is so supportive. LBJ is a nurturing mentor — she wants you to succeed and she wants to make a difference. She’s so tough and so kind.”

According to Hickman, Boyd-Judson is all about getting students out in the world, doing on-the-ground work.

Boyd-Judson concurs.

“A critical part of my mission has been not just having a place where we celebrate the humanities here at USC,” she said, “but where we take the humanities and all the big questions, the love of truth and beauty, and everything that’s in our core mission for the university, and we suffuse it outward.” —L.P.

EMPOWERING STUDENTS Through the USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics, director Lyn Boyd-Judson is giving students the tools and opportunities to make a difference in their world and envision an even better future.

Reverberations The USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics engages students with the values at the core of humanity. In this effort, it seeks moral reflection, understanding of self and multidisciplinary dialogue.

More than 2,000 students and faculty from the USC Dornsife community are actively working to make a positive impact across society and around the world.

200 Levan Undergraduate Scholars 3 ANNUAL LEVAN-OXFORD SEMINARS

10 Levan Undergraduate Fellows

3 Levan Graduate Fellows 1 UNESCO CHAIR Spring / Summer 2017 47

fault model that identifies the myriad faults across the Golden State where the ground has the potential to slip and tremble.

“Geologists have spent decades sweating in the field to map these faults and understand their three-dimensional structure,” said Jordan, University Professor, William M. Keck Foundation Chair in Geological Sciences and professor of earth sciences.

Researchers then use supercomputers to analyze that data and create models to approximate how those faults might break as well as the resulting strong shaking.

The operation is elaborate. Scientists from across institutions and disciplines such as geology, seismology and geodesy — the branch of science that studies the earth’s shape and movement — coordinate their findings into usable seismic hazard estimates. That information guides structure engineering and design and emergency preparedness, as well as insurance premium assessments.

“This research is visionary because this notion of putting it all together and actually creating models that do all of this together is pretty new,” Jordan said. “We don’t really have this type of system-level modeling capability in many places, and so we’ve been trying to develop how that works.”

Other countries are taking notice of how SCEC researchers are collaborating on these grand-scale projects. For instance, scientists in New Zealand recently launched the QuakeCoRE Centre for Earthquake Resilience to connect research programs across national and international institutions.

Jordan presented the distinguished lecture on earthquake system science in California at QuakeCoRE’s inaugural annual meeting in 2016. Recently, Jordan met with researchers in China who are working to establish a SCEC-style research center, too. “We are setting a template for how you do this kind of research worldwide,” he said.

The center also has a significant education component

seismic scienc seismic science seismic science seismic science

The largest earthquake to jolt Southern California occurred more than 150 years ago. The Great Fort Tejon Earthquake of 1857 — the biggest recorded quake in state history at magnitude 7.9 — originated in Monterey County, rumbling 225 miles along the San Andreas fault, kicking up dust all the way down to the Cajon Pass north of San Bernardino.

According to reports, the current of the mighty Kern River turned upstream and gushed 4 feet over its banks.

The Los Angeles River was also reportedly thrust from its bed. Two people were killed by the temblor, a testament to how sparsely populated the state was at the time.

Studies have shown that it is only a matter of time before another “big one” hits. The chance of having one or more magnitude 7.5 or larger earthquakes in California over the next 30 years is greater than 50 percent. The probability of a smaller, but still substantial, 6.7 magnitude quake occurring in that time period jumps to 99 percent. Let that soak in. With the high-density populations of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, a large earthquake could severely damage crucial water aqueducts and power lines, requiring repairs in the billions of dollars. Not to mention the lives that it would jeopardize.

“Earthquakes have become much more disruptive to society

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than they used to be,” said Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), which is headquartered at USC Dornsife. “Our exposure to hazards is much higher, so the risks are higher. That just means we have to understand on the system level what’s going to happen in an earthquake — not just what’s going to happen to my house and what’s going to happen to USC, but what’s going to happen everywhere.”

Thankfully, SCEC, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is at the forefront of earthquake system science. The science and technology center brings together a network of more than 1,000 earthquake researchers from across the United States and the world to get to the bottom of how exactly earthquakes work and to offer models for forecasting when and where large temblors might occur.

Among the many projects headed by SCEC is an innovative model for forecasting earthquakes called the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF), developed in concert with USGS and the California Geological Survey. UCERF represents the most authoritative estimates of the magnitude, location and likelihood of earthquakes in California, both in the long term and in the short term.

To make these forecasts, hundreds of scientists have contributed their research to create a community earthquake

that touches all levels of learners. Undergraduates can intern with SCEC while K–12 students can join the citizen-science Quake Catcher Network, in which volunteers place earthquake monitoring sensors in their classrooms or homes to collect seismic data. Students learn about earthquake science from a curriculum that complements gathering the data.

But nothing might be as far reaching as SCEC’s communication and outreach arm as exemplified by the Great ShakeOut Earthquake Drills. SCEC coordinates the annual global disaster preparedness event, which helps individuals and organizations around the world get ready for a major earthquake.

“It’s a remarkable public outreach and educational activity that has taken on significance worldwide, and it’s done right here at USC,” Jordan said.

In 2016, more than 50 million people from more than 70 countries registered to participate in the Great ShakeOut, which called for participants to practice the “drop, cover, and hold on” drill for at least one minute wherever they were — school, work, home or elsewhere. Some went further, holding table-top exercises, tsunami and fire evacuation drills, safety equipment demonstrations, and even mock search-andrescue activities.

“The mission of ShakeOut is that everyone, everywhere, should know how to protect themselves during an earthquake,” said SCEC Associate Director Mark Benthien, who coordinates the ShakeOut drills worldwide.

In the decade and a half that Jordan has directed SCEC, he has seen the center directly impact the way scientists understand earthquakes and how the public has learned to prepare for a tremor with the new models and simulations produced to the global preparedness drills run by the center.

“We’ve really changed the way people deal in a practical sense with seismic hazards,” Jordan said. —M.B.

