Trojan Family Magzine Summer 2010 by University of Southern California

Inside FeatuRes

22 the Impossible Dream of steven sample The remarkable odyssey of USC’s 10th president, who was able to make his audacious dreams for USC come true.

30 teaching the teachers The USC Rossier School’s online MAT@USC has found its audience. By starshine Roshell

36 Healing Invisible Wounds The School of Social Work launches a new program in military social work. By Diane Krieger

›› page 48

MFa student erin Reynolds ’06 is developing a series of health-related video games for mobile devices.

44 usC got games USC leads the way as game design enters the educational mainstream. 52 a Lot to Lose Surgical options when excessive weight becomes a health issue. By sara Reeve and Katie Neith

›› page 36

“We have to prepare the civilian population to receive service members struggling with mental health issues years after they’ve come back.” – Marilyn Flynn, dean of the USC School of Social Work, describing her school’s groundbreaking program in military social work.

USC Trojan Family Magazine Summer ’10 Published by the University of Southern California Volume 42 Number 2

taylor Hackford ’67

›› page 56

Summer 2o1o columns

4 Editor’s Note

5 President’s Page USC’s unappeased nature, its “we-can-do-more” spirit, recurs throughout our history. 72 Last Word Celebrating storied sidekicks in literature and pop culture.

20 Shelf Life A new book by historian María Elena Martínez unravels the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre as it was applied in the New World.

17 Global Horizons USC trauma specialists were among the first medical personnel on the scene after the Haiti earthquake. departments

6 Mailbag Pats and pans from readers. 10 What’s New A new name for USC’s dental school, a new language for the fictional residents of Pandora and a new record for the Good Neighbors Campaign.

››

Page 34 Melora Sundt on the USC Rossier School’s new online master’s: “We set out to build a platform that would not only allow people to absorb content, but [also would] mimic facets of in-class education programs.”

For past issues of USC Trojan Family Magazine, visit www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family

12 Lab Work A $25 million NSF grant will create a national center at USC to explore the “deep biosphere.”

56 Family Ties The USC Alumni Association honors Taylor Hackford ’67 with its top achievement award, and presents “Women Empowering Women.” 61 Class Notes Who’s doing what and where. On the cover: The Impossible Dream of Steven Sample. Illustration by Stephanie Dalton Cowan.

15 Arts & Culture Scoring for video games is the next big thing, according to USC Thornton School alumni; and a new film on Uzbekistan’s Nukus Museum, a repository of Russian dissident art. 19 U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

[ editor’s note ]

USC’s 11th President

As we were going to press with this issue, the news came out: Executive vice president and provost C. L. Max Nikias will become the 11th president of the University of Southern California effective August 3, 2010.

Editor

Susan Heitman

In announcing his appointment to the USC community, Board of Trustees chairman Edward P. Roski, Jr., said: “Max is a remarkable and inspiring leader, a brilliant scholar and the best possible person to lead our university forward. Because of what he has already accomplished at USC, and his bold and exciting vision for the future, he was the unanimous choice of the search advisory committee, whose members spent hundreds of hours reviewing portfolios and letters of nomination to get to 75 serious candidates, and then interviewing seven finalists – an impresC. L. Max Nikias

USC

Trojan Family Magazine

sive and diverse group of university presidents and provosts.”

Outgoing President Steven Sample also praised the man who has been his second-ranking officer for the past five years. “I have long believed that Max Nikias is one of the country’s most talented provosts,” Sample said. “I’m delighted to have a successor whose keen vision and energy will keep the university moving ahead at a rapid pace. USC will be in excellent hands with Max as president.” Nikias was recruited to USC in 1991 to develop a national-caliber center for multimedia research (the Integrated Media Systems Center), and became dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 2001. In his current position, he is credited with accelerating the university’s academic momentum, strengthening the academic medical enterprise, helping attract a series of major donations to USC, creating innovative cross-disciplinary programs, enhancing globalization efforts and increasing support for students at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels. Each fall, he teaches an orientation-week seminar for incoming freshmen on the development of democracy and the dramatic arts within ancient Athens. His two daughters, Georgiana and Maria, both attend USC. “My wife, Niki, and I and our daughters love being a ‘Trojan family,’ ” he said. “And we love being a part of the greater Trojan Family. To be able, then, to lead this Trojan Family forward now is the opportunity of a lifetime, as we write together the next chapter in USC’s extraordinary history.” – Susan Heitman

Art Director

Rick Simner senior Editors

Allison Engel Diane Krieger Contributing Writers

Susan Andrews, Andrea Bennett Alex Boekelheide, Mary Bruce Ariel Carpenter, Anna Cearley Talia Cohen, Mel Cowan Lori Craig, Jackson DeMos Bill Dotson, Beth Dunham Kevin Durkin, James Grant Richard Hoops, Pamela J. Johnson Timothy O. Knight, Ross M. Levine Meghan Lewit, Eric Mankin Carl Marziali, Steve McDonagh Cynthia Monticue, Annette Moore Laurie Moore, Jon Nalick, Katie Neith Eddie North-Hager, Justin Pierce Sara Reeve, Leslie Ridgeway Gilien Silsby, Kukla Vera Lauren Walser, Suzanne Wu managing Editor

Mary Modina Design and production

Russell Ono Stacey Torii Photography

Allison Engel (coordinator) Dietmar Quistorf advertising/Circulation Manager

Vickie Kebler (213) 740-3162

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USC Trojan Family Magazine University of Southern California Los Angeles, California 90089-7790 tel: (213) 740-2684 / fax: (213) 821-1100 e-mail: magazines@usc.edu web: www.usc.edu/trojan_family USC Trojan Family Magazine (ISSN 8750-7927) is published four times a year, in February, May, August and November, by the University of Southern California, Office of University Public Relations, 3375 S. Hoover St, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790.

President’s Page By Steven B. Sample

Soon after I accepted the call to lead USC as its 10th president, the editor of USC Trojan Family Magazine, Susan Heitman, interviewed me for an article. At one point she asked me to identify what in particular drew me to USC. I answered (and here I’m mostly quoting

President Steven B. and Kathryn Sample with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at the USC Thornton School of Music Dickens Dinner last December, when the Samples received the John C. Argue Dickens Medal of Honor

directly from the 1991 article): I got the sense from the search committee and the trustees that they all were clear about wanting USC to emerge as one of the very best private universities in the country. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good institution now, it’s clearly a very strong research university, but I think there is a desire, a real desire, on the part of the people I spoke with to make it better. That’s not true at most universities in the United States. Most universities are relatively happy with where they are. They may talk vaguely in terms of getting better, but they’re not really committed to it, they’re not hungry for it to the point where they are willing to make really tough comparisons between themselves and their peers. But USC’s genuine desire to move ahead relative to her competitors was very appealing to me. Nearly 19 years later, as I reflect on all of USC’s advances – strides that I attribute to the collective efforts and vision of the entire Trojan Family – I believe that this sense of dissatisfaction, of genuinely wanting to improve, is a true leitmotif for USC. That keen desire to do even more tomorrow no matter how much we may have accomplished today is, to me, among the most compelling and defining characteristics of the Trojan Family. USC’s unappeased nature, its “we-can-do-more” spirit, recurs throughout our history. It shines on even in the face of the naysayers who appear on the scene from time to time, whether they’re prophesying doom in the local economy, the worldwide economy, war, plague, pestilence or what have you. Our ambition is one of the key factors behind USC’s

success. Quite simply, we started out in 1880 on what was the western frontier, and we never lost that frontier spirit of solving problems ourselves, taking care of each other, and venturing down new and untrodden paths. the last President’s Page I will write for USC Trojan Family Magazine, I am of course tempted to wax nostalgic. But, in truth, it’s more in the nature of optimists (among whose ranks I number myself) to look forward. Therefore I should like to leave you, my fellow Trojans, with a simple admonition: Continue to press upward. Never succumb to the temptation to sit back, “consolidate our gains” and take a breather. It’s when you have your competitors on the run that you should push the hardest. In the competitive climate of American higher education, you’re either moving ahead of the competition or you’re falling behind. You’re never going to just stay even with the competition; that is, you can never simply call “time out” and conserve your present position. So I hope that we will continue to be ambitious and audacious and that we will constantly renew the spirit of innovation and calculated risk-taking for which USC is known around the world. Thanks to the commitment and support of our alumni, and your service as ambassadors for USC, we are not only making USC better in every aspect, but we are also making our unique mark on the higher-education landscape. We have the potential in dozens of areas to solidify our reputation for excellence and enhance it. Although Kathryn’s and my service as first lady and president of USC will conclude soon, we are looking forward to working side by side with all of you as we continue the great and demanding task of building up this beautiful and noble institution. l IN LIGHT OF THIS BEING

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Mailbag

“It appears that your magazine is becoming less of a megaphone to broadcast ‘the USC message’ and more of an interesting magazine about people that have a USC connection. Now I want to read it and not throw it away after a quick glance.” quoted ››

surveying the road I think it’s great that USC has increased its mass transit usage and I appreciate Carl Marziali’s article about USC transit use (“Transit Tales,” Spring 2010, p. 32). I do have one bone to pick with him, though: his assertion that the University of Washington (UW) has “no mass transit, except on game days.” The UW has four shuttles that operate regularly: a Dial-a-Ride service for disabled persons, a NightRide shuttle, a South Lake Union Shuttle to transport people to UW medical and research facilities, and a Health Sciences Express that goes between UW and various medical centers. There are also four non-UW shuttle services that serve the university. More significantly, the nearly 57,000 faculty, staff and students who go to UW every day can get there with Metro buses (run by King County, where Seattle is located) that run every 10 minutes throughout most of the day to downtown Seattle and have regular but slightly less (and sometimes more) frequent service to other areas of the city, county and surrounding counties. And these are the exact same buses that are used on game days, so if they’re counted for game transportation, why not also count them for daily commuting? While these buses are not universityrun, they do operate on the university campus, and directly adjacent to it on four sides, with excellent service, negating the need for UW to duplicate services. And the newer buses that Metro has brought into its fleet are low- or zero-emission buses. Also not directly related to UW, but

including it, the greater Seattle area has the most extensive vanpool usage of anywhere in the country, with 15 percent of all national vanpool usage. The area also has significant carpool usage and an under-construction light rail stop that will serve the university. Lastly, a suggestion for the future: Try personal rapid transit. It’s an elevated and automated system of individual, small carlike trains with no stops for lights or other

[last word]

passengers. The small cars make it cheaper to build because the guideways it travels on are also small. It’s cheaper to operate because of the automation, it doesn’t conflict with traffic because of the elevation and it’s faster due to being nonstop rather than pick-up and drop-off. It also uses much less energy than cars and trams or buses per passenger mile. We’re in the 21st century now, so doesn’t it make sense not to still be using 19th-century and early 20th-century technology? (I have no direct connections with UW or Metro, I just care deeply about transportation and transit.) David Ward S E AT T L E , WA

Author Carl Marziali replies: I agree that to a rider, a bus is a bus, but in this story we were

Coffee talk

With a Starbucks practically on every corner, it was a little surprising to discover that more than a few of the 99 Last Worders who entered this contest are tea-totalers. “I learned quite a bit about coffee,” writes Laurie Curtis-Abbe of Ventura, Calif., mother and wife of two Trojans, and a self-proclaimed abstainer who “won’t touch it unless it’s candy or ice cream.” Non-coffee drinker Mark Saunders BSCE ’75 of Bartlett, Tenn., enlisted “a couple of connoisseurs” to help with the research. (They aced the test.) “Wow, tough contest,” quips David Rein, PharmD ’84. “I needed several cups of tea to make it through.” Others were devout coffee snobs. Mary Kay Wildt of Pinehurst, North Carolina, confided that, thanks to the Internet, for seven years she has purchased “green coffee beans from the finest fincas [Latin American plantations, in case you were wondering] and roasted them at home for personal pleasure.” Drawn from our 42 correct entries, these five randomly selected winners will be rewarded with $50 Borders gift certificates: Laura Arguea MA ’89, Mary Jo Brown PhD ’90, Betsy Creswell, David T. Lichtor and Mary Ann Tayloe. Will they spend it, we wonder, on books or hot brew? answers ›› 1. Kaldi, the goatherd 2. caffeine 3. quinic acid 4. niacin (vitamin B3) and trigonelline 5. Colombian 6. Kona 7. peaberry or caracoli 8. Indonesia (Java and sumatra) 9. Coffea arabica 10. Kaffa (forest region) Bun or Bunna (amharic word) 11. Kahlúa liqueur l

we welcome letters from readers although we do reserve the right to select and edit for space. Please include your name, address, e-mail address, degree and year of graduation, if applicable, with each letter and mail to: USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790 or e-mail us at: magazines@usc.edu. Please note that, because of our production schedule, it might be several months before your letter appears.

U S C T R o j A N FA M I Ly M A g A z I N E summer 2010

looking specifically at free, university-provided transit. We have updated the story online to mention UW’s night shuttle, the Dial-a-Ride and the shuttles between the medical centers (http:// uscnews.usc.edu/university/transit_tales.html). Thanks for passing that information along. P.S. My most vivid memory of UW is of having my car towed during a snowstorm on a game day. Should have taken that shuttle. The transportation article in the Spring 2010 USC Trojan Family Magazine sure brought back memories. In 1946, I enrolled in the USC School of Engineering. My wife and I were living in Long Beach. With my having just been discharged from the Army Air Force, our assets would not accommodate an automobile. Without an automobile, the only way to get to USC was by public transportation. When I started school, our apartment was only two blocks from the Pacific Electric line to Los Angeles. I boarded the P.E. and rode it until it intersected Vernon Avenue. At that point, I boarded the Vermont Avenue streetcar and got off a couple blocks from the campus. Total transit time was about one hour, which I could use for study.

