Alumni News

OLU ORANGE, adjunct assistant professor of political science and director of the USC Dornsife Mock Trial Program, was named “a top lawyer of the decade” by the Daily Journal. A civil rights attorney, he is one of 18 lawyers selected for this honor from the 266,000 practicing in California.

NATHAN PERL-ROSENTHAL, associate professor of history, spatial sciences and law, was awarded a 2021–22 Shelby Cullom Davis Center Fellowship at Princeton University.

CHRISTIAN PHILLIPS, assistant professor of political science, received the Raubenheimer Faculty Award for outstanding teaching, scholarship and service within the university.

LISA PON, professor of art history, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, supporting her efforts to digitally reconstruct the private library of Renaissance Pope Julius II.

ALISON DUNDES RENTELN, professor of political science, anthropology, public policy and law, was appointed to the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the only independent, bipartisan agency charged with advising the president and Congress on civil rights and reporting annually on federal civil rights enforcement. She was also elected to the Class of 2023 Board of Trustees of the Law and Society Association.

ALEXANDRE ROBERTS, assistant professor of classics, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

STEVE ROSS, Dean’s Professor of History, Myron and Marian Casden Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of Jewish Role in American Life and professor of history, received the Raubenheimer Faculty Award for outstanding teaching, scholarship and service within the university.

BENJAMIN UCHIYAMA, assistant professor of history, received the John Whitney Hall Award from the Association for Asian Studies for his book Japan’s Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

University Professor Emeritus MICHAEL WATERMAN received the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics. Awarded to one individual biannually, the prize recognizes outstanding mathematical contributions that have had a direct and fundamental impact on scientific, business, finance and engineering applications.

DUNCAN WILLIAMS, professor of religion, American studies and ethnicity and East Asian languages and cultures, received a Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award for his book American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019).

CAROL WISE, professor of political science and international relations, received a Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award for her book Dragonomics: How Latin America is Maximizing (or Missing Out on)China’s International Development Strategy (Yale University Press, 2020).

ERIN GRAFF ZIVIN, professor of Spanish and Portuguese and comparative literature, was elected to the Modern Language Association’s Executive Council.

Alumni News

1970s

sciences, ’71) was elected a fellow in the Society of Risk Analysis; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society; and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

GARY PETERSON (B.A., political science,’72; M.S., education, ’74) earned his Ed.D. in leadership in innovation and continuous improvement from Concordia University Wisconsin in May 2021.

1980s

GLORIA BURGESS (Ph.D., speech communication, ’80), executive director of the John Maxwell Team, gave two TEDx talks in 2020 — “A Seat at the Table” and “Legacy: the Current of Life.”

1990s

MARY DRABNIS (Ph.D., chemistry, ’97) was appointed chair of the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s Patent Cooperation Treaty Issues Committee.

JENNIFER ESPERANZA (B.A., anthropology and linguistics, ’96) was promoted to professor of anthropology at Beloit College, Wisconsin.

LORI COX HAN (Ph.D., political science, ’97) is the inaugural holder of the Doy B. Henley Endowed Chair in American presidential studies at Chapman University, California, where she has been a professor of political science since 2005.

2000s

DIANA AKIYAMA (Ph.D., religion and social ethics, ’01) was ordained and consecrated as the 11th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon.

Continued on page 42. TROJANALITY

Finding Magic

Endocrinologist Karen Tsai ’13 is a triple threat against COVID-19.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Karen Tsai ’13 was working as a resident in internal medicine at LAC + USC Medical Center, where she got a firsthand view of the city’s rapidly worsening infection rate. Upon hearing about the dire situation her friends and colleagues in New York were facing, she knew she had to help.

So, in March 2020, Tsai and a colleague founded Donate PPE, a nonprofit aimed at amassing personal protective equipment (PPE) donations and dispersing them to hospitals and other places that needed them most. The result? Donate PPE sent face masks, face shields, gloves and other items to nearly every state in the nation, plus Uganda. Later, the organization supplied equipment to schools, food banks and homeless shelters.

But Tsai didn’t stop there. After seeing the pandemic’s psychological effects on children during her daily work as a physician, she was inspired to create Monster Dance (Madeleine Editions, 2020), a multimedia ebook designed to explain the virus to kids. Tsai, who served as a consultant for the book, said a portion of the proceeds was donated to PPE efforts, some books were donated to children’s hospitals and some were sold at a low cost to classrooms.

One of Tsai’s former USC classmates, who works with the Television Academy on the Emmy Awards, was impressed with Tsai’s work during the pandemic and urged her and her brother — a physician who is chief medical officer of Donate PPE — to apply to present an award during the ceremony. Shocked to be chosen but happy to participate, Tsai and her brother, both in scrubs, presented the award for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series. (Winner: Billy Crudup in The Morning Show.)

Tsai says the pandemic pushed her to work outside her comfort zone, and the result was worth it.

“Don’t be afraid to ask for help. When things get rough, and people can come together, that’s when magic happens.” —M.M.