EPIC CENTER The Southern California Earthquake Center is leading the charge in earthquake system science to ensure that wherever and whenever “the big one” hits, we’re prepared.

Reverberations FREQUENCY OF EARTHQUAKES OF VARIOUS MAGNITUDES

1,300,000 130,000 13,000 1319 134 2-2.9 3-3.9 4-4.9 5-5.9 6-6.9 7-7.9 8 and higher

17

1

SIZABLE SHAKING Earthquakes take place around the world almost constantly, but most are relatively small; the majority of temblors average a magnitude 2.9 or less.

But notches on the magnitude scale make a sizable difference. The scale is logarithmic, meaning that for each step up in magnitude, an earthquake releases 32 times more energy.

So, for instance, the Northridge earthquake that shook the San Fernando Valley with great intensity in 1994 was relatively moderate at a 6.7 magnitude, compared with what scientists think of as a “big one,” which would measure 7.5 or larger.

Average annual number of earthquakes worldwide. (Graphic not to scale.) Source: earthquake.usgs.gov Spring / Summer 2017 49

Power to the Patient

IN APRIL 2000, PETER KUHN STEPPED OFF A PLANE IN ATHENS, GREECE. IT WAS HIS FIRST TRIP TO THE CITY, THE CENTER OF CIVILIZATION IN ANCIENT TIMES.

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C A N C E R C E L L IL L U S T R AT I O N BY A L E X A N D E R U G R E E N

PETER KUHN, Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences, professor of medicine, biomedical engineering, and aerospace and mechanical engineering, and associate director of the Bridge Institute at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience

Hailing a cab outside the airport, he slipped into the back seat and handed the driver the address of his hotel destination, then settled in for the ride. About an hour later, they arrived. The cost: $100.

“Two days later, back to the airport from the same hotel was just shy of a $20 cab ride that took no more than 10 minutes,” said Kuhn, Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences and professor of medicine, biomedical engineering, and aerospace and mechanical engineering. The first driver had taken advantage of Kuhn’s unfamiliarity with Athens and unnecessarily extended the trip, running up the bill.

Kuhn had actually enjoyed that scenic ride, so he didn’t mind the swindle too much, but he now marks the incident as an important lesson in how times have changed.

“Interestingly enough, that wouldn’t happen again today,” he said, noting the explosion of GPS and cell phone technologies.

These advances, the kind used by driving services such as Lyft and Uber, bring a new level of transparency to the process. Both driver and passenger know how long the trip should take. And by using navigation services and apps to gather data from other users on similar paths in the vicinity, they can choose to change the route to avoid traffic or skirt construction.

Kuhn, who also is associate director of the Bridge Institute at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, wants to bring this same kind of transparency, along with the decision-making power it provides, to cancer treatment.

“It doesn’t matter where I am, using my GPS and overlaying local real-time traffic, I can see how long the trip will take or detours that might be an advantage,” he said. The same should essentially be true for patients. That is his vision behind initiatives such as CancerBase and ATOM-HP (Analytical Technologies to Objectively Measure Human Performance).

Both projects were highlighted as part of former vice president Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot program. They aim to gather data in real time from doctors, patients and researchers and make the

information available immediately in an easily understood format.

ATOM-HP — developed in collaboration with USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center; the Keck School of Medicine of USC; the USC Viterbi School of Engineering; and the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy — uses wearable technology and smartphones to monitor patients. Current cancer treatment and monitoring is confined to clinic visits, sometimes weeks apart. ATOM-HP enables continuous, real-time data capture, eliminating gaps in the process.

CancerBase is a social media-based tool. Kuhn’s team along with colleagues from the Keck School of Medicine, USC Iovine and Young Academy and Stanford University designed CancerBase to empower patients to share their experiences anonymously in a format akin to Facebook and other online social platforms.

Much like current navigation apps, which gather data from many users on similar paths, ATOM-HP and CancerBase will process the data received to allow patients to team with physicians and choose, at any time during treatment, the path best suited to their individual needs.

“It will let patients compare their experiences with others like them and make choices that fit their needs,” Kuhn said.

A 30-year-old mother facing breast cancer, for example, might opt for a treatment with a slightly higher risk of recurrence than chemotherapy but avoids the cognitive side effects of “chemobrain,” so she can continue to attend to her young children’s needs. A 75-year-old prostate cancer patient may decide the risks of surgery outweigh the 10 percent chance of death from his particular form of the disease over the next 15 years.

Personal preferences and social concerns can be just as important as the need to tackle the cancer, Kuhn said.

Kuhn speaks not just from an academic view. Much of his work is rooted in a very personal experience: His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when he was 18.

Though her treatment was successful, every unexplained pain she felt has been a source of concern for the past 30 years, he said.

“I grew up with that worry, conscious of this constant fear because pain is indeed often the first indication of metastatic progression.

Even though the physicians monitor patients, still too often the first indication the disease has returned and spread is pain.” By then, the cancer has a renewed virulence.

Kuhn finds the status quo — relying on a patient to report pain and then having to determine if further testing is warranted — difficult to accept. “That means that we as scientists have really failed the patients. It’s ridiculous.”

Technologies such as ATOM-HP and CancerBase, he believes, could be the key to turning that around, providing the appropriate tools to both the treating physician and the patient. Using social media and the latest data-harnessing technology to analyze large amounts of the most current data will help patients and doctors track health from the initial diagnosis, through treatment and well after. And researchers can use the information to further advance treatment.

“We need a continuum of care to support the continuum of disease,” he said. “If we want a continuum of care, we need to have a continuum of data to support that, and we need a spectrum of technologies for both the health and the disease of that patient to support that. We have to build that out.

“It all fits in this bigger picture,” he said. “Convergent science at USC enables us to bring this all together and indeed deliver solutions to the wicked problem of cancer.”

I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y J E A N F R A N C O I S P O D E V I N ; H A L D A N E P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F F. D U N C A N H A L D A N E

“We need a continuum of care to support the continuum of disease.”