Our financial condition improved and we purchased an automobile. Now, I could drive to school. As this was before freeways, the trip usually took an hour and a half, with no study time except when stuck in traffic. As the saying goes, “What goes around comes around.” Upon graduation in 1949, we moved to Columbus, Ind., where commuting is no problem, except for right now with 10 inches of snow covering things. (I have slept a few times since the 40s so I may have mixed up the Vernon and Vermont Avenue streetcars. I know that Vermont Avenue is on the west side of the campus, then and now.) John C. Walter ’49 COLUMBUS, IN

“Everything I know about driving I learned from USC transport drivers.” If I were with the public relations department of USC, I’d shudder at that statement. Driving a minibus with “USC” written large on the side and using swooping techniques to gain a few seconds are not exactly the tactics I would employ to try to kill the “University of Spoiled Chil-

dren” image. I recall some words carved on a stone arch leading to a churchyard in Yorkshire: “There is never so little time but there is time for courtesy.” Bill Warren PA S A D E NA , CA

Pats ... I am writing to you about the spring edition of the magazine. We receive it because our son, Joel Pressmen, is an alumnus, having received his bachelor’s in 1972 and his master’s in 1975. By the way, he is head of performing arts at Beverly Hills High School. I thought you might like to know how much my husband, Rabbi Jacob Pressmen, and I enjoy reading your publication. Your Spring 2010 edition was most interesting and enjoyable. To begin with, the article about Norman Corwin and his book One World Flight: The Lost Journal of Radio’s Greatest Writer (“The Return of a Forgotten Journal,” What’s New, p. 16) was especially interesting for us. Norman is an old friend, and our friendship was nurtured at a summer session with him at Idyllwild. Other items that appealed to us were the

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one about David Bohnett (“Orchestrating Change,” What’s New, p. 22), the article about the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (“Masters of Their Own Universe,” p. 24), “Transit Tales” (p. 32) about USC’s unique transportation system, and professor Josh Kun (“The Consummate Listener,” p. 38) and his remarkable work in music with Jewish and Yiddish themes. We hope that you continue with your fine articles and that we will have the continued pleasure of reading them. Marjorie Pressmen

p. 44) article about exceptional care given by doctors of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center is very winsome. It features a photo of the chief of urology, Inderbir Gill, whose skill and reputation have attracted patients from around the world, including the patient in the X-ray with dextrocardia (a very rare condition where the heart is located on the right side of the chest). Or do the photo props need a double check? Alfred Dickson ’55, MD ’59 PORTLAND, OR

B EV ER LY H I LL S, CA

It appears that your magazine is becoming less of a megaphone to broadcast “the USC message” and more of an interesting magazine about people that have a USC connection. Now I want to read it and not throw away after a quick glance. This may not appeal to all, but it makes me feel that USC is developing a more serious, academic environment than most give credit. Keep improving the magazine. Richard Giesbret ’73 W est hollywood , ca

I received my first USC Trojan Family Magazine in many years. I don’t know how it happened, but thank you. I loved reading it. I get the UCLA mag and it doesn’t compare. P.S. I was so sorry as a Knight to see that the Trojan Knights don’t wear the straw hats any more. Oh well .... Richard S. LeVine, Esq. ’62 chica g o , I l

And Pans As a Trojan alum and longtime reader of USC Trojan Family Magazine, I was amazed that the recent spring issue failed to include even a single article on the departure of Pete Carroll. No matter how you view Coach Carroll’s leaving, his era in USC athletic history is virtually unequalled in terms of national prominence. Trojan football has been at the very top of the national collegiate mountain for the majority of the past eight seasons. I do not believe we will see his record (82-9 from 2002 to 2008) challenged again in our lifetime. Your publication is high quality and much appreciated. However, in this instance, the absence of comment is a significant error. Richard Patman, ’61 EUGENE, Or

Medical Notes “The Personal Is Medical” (Spring 2010,

U S C T r o j an Family ma g a z ine summer 2010

Dr. Dickson has a good eye! In the layout process, the photograph of Dr. Gill was indeed “flopped” (that is, rotated horizontally) for aesthetic reasons. Unfortunately, USC Trojan Family Magazine has no radiologists on its staff, so no one picked up the anatomical peculiarity this change produced in the patient’s X-ray. We regret the error. Several articles related to the USC Norris Cancer Hospital, as part of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, have appeared in recent issues of USC Trojan Family Magazine. It might be of interest to your readers to know that the credit for the genesis of this center belongs to Roger O. Egeberg, M.D., dean of the USC School of Medicine in 1968. At that time, President Nixon had declared the “War on Cancer” and funds were becoming available for the planning and construction of cancer centers throughout the United States. Dean Egeberg had the foresight to begin the long process of writing planning grant applications, fundraising, site selection, and eventual construction leading to the opening of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital on the medical campus in 1982. Dr. Egeberg left USC’s medical school to become assistant secretary of health and scientific affairs under President Nixon in 1969. He was also well known as personal aide-de-camp to General Douglas MacArthur during World War II. (I was hired by Dr. Egeberg in 1968 as director of planning for the proposed USC Comprehensive Cancer Center.) Daniel M. Anzel, M.D. LOS ANGELES, CA

Letters on Letters I read with great interest the letter from Russell West Jr. ’88 about former trustee Virginia Ramo (“Remembering Virginia Ramo,” Mailbag, Spring 2010, p. 7). Virginia and I served together on the USC Board of Trustees for many years

and were great friends. She was a beautiful person, full of energy, enthusiasm and commitment to helping USC become a strong and vibrant university. She and I also served together on the Student Affairs Committee of the Board of Trustees, which I now chair. In his letter, Mr. West recounts attending a 1984 committee luncheon and sitting between Virginia and fellow trustee Wallis Annenberg. He reminisced about how special he felt as he interacted with these two great Trojans. Members of the Trustee Student Affairs Committee still have lunch with students four times a year during our meetings. It gives us a chance to learn about the students, why they chose USC, what they like about the university and what they would like to see improved. We also hear from them about their academic programs, university involvements and community-service projects. For example, in the past several years we have hosted students from Troy Camp, Order of the Torch, Alternative Spring Break programs, cinematic arts, social work, the Ph.D. program in psychology, residential education, Undergraduate Student Government, Graduate Student Government, fraternities and sororities, Annenberg Television News, New Student Orientation, pharmacy, law, engineering, Helenes, Norman Topping Student Aid Fund, dentistry, Thematic Option, USC Stevens innovation award winners and firstyear Trustee Scholars, to name a few. So, as Mr. West pointed out, this great tradition of trustees meeting directly with students continues and will do so for many years to come. It is nice that his attending one of those meetings was made so special by our beloved friend Virginia. Lorna Reed ’58 U S C T rustee CAMPUS

It was recently brought to my attention that a letter in the latest issue of USC Trojan Family Magazine (Mailbag, p. 8) titled “Wayne’s World,” sent by Chester Berrlow, stated that he is a big John Wayne fan and is interested in anything about the man. Mr. Berrlow read an article about John Wayne in a past issue and then goes on to state that he met a lady who had attended an event with a man she thought might be a Wayne family member. He writes that the woman mentioned something about a football scholarship related to John Wayne. “Maybe it was in Wayne’s name? I would be interested in finding out more.”

There is in fact a John Wayne Scholarship that is awarded annually by the Trojan Football Alumni Club to a graduating senior. Since 1978, we have awarded, in partnership with the John Wayne family, dozens of post-graduate scholarships to former players not pursuing professional football careers. We also were instrumental in establishing the Marv Goux Endowed Scholarship. If you or Mr. Berrlow would like any further information, you may view our Web site, www.trojanfootballalumni.com. As the current president of the Trojan Football Alumni Club, I would like make sure that you have the correct information about this scholarship that the Wayne Family so generously bestowed. Mike McGirr ’98 T f ac P resident CAMPUS

Notice Board I am wondering if you can give me some information or maybe write a column about a swim coach whom I knew as Mr. Anderson. Back in the 1960s, my dad was a USC professor. On Saturday mornings, “faculty brats” were lucky enough to take

swim lessons in the USC pool, located in the Physical Education Building. If I remember correctly, our instructors were the USC PE majors. I was a skinny, not very strong 8-year-old, and those teachers were tough! We swam numerous laps, jumped off the high diving board and worked on lifesaving certification. One exercise involved swimming the side stroke with a 5- or 10-pound brick on your hip. If you dropped the brick, too bad; you had to dive to the bottom of the pool and retrieve it. The program was headed by Mr. Anderson, who had been the ’SC swim coach in previous years. I remember him as a kind and gentle man and would love to know more about his career at USC. If any of those instructors happen to read this, their efforts paid off. Thank you for instilling a love of swimming in me. I still swim two or three times every week and love every minute of it. Melanie McLaughlin (d’Avis) ’77 S O U T H H A M I LT O N , M A

USC historian Annette Moore replies: Peter Daland was USC’s head swim coach throughout

most of the 1960s. There was, however, a student swimmer named Wayne Anderson who competed in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He earned a B.S. in business from USC in 1968, and an MBA in 1973. Could this be the “Mr. Anderson” whom Ms. McLaughlin is remembering? We need your assistance in preserving the heritage of our university. The USC University Archives exist to collect, preserve and make available records having permanent value in documenting the history of the university and USC-related organizations as well as the activities of faculty, staff and students. Books, manuscripts, USC periodicals and newspapers, posters, photographic images, disc and tape recordings, and other items are available for research under supervised conditions. Gifts of any items contributing to documentation of the history of USC will be greatly appreciated and carefully preserved. Please contact me at (213) 740-2587 or czachary@usc.edu, or visit us at www.usc. edu/ arc/libraries/uscarchives Claude Zachary USC University Archivist CAMPUS

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U S C T r o j an Family ma g a z ine summer 2010

What’s New NEWS

NOTES ON ALL THINGS TROJAN

$35 Million Gift Names Dentistry The Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC honors an alum who made a record-setting donation. HERMAN OSTROW, a USC trustee, alumnus and lifelong Southern Californian, has donated $35 million to USC for its School of Dentistry. The gift was announced Jan. 20 by USC President Steven B. Sample at a gala unveiling ceremony at the Norris Dental Science Center on the University Park campus. In recognition of the gift – believed to be the largest individual donation to a dental school in the United States – the school has been renamed the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC. “This magnificent gift will be a powerful catalyst for innovations and improvements in human health and for building on USC’s long tradition of leadership in dentistry,” Sample said at the ceremony. “Since the school’s founding in 1897, USC’s dental programs have contributed significantly

to oral health in our region, our nation and the world by educating the best practitioners, by advancing scientific research and by providing dental care to underserved members of our community.” The gift will be pivotal in raising the school to the next level of effectiveness, by providing resources to renovate and improve clinical facilities, to bring in new faculty members, to continue to support dental and craniofacial research, to enhance service pro grams in downtown Los Angeles, and to attract and retain the best students, according to Avishai Sadan, dean of the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC. “We are grateful and proud that an alumnus of our school has chosen us to carry his legacy,” says Sadan, who took the helm last August after the retirement of Harold Slavkin. “Our tradition of excel-

lence in clinical education, research and community outreach; our world-renowned, dedicated faculty and staff; and loyal alumni such as Dr. Ostrow will safeguard the lofty reputation of the school for decades to come.” his DDS from USC in 1945, has a history of hard work and entrepreneurship. He spent 17 years practicing dentistry, including both private practice and service in the Army Dental Corps, before delving into Los Angeles construction and the real estate market. “I’m proud to give my support and my name to the USC School of Dentistry, an institution with a well-earned reputation for excellence,” Ostrow said. “I am thrilled that my legacy will provide tomorrow’s talented professionals with opportunities to achieve great successes.” The school is a leader in learner-centered education, and is a major recipient of federally sponsored biomedical research funds, ranking among the elite of all dental schools. It has been home to breakthroughs in craniofacial development, tissue engineering, tooth regeneration and biomineralization, among other areas, along with profession-changing clinical innovations. In addition, tens of thousands of people have received oral health care through the school’s dental clinics, mobile clinics and community-based health programs, which provide cutting-edge, comprehensive and compassionate dental care to diverse communities throughout Southern California. l

OSTROW, WHO EARNED

Running the Numbers The Lowdown on Dentistry Number of Full-time Faculty

Senior DDS and dental hygiene students in new Ostrow School T-shirts celebrate the new name.

1897 118

Students on Financial Aid

95%

Unique Patients Annually

83,000

Free Services Provided/Year

$4.1 M

PHOTO BY STEVE COHN

Year Established

OSCAR INCLUDED

The USC-Avatar Connections

PHOTO COURTESY OF WETA/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Trojans helped create digital faces, invent the Na’vi language, compose the musical score and more.

FIVE USC FACULTY members from disparate fields played significant behind-the-scenes roles in the blockbuster film Avatar, joining a healthy number of USC cinematic arts and music alums who also lent their talents to James Cameron’s sci-fi epic. Paul Debevec, associate director for graphics research at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, shared a scientific and engineering Academy Award this year for the design and engineering of a facial rendering system used in the film. The Oscar, presented to Debevec and three others at the Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony, recognized more than 10 years of research, development and application of technologies designed to achieve the goal of realistic digital actors. The Marina del Rey institute’s Light Stage 5 system, its latest geometry and appearance capture system, was used to digitize the faces of most of the film’s principal cast. USC research assistant professor Abhijeet Ghosh and postdoctoral researcher WanChun Ma also were recognized with film credits in Avatar for their work using the institute’s facial screening technology. Cameron has long looked to USC for tech nical expertise. As USC lecturer Syd Field noted in his 1994 book, Four Screenplays, the filmmaker learned all he knows about

special effects at USC, even though he was never a student here. “I’d go down to the USC library and pull any theses that graduate students had written about optical printing, or front screen projection, or dye transfers, anything that related to film technology,” Cameron told Field. “I literally put myself into a graduate course on film technology – for free.” The filmmaker’s reliance on USC expertise goes beyond technology, however.

[RECORD GIVING]

Na’vi, the language spoken by the natives of Pandora, was developed by linguist Paul Frommer, a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business who received his Ph.D. in linguistics from USC College. Frommer spent four years on the project, creating more than 1,000 words for the fictional language, a mixture of Polynesian and African dialects. He developed rules and a structure of the language. A New York Times article on his project led to a blog on the newspaper’s Web site, where Frommer answered readers’ questions about Na’vi. He plans to publish a guide to the created language, which has attracted fans around the globe. Meanwhile USC College anthropology professor Nancy Lutkehaus briefed director Cameron and his longtime producing partner Jon Landau on so-called “primitive” tribal groups. Landau, who attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts in the early 1980s, was one of many former USC students who worked on Avatar. The filmmakers consulted Lutkehaus, an expert on the cultures of Papua New Guinea, on the coming-of-age ceremony that the film’s protagonist undergoes. The musical score, which was nominated for a Golden Globe award, was composed by two-time Academy Award winner James Horner ’74, a USC Thornton School of Music graduate who won the Oscar in 1998 for his work on Titanic, Cameron’s earlier box-office smash. John Knoll ’94, a cinematic arts major, was a visual effects supervisor on the film. Fellow cinematic arts alums Addison Teague MFA ’02 and Tim Nielsen MFA ’99 were sound effects editors. – Allison Engel

Good Neighbors Tops $1.2 Million

The 2009 USC Good Neighbors Campaign, launched in October during tough recessionary times, exceeded its goal with a record $1.2 million given by USC faculty and staff. This was the last campaign under the tenure of USC President Steven B. Sample and may stand out as his proudest fundraising achievement in his 19 years. The 2009 total puts the amount donated over the Good Neighbors Campaign’s 15-year history at more than $11 million, all of which has gone to support more than 365 community organizations partnering with USC to put children on the path to college, make streets safer for families, and provide activities and education to improve the health of those in the neighborhoods around USC’s campuses. Thomas S. Sayles, USC vice president for government and community relations, who came to USC last year, helmed the campaign for the first time. “This year’s record-breaking campaign is a fitting tribute to President Sample,” Sayles says. l

To read more about USC’s neighborhood outreach efforts, visit http://communities.usc.edu

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

Thought LEADERS

Lab Work

›› STILL FEARFUL

Fear mongering for personal, political and corporate gain continues unabated in America, USC sociologist Barry Glassner wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January. Basic Books recently published a 10thanniversary edition of Glassner’s prescient book, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things – Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage & So Much More.

›› UNTIDY HISTORY

Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at USC College, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post last fall about the toppling of the Berlin Wall. She wrote: “One of the most momentous events of the past century was, in fact, an accident, a semi-comical and bureaucratic mistake that owes as much to the Western media as to the tides of history.”

›› LEAN THOUGHTS A new master plan for higher education is needed in California, one with assumptions that square with today’s fiscal and learning realities, wrote William Tierney of the USC Rossier School of Education in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in January. Tierney, a University Professor, said the plan “is the first step to returning the system to its former glory.”

Deep-Sea Drill A $25 million NSF grant creates a national center at USC exploring the “deep biosphere.” fact that nearly half of the Earth’s total biomass resides in subsurface habitats – mines, aquifers, soils on the continents, and sediments and rocks below the ocean floor. This massive area is what USC biologist Katrina J. Edwards studies. Her work recently got a major boost in the form of a $25 million National Science Foundation grant. Edwards will use the funds to establish the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations, a new NSF Science and Technology Center. She and her USC team members will partner with several major research universities and national laboratories to study the “deep biosphere” beneath the oceans. Their explorations – a series of international, coordinated missions on the subseafloor biosphere – will focus on three habitats: the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Seattle and Vancouver Island in the Pacific Ocean; the North Pond, a sediment-filled valley near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; and the South Pacific Gyre, the world’s largest system of ocean currents, located between South America and Australia. “Our mission statement is to understand IT’S A LITTLE-KNOWN

the extent, function, dynamics and implication of the existence of a deep biosphere on Earth,” says Edwards, who has appointments in both biological sciences and Earth sciences at USC College. “We focus on the marine realm because it is by far the biggest challenge in terms of potential habitat size.” The center will promote the scientific, educational and diversity goals of deep sub-seafloor biosphere researchers. It also will advance the suite of scientific tools, train and educate a new generation of deep sub-seafloor biosphere researchers, and translate knowledge of the deep subseafloor biosphere and ocean sciences to a broad community that includes K-12 children. “The awarding of a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Cen ter to Katrina Edwards is a tremendous achievement for her and for her research team as they seek to understand the subocean biosphere and the impact it has on the future of our planet,” says Howard Gillman, dean of USC College. “The Col lege is proud to be the lead institution and home for the center.” Edwards believes the timing of the grant is on target. “Given the maturity of the

To read what USC faculty are writing and saying in the media, visit http://uscnews.usc.edu

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

Marine biologist Katrina Edwards

PHOTO BY PHILIP CHANNING

›› RESEARCH EQUALS JOBS In an opinion piece on CNN.com in late January, Krisztina Holly, executive director of the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, made the case that the fiscal year 2011 federal budget should increase spending on university programs to help translate research into new employment opportunities. She quoted U.S. secretary of commerce Gary Locke: “If you want job growth, create businesses.” l

field and the significant advancement in technology, this is an ideal time to establish the center,” she says. “Marine research has been hobbling along for decades ever since we discovered, from core samples taken in the 1980s, that microbes existed within all marine sediment. This grant will, over the next two years, help shape the field of microbiology.” USC was one of five institutions to win a new Science and Technology Center award following a merit-based competition in which 247 preliminary proposals were received. “These five new centers will involve teams of researchers and educators, integrate learning and discovery in innovative ways, tackle complex problems that require the long-term support afforded by this program, and lead to the development of new technologies with significant impact well into the future,” says Arden L. Bement, director of the National Science Foundation. track record of winning center-of-excellence awards, according to Executive Vice President and Provost C. L. Max Nikias. “We have built a reputation for quality research that leverages our strengths in multidisciplinary collaboration between our schools, other institutions and industry,” he says. “This highly competitive award demonstrates that Katrina Edwards, other USC College faculty and USC researchers are at the forefront of science in the exploration of the biosphere.” Partner universities and laboratories collaborating on the project include the University of Alaska Fairbanks, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the University of Rhode Island, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science Technology, Harvard University and the University of Bremen.

USC HAS A STRONG

– Susan Andrews

“Steven B. Sample has engineered one of the great recent transformations in American higher education.... The next leader must replace a living icon.”

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL KLEIN

OVERHEARD

››

– The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a March 7 tribute to USC’s retiring president.

THE SHEWANELLA SHUFFLE

Dancing Bacteria Bacteria do the “electric slide” in a remarkable discovery that may lead to better fuel cells. PEERING INTO a microscope, researchers in the laboratory of USC geobiologist Kenneth Nealson saw something no one had ever seen before: an electrically induced bacterial dance. They dubbed it electrokinesis. Their description of the never-before-observed bacterial behavior recently appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The metal-metabolizing Shewanella onei densis microbe, they discovered, does not just cling to metal in its environment, as previously thought. Instead, it harvests electrochemical energy obtained upon contact with the metal and swims furiously for a few minutes before landing again. Electrokinesis is more than a curiosity. Nealson, who discovered Shewanella oneidensis in 1988 among the sediments of Lake Oneida in New York, hopes to harness it to boost the power of microbebased fuel cells enough to produce usable energy. The discovery of electrokinesis does not achieve that goal directly, but it should help researchers better tune the complex living engines of microbial fuel cells.

“To optimize the bacteria is far more complicated than to optimize the fuel cell,” Nealson says. Electrokinesis was discovered in 2007 by undergraduate Howard Harris, now one of Nealson’s graduate students. Nealson had given Harris what seemed an ideal assignment for a double major in cinema and biophysics. “I had asked him if he would just take some movies of these bacteria doing what they do,” Nealson says. Filming through a microscope isn’t easy, but with the help of USC biophysicist Moh El-Naggar, Harris was able to make a computer analysis of a time-lapse sequence of bacteria near metal oxide particles. “Every time the bacteria were around these particles … there was a great deal of swimming activity,” Nealson recalls. Harris then discovered that the bacteria displayed the same behavior around the elec trode of a battery. The swimming stopped when the electrode turned off, suggesting that the activity was electrical in origin. As is often true with discoveries, this one raises more questions than it answers.

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

energy in two steps: by absorbing dissolved nutrients and then by converting those nutrients into biologically useful forms of energy through respiration, or the loss of electrons to an electron acceptor such as iron or manganese (humans also respire through the loss of electrons to oxygen, one of the most powerful electron acceptors). “If electrons don’t flow, it doesn’t matter how much food you have,” Nealson says. However, he adds, “In some environ-

WHO SPEAKS UPSPEAK?

The Science of Sing-Song Speech New research suggests a musical speech pattern is a tell-tale sign of an empathetic heart.

SOME PEOPLE ARE annoyed by upspeak: the habit of making a statement sound like a question? Actually, the ability to change intonation in speech – as in upspeak – may be a sign of superior empathy. That observation flows out of a new study by researchers at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, showing that people use the same brain regions both to produce and to understand intonation in speech. Many studies indicate that people learn by imitating through so-called mirror neurons. This study shows for the first time that prosody – the music of speech – also works on a mirror-like system. And it turns out that the higher a person scores on standard tests of empathy, the more activity in the prosody-producing areas of the brain. Increased empathic ability is linked to the ability to perceive prosody as well as activity in these motor regions, says Lisa Aziz-Zadeh. An assistant professor in occupational therapy, she and collaborators Tong Sheng, a neuroscience doctoral student in USC College, and Anahita

Gheytanchi, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, recently published their findings in the journal Public Library of Science ONE. “Prosody is one of the main ways that

[RARE BREED]

ments, the food is much more precious than the electron acceptors.” If a metal surface became too crowded for bacteria to absorb nutrients easily, they might want to swim away and come back. To answer the how question, Harris and USC earth scientist Mandy Ward are planning other experiments with Shewanella. They expect the experiments to keep Harris busy through his doctoral thesis. – Carl Marziali

we communicate with each other,” AzizZadeh says. In some cases, humans can’t do without it – such as when talking to a stroke victim who garbles words but can express emotion. Or when talking to a pet. Animals don’t understand language, explains Aziz-Zadeh. “They basically are understanding your prosody.” She and her colleagues imaged the brains of 20 volunteers as they heard and produced prosody through happy, sad and other intonations of the nonsensical phrase “da da da da da.” The same part of the brain lit up when the volunteers heard the phrase as when they repeated it. The area is called Broca’s Area and sits about two inches above and forward of each ear. The volunteers with the most activity in Broca’s Area tended to score high on empathy measures. They also used prosody more frequently in daily speech. It is not clear whether empathy brings about prosodic activity or whether frequent use of prosody can somehow help develop empathy – or whether there is no causal relationship either way. – Carl Marziali

Summering in the South Pole

Though it hosts almost no animal life, Antarctica does host a prestigious summer workshop for young biologists. The National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station is headquarters for the International Graduate Training Course in Antarctic Marine Biology, an exceptionally selective program for would-be polar scientists. “It was the first formal graduate training program held on the seventh continent,” says Donal Manahan, program founder and director of USC’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. “No group of graduate students had ever been to Antarctica before on this scale.” Manahan and a small group of colleagues have been accompanying some of the world’s best young biologists to Antarctica since 1994. More than 200 faculty and students representing 30 nations have participated to date. – Carl Marziali

To read a blog written by USC biologists working in Antarctica, visit http://summerinantarctica.usc.edu

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

ILLUSTRATION BY TIM BOWER

Two in particular intrigue the researchers: Why do the bacteria expend valuable energy swimming around? And how do the bacteria find the metal and return to it? Do they sense it through an electric field or the behavior of other bacteria? Nealson and his team so far have only educated guesses. To answer the why question, he surmises that bacteria may swim away from the metal because they have too many competitors. Bacteria get

Inquiring MINDS

Arts & Culture

›› BRAIN GEOMETRY African tribal people perceive shapes just as well as Westerners, despite having little exposure to artificial geometric objects. In a study published in Psychological Science, a research team led by USC neuroscientist Irving Biederman found that Southland college students and members of the semi-nomadic Himba tribe of northwestern Namibia responded virtually identically to shape variations in sorting experiments. Yet the Himba have no word for square, circle or triangle.

›› BOOSTING ESTROGEN BENEFITS New research from the lab of USC neurobiologist Michel Baudry clarifies estrogen’s mechanism of action, with huge pharmaceutical implications. In a study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Baudry and colleagues from Pomona’s Western University of Health Sciences found that estrogen, when acting through the protein calpain, does not work as a slowly diffusing hormone, but as a neurotransmitter with a more powerful and nearly immediate effect on the brain. In the future, drug developers may target calpain directly, possibly avoiding the cancer risk associated with hormone therapy while tapping estrogen’s ability to stimulate learning and memory.

›› TSUNAMI THREAT Engineers from the USC Tsunami Research Center prepared a complete set of California inundation maps, giving the best estimate for the largest anticipated tsunami events. Prepared by Costas

PHOTO COURTESY OF THAT VIDEOGAME BLOG

Synolakis, Jose Borrero and Aggeliki Barberopoulou, the large-scale maps show 350,000 Californians living in areas subject to inundation, with a worst-case scenario of 45-foot waves in Crescent City.