Legacy

by Darrin S. Joy

F. D U N C A N H A L D A N E , 1 9 8 1 – 8 5 F. Duncan Haldane, the recipient of a 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, conducted much of his award-winning research while a professor of physics at USC Dornsife from 1981-85.

Now at Princeton University, Haldane relied on advanced mathematical models to win the prestigious award he shares with David Thouless of the University of Washington and J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University. Their research into the bizarre properties of matter in extreme states, including superconductors, superfluids and thin magnetic films, may have major applications in electronics, materials science and computing.

Haldane initially experienced difficulty in getting his work recognized. It wasn’t until after arriving at USC Dornsife that the Londonborn physicist succeeded in publishing two landmark papers, both in 1983, that later established his reputation.

“It is very gratifying that work, which was initially disbelieved as a bizarre prediction, has blossomed into one of the foundations of new ideas on topological matter, entanglement, matrix product states, and much else,” Haldane said. “All these things are things that no one expects. You stumble over something, and then you find the big picture after.” —S.B.

Artist’s metaphorical concept of topology, in which a coffee cup and doughnut are “equal” to one another in topological terms based on the number of loops within each.

Spring / Summer 2017 51

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY TROJANA LIT Y

HONORS

Faculty News AIMEE BENDER, professor of English and director of the Ph.D. program in Creative Writing and Literature, was appointed a Distinguished Professor by USC President C. L. Max Nikias, a designation reserved for those who have brought special renown to USC. DANIELA BLEICHMAR, associate professor of art history and history, and associate provost for faculty and student initiatives in the arts and humanities, was named a 2016-17 visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Part artist and part inventor, USC’s scientific glassblower makes handcrafted pieces that keep critical USC labs running.

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Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Writer in Residence Emeritus T.C. BOYLE won the inaugural Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award for his novel The Harder They Come (Ecco, 2015).

University Professor ANTONIO DAMASIO, David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC Dornsife, was awarded the 2016 Mind and Brain Prize in recognition of his fundamental investigations

MEGAN LUKE, assistant professor of art history, was awarded a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She will be based at the Freie Universität in Berlin for three residencies from 2017–19, where she will work on her forthcoming book.

ALICE GAMBRELL, associate professor of English, was named the 2016-17 McElderry Research Fellow by USC Dornsife’s Department of English.

JESSE GRAHAM, associate professor of psychology, received a Sage Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology.

JILL MCNITT-GRAY, Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering and professor of biological sciences and biomedical engineering, was awarded the 2016 Dr. C. Harmon Brown Award from USA Track & Field for her contributions to the fields of sports medicine and science.

WILLIAM HANDLEY, associate professor of English, received the Western Literature Association’s 2016 Susan J. Rosowski Award. The honor is given for outstanding teaching and mentoring in the field of western American literature.

JOSH KUN, associate professor of communication and American studies and ethnicity, was selected as a 2016 fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Considered one of the most prestigious prizes in the United States, the MacArthur Fellowship provides a $625,000 grant, popularly known as the “genius” grant.

ANDREW LAKOFF, associate professor of sociology, was named a 2016-17 fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

PAUL LERNER, professor of history and director of the Max-Kade Institute for AustrianGerman-Swiss Studies, received the American Historical Association’s 2016 Dorothy Rosenberg Prize for his book The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 (Cornell University Press, 2015). The prize recognizes

SLIWOSKI PHOTO BY GUS RUELAS

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

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

Scientific glassblowers used to populate research universities and corporate laboratories across the United States, but due to everything from budget cuts to automation, they are increasingly scarce. However, their expertise and artistry are essential for chemists who design glassware for their unique chemical reactions. This isn’t stuff you can order in a catalog.

“I make one-of-a-kind items here,” said Sliwoski, one of only a few glassblowers left in Los Angeles.

“It’s an art that’s been around for 1,000 years,” he said. “You don’t want it to disappear. …

No matter what, with automation and everything, there’s stuff we still need that is made out of glass.”

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

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

“In some ways, he’s an artist and in some ways, he’s a very sophisticated engineer,” said Mark Thompson, Ray R. Irani, Chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Chair in Chemistry, and professor of chemistry and chemical engineering and materials science.

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

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

JOHN BOWLT, professor of Slavic languages and literatures, was selected to receive the 2016 Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award for his work creating and promoting the field of Russian modernist visual culture.

“the most distinguished work on the history of the Jewish diaspora published in English.”

C H E R E Z OV A N D S T E V E N S P H O T O S BY RYA N YO U N G; F O K I N P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F VA L E RY F O K I N; K AT R I T C H P H O T O BY P E T E R Z H AOY U Z H O U

A Glass Act

JAMES BOEDICKER, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and biological sciences, received a 2016 DARPA Young Faculty Award, which identifies and engages rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions.

of brain processes underlying emotions, decision making and consciousness, and for his contributions to the modern discussion of the mind/body problem.

VIET THANH NGUYEN, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity, received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize as well as the 2017 Book Award in Creative Writing (Prose) for his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015). Nguyen was also selected for the 2016 National Book Award in Nonfiction shortlist for his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016).

MATTHEW PRATT, associate professor of chemistry and biological sciences, received the American Cancer Society’s HOPE Award, which honors an ACS-funded researcher who is in the first two years of funded work.

Pratt was honored for research that “significantly impacted the society’s goal of a world free from the pain and suffering caused by cancer.”

HANNA RIESLER, Lloyd Armstrong Jr. Chair for Science and Engineering and professor of chemistry, received a 2016 Inspiring Women in STEM Award

from INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine. The award recognizes women who work to inspire and encourage the next generation of young people to pursue STEM education and careers. Reisler was honored for her efforts to develop the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) program at USC. GEORGE SANCHEZ, professor of American studies and ethnicity and history, and director of the Center for Diversity and Democracy, received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS). He was recognized for his numerous influential articles, reports and edited anthologies that have shaped the fields of Chicano, Latino and ethnic studies. He was also honored for his mentorship and teaching of students.