›› Better Cancer trap USC pharmacy researcher Andrew MacKay has designed a new nanomedicine that delivers chemotherapeutics to mouse tumors with extraordinary results. Not only does drug tolerance increase fourfold, but tumors also regress almost completely after a single dose. The genetically engineered chimeric polypeptide molecules are novel for their generality, simplicity and biodegradability. McKay’s work was published in the journal Nature Materials. l For the latest research, visit http://uscnews.usc. edu/science_technology

Video games composer Jason Graves ’98

Dark Orchestral Guys Scoring for video games is the next big thing, as various USC Thornton alums demonstrate. Like most kids, Jason Graves ’98 was entranced by E.T. But not for the usual reasons. “That was the first movie where I thought the music was really something, and it stuck with me,” he says. “When I became a composition major in college, I went back to E.T. and also got into Hook – another phenomenal John Williams score. Then I read about USC’s film-scoring program and thought, ‘Maybe I want to do that.’ ” Graves does “do that,” but primarily for computer games. A classically trained composer, jazz drummer, world percussionist, keyboardist and guitarist, he has scored more than 80 games ranging from Star Trek to Arthur and the Invisibles. His latest, Dead Space, won nine awards last year, including two from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (the U.K.’s version of the Oscars). Dead Space has been so successful, in fact, that Graves is getting a reputation as a master of the eerie. “It’s ironic, because Dead Space was more textural than melodic, and I like the big thematic, cinematic, sweeping themes a lot more,” he says. “But I’m still happy being pigeonholed as ‘the dark orchestral guy’ because I’m glad to be working.” Graves is a graduate of the elite scoring

for motion pictures and television program at USC’s Thornton School of Music. The yearlong certificate program has turned out other top composers in the video game industry, including Gerard Marino ’00 (God of War series), Bear McCreary ’02 (Dark Void) and Jesse Harlin ’02, whose credits, as staff composer for LucasArts, include the Galaxies, Republic Commando, Revenge of the Sith and Battlefront II installments of the Star Wars series. Ten years ago, few composers imagined video games would be a source of commissions. “Music for games was done more by music programmers than composers,” says USC scoring program chair Brian King. Today, games represent a big piece of the market for new music. “It’s evolved now to where games use full orchestras,” says King. “The attention to detail, the attention to quality of production, is on a scale with feature films now.” Gone are the never-ending loops of Super Mario days. “There are many, many levels and layers,” says King. “You’ll write literally hours of music so designers and developers have the opportunity to program in these variations.” While the prestige accorded to game composers is not yet on a par with that of film composers, music for games has already

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

[Sully in the Sky]

Post-Soviet Treasure

The Desert of Forbidden Art A new film tells the improbable tale of Uzbekistan’s Nukus Museum, a repository of Russian dissident art.

Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope

paintings rolled up under the beds of old widows, buried in family trash….” So begins actor Ben Kingsley’s narration for a remarkable documentary – written, produced and directed by USC cinematic arts associate professor Amanda Pope and cinematic arts alum Tchavdar

“I FOUND THESE

Anatomy of Heroism

“The heroic bosom beats no more!” complained Lord Byron nearly two centuries ago. A documentary by USC Annenberg professor Dan Birman proves him wonderfully wrong. Brace for Impact, which aired on the cable channel TLC, reconstructs the extraordinary landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, piloted by one Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III. Narrated by actor and amateur pilot Harrison Ford, the film details how one man’s actions saved 155 lives. Boarding a helicopter, Sully retraces the plane’s path from LaGuardia Airport and takes the audience through the choices he made within seconds of striking a flock of Canada geese over Manhattan. Birman wrote and directed the film with help from USC Annenberg alums David Eisenberg MA ’06 (associate producer), Adriana Padilla MA ’08 (production coordinator) and Megan Chao MA ’08 (research assistant). The film includes interviews with passengers, air traffic controllers and boat captains who assisted in the rescue. l

Georgiev MFA ’00. The Desert of Forbidden Art, which premiered in February at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, is the story of one man’s private struggle against censorship. The man was artist and collector Igor Savitsky (1915-1984), who daringly rescued 40,000 fellow artists’ canvases and built a museum for them in the remote desert of Uzbekistan, far from the watchful eyes of the KGB. The paintings had drawn the wrath of the Soviet regime, and their creators had been executed or sent to gulags. Were it not for Savitsky – who went knocking on the doors of the widows and children of these long-forgotten artists – they might well have been lost forever. Georgiev and Pope stumbled upon the story more than six years ago, while working on another documentary about the former Soviet Union. The filmmakers tracked down what archival documents existed and located the surviving children of the artists and other witnesses to the era. Kingsley agreed to voice Savitsky’s letters and diaries, and Sally Field and Ed Asner narrated the stories of the persecuted artists. The Desert of Forbidden Art has been screened at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, the Cleveland International Film Festival and the New Zealand International Documentary Film Festival, among others. – Allison Engel

To see clips from the film, go to http://tlc.discovery.com/tv/brace-for-impact/brace-for-impact.html

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

GEORGIEV AND POPE PHOTO BY ERNEST KURTVELIER / SULLENBERGER PHOTO BY DAN BIRMAN

found its way into concert halls. A series called Video Games Live regularly tours the United States, Europe and Asia. It played the Hollywood Bowl last year. Composing for games requires the same skills and discipline as composing for film and television. However, there are some important differences. In film scoring, the composer works from a locked print. The assignment is to underscore dialogue and emotional content in finished scenes following the spotting notes provided by the director. “With games, in the best-case scenario they will give you a simulation of what the game play is like,” says King. “Or you might get a description of what it should sound like.” Recognizing the importance of games in the commercial scoring industry, a twopart course taught by USC Thornton faculty member Lennie Moore, himself a prolific game-music composer, is now a required part of the scoring for motion pictures and television program. Graves, who scores eight to 12 games a year now, only broke into the industry after graduating. A new generation of scoring students is more enterprising. Take Austin Wintory ’07: He offered his scoring services to student game designers while still at USC. When one project, flOw, was purchased by Sony, Wintory got his first big break. He quickly gained a reputation as a rising game and film composer. – David Menconi and Diane Krieger

Global Horizons Mapping the Possibilities Interactive maps of digs pave the way for amicable division of Palestinian and Israeli patrimony. A TEAM OF American, Israeli and Palestinian

experts has developed the first map detailing 40 years of Israeli archaeological activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem – much of it never publicly disclosed. The Google Maps portal is a welcome development in the profession, judging by the fact that it was awarded the 2009 Open Archaeology Prize from American Schools of Oriental Research, the main organization for archaeologists working in the Middle East. Project leaders Lynn Swartz Dodd of USC and Rafi Greenberg of Tel Aviv University received the award at the organization’s annual conference in November. “The significance of making this data public should not be underestimated,” says team member Ran Boytner, director for international research at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. “For the first time, both Palestinians and Israelis can dynamically consult this interactive map

PHOTO BY MARK BERNDT

OVERHEARD

›› “Each of us is

committed to continuing our work so that all information about Israeli archaeological activity in the West Bank and Gaza becomes publicly accessible.” – Religion scholar Lynn Swartz Dodd on the goals of the digital map-making team.

and view what cultural heritage will fall under the sovereign rule of each side during final peace negotiations.” The West Bank and East Jerusalem Archaeology Database, part of the USC Digital Library, grew out of an effort to devise a framework for the disposition of the region’s archaeological treasures in the event of a two-state peace agreement. Dodd and Boytner had invited Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists in 2005 to engage in a dialogue about archaeology (read more at www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/15067). This led to a research effort to identify Israeli archaeological activity since 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Built over several years through hundreds of hours of research, bolstered by freedom-of-information requests and, when necessary, a lawsuit in Israeli courts, the award-winning Web site provides interactive satellite maps showing locations of about 7,000 archaeological sites in the region, including Shiloh, where the Bible locates the original tabernacle of the Hebrews; Battir (Khirbet al Yahudiya), where the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion; the Qumran caves, where the Dead Sea Scrolls (the earliest copies of the Bible) were found; Jericho; and many sites within Jerusalem. Greenberg, a senior lecturer in archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Adi Keinan, formerly of Tel Aviv University and now a doctoral student at University College London, did the research for the Web maps now available at USC. (The public can access the West Bank and East Jerusalem Archaeology Database at http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/wbarc For best viewing, install Google Earth.) Dodd described the process as seeking to “fill a void” in preparation for future peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. “That void was intelligent, prepared conversation and data resources that could inform negotiation over cultural

heritage and archaeology,” she says. “The respective authorities and archaeological communities did not endorse the research officially; they were aware of it, and they did not intervene to stop it.” The searchable map helps define the scope of a future agreement. “We’ve started a database that lets you know what to negotiate for,” says Dodd, who directs USC’s Archaeology Research Center. “Each of us is committed to continuing our work so that all information about Israeli archaeological activity in the West Bank and Gaza becomes publicly accessible.” For scholars and laypersons, the database has other practical uses. For example, the overlay of ancient sites on contemporary satellite photographs allows instant comparison of settlement patterns, which in turn may provide information about ancient stream flows and other important features. Government agencies could consult the database before planning roads or other public works projects. Tourists and history buffs could research locations of specific sites, such as early Christian churches. Dodd is working with the USC Digital Library to augment the database with educational resources for K-12 and college. – Carl Marziali

Lynn Swartz Dodd

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

Karen Embrey (front) administers spinal anesthesia at an Israeli field hospital in Haiti.

first responders

Mission to Haiti USC trauma specialists were among the first medical personnel to land on the earthquake-ravaged island. WHILE THE WORLD stared in horror at the effects of Haiti’s devastating earthquake last January, a 10-person trauma-specialist team from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and LAC+USC Medical Center mobilized for action. “As the images began to be transmitted, it became clear to me that I had to be there,” says Henri Ford, vice dean of medical education for the Keck School and chief of surgery at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, who was born and raised in Haiti. The earthquake hit on Jan. 12; the USC team left Los Angeles for Miami on Jan. 16. They arrived the next morning in Port-au-Prince, traveling on a private jet provided by Project Medishare Haiti and the Miami Global Institute. Among the first medical personnel to arrive in Haiti, the USC team worked in two different areas. Ford collaborated with GHESKIO, a Haitian nongovernmental organization that set up a clinic outside of the capital. The other group, led by LAC+USC Medical Center trauma surgeon Ramon Cestero, worked with the Israeli Defense Force at the Israeli field hospital near the soccer stadium in Port-au-Prince. The team included trauma and orthopedic surgeons, emergency medicine and intensive care unit specialists, a nurse anes-

thetist, a surgical ICU nurse and a physician assistant. With Ford and Cestero were USC team members Howard Belzberg, David Dromsky, Karen Embrey, Kara Hammons, Mira Lenzini, Edward Newton, Andrew Tang and Claudel Thamas. Two days after his arrival, Ford performed abdominal surgery on a 6-year-old boy aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. The child’s pelvis had been frac-

[citizen journalists]

tured and his bladder ruptured by a falling brick. Ford later surgically removed a piece of brick embedded in a girl’s skull, with help from CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta. Upon their return, Ford and Cestero put together a slide show documenting the planning, logistics, working conditions and lessons learned, as well as the spectrum of injuries and health issues that the team had faced. Terrible as they are, the pictures tell a story of hope. “Despite all the horrible stories, there were favorable outcomes,” says Cestero, who estimates that his team triaged 350 people, performed 50 external fixations on broken bones and delivered seven babies. More work remains to be done, however. Ford emphasizes the immense need for future support in the rebuilding of Haiti, particularly in follow-up care for the sick and injured. “There will be opportunities for the Keck School and the entire Trojan Family to really play a pivotal role in the building of a ‘new’ Haiti,” he says. At a Feb. 3 town hall meeting, Keck School dean Carmen A. Puliafito – who organized the medical mission with Demetrios Demetriades, Keck School director of trauma and surgical critical care – issued a school-wide call to action: “Individuals can make a tremendous difference, even when their effort seems like a drop of water in a vast ocean,” he told the audience of medical students and faculty. “Some day, some of you will be getting a call. How you answer that call will make all the difference in the world.” – Katie Neith

Live from Erbil

Kurdish cub reporters will soon be on the beat in Erbil thanks to the Tiziano Project, a nonprofit organization staffed and directed by USC Annenberg alumni and students. The project recently established a three-month journalism training program for youths in the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Named for an Italian journalist who stayed after the Vietnam War to document the fall of Saigon, the Tiziano Project was founded by Andrew McGregor MA ’09 and Jonathan Vidar MA ’06, who met in a spring 2007 photojournalism class at USC Annenberg. By that summer, they were in Kigali, Rwanda, training dedicated locals to produce content for Western news agencies. Other Tiziano Project members from USC Annenberg include Chris Mendez, a graduate student in communications management; Thomas Rippe MA ’07; and David Torstenson ’03. Journalism professors K. C. Cole and Michael Parks are faculty mentors. This summer in Iraq, the project will send four multimedia journalism specialists to train a select group of students in photography, new media and videography. – Jackson DeMos

To learn more about the Tiziano Project and its training programs, go to www.tizianoproject.org

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

walling out the wind

Do-It-Yourself Rancho USC architecture students travel to Panama to retrofit a farming community caught in a dust bowl. “Be the change you want.” A group of USC architecture students has taken that advice to heart, forming their own chapter of the nonprofit Global Architecture Brigades and traveling to a farming cooperative in Panama that in recent years has been devastated by strong winds. Eleven students spent five days last August in Granja San José Arriba, in the province of Veraguas, interviewing the farmers, preparing a site analysis, and researching local building materials and techniques. The first visit led to a detailed plan that would protect both the farm’s crops and its people. To lessen the effects of extreme winds, a series of five masonry walls would be placed strategically throughout the property. To shelter the farmers and their families, the decaying “rancho” would be rebuilt. Its large meeting space, kitchen, depository and dormitory all would be clustered under a sturdy, two-part roof – the northern half of which would be made of heavy wood construction to divert strong winds. The southern half of the roof would be sheathed in clear plastic and enclose a second-floor solar grain dryer. Indigenous

GANDHI SAID:

wood, river stones and native cane would provide much of the construction material. Without the aid of power tools and modern construction equipment, the project would be carried out using local building methods. After four months of fund raising, design development and construction documentation, the USC group returned to Panama in January to begin the construction phase. The farmers had already poured a new concrete floor. They also had arranged for the cutting and transportation of structural wood and had gathered rocks and sand for concrete and masonry walls. After demolishing the old rancho and pouring foundations, the students began building stone and masonry walls and erected the wood framing and roof structure. By the end of their stay, the project was virtually complete. “This program is an amazing experience,” says Nathan Doctor, student leader of the USC Architecture Brigades chapter. “It is extremely rewarding to navigate the full design process in a way that creates change and empowerment.” To learn more about project details, visit www.USCArchitectureBrigades.com l

Trojan CONNECTIONS ›› GITMO TO BOGOTA USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development dean Jack H. Knott was one of 50 civilian leaders who recently traveled to Guantanamo Bay and Central and South America for the 78th Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, sponsored by the U.S. secretary of defense. The group learned about the Southern Command’s biggest challenges. Knott toured Guantanamo Bay, where 220 prisoners are still being detained. The group also flew to a Caribbean Air Force base in Curaçao used for the detection of drug trafficking, and visited a special naval training base in Colombia. ›› AGING IN DUBAI

USC Davis School of Gerontology Dean Gerald C. Davison traveled to Dubai for the Summit on the Global Agenda. Hosted by the World Economic Forum, a Geneva-based nonprofit, the meeting brought together worldwide leaders from academia, business and government to grapple with climate change, financial risk, fragile states, chronic disease and malnutrition. Davison served on the specialized Global Agenda Council on the Aging Society. “There are significant benefits to an aging world,” he noted. “Older people represent an underutilized resource for society rather than being an inevitable drain.”

›› ALGERIAN NARRATIVES As part of her two-year Carnegie Fellowship, international relations scholar Laurie Brand traveled to Algeria in search of primary source materials on that country’s “national narrative.” In the capital, Algiers, and the second-largest city, Oran, she pored over school civics textbooks. Says Brand, “The deep concern Algerians have with how their history is written owes in no small measure to the fact that for years it was France – the former colonizing power – and its scholars and former colonial administrators that produced most historical knowledge about the country.”

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL KLEIN

›› HATE SPEECH

USC Gould School of Law professor Rebecca Brown spearheaded an international conference on hate speech with colleagues from the University of Copenhagen and New York University Law School. The twoday conference, held at NYU, brought together scholars from around the world. l For updates on USC projects around the world, visit uscnews.usc.edu/global

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

New RELEASES 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe

By Mary Elise Sarotte PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, $29.95

Only rarely can one pinpoint a truly transformational year in history. The year 1989 qualifies. International relations scholar Mary Elise Sarotte uses documents, interviews and television broadcasts from around the globe to explore the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall. She describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe.

Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora

By Sarah M. A. Gualtieri UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, $21.95

This study of Arab immigration to the United States places Syrians at the center of discussions about race. Middle East historian Sarah Gualtieri focuses on the first wave of Syrian settlement prior to World War II and continues the story up to the present. Using oral histories and archival work, Gualtieri shines a spotlight on the experience of race in the United States and the wider Syrian diaspora.

The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It

By Christine Pearson and Christine Porath PORTFOLIO, $25.95

Shelf Life The Real Thelonious A long-awaited biography elucidates the music, life and fragile mental health of the High Priest of BeBop. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

By Robin D. G. Kelley Free Press, $30

EVERY DAY for almost a year, historian Robin D. G. Kelley dug through junk, seeking the flesh-and-blood man behind a jazz legend. In a storage unit stacked to the ceiling with bags and boxes, he sorted through the belongings of Thelonious Monk. “I was like an archaeologist,” says Kelley, a professor of history and American studies and ethnicity in USC College. “There was dust everywhere; there were mice. It was terrible.” It was also a great privilege – the culmination of 14 years of research leading up to Kelley’s much-anticipated biography of the great American jazz pianist-composer. In Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original – which The New York Times Book Review hails as an “extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography” – Kelley set out to “correct the record,” laying bare the musical genius beneath the myths and bizarre rumors. Monk’s stony silences, his exuberant dancing during concerts, his retreats into isolation and occasional sleep-attacks at the piano were the outward signs of a bipolar disorder that went unrecognized for much

of his life, Kelley says. Earlier biographers had focused on the idiosyncrasies almost to the exclusion of all else. “For well over half a century, the press and the critics have portrayed Monk as ‘eccentric,’ ‘mad,’ ‘childlike,’ ‘brooding,’ ‘naïve,’ ‘intuitive,’ ‘primitive’ … ” he writes in a prelude to the book. “There was no attempt to discuss the nature or seriousness of his musical intentions.” Kelley’s book traces Monk’s musical journey from childhood piano lessons to late-night concerts in Greenwich Village. It offers a behind-the-scenes view of historic recording sessions. The author concludes that Monk, who died in 1982, was anything but a musical naïf. Introduced to Monk’s music as a teenager, Kelley became “completely obsessed with Monk’s sound, his clang-clang sound of surprise, rich with deafening silences, dissonances and harmonic ambiguities.” Winning the support of the Monk family, he gained unfettered access to the family papers and materials. This is where the storage facility came into play. In the midst of the dust, mice and boxes of junk, Kelley unearthed treasure. Here was Monk’s silk smoking jacket, his London hotel receipts, never-published photographs, reel-to-reel rehearsal recordings and music written in Monk’s own

PHOTO BY LISAGAY HAMILTON

Whether it’s an arrogant boss or a standoffish coworker, bad behavior in the workplace is a nuisance. It’s also a threat to a company’s bottom line, argues USC Marshall’s Christine Porath. Citing years of research, she and her co-author prove that incivility in the workplace carries a staggering economic toll. And they offer tips for business leaders to bring it to a stop. l

Faculty books can be purchased at Trojan Bookstore. Call (800) 447-8620 or visit www.uscbookstore.com

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

Robin D. G. Kelley

hand. Kelley found and documented so much history that not everything fit in the book. He created a Web site (www.monkbook.com) to contain the overflow. This was Kelley’s eighth book, and he has several others in progress, including the forthcoming Speaking in Tongues: Jazz and Modern Africa. Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and

the Diaspora, co-edited with poet Franklin Rosemont, was published in late 2009. But his biography of Monk stands out from all the other books he has or ever will publish. “This is the one that matters,” he says. “When I finished the last chapter and sent it off, I wept. I can’t say that about any other books I’ve written.” – Laurie Moore

Who’s Pure In new spain?

Race, Blood and ‘Old Christians’ A new history unravels the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre as it was applied in the New World. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico

By María Elena Martínez

PHOTO BY MARK TANNER

Stanford University Press, $65

IMPURE BLOOD. It’s a topic that has captivated María Elena Martínez for a decade. How did the Inquisition-era concept, designed to privilege “Old Christians” over converts, shape the race-based caste system of colonial Mexico, privileging Europeans over indigenous and African peoples? Her new book, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico, is the first in-depth study of the intriguing subject. Limpieza de sangre is Spanish for “purity of blood,” an idea developed in 15th-century Spain, referring to a person free of Jewish, Muslim or heretical ancestry. Purity of blood became an obsessive concern in Spain when persecuted Jews and Muslims began converting to Christianity in large numbers. Converts were dubbed New Christians and those claiming to have limpieza de sangre called themselves Old Christians. By the mid-16th century, proof of blood purity was required to enter certain professions, public offices, universities, military and religious orders, convents and guilds. When the Spanish began colonizing the Americas, they brought with them the concept of impure blood. Martínez, an associate professor of history and American studies and ethnicity in USC College, examined limpieza de sangre documents to determine when and how the idea of impurity extended to people of indigenous and African ancestry. These documents – genealogical dossiers

submitted to cathedral chapters, inquisitorial tribunals and religious orders, along with town council records, writings by theologians and jurists, marriage licenses, indigenous nobility petitions, royal legisla-

[PHILOSOPHY]

tion and civil law cases – were dispersed in libraries and museums throughout Mexico, Spain and the United States. She also studied 18th-century Mexican casta (caste) paintings depicting lineage. “I could have spent a lifetime studying documents that made reference to lim pieza de sangre and still not be finished,” Martínez says. In the New World, the concept had profound repercussions for the populations under Spanish rule. Indigenous peoples were not labeled as impure in blood. Unlike Jews and Muslims, the reasoning went, they had not historically rejected Christianity. Because they had ostensibly accepted Spanish rule and Christianity, they were considered free Christian vassals of the Crown of Castile. The rules were very different for those of African descent. Spanish monarchs made no pronouncements declaring Africans pure of blood. They did not prohibit the enslavement of people of African descent as they did with the indigenous populations. In the mid-18th century, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition amended its purity-of-blood statute to explicitly include people of African ancestry in the category of impure blood. Indigenous peoples were not included in the category. In practice, both indigenous and black populations faced discrimination and were viewed as inferior to Spanish Christians. But there were fundamental distinctions drawn between the groups concerning limpieza de sangre and their status as Christians. In January, Martínez’s book was awarded the American Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History and the Conference on Latin American History’s Mexican History Prize. – Pamela J. Johnson

What’s the Big Idea?

Face it: There will never be another Plato, Aristotle, Descartes or Kant. “Nobody keeps track of what’s going on simultaneously in physics, biology and psychology,” says USC philosophy chair Scott Soames. “It’s too big for one brain.” Soames has proposed the next best thing: a series of books by top philosophers giving an overview of the most important unanswered questions and landmark developments. “Instead of one grand picture, what we need is a series of overlapping pictures,” says Soames. Princeton University Press has signed on to the idea with its 22-volume Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy series, with Soames as series editor. The first volume, Philosophical Logic, by Princeton philosopher John Burgess, came out in September. Soames’ own tome, Philosophy of Language, will be released this year. Philosophy of Law will be penned by USC’s Andrei Marmor. – Suzanne Wu

For more information, visit http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/pfcp.html

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

special section

The Impossible Dream of Steven Sample A self-styled contrarian, USC’s tenth president has transformed the university through his vision, energy and sheer force of will.

Steven Sample’s views on leadership are detailed in his 2001 bestselling book, The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership.

In retrospect, all the signals were there from the beginning. In January 1992, USC’s new president convened a strategic planning group and asked it to imagine what at the time seemed to be an impossible dream: USC as the cover story in Time magazine in 2002. It actually took less time than that: In 2000, USC was named Time magazine/Princeton Review’s College of the Year, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine ran a cover story titled “Engineer, Drummer, Pitchman – Steven Sample is Staging a Surprise Production: The Makeover of USC.” Since then, the word has spread, and USC’s remarkable transformation is well known: Top-quality students are attracted by the integration of liberal and professional education, which encourages them to think deeply and creatively; high-profile faculty are lured from prestigious universities by the combination of opportunity and resources to support them; USC is a leader in establishing connections in Asia and the Pacific Rim; and the determination to be a “good neighbor” to local communities has produced a culture change within the university as well as its two neighborhoods. The numbers alone tell much of the story: Record of Accomplishments

1991

Today

Number of Applicants

About 10,400

36,000

Admission Rate for All Students

70%

24%

Admission Rate for SCions

76%

35%

SCions in Freshman Class

17%

22%

Six-year Graduation Rate

58%

88%

National Merit Scholars in Freshman Class

232

Total National Merit Scholars (all classes)

About 75

951

SAT Scores

1070

2068*

National SAT Percentile

About 60th

About 95th

Average GPA of Incoming Freshman

3.4

4.05**

Endowment Pool Market Value

$450 million

$3.58 billion***

Sponsored Research by Faculty

$183.3 million

$464 million

Minors Offered to Undergraduates

About 150

U.S. News & World Report Rankings

51st

26th

Undergraduate Financial Aid

$37.3 million

About $180 million

Capital Construction

Not available

+ 6 million sq. ft.

Annual Voluntary Donations by Faculty and Staff to Community Outreach

About $100,000

$1.2 million

(United Way)

(USC Good Neighbors)

Endowed Chairs and Professorships

152

403

National Academy Members

Annual Giving by Alumni

13%

46%

*1378 adjusted to the old scale; **3.7 unweighted / 4.05 weighted; ***peak value October 2007

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Steven Sample in the Time magazine/ Princeton Review â&#x20AC;&#x153;College of the Yearâ&#x20AC;? story honoring USC

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

How do you capture the story of USC during the Sample administration? A simple list of events would fill most of this issue. Instead, we’ve focused on four signature areas of accomplishment during the past two decades.