BRUCE SMITH, Dean’s Professor of English and professor of theatre, received four awards for The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which he edited. The two-volume set was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 by the American Library Association and the Outstanding Print Reference Work of 2016 (Humanities) by Library Journal.

ARTHUR STONE, professor of psychology and director of the USC Dornsife Center for SelfReport Science, was awarded the John Ware and Alvin Tarlov Career Achievement Prize for patient reported outcomes measures.

It acknowledges Stone’s contributions to the field, including the development of real-time techniques for capturing patient experiences and, as a team effort, the Patient Reporting Outcome Monitoring and Information System.

Continued on page 55.

Influential Minds in Science

Four USC Dornsife researchers set a high bar for their peers, ranking among the top 1 percent of cited scientists in their fields of study.

Science does not take place in a vacuum. Countless experiments are undertaken every year, with each one drawing ideas from previous experiments, adding to the pool of knowledge and fueling further studies. Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters), a New York City-based multinational media and information firm, generates an annual Highly Cited Researchers list to determine which scientists have made the most foundational contributions to their fields.

First noting the top 1 percent of cited papers indexed between 2004 and 2014 in 21 fields of study, the company Vadim Cherezov then counts the number of these papers attributed to each author. These research papers describe work that the scientific community has judged to be the most noteworthy.

In the end, about 3,100 researchers rose to the top of their fields.

The prestigious list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” for 2016 includes four scientists from USC Dornsife. All are members of the Bridge Institute at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience.

Vadim Cherezov, professor of chemistry, biological sciences, and physics and astronomy, was noted in the Valery Fokin Pharmacology and Toxicology category. Cherezov studies the structure and function of proteins that reside in cell membranes, many of which may be involved in serious diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as diabetes and cancer.

Valery Fokin, professor of chemistry, appears in the Chemistry category. Fokin is known for co-discovering copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, recognized in the field as the iconic example of “click chemistry.”

This term refers to finding the simplest and most reliable chemical reactions to build molecules that can be used to Vsevolod Katritch discover new medicines and materials. Fokin’s research focuses on uncovering the molecular basis of human disease by identifying features that set it apart from healthy physiological processes.

Vsevolod Katritch, assistant professor of biological sciences and chemistry, is listed in the Pharmacology and Toxicology category. Katritch employs structure-based computational approaches to study signaling of membrane proteins, including members of the superfamily of G protein-coupled receptors, and to design new molecules that selectively control the function of these important clinical targets.

Raymond Stevens Raymond Stevens, Provost Professor of Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Neurology, Physiology and Biophysics, and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and director of the Bridge Institute, was named in two categories: Pharmacology and Toxicology and Biology and Biochemistry for the third year in a row. Authoring more than 300 peer-reviewed articles, Stevens pioneered work in high-throughput methods for revealing the structure of proteins — essential work for pharmaceutical drug development. He is a serial entrepreneur and has helped develop several therapeutic molecules for conditions ranging from influenza to diabetes. —D.S.J. Spring / Summer 2017 53

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY F A C U LT Y C A N O N

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI: Performing Authorship Columbia University / Assistant Professor of French and Italian and Gender Studies Gian Maria Annovi revisits Pier Paolo Pasolini’s multimedia oeuvre, interpreting his authorial performance as a masochistic act that elicited rejection and generated hostility to highlight the contradictions that structure a repressive society.

Anna Journey of English publishes a collection of essays and a new book of poems that explore her fascination with the peculiar and the grotesque.

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THE ART OF PHILOSOPHY: Visual Thinking in Europe From the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment Princeton University Press / Assistant Professor of Art History Susanna Berger shows that the making and study of visual art in Europe from the late 16th to the early 18th centuries functioned as important methods of philosophical thinking and instruction.

MARRIAGE AND THE LAW IN THE AGE OF KHUBILAI KHAN:

HAUNTED: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds Yale University Press / Exploring how fear has been shaped into images of monsters and monstrosity, University Professor of English, Art History and History Leo Braudy explores four major types: the monster from nature (King Kong); the created monster (Frankenstein); the monster from within (Mr. Hyde); and the monster from the past (Dracula).

and exploring questions of immigration, identity, love and family, the second work of fiction from Aerol Arnold Chair of English, Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity, and 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth.

SO MUCH BLUE: A Novel Greywolf Press / As the events of the past intersect with the present, the painter protagonist in the latest book by Distinguished Professor of English Percival Everett struggles to justify the sacrifices he has made for his art and the secrets he has kept from his wife.

PA I N T I N G “ T H E P E N I T E N T A N D T H E PAT I E N T ” BY RYA N M C L E N N A N; J O U R N E Y P H O T O BY S T E P H A N I E D I A N I

THE TERRANAUTS: A Novel Ecco / Set in 1990s Arizona at a biosphere-type experiment and told through three narrators, the latest book by Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Writer in Residence Emeritus T.C. Boyle brings to life an electrifying, pressured world in which connected lives are uncontrollably pushed to the breaking point.

Peculiar Journeys

Like the wild fox she defied her mother to feed that left “Nothing except / a paw print browned in old grease, / ghosted to the bone china’s edge,” Anna Journey’s poetry has a haunting, feral quality that leaves its singular traces imprinted on the reader’s mind long after the words have faded from the page.

The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), the third collection of poetry by the assistant professor of English, is followed by her first book of essays, An Arrangement of Skin (Counterpoint, 2017). Reading it, The Boston Globe wrote, “is like cracking open a closet door and peering in to see a tight and private collection of oddities, secrets, and skeletons.”

For those familiar with Journey’s work, this is to be both relished and expected. Her new poems and essays brim with tales of graveyards, taxidermy, infidelity and tattoos — even a fried chicken prom corsage sold as a novelty item by a Kentucky florist. “You want to see the photographs / snapped after midnight when the blonde prom dates gnaw / their pinkribboned corsages to the gristle,” she writes.

Journey said she has always had an interest in dark fairy tales and a fascination with the stories her mother told her about her own childhood living on the grounds of the Texas mental asylum where her father, a psychiatrist, did his residency.