1 Undergraduate Education

The Decade’s Hottest School “Stanford. Duke. Northwestern. These are just some of the schools that counselors report USC will soon surpass as one of the most soughtafter campuses in the country.” Kathleen Kingsbury, “The Decade’s Hottest Schools,” The Daily Beast, Dec. 13, 2009

Renaissance Scholars compete for $10,000 prizes

Talented Students

951

National Merit Scholars in 1991: 75; today:

Steven Sample made “depth with breadth” a hallmark of the

undergraduate experience at USC. Building on the university’s historic strength in combining liberal and professional education, he introduced a new program, called the Renaissance Scholars, that encouraged students to take a major and a minor, or a double major, in widely disparate fields, and offered $10,000 prizes for students who were able to complete such a program with distinction. To date, some 119 Renaissance Scholar Prizes have been awarded to graduating seniors, and USC today offers more than 150 undergraduate majors and some 150 academic and professional minors – the broadest selection of any U.S. university. He also focused on changing USC from a commuter campus to a residential university, and has spearheaded the development of on-campus and close-to-campus housing as well as on-campus arts, cultural and athletic programming – all in support of his dream of giving students a small-college experience inside a large, urban research university. The results of these and other changes have been dramatic in terms of demand: • Over the past 19 years, the number of fall-semester applicants has more than tripled, from just over 10,000 to 36,000; • USC now receives more than 12 applications for every opening in the freshman class; • The university’s six-year graduation rate has risen from 58 percent to 88 percent; • The average SAT scores of incoming freshmen have increased by more than 300 points; and • The number of National Merit Scholars in the freshman class has grown from 33 to 232, placing USC among the top five universities in the country.

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

“Of all of USC’s initiatives during my tenure as president, I’m proudest of the Renaissance Scholars program and our emphasis on depth with breadth.” Steven B. Sample,

Annual Address to the Faculty, Jan. 26, 2010

Multiple Academic Paths “[Sample] had a tremendous effect on me before I even became a student at this university. I remember being a senior in high school, and one of the things that really jumped out at me about USC was its emphasis about pursuing multiple academic paths.” Nick Hamada, Interfraternity Council president; senior majoring in international relations

Spoiled No More “When Sample left the presidency of the University at Buffalo to come here, USC accepted 70 percent of all applicants. … Today, USC gets three times as many applicants as it used to and accepts only a third as many of those. The days of the party school in the bad neighborhood – the reputation the school used to have – are over.” Susan Estrich, the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science at USC

Skyrocketing Applications

36,000 1991 number of applicants: 10,400; today:

A Different Kind of Class “At the heart of the university’s mission is the experience of the undergraduates. People are clamoring for admission, and the SAT scores have been transformed. It’s a different kind of class.” Cornell University president emeritus Frank H. T. Rhodes, March 2001

Highlights from a Transformative Presidency

“USC is evolving from a commuter campus to a residential university.... Our students are spending more time on campus, enjoying shows and concerts, lectures and athletic events, and simply hanging out together.” Steven B. Sample,

USC Trojan Family Magazine, Summer 2006

Making Medical School History “One hundred and ten million dollars happens to be the largest commitment ever made to any medical school in the history of medicine. And that wouldn’t have happened had the Keck Foundation not looked very carefully at USC, its leadership, the leadership of its medical school and the needs of the community.” Simon Ramo, W. M. Keck Foundation board member

Campus pride: The Keck School of Medicine of USC

Resources for Faculty 1991 endowed faculty positions: 152; today:

403

Sample signing “topping out” beams for the new Ronald Tutor Campus Center

2 Building Resources

“It’s nice to back a winner.” Flora L. Thornton,

Among Steven Sample’s achievements over the past 19 years is

a phenomenal increase in funds raised to build endowment, develop academic programs and support campus improvements. At its conclusion in December 2002, USC’s Building on Excellence campaign had raised $2.85 billion – setting a fundraising record in American higher education. During Sample’s tenure, USC also became the only American university to have received five gifts of $100 million or more: • $112.5 million from Alfred Mann to establish the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering; • $110 million from the W. M. Keck Foundation to endow the Keck School of Medicine of USC; • $120 million from the Annenberg Foundation to establish the USC Annenberg Center for Communication; • $100 million from the Annenberg Foundation for the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism; and • $175 million from alumnus George Lucas and his Lucasfilm Foundation to endow the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Overall, USC’s endowment grew from about $450 million to $3.5 billion (at its peak in October 2007, prior to the economic recession). Sponsored research by faculty grew from about $183 million to $464 million, funds available for undergraduate financial aid

on her $25 million gift to endow USC’s music school

grew from $37.3 million to about $180 million, and annual voluntary contributions by faculty and staff grew from about $100,000 (United Way) to $1.2 million (Good Neighbors Campaign). Endowed chairs and professorships rose from 152 (from 1885 through March 1991) to 403 (April 1991 through March 2010). Academic programs have been infused with new vitality and direction. Among the wide variety of institutes and centers expanded or initiated during Sample’s administration are the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Dornsife Imaging Center/Brain and Creativity Institute, Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. New research facilities that have transformed the Health Sciences campus include the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, Harlyne J. Norris Cancer Research Tower, and Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research. On the University Park campus, improvements include Ray R. Irani Hall, housing research in molecular and computational biology, the cinematic arts complex and the soon-to-be-opened Ronald Tutor Campus Center, as well as McCarthy Quad, a landscaped green space between Leavey Library and Doheny Memorial Library.

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

“USC has the longest standing tradition of arts education in Southern California, and we are very excited to make this gift to continue the tradition of excellence.” Edward P. Roski, Jr.,

on endowing the Gayle Garner Roski School of Fine Arts

The Birth of a Passion “I discovered my passion for film and making movies when I was a student at USC in the 1960s, and my experiences there shaped the rest of my career. I’m also an ardent advocate for education at all levels and encouraging young people to pursue their ambitions by learning. I’m very fortunate to be in a position to combine my two passions and to be able to help USC continue molding the futures of the moviemakers of tomorrow.” George Lucas ’66

Nobel Prize-winner George Olah with Katherine B. Loker, founder of the Loker Hydrocarbon Institute

Resources for Faculty 1991 sponsored research by faculty: $183.3 million; today:

$464M “The fact that more than half of our campaign money came from other universities’ alumni stunned our competitors nationwide.” Steven B. Sample,

State-of-the-University Address, Feb. 26, 2003

Fountains & Flourishes The courtyard of the new cinematic arts complex at USC, opened in 2009

Technological Collaboration

Making a Difference

“Scientists and engineers who develop modern communication technology will work alongside social scientists, writers and artists who create the content of communication and manage its technology.”

“At a private institution like USC, you can make a difference. Here at USC, I can work to improve society as a whole by helping an effective school to become even more effective.”

Announcement of the 1993 gift creating the USC Annenberg Center for Communication

USC Trustee Kenneth Leventhal, on his 1995 gift to support USC’s school of accounting

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

USC’s first lady, Kathryn Brunkow Sample, has been a champion of campus beautification at USC, and understands the power of the built environment to affect people’s experiences and perceptions. She has advocated for architectural beauty and consistency that appeal both to new generations and to lifelong Trojans whose bonds to USC are inseparable from the physical spaces. Her desire to highlight and share USC’s architectural beauty has led to the publication of a book due out this summer – The Fountains and Flourishes of USC. Featuring a preface by Kathryn Sample and dozens of stunning photographs, the book offers a visual exploration of the 35 fountains on both campuses, as well as the grandeur, elegance, charm and whimsy of campus buildings and their embellishments.

Highlights from a Transformative Presidency

3 Global Reach

Global Foresight “When he first took the board to Asia in the ’90s, I don’t believe at that time that anybody else, any other university, was even thinking about it. The fact that he brought nonAmericans onto the board – which was at the time also something new – all those things are very foresighted. And nobody else did it. Steve did it.” USC trustee Ronnie C. Chan ’76, “Steven B. Sample: Global Education Leadership Award,” 2009

James Ellis, Ronnie C. Chan and Steven Sample in Beijing, 2006 USC’S global presence expanded exponentially under Steven

Sample’s leadership, with new programs of research, study and service that span countries and continents. USC now has a worldwide alumni network, enrolls the largest number of international students of any U.S. university, and operates five international offices in Asia and one in Mexico City. USC began opening the Asian offices in the 1990s to work with partners in education and research, in the corporate and NGO worlds, and in government agencies and international organizations. The international offices also help support a growing network of international alumni clubs. Convinced of the importance of the Pacific region in the next century, Sample worked with the chancellors and presidents of various universities in countries ringing the Pacific Ocean – from Australia to Korea to Canada to Mexico – to establish the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) in 1997, and served as its founding chairman. APRU today is a consortium of 42 leading research universities dedicated to the economic, scientific and cultural advancement of the Pacific Rim. Building upon this, Sample convened USC’s first international conference in Hong Kong in 2001 – followed by Shanghai in 2002, Seoul in 2004, Tokyo in 2007 and Taipei in 2009 – to bring USC’s leaders and international alumni together with other experts on key issues and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region. Sample also has celebrated USC’s role in helping shape Los Angeles as the de facto capital of the Pacific Rim, a claim he makes based on the city’s – and the university’s – strengths in business and commerce (in particular, global communications), creativity and intellectual capital, and ethnic diversity. USC has created a global network of scholars and programs as well, particularly around the Pacific Rim. Among them are the USC Korean Studies Institute, established in 1995 to promote research and education related to Korea, and the USC U.S.-China Institute, established in 2006 to produce rigorous, policy-relevant social-science research focused on the contemporary U.S.-China relationship.

International public policy graduates in 2009

A Global University

8,000

International students at USC in 2009-10:

“Before Steve came here, being global meant pretty much that everybody came here. Now being global means that we reach out, we are there.” Marilyn Flynn,

dean, USC School of Social Work

Worldwide Alumni Network “One of my favorite stories about the global influence of USC alumni comes from a meeting I had with the prime minister of Malaysia. After our one-hour meeting, I thanked him for being so generous with his time. He replied: ‘But Dr. Sample, of course I must be kind to the president of USC. After all, my government is riddled with these – what do you call them? – these Trojans!’ ”

Living University “The faculty have benefited from USC becoming ‘The Living University,’ with increasingly residential and vibrant campuses, deep engagement with the community, the region and the world, and a clear recognition of the need for greater sustainability in all we do.”

A Leader of Leaders “President Sample is a leader of leaders. He is an educational statesman.” Verna B. Dauterive M.Ed. ’49, Ed.D. ’66, “Steven B. Sample: Global Education Leadership Award,” 2009

University Professor Alexander Capron, president, USC Academic Senate, 2009

Steven B. Sample, USC Trojan Family Magazine, Winter 2006

Professor of international relations Steven Lamy U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Pacific Vision

Sample in 1997 with three of the 20 founding presidents of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities

sıx Global Presence

1991 number of international offices: zero; today:

“Steve Sample had the idea and was a major leader among all of the presidents in American higher education to recognize the growing importance of the Pacific Rim. He led the effort to create linkages between American universities along the West Coast of our country to institutions and universities in Japan and China and Taiwan and Hong Kong and Australia. It was a remarkable achievement.” Molly Corbett Broad, president, American Council on Education, 2009

First Families of Troy

Joint Educational Project director Tammy Anderson with students

4 Strengthening Community From the beginning of his administration, Steven

As USC’s 10th first lady, Kathryn Brunkow Sample has served the university in many capacities – as ambassador, advocate, supporter and senior adviser to the president. She and her husband travel extensively together on USC business, and she is the university’s official hostess, opening the doors of their home to some 2,500 guests each year. But she has also focused on the family lives of USC’s presidents – both her own family’s life and that of the nine presidential families that preceded her. As part of USC’s 125th anniversary celebration, she conceived a plan to acknowledge the role of the presidents’ wives in the life of the university: Portraits of the university’s first ladies now are prominently displayed in Bovard Administration Building along with those of their husbands, and a book, USC’s First Ladies: A Trojan Family Album, offers a view of USC’s development through the lives and works of its presidential families. Pictured above, left to right: USC First Ladies Marilyn Zumberge, Kathryn Sample and Lucy Hubbard Haugh.

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Sample focused USC’s community-service efforts on five initiatives, with special emphasis on the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of the two campuses: • Providing educational, cultural and developmental opportunities for the children living in the university’s immediate neighborhoods; • Working with neighbors, city and county officials, and the Los Angeles Police Department to provide safer streets; • Encouraging more entrepreneurs, and especially minority entrepreneurs, to establish businesses in the immediate vicinity of USC’s campuses; • Encouraging more USC employees, and especially lower-paid long-term employees, to own and occupy housing in the neighborhoods surrounding the university’s campuses; and • Preferentially employing at USC more persons who have lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the university’s campuses for the past five years. In 1993, he announced the formation of a nonprofit corporation, USC Neighborhood Outreach, Inc., to receive funds raised to create university-community partnerships benefiting the local

Highlights from a Transformative Presidency

community. The following year, he launched what is now the centerpiece of the university’s public-service efforts: the USC Good Neighbors Campaign. The campaign – which asks USC faculty and staff to contribute a portion of their paychecks to support programs that strengthen local communities – has raised more than $11 million since its founding in 1994, all of which has gone to support more than 365 community organizations partnering with USC to put children on the pathway to college, make streets safer for families, and provide activities and education to improve the health of those in the neighborhoods around USC’s campuses. One of these partnerships, the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative, is a rigorous, six-year pre-college enrichment program designed to prepare low-income neighborhood students for admission to the university. Those who complete the program and meet USC’s competitive admission requirements are rewarded with a full 4.5-year financial package. Since the initiative enrolled its first scholars in the 1991-92 academic year, 99 percent of its graduates have been accepted into institutions of higher learning. About one-third of the scholars in each graduating class enters USC; others attend institutions such as Yale, MIT, Stanford, UCLA and Dartmouth.