“Those were the kinds of stories I grew up hearing,” Journey said. “They seemed normal to me as a child, and I didn’t realize there was anything unusually macabre about them until much later.

“A sense of risk and wonder is what I try to carry into both my poems and essays.

It’s also what I hope to share in teaching my students — that writing is a continuous process of discovery.” —S.B.

Cases From the Yuan dianzhang Harvard University Press / Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and History Bettine Birge reveals the complex, sometimes contradictory inner workings of the Mongol-Yuan legal system, seen through the prism of marriage disputes in chapter 18 of the Yuan dianzhang.

TWO FACES OF EXCLUSION: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States University of North Carolina Press / Professor of History and Spatial Sciences Lon Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination.

THE REFUGEES Grove Press / Written over a period of 20 years

CONTINENTAL AMBITIONS: Roman Catholics in North America: the Colonial Experience Ignatius Press / The late University Professor and Professor of History, and Policy, Planning, and Development Kevin Starr provides an evocation of three Roman Catholic civilizations — Spain, France and Recusant England — as they explored, evangelized and settled the North American continent.

BEAUTIFUL BRAIN: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal Harry N. Abrams / Co-author, University Professor, Appleman Professor of Biological Sciences, and Professor of Neurology and Psychology Larry Swanson describes Nobel Laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s contributions to neuroscience through his groundbreaking artistic brain imagery.

DAVID ST. JOHN, University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

St. John will consult with the organization on matters of artistic programming, serve as a judge for the organization’s largest prizes for poets and act as an ambassador of poetry in the world at large.

Alumni News

MARK THOMPSON, Ray R. Irani Chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Chair in Chemistry and professor of chemistry and chemical engineering and materials science, was named a co-recipient of the IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal for his pioneering work on organic devices leading to organic lightemitting diode displays. The award is presented to individuals or a group for outstanding contributions to material and device science and technology.

The American Bar Association Section of International Law selected ROBERT E. LUTZ (B.A., political science, ’68) to receive the section’s 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award.

WENDY WOOD, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business and director of the Social Behavior Laboratory, was named the first holder of the Sorbonne University INSEAD Distinguished Visiting Chair in Behavioral Science for the 201718 academic year.

NINA ELIASOPH, professor of sociology, and PAUL LICHTERMAN, professor of sociology and religion, were honored with the 2016 Clifford Geertz Award from the Section on Sociology of Culture of the American Sociological Association for their article “Civic Action.” The annual Geertz Award recognizes the best article on cultural sociology. They also received the 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award from the Section on Political Sociology for the same article.

1940s

The Honorable MANUEL L. REAL (B.S., business administration, ’49) celebrated 50 years as an active U.S. District Court judge on Nov. 3, 2016. He was appointed

by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966.

1960s

1970s

BEN EUBANKS (B.A., history, ’78) was appointed a member of the 2017 Beverly Hills/Greater Los Angeles Association of REALTORS board of directors.

He is also a member of the California Association of REALTORS board of directors.

DAVID R. MOORE (B.A., speech communication, ’75) was sworn in by the chief justice of the California Supreme Court as a member of the board of directors for the conference of California Bar Associations.

1980s

KIMBERLY J. DURMENT-LOCKE (B.A., English and print journalism, ’83) received the Excellence in Diversity Award from The Aerospace Corporation.

“Slum Lord,” a short story by TIMOTHY FOUNTAIN (B.A., political science, ’82), was selected for radio broadcast in the University College Cork (Ireland) Carried in Waves competition.

JENNIFER APPLETON GOOTMAN (B.A., interdisciplinary studies, ’81) was named the executive director of DC Stoddert Soccer in Washington, D.C.

BONNIE NIJST (B.A., English, ’81), president and CEO of Zeesman Communications Inc., was awarded the MBE Trailblazer Award from the National Minority Supplier Development Council.

UTE E. VAN DAM (B.A., communications arts and sciences, ’84) was elected to a third term as a school board trustee for Moorpark Unified School District. She recently served as board president.

LORI WALDON (B.A., political science, ’83) was named regional director of news for KCRA-TV and KQCA-TV in Sacramento, CA; KOAT-TV in Albuquerque/Santa-Fe, NM; and KSBW-TV in Monterey/ Salinas, CA.

1990s

DAVID BLAKESLEY (Ph.D., English, ’90) received the George Yoos Distinguished Service Award and was named a fellow by the Rhetoric Society of America.

DAVID BOWMAN (B.S., geological sciences, ’93; M.S., geological sciences, ’96; Ph.D., geological sciences, ’99) was appointed dean of the College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics at Eastern Washington University.

Boston Public Schools Assistant Superintendent of the Office of English Language Learners FRANCES ESPARZA (B.A., international relations, ’97) was appointed to the board of directors at Boston Partners in Education in October 2016.

MICHELE LEIGH (B.A., Russian, ’92; M.A., critical studies, ’96; Ph.D., critical studies, ’08) received a Fulbright Scholar award to conduct research in Russia for her book on women who worked in the Russian silent film industry.

Continued on page 57.

Spring / Summer 2017 55

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY A LU MNI AND ST UDENT CANON

TROJANA LIT Y ROBERT VINSON (B.A., humanities, ’95) was elected president of the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.

PSYCHOSIS IN THE PRODUCE DEPARTMENT Red Hen Press / Laurel Ann Bogen (B.A., English, ’71; MPW, ’01) explores beauty and madness, dysfunctional families, love and anti-love, and growing up as a baby boomer.

THE LILIES OF DAWN Annorlunda Books / Vanessa Fogg (B.A., biological sciences, ’95) examines spirituality and empowerment in her fairy tale novella about a flock of enchanted cranes and a poisoned lake of water lilies.

CAKE TIME Red Hen Press / Siel Ju (Ph.D., literature and creative writing, ’08) grapples with urgent questions, including how to love madly without losing a sense of self.

TESTIFY Red Hen Press / The debut novel by current Ph.D. candidate in literature and creative writing Douglas Manuel is a contemplation of race, religion and class that confronts some of the most critical issues in society.

ANDREW VREES (B.A., political science and broadcast journalism, ’91) was named Broadcasting & Cable magazine’s News Director of the Year. He is vice president, news, at WCVB-TV in Boston, MA.

THE UNSETTLERS: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America Riverhead Books / Mark Sundeen (MPW, ’99) traces the search for the simple life not only through the stories of three very different couples, but through the visionaries that inspired them to walk away from the life they knew in order to find — or create — a better existence.

2000s

VENITA BLACKBURN (B.A., creative writing, ’04) received the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for 2016. Her collection of stories, Black Jesus and other Superheroes, will be published later this year.

MATT LEINART (B.A., sociology, ’05) was named to the 13-member 2017 College Football Hall of Fame.

POMEGRANATE EATER Kore Press / Through prose poems interrogating the self in the guise of various fruit, epistles addressing a shadow lover and lexical tapestries whose words seem to point only away from meaning and toward one another, Amaranth Borsuk (M.A., English, ’06; Ph.D., literature and creative writing, ’10) lets language speak, directing our gaze at its shimmering surfaces.

RAISING A CHILD WITH AUTISM Straight Street Books / Timothy Fountain (B.A., political science, ’82) provides parents of affected children tips, techniques, hope and encouragement.

DEEP WATERS University of New Mexico Press / In this introduction to the breadth of writer Frank Waters’ work, Alan Louis Kishbaugh (B.A., international relations, ’61) touches on subjects reflecting the great cultural shifts of the late 20th century.

HUMANISM AND THE DEATH OF GOD: Searching for the Good After Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche Oxford University Press / Ronald E. Osborn (Ph.D., political science and international relations, ’12) wrestles with the question of whether we can have a compelling basis for humanistic values and human rights apart from religion.

2010s

THE ADVENTURES OF ABUELITO MindStir Media / From doing somersaults on the moon to racing cheetahs in the Serengeti, the protagonist in the literary debut of Jackie Tait (MPW, ’07) has had his share of fun, but none of his exploits compare to his grandest adventure of all.

TIMOTHY JOHNSON (B.A., international relations, ’11; B.A., music-violin, ’11) was appointed to the U.S. Foreign Service and will serve as a public diplomacy officer within the U.S. Department of State.

LEGO released the first product from toy designer AMANDA BROOKE SAYERS (B.A., anthropology and psychology, ’11) in May 2016 as part of the LEGO Friends line of toys.

Births

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BONE CONFETTI Noemi Press / In her first poetry collection, Ph.D. candidate in literature and creative writing Muriel Leung explores two types of survivors at the end of the world: lovers and ghosts who die, are revived and die again. They scale the horizon, collecting debris wherever they go in the attempt to fashion a new sense of humanity.

THE SONIC COLOR LINE: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening NYU Press / Jennifer Stoever (Ph.D., American studies and ethnicity, ’07) explores how black thinkers conceived the cultural politics of listening at work during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

SCANDALIZE MY NAME: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life Fordham University Press / Terrion L. Williamson (M.A., American studies and ethnicity, ’08; Ph.D., American studies and ethnicity, ’11) approaches the study of black female representation as an opening onto a critical contemplation of the vagaries of black social life.

MOLEDINA PHOTO COURTESY OF JAMIL MOLEDINA

TRUMAN, FRANCO’S SPAIN, AND THE COLD WAR University of Missouri Press / Wayne H. Bowen (B.A., history, ’90) provides a framework for understanding how a nation facing a global threat develops strategic relationships over time.

LAVENDER AND RED: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left University of California Press / Emily K. Hobson (M.A., American studies and ethnicity, ’07; Ph.D., American studies and ethnicity, ’09) presents a history of queer radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war and racism.

REBEKAH SICK OLKOWSKI (B.A., Spanish and international relations, ’09) and Gary Olkowski welcomed a son, Robin Alexander, on Nov. 26, 2016.

In Memoriam

BARBARA BLAKE ABRAHAM (B.A., social sciences and communication, ’52) San Diego, CA (10/11/16) at age 86; was a member of Chi Omega while attending USC; after brief career with Convair, volunteered for the

Navy Relief Society and Caridad International.

JOHN ROSS BOYD (B.A., Slavic languages and literatures, ’70) Rosamond, CA (7/9/16) at age 69; served as a Los Angeles City fireman and paramedic.

LAVINIA REYNOLDS JOHNSON CARROLL (B.A., speech, ’39) San Luis Obispo, CA (9/9/16) at age 100; lived according to her motto, “Love one another,” which was passed on to her by her mother.

ANNE CLEMENTS CLARK ELDRED (B.A., political science, ’51) Sierraville, CA (9/19/16) at age 84; was a dedicated volunteer with the Sierra County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse and the Girl Scouts of America; member of the Sierra County Historical Society and worked as a tour guide at Kentucky Mine; during collegiate years was a Helen of Troy.

ALFONSO GONZALES (B.S., zoology, ’16) Hermosa Beach, CA (12/27/16) at age 96; the oldest graduate in USC history, completing the final credit of his degree on May 13, 2016; served in the U.S. Navy before transferring to the U.S. Marine Corps; trained in field medicine, treating wounded on the battlefield during World War II; led his own soil business until retiring in 2008.

JOHN “JACK” CLADWELL HESSIN (B.A., political science, ’51) Anchorage, AK (3/26/16) at age 89; served in the Army Air Corps during World War II as a radio operator; played football while attending USC; was a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation; served as a magistrate with the Fairbanks District Court.

MICHAEL CERVANTES (B.A., English [creative writing], ’04; MPW, ’06) Los Angeles, CA

(10/24/16) at age 35; creator and editor in chief of DailyGirth. com; an avid reader who enjoyed weight lifting and watching USC football and Los Angeles Lakers basketball.

JAMES W. KINNEY (B.A., history, ’61; M.S., education, ’68) Palos Verdes Estates, CA (10/18/16) at age 77; taught history and served as activities director at Palos Verdes High School; part owner of Argo World Travel.

MALCOLM LUCAS (B.A., political science, ’50; LLB, ’53) Los Angeles, CA (9/28/16) at age 89; became a judge on the California Superior Court in 1967 and a U.S. District Court judge in 1971; appointed to the state court in 1984 and elevated in 1987 to chief justice.

JAMES B. ROE (M.S., biology, ’68) Portland, OR (12/19/16) at age 72; was an orthopedic surgeon in California and Oregon; enjoyed heli-skiing, motorcycles and travel.

GEORGE R. VICK (Ph.D., philosophy, ’68) Pasadena, CA (9/30/16) at age 86; joined the faculty as a philosophy instructor while pursuing his Ph.D. at USC; professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles.

Playing it Forward

Jamil Moledina leads games strategy for Google Play, drawing on lessons he learned at USC Dornsife.

When gaming entrepreneur and science fiction writer Jamil Moledina ’94 was offered a job leading games strategy at Google Play, the tech whiz thought twice before accepting. Having recently created his own startup, he wasn’t initially keen to return to a large company. However, the opportunity to help develop the game industry was too tantalizing to pass up.

Previously editor-in-chief of Game Developer magazine and executive director of the Game Developers Conference, Kenya-born Moledina joined Electronic Arts and then moved to mobile start-up Funzio before launching his own company.

Paradoxically, Moledina won the top job at Google Play not because his startup — Wormhole Games — succeeded, but because it hadn’t. While visiting tech companies to help his employees find new jobs, Moledina told Apple and Google they could do better supporting games like those he created. To his surprise, Google agreed, inviting him to do just that.

Now he draws on his B.A. in international relations and East Asian area studies to fuel his twin passions: gaming and science fiction. He published a sci-fi novel, Tearing the Sky (Kalyphon Press), in 2010.

Moledina also credits his carefree childhood in Africa with his success, noting, “Having that freedom to dream is important to the creative process.” —S.B.

JOSEPH ALBERT WAPNER (B.A., philosophy, ’41; LL.B., ’48) Los Angeles, CA (2/26/17) at age 97; served in the U.S. Army in World War II; awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for his bravery; served for 20 years on the California Municipal and Superior Courts before his 12-year starring role on The People’s Court, where he served as judge; honored in November 2009 with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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

Insightful Mind Renowned for his pioneering research, Bosco Tjan was a beloved professor of psychology.

The lauded scientist helped establish USC as a notable center of advanced hydrocarbon chemistry.

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gases. His novel approach was based on the use of methanol for energy storage as a convenient renewable liquid fuel to replace gasoline and diesel, and as a feedstock for making petroleum-derived products.

At USC, he was Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Chair in Organic Chemistry, and founding director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at USC Dornsife.

“Distinguished Professor George Olah was a true legend in the field of chemistry. His pioneering research fundamentally redefined the field’s landscape, and will influence its scholarly work for generations to come,” said USC President C. L. Max Nikias. “While Professor Olah was a worldrenowned Nobel laureate and a giant in chemistry, he was also a beloved member of our Trojan Family. He will be deeply missed.”

PHOTO BY JOHN LIVZEY

George Olah, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Chair in Organic Chemistry, was born in Hungary in 1927. He and his family fled the Soviets in 1956, and he eventually joined USC in 1977.

Chemist George Olah, who won USC’s first Nobel Prize, died at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 8.

He was 89.

Olah had a profound influence on the world of hydrocarbon chemistry, and his discoveries had applications to everyday life: He helped pave the way for less polluting gasoline, more effective oil refining and several modern drugs.

In 1994, Olah received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for groundbreaking work on superacids and his observations of what are known as carbocations, a fleeting chemical species long theorized to exist, but never confirmed — until Olah devised a way to keep them around long enough to study their properties.

His post-Nobel research focused not only on developing a new way to solve dependence on fossil fuels, but also on mitigating global climate change caused by greenhouse

S TA R R P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F M I C H A E L M AC O R / S A N F R A N C I S C O C H R O N I C L E / P O L A R I S ; TJ A N P H O T O B Y P E T E R Z H A O Y U Z H O U

A Nobel Achiever

Bosco Tjan, professor of psychology and co-director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center, died on Dec. 2, 2016, in Los Angeles. He was 50.

Tjan, who joined USC Dornsife in 2001, was a worldrenowned expert on vision, particularly in how the brain recognizes shapes and scenes. Tjan recently received a $4 million grant with a team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health to study how blindness changes the brain. His ongoing research projects included image enhancement for people with impaired vision, indoor navigation aid for the blind and the visually impaired, and perception of visual speech.

“Bosco Tjan was a beloved member of our psychology faculty,” said Jo Ann Farver, professor and chair of psychology. “He was a dedicated, kind and patient teacher and mentor of graduate and undergraduate students. We will all especially miss his sense of humor, keen wit and brilliant mind.”

Irving Biederman, Harold Dornsife Chair in Neurosciences and professor of psychology and computer science, was a close friend and longtime colleague of Tjan’s. In a eulogy, Biederman described Tjan as “a major contributor to vision science.”

“He tackled a wide range of problems, and everything he published was a paragon of beautiful design and rigorous methodology.”

California Dreamer

California State Librarian Emeritus Kevin Starr was one of the leading historians of the Golden State.

Historian and University Professor Kevin Starr, who served as the State Librarian for California for a decade, died Jan. 14 in San Francisco. He was 76.

“Professor Starr was our dear friend, a beloved teacher and a USC treasure, but he truly belonged to the world,” USC President C. L. Max Nikias said. “His bright mind, rigorous intellect and passion for language will be deeply missed, but his extraordinary books will continue to inform us for generations to come.”

A native of San Francisco, Starr joined USC Dornsife in 1989 and was a professor of history and policy, planning and development and special adviser to the provost. A highly sought-after lecturer and writer, he was known for his far-reaching explorations of life in California. He authored the renowned eight-volume series Americans and the California Dream, which chronicles social and cultural history in the state since its admission to the union in 1850.

In 2005, he received the Presidential Medal from USC. The next year, Starr was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush and received the Centennial Medal from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

In 2010, he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame.

“Kevin Starr was a rarity in his field — an iconic figure whose scholarly understanding of the complexities and beauty of California’s history were matched only by the masterful prose he used to convey that understanding to others,” said USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller.

“The academic world has lost a truly exceptional human being.”

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IN MY OPINION

Entrepreneurs Sandra Tsing Loh MPW, ’89 finds insight, food and millennial dreams at South by Southwest.

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Sandra Tsing Loh, a former USC Dornsife student and faculty member is a writer/performer whose latest play is based on her book The Madwoman in the Volvo (Norton, 2014), named one of 2015’s “Most Notable Books” by The New York Times.

A contributing editor for The Atlantic, her radio show “The Loh Down on Science” airs daily throughout the nation.

She teaches science communication and drama at the University of California, Irvine and beyond.

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY H A L M AY F O R T H; P H O T O BY J O H N L I V Z E Y

When I came of age — this was back in the ’80s — my tribe of impressionable youths all wanted to be performance artists like Laurie Anderson, writers like Bret Easton Ellis, rockers like …? True, it wasn’t a golden age for rock. (Cue Flock of Seagulls, Pet Shop Boys). Nor was it, possibly, for fashion. (Think moussed hair, parachute pants, eerily shiny Members Only jackets).

By contrast, today, in the “twentyteens,” it seems what many dreamy-eyed, creative young people aspire to be are not artists or writers or musicians but … entrepreneurs. Like — wait for it — Gary Vaynerchuk! Doesn’t ring a bell?

No matter. All this — and more — is what I learned when I attended South by Southwest (SXSW) recently in Austin, Texas. A trendsetting music, film and interactive media festival, SXSW also features a tech-based “Startup Village.”

My colleagues Mark Davis and Sarah Mojarad (both joining the USC faculty this year) had invited me to their panel “Getting to Yes: Communication and Entrepreneurship.”

Communication for techies is my expertise: I’m a specialist on what I like to call, with apologies to Mark Twain, “The Awful Scientific Language” — a hodgepodge of Greek, Latin, mistranslated German and pirate-speak, it often does not make sense to ordinary humans. I couldn’t wait to share my “soft skills” with our next-gen Bill Gateses.

But SXSW Startup Village entrepreneurs weren’t just nerdy science-mathletes. Here were guys sporting

new-growth, mountain-man beards and modern-primitive ear plugs, and gals with nose piercings, blue hair and combat boots. They were inventing fashion apps and microbrews and, I want to say, crowd-sourced design memes for sustainability — sometimes all at the same time! Even the food trucks were mix-taping disruption. Picture a $12 Korean-Mexican Belgian waffle rolled into a cone filled with kimchi pork and panko fried chipotle avocado.

On the one hand, it was easy to get caught up in the DIY (“Do It Yourself,” for you laggards) excitement. Sample SXSW presentations included: “The Pitch: Selling Your Disruptive Health Startup,” “Shark, Billionaire, Activist” and “Outthink the Future with Just 10 Ideas a Day.” There was a strong spiritual element, too, à la “The Love Algorithm,” “Good Is the New Cool” and “The Future of Emotional Machines.” The futuristic neo-words were dizzying: “grocerants,” “chatbots,” “artivism,” “foodporn,” “wayknowing,” “biopunk,” and “hackpharma”! More familiar, but just as zeitgeisty? “Burkini,” “cannabis” (along with its amiable bro “cannabis startup”) and, of course, never out of style (“Keep Austin Weird”!) “vinyl.”

And yet, there was a palpable undercurrent of stress, too.

For such young people, time is fleeting. With “Seconds Matter: Capturing Attention in Mobile Feed,” seconds mattered so much there wasn’t time for an article. Rows of conference rooms featured “speed pitches,” “accelerator pitches” and “super accelerators,” flanked by: “It’s Not Ready Yet: The Perfectionist’s Struggle,” “You Can Survive Creative Burnout Meetup” and “The Threat Is Evolving: Are You?” Was there an unspoken connection between “Psychopaths in Silicon Valley: A Guide” and the “Entrepreneurs’ Guide to Battling Depression & ADHD”?

(Description: “49% of entrepreneurs have some form of mental health condition and 30% of entrepreneurs suffer from depression [2x more likely than non-entrepreneurs]).”

The aforementioned Gary Vaynerchuk — an online marketing guru — said it best to a crammed ballroom of rapt SXSW-ers. Vaynerchuk’s talk was essentially a Q&A session for aspiring entrepreneurs. As he noted while pacing, in athletic shoes and headset, “Starting 15 years ago, suddenly everyone wanted to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are like rock stars now! And that’s great for me personally. I work 18 hours a day because I love it! But not everyone’s like that. Maybe you’re not an entrepreneur.

And that’s fine. Number 11 at Facebook makes more than everyone in this room combined!”

Wisdom to ponder. In the meantime, many of the rest of us will just have to seek comfort in microbrews, chipotle avocado and some kimchi. Sustainable kimchi.

Fuel passion. Spark curiosity. Ignite discovery.

USC Dornsife cultivates a liberal arts mindset in our next generation of creators, leaders and visionaries.

Your gift enhances our capacity to take on society’s most complex issues — sustainability, cancer and neurodegenerative disease, poverty and more. Support from alumni, parents and friends upholds this dynamic academic community. Help us clear new pathways for discovery with your gift to USC Dornsife today. dornsife.usc.edu/giving

Spring / Summer 2017 61

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Life Moment

P R O B L E M S W I T H O U T PA S S P O R T S E N S T 4 8 0

The World Below A friendly humphead wrasse crosses paths with environmental studies students as they plunge into Micronesian marine biodiversity at the famed Blue Corner diving spot in Palau.

PHOTO BY DAVID GINSBURG