“The University of Southern California has been a point of convergence. I think that’s one of the brilliant points of the diamond of Steve Sample. In the role of an enabling institution, USC stands mightily.” First African Methodist Episcopal Church (right)

Rev. Cecil B. Murray,

A Strong Culture of Public Service “USC has developed something for which other universities and colleges would give their right arm – a strong culture of public service among our undergraduates. Indeed, this culture of public service has become an integral part of undergraduate education at USC.” Steven B. Sample, Annual Address to the Faculty, January 2000

Neighborhood Initiatives

USC Kid Watch volunteer Ruth Andrade with neighborhood children

“Regardless of where we live, every person who works at USC has a tremendous stake in the surrounding community – financially and morally.” Steven B. Sample,

1992

Faculty and Staff Community Support Donations to the USC Good Neighbors Campaign since 1994:

$11M

“Schools tend to push their pre-college programs to the kids who are getting the A’s and B’s. Our program wants those kids who may be highly motivated but have not realized their potential. They may be C-average [students], but their potential may be A’s and B’s.” Kim Thomas-Barrios, director of USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative

Changing Lives Percentage of Neighborhood Academic Initiative graduates accepted into college:

99% Safety for Kids “Another child appears bewildered when asked by a reporter about his neighborhood’s safety. ‘Yeah, it’s safe here,’ he shrugs, perplexed by the strange question. ‘You’d better ask my mother about that. She’s in Kid Watch.’ “ Gale Holland, “The Kids Are All Right,” USC Trojan Family Magazine, Summer 2001

Enlightened Self-Interest “More institutions might do well to emulate USC’s enlightened selfinterest, for not only has the ’hood dramatically improved, but so has the university.” Time/Princeton Review, in naming USC “College of the Year 2000”

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Teaching the

Teachers

The USC Rossier School of Education debuts a first-of-its-kind online Master of Arts in teaching degree, dedicated to addressing one of America’s more serious problems – attracting and retaining qualified teachers.

By Starshine Roshell

Research shows that more than a third of America’s teachers could retire within the next four years, creating a dire shortage of qualified instructors in the nation’s schools. And this shortage will be most keenly felt in the areas where the need is greatest – in innercity schools. Karen Symms Gallagher, dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, has known for some time that her school – and the profession – needed to drastically change its approach to educating teachers if it was going to address this crisis. “We believe the failure of our children to meet basic academic benchmarks can be attributed to the profession’s failure to prepare enough teachers who are ready to motivate and teach all our children how to learn,” she says. She started with a bold, and seemingly counterintuitive, move in 2006, when she announced the elimination of the school’s undergraduate program, which ended in 2008. “It had become a boutique program, graduating only about 100 students a year,” Gallagher says. “A hundred students a year is not really serving the needs of the schools.”

At the same time, the school’s Master of Arts in teaching, which began in 2004, was increasingly popular with students. Full-time students with bachelor’s degrees could complete their teaching credentials and master’s degrees in 13 months. But growth of the program was limited by brick-and-mortar constraints. “The number one issue on our campus is we need more space,” Gallagher says. “There just physically is not the place to put more students.” Enter John Katzman, founder of the Princeton Review, who had a bold proposal. Katzman and his wife, Alicia Ernst, had teamed up with USC Rossier in spring 2008 to fund the Katzman-Ernst Center for Educational Entrepreneurship, Technology and Innovation. Convinced that America needed to move its public school system out of the 19th century and into the 21st century, he was launching 2tor, a private company dedicated to helping top-notch universities create and administer uncompromising online programs. He was also convinced that developing such a program for teacher preparation would benefit USC and, ultimately, the nation’s schools.

Photographs by Steve Cohn

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

in their own homes. But these programs have never been able to match the rigor and value of traditional degrees from distinguished universities. Until now. In June 2009, the USC Rossier School launched MAT@USC and began offering students across the country the chance to earn its respected Master of Arts in teaching degree online. Unlike many online degree programs, the MAT@USC is demanding. It’s selective. And, thanks to the highly interactive platform provided by partner company 2tor, it mirrors the stringent curriculum of the school’s oncampus program. “This isn’t some extension program,” says 2tor chief operating officer Chip Paucek. “This is the real live MAT, augmented to be online. That’s a brave and smart decision.”

2tor staff members Jennifer Hanlon (left) and Heather Attale demonstrate the MAT@USC computer screens and video camera to student Theodore Sagun.

Convincing the faculty was trickier. “When you say ‘online degree,’ people think, ‘That’s bad quality; we’re not going to do it,’ ” Gallagher says. “And with what John was envisioning in terms of the platform, there wasn’t much to look at to see what he was talking about.” But Katzman’s passion for the project won Gallagher and the USC Rossier faculty and staff over. “He started with: ‘This school should be producing huge numbers of well-prepared teachers. Los Angeles needs them. The country needs them. You can make a difference,’ ” Gallagher recalls. “Our mission all along has been to strengthen urban education locally, nationally and globally. And we saw an opportunity here for 2tor to bring the resources that we alone could not provide. “So the faculty said, ‘All right, we can do this.’ We took a leap of faith and then we worked out a contract where we had everything spelled out.” In recent years, online degree programs have offered busy students the convenience of learning on their own time, at their own pace and

The MAT@USC continues USC Rossier’s long focus on serving inner-city and low-income populations. “Despite growing awareness of the educational achievement gap for low-income children in our urban K-12 schools,” Gallagher says, “too many schools still adhere to a 19th-century model aimed at preparing a largely homogeneous population to succeed in an industrial economy.” The first of its kind at a major research university, the program is aimed at both current and aspiring teachers whose schedules and locations would otherwise prevent them from attaining an advanced and meaningful degree. Students can start at various times throughout the year. There were 144 students in the first cohort last June, 229 in September 2009 and 243 in January of this year. As many as 400 students are expected in May – doubling the size of the entire USC Rossier student population. The online program blends the sophistication of new technology with traditional hands-on, in-classroom training for every student. Students are placed in appropriate schools in their own communities – at the elementary, middle school and high school levels – to be mentored by experienced teachers in required “guided practice” coursework, which was once called “student teaching.” But the program’s first students seem even more excited by the advanced technology – including real-time webcam discussions – that allows daily face-to-face interaction with their teachers and peers. “You really get that feeling of a graduate classroom,” says Eran Even-Kesef, a Maryland dad who began the program in September. “You see the professor and all the other students, and they see you. Everybody can speak to everyone else. We can read each other’s facial expressions.” USC Rossier’s regular full-time faculty members deliver their lectures via video, PowerPoint and even animation. Students can access course materials 24 hours a day, and get to know their professors and classmates through custom-designed social-networking tools that look and function like Facebook. U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

“The coolest parts are the video chats and how you can break up into groups,” says student Angel Miles, a single mom in Washington, D.C. “The professors can take a class of 20 and divide us into live group chats that they can listen in on. Afterwards we can all meet back as one class and discuss what happened in our private groups.” When students are at their assigned schools for in-class observation and hands-on instructional practice, they use simple plug-andplay video cameras to record their observations, then upload them for discussions with their professors and fellow students. USC Rossier contributes the professors and curriculum. “The intellectual property is ours,” Gallagher explains. “We admit students and decide who will graduate.” 2tor, meanwhile, provides the one-of-a-kind technology platform as well as round-the-clock technical assistance for students – everything from making sure their computer speakers are working to helping them replace lost ID cards. 2tor also kicked in substantial capital. “Before we had one student enrolled,” Gallagher says, “2tor had spent several million dollars on marketing and recruiting.” The result, she says, is a true partnership. “When you put it together, it’s got DNA from both of us.”

“You really get that feeling of a graduate classroom. You see the professor and all the other students, and they see you. Everybody can speak to everyone else. We can read each other’s facial expressions.”

appropriate credentialing in all 50 states – something that had never been done before. “There was a dearth of good resources on credential require– Eran Even-Kesef, a Maryland dad ments,” says 2tor’s Paucek, who who began in September is the former CEO of Hooked on Phonics. “As we developed the necessary information, we decided to put it online and use proper search engine optimization to drive traffic.” The result – a site called CertificationMap.com – has been wildly successful. “In only a year, it has become one of the most trusted sites on the Internet for teacher certification,” Paucek says. “And it has driven not only traffic but also many actual students into the program.” Until now, the online-degree market has been dominated by forprofit schools like the University of Phoenix. “Those are great businesses, but not great quality programs,” Paucek says. He believes that top-tier universities tend to merely dabble online with individual classes or certificate programs. “But if you’re dabbling, you’re really not making an impact.” And when it comes to distance learning, he adds, many schools ANOTHER ADVANTAGE of the MAT@USC is that it offers students have dipped their toes in the water, but remained reluctant to dive in. the ability to earn a California teaching credential from wherever “It’s a challenge to offer degrees online,” he says, explaining that they live. Students also are able to access resources and support to the MAT@USC’s innovative technology wasn’t possible even five help them as they seek credentials outside California, as students years ago. “It’s also very expensive. You have to spend millions. And from 46 states are doing as of this writing. universities aren’t known for taking risks.” As part of its work on credentialing, the MAT@USC created He gives credit to USC for rising to the challenge. a unique service, providing detailed online information about “This is definitely outside the box,” Paucek says. “It’s not just new to the institution, it’s new to the world, and that’s hard. There have been moments when we’re asking to do something that has never been done before; and MAT@USC: Just the Facts when it’s been done for 100 years in a particular way, there are invariably institutional barriers to that. ›› Online degree program is the first of its kind at a major research university “But the provost’s office and the dean of graduate admissions have been amazing, pushing through ›› Offers the same faculty and curriculum as the on-campus master’s in teaching program with the convenience of online learning those barriers.” The instructors have embraced the program, too. ›› Custom-designed interactive learning environment allows for frequent personal “The faculty have been more supportive than I interaction between students and their professors and peers think most faculties would be,” he says. “They’re very ›› Places students in schools in their own communities to learn from mentor self-reflective. They’re mission-oriented. They would teachers while gaining teaching experience like to produce thousands of great teachers if they can.”

›› Full access to the Trojan Family network, including job-placement assistance after graduation

›› Accelerated program can be completed in as little as one year ›› CertificationMap.com simplifies the complicated teacher-certification process, providing a wealth of easy-to-access information about salaries, tenure and prerequisite coursework in each state.

›› Recently given the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education’s

Best Practices Award for the Innovative Use of Technology, which recognizes an innovative use of educational technology in a school, college or department of education

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

teaches the program’s “Framing” course, which challenges students to question their preconceived notions about education. As associate dean at USC Rossier, she also chaired the design team for the online program, helping answer perhaps the project’s most pressing question: What

PROFESSOR MELORA SUNDT

Starshine Roshell is a syndicated columnist, author and journalism professor at Santa Barbara City College. Her work has appeared in Westways, Santa Barbara and Miller-McCune magazines.

MAT@USC http://mat@usc.edu/

The online “classroom” looks like the opening of The Brady Bunch, with live video boxes showing each student’s and professor’s face.

on earth would such a program look like? “We looked around at what everyone else was doing in online learning,” Sundt says. They weren’t especially impressed. “Nothing allowed you to feel like you were immersed in a classroom environment, and nothing allowed you to feel like you were connecting with your fellow students.” She and 2tor’s software designers vowed to change that. “We set out to build a platform that would allow people not only to absorb content – to read and watch and learn – but also to mimic facets of in-class education that are largely lost in other online programs.” When creating lesson plans for a traditional classroom, Sundt says, “You don’t go off the deep end because it’s going to be too expensive or you don’t know how to do it.” But in creating the MAT@USC platform, tech developers encouraged instructors to dream big. “The 2tor guys would say, ‘So how would you teach this in a classroom?’ ” Sundt recalls. “I’d say, ‘Well, I’d have the students write on a timeline taped around the room.’ And the designers would go away for an hour and come back with an interactive timeline!” During class, professors can scrawl notes on a virtual white board, or pull up videos or Word documents for discussion. 2tor takes a skyis-the-limit approach to brainstorming tools for each individual class. “It’s a revenue-sharing partnership,” Sundt says, “so it’s in their best interest to create an over-the-top, mind-blowing learning experience because that will attract students into the program.” By all reports, the platform is easy to navigate. “It’s like using any new technology,” Sundt says. “It’s nerve-wracking the first couple of times, but it’s not that hard.”

Users say the online “classroom” looks like Hollywood Squares or the opening sequence of The Brady Bunch, with a grid of boxes showing live video of each student’s and the professor’s face. The format makes for far different dynamics than you find in a real classroom setting. “All you’ve got is head and shoulders so you can’t read people’s body language,” Sundt says. On the other hand, students can’t get away with texting or multi-tasking during a lecture. “It’s very hard for them to tune out because the camera’s on their faces the whole time. It’s intense.” She’s had to adjust her teaching style as well. “The dimension of time is very different when you’re online,” she says. “You can’t do a 90-minute lecture. You have to alter up the instruction about every 20 minutes. You can work through a PowerPoint presentation, you can give them something to consider in small groups, you can do polling.” The students “attend” office hours by logging on for one-on-one video chats with their instructors, and they can learn more about each professor by checking out faculty members’ personal profile pages. “A pleasant surprise was how well I get to know the students,” Sundt says. “They really like that interaction. They write to me and say, ‘Oh, I see you like True Blood!’ ” One night, she invited any MAT@USC students in the Los Angeles area to join her for dinner; four showed up for a fun and informal chat about education. INDEED, WHILE students log on from as far away as Puerto Rico and 46 states, others are just blocks away – close enough to walk to campus. It wasn’t geography that previously prevented them from

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

The MAT@USC tech developers encouraged instructors to dream big. “The 2tor guys would say, ‘So how would you teach this in a classroom?’ I’d say,‘Well, I’d have the students write on a timeline taped around the room.’ And the designers would go away for an hour and come back with an interactive timeline!”

earning a teaching degree; it was time. Traditional classes require students to be on campus for hours and hours. “It’s all day; you can’t do anything else,” says Gallagher. “Their lives aren’t organized like that.” She adds that many of the MAT@USC students have full-time jobs. “We’re getting people who – Professor Melora Sundt, are in other careers and are who oversaw the design team thinking of becoming teachers. We’re getting people saying, ‘I always wanted to be a teacher but my parents told me I should go do X instead, and now I can’t just quit my job and go back to school.’ ” The program also makes a point of showing the students that, no matter where they live, they are part of the Trojan Family. “We’re not just preparing good teachers,” Gallagher says. “These are Trojan teachers. We want to make sure they understand all that it means to be a Trojan: the relationship between the traditions and the people who have come before. “We do an orientation in which we give them a virtual tour of the campus. We talk to them about football and what our colors

are – cardinal and gold, not red and yellow. We say, ‘Here are the teams we root against.’ ” The welcome wagon is working. Fully half of the students in the first cohort plan to drive or fly to campus in May to walk in gradua-

Commuting from the East Coast It’s almost time for class to begin, and Haley DeMaria is doing what any other Trojan student would do. She’s glancing back over her homework, getting out her USC pen and opening the cardinal-and-gold notebook she bought at the bookstore. Only DeMaria isn’t sitting in Taper Hall. Or Stauffer. Or Waite Phillips. She’s sitting at her dining room table in Annapolis, Md., wearing a headset and waiting for her professor’s face to appear on the screen of her laptop. DeMaria is among the first students to enter the MAT@USC, the new online degree program from the USC Rossier School of Education. Launched in June 2009, the program allows current and aspiring teachers like DeMaria to earn a Master of Arts in teaching degree from a prestigious university without having to squeeze into campus class schedules.

A Notre Dame alumna with an undergraduate degree in history, DeMaria, 36, taught high school history for four years without any formal teacher training. She wanted an advanced degree, but with two young sons and a husband who often travels on business, she had no time to earn one. “The nature of my life is not conducive to me actually sitting in a classroom,” she says. But when her youngest child started kindergarten last year, she began searching for options. “I really wanted an education and not just a degree. I wanted a school that I could feel a part of – you want teams you can root for!” Then she heard about the MAT@USC. “There’s a stigma around online degrees, and I probably had that prejudice as well,” she says. “But that’s where the MAT@USC really gets it

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

right, because they bring the university to you. I’m learning from the best professors in the country, but I can do it on my own schedule.” In fact, she recently had the opportunity to travel to London with her family for two months, and was able to continue attending her online classes and keep up with her coursework abroad. “I didn’t have to put my degree on hold to have time with my family,” she says. DeMaria was part of a pilot program started in April 2009, and she traveled to campus in June to speak at the USC Rossier School’s 100th anniversary celebration. She shared her inspiring life journey, which included competitive swimming, paralysis after a tragic accident, a miraculous recovery and a published autobiography. “Being there and seeing it really helped my sense of feeling like a

Trojan,” she says. “I visited the USC bookstore to get some Trojan gear: T-shirts and a water bottle for me, shorts for my husband.” She plans to return to campus in May to take part in graduation ceremonies. In some ways, DeMaria says, the MAT@USC’S custom teaching platform is actually better than the traditional classroom environment. “It’s a highly effective way to run class,” she says. “You’re interacting with professors and classmates from all over the country. To me, that enriches the program, because I’m hearing about classroom experiences from everywhere, not just in my region.” She learned to use a flip-phone camera so she can record footage of herself teaching in a local classroom and then upload the clips so her peers and professors can watch them and provide feedback. Doesn’t she miss the face-to-face interaction of traditional degree programs? “It is face-to-face,” she says. “For instructors’ office hours, you pop into a virtual video chat room where you

tion ceremonies with all the other graduates. Angel Miles plans to don her cap and gown in spring 2011. Eran Even-Kesef will join her in the spring even though he graduates in November. “Definitely!” he says, laughing. “Are you kidding me?!” For him, being part of a respected institution like USC was the program’s biggest draw. “USC’s a big deal; it’s a prestigious school,” says Even-Kesef, who posted a USC banner on his wall so that other classmates can see it during their video chats. “When I called the school that I was assigned to do my fieldwork in, I introduced myself, and the woman on the phone said: ‘Oh! You’re the USC kid!’ I felt like a virtual red carpet was laid out before me. I’m not sure I would’ve gotten that same treatment if I were somewhere else.” MAT@USC students pay the same per-unit fee as students at USC’s on-campus classes. “If they’re getting a university degree, they have to pay university tuition,” Gallagher says, “and we have the distinction of being the most expensive online master of education program.” Skeptics fretted that students would balk at paying so much for an online degree, even with the reimbursement program available to graduates who teach in high-needs schools. “But we’ve gotten through the first hurdle,” Gallagher says. “People want to do it!” She hopes eventually to be able to offer the online program to schools in other countries, and that someday students will be able

to combine the online and on-campus programs to best suit their needs. Already the courses taught in traditional classrooms are getting positive blowback from the faculty’s exposure to new teaching methods. “We’ve noticed that some of the things that work really well online don’t work so well on campus,” Gallagher says. “We have to stop and go, ‘OK, now how would we solve this face to face?’ ” USC Rossier plans to do longitudinal evaluations of its graduates, tracking the careers of students who earned their degrees online and those who earned them on campus, to see if there are any noticeable long-term differences in their success. “The best result will be that there is no difference,” Gallagher says, “because if we can demonstrate that it’s the same, then we can overcome people’s resistance to online learning.” But in fact, there’s one difference that she hopes the study will reveal: a particular tech-savvy among the online degree recipients. “There are so many teachers who really don’t know how to use technology effectively,” she says. “MAT@USC teachers are going to realize, ‘This is how I can reinforce the math lesson or how I can use video to reinforce some theoretical understanding.’ Because they themselves have used technology to learn.” l If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

learn not to doze off, fidget or otherwise embarrass themselves. “You are 100 percent present during class time,” DeMaria says. “They can see everything you do. Nobody even likes to eat!” She was amused to log on at 11 a.m. Eastern time one day and see the sleepy faces of her West Coast classmates. “Everybody had coffee and you could tell they had just woken up.” She does most of her coursework while her boys, ages 6 and 8, are in school – MAT@USC student Haley DeMaria, and after they’ve gone to at home in Maryland with her sons bed. But every once in a Edward, 6, and James, 8 while she invites them to see what she’s doing online. “I love the fact that my kids know I look forward to meeting them in I’ve gone back to school,” she says. person because I feel like there are “I think it’s great that they see that some I know really well.” you don’t stop learning when you Really, really well. Because the graduate from high school or even webcams are trained on each college – that it’s something you can student for the duration of each do throughout your life.” 90-minute class, students quickly – Starshine Roshell

PHOTO COURTESY OF HALEY DEMARIA

“I love the fact that my kids know I’ve gone back to school. I think it’s great that they see that you don’t stop learning when you graduate from high school or even college – that it’s something you can do throughout your life.”

can talk to them. And in class, you’re looking at your screen and you’re seeing all these boxes and faces and you’re really having a discussion with your peers.” She finds herself instant-messaging her classmates during class, and

gathering with them online for virtual study groups. “It’s amazing how well you can get to know someone you’ve never met,” she says. “I probably interact with them more online than I would if I were sitting next to them in class.

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

Military social work leaders (from left) R. Paul Maiden, Dean Marilyn Flynn, Jose Coll and Anthony Hassan.

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

Photographs by Markâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;Berndt

Healing Invisible Wounds By Diane Krieger

There’s a mental health crisis brewing in America’s armed forces. Experts say one in three veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home traumatized, and the clinical social workers who treat them are overwhelmed by the numbers. USC comes to the rescue with the nation’s first military social work program. IT’S A SIGN OF HOW FAR WE’VE COME as a society that Corporal Klinger doesn’t seem

very funny anymore. In the 1970s and early ’80s, audiences chuckled over the lovable M*A*S*H character who cross-dressed with panache, hoping thereby to convince the Army brass that he deserved a Section 8 discharge. Today we know that the stresses of combat don’t express themselves in the urge to don high heels, wide-brimmed hats and feather boas, and that our troops’ fragile mental health is nothing to laugh about. Nearly one in three Americans deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan will return with serious mental trauma, which tends to express itself in substance abuse, depression, domestic violence, suicide and, once in a while, murder. In January 2008, The New York Times tallied 121 cases of returned veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan either convicted of or charged with killings. At the same time, U.S. Army and Marine Corps suicide rates rose to their highest levels in decades. According to new data released by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in January, suicides among veterans increased by 26 percent just from 2005 to 2007. Today, one in five suicides in America involves a veteran. That’s an average of 18 veterans taking their own lives each day. Experts attribute these heartbreaking statistics, in large part, to the high number of veterans returning to the United States plagued by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is a testament to the enlightened outlook of present-day American culture that we don’t sweep this under a rug. We talk about it endlessly. Indeed, PTSD has entered the mainstream vocabulary. We understand the seriousness of this condition. What’s less well understood is how to manage an emerging mental health crisis. A 2007 report by the American Psychological Association found a severe shortage of social workers and

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

lion troops deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002. The patient-to-therapist ratio doesn’t improve much on the veteran side. “The VA and Vet Center facilities are overrun,” says Hassan, who recently retired from the Air Force. “They’re unable to manage this.” Even if they could, reservists and national guards – who now make up 40 to 50 percent of troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan – will be discharged and go right back to their civilian jobs and communities, which could be hundreds of miles from the nearest VA or Vet Center facilities. ended tomorrow, the problem would persist, because “we know that PTSD may express itself years after people are discharged,” says Marilyn Flynn, dean of the USC School of Social Work. Indeed, U.S. secretary of defense Robert Gates has given his agency the task of developing a 40-year response strategy to veterans, recognizing that the emotional and physical tolls of war are lifelong. But society as a whole will have to share the load. “We have to prepare the civilian population to receive service members struggling with mental health issues years after they’ve come back,” Flynn says. For the dean, that means better education of future social workers and large-scale re-education of those already in the field.

IF BOTH WARS

Warriors to Trojans SIX MONTHS OUT of the U.S. Air Force, Anthony Hassan still hasn’t gotten used to feeling the wind in his hair. Being outside without “cover” (a hat) just seems wrong. He still gets a guilty feeling when walking and talking on his cell phone. In the military, this was deemed totally unprofessional. The transition back to civilian life is not easy, even for veterans who don’t have PTSD to hold them back. That’s why the USC School of Social Work came up with Warriors to Trojans, a concerted effort to make USC a veteran-friendly university. There are currently about 200 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans studying here. Several schools have formed veterans student groups: For social work students, it’s the Uniform Services Social Work Interest Group. Together with the USC Rossier School of Education’s Counseling Division and the Department of Occupational Therapy, the School of Social Work has launched a steering committee to develop resources on campus for returning veterans. The committee hosted a Veterans Day celebration; it designed a needs-assessment survey to determine what services would be most useful to veterans. And it has started a Veterans Transition Group, which will run weekly rap sessions on integration into the university community. Affordability is an important issue. In 2008, Congress passed the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, greatly expanding federal educational benefits for veterans.

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

warriors can embark on useful and fulfilling careers debt-free. And in a pioneering move, USC is smoothing the way for future soldier-social workers. Last fall, it arranged for Cassandra Rush and Jason Imhoof, both students in the military track, to become the nation’s first ROTC candidates in a MSW program. Rush had enlisted in the Army after college. Imhoof had been in the National Guard for more than three years. When they enrolled in USC’s social work graduate proJason Imhoof and Cassandra Rush at their ROTC swearing-in gram in 2009, it was unclear how they could study and stay in uniform. The new G.I. Bill, which went into effect last Ironically, to become a military social worker, August, covers the equivalent of four years of one normally must quit the military. That’s what undergraduate tuition at a public university. In Anthony Hassan had to do. Internships and California, that comes to around $60,000. The thousands of hours of clinical work experience feds also kick in a monthly living stipend. don’t mesh well with the duties of a full-time A two-year Master of Social Work (MSW) degree costs around $80,000 at USC. That soldier. Hassan left the Army after 11 years of leaves veterans $20,000 in the hole. However, service to attend graduate school. After earning under the G.I. Bill’s supplementary Yellow his MSW degree, he re-enlisted in the Air Force. Ribbon program, private universities can go Unlike Hassan, Rush and Imhoof had 50-50 with Uncle Sam to cover veterans’ outValvincent Reyes looking out for them. Himself standing education bills. an Army reservist and military social worker, Social work dean Marilyn Flynn has set aside Reyes arranged for the ROTC Cadet Command $100,000 a year to match Yellow Ribbon grant in Virginia to offer the two Trojans scholarships. money, awarding 10 scholarships to veterans When they graduate in 2011, Imhoof and Rush in the MSW program’s military track. With the will be licensed clinical social workers and fully federal matching funds, these real-life Trojan commissioned officers in the U.S. Army. – DK

P H O T O B Y D i e t m a r Q u i s to r f

other mental health professionals equipped to treat armed forces members, veterans and military families. And, make no mistake, social workers – the first line of defense in tackling society’s major problems – are increasingly the ones diagnosing and treating combat stress disorders. Once upon a time, clinical psychologists would have handled this caseload. That’s not feasible anymore. “It’s huge, huge!” says USC’s Anthony Hassan of the demand for licensed clinical social workers specializing in combat-related issues. Hassan is director of the newly created Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families, one prong of a bold initiative that USC’s century-old School of Social Work has launched to address the looming crisis. The raw numbers illustrate the scope of the problem: Nearly 2 million American troops have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Another 100,000 are currently in Iraq, and some 100,000 more are either stationed in or on their way to Afghanistan. The Army has 200 slots for social workers – only 140 of them currently filled (another problem USC’s School of Social Work is tackling). The Air Force is at full capacity with 210 social workers. The Navy, which provides mental health services to the Marine Corps, historically has employed only a handful of social workers. With caseloads ballooning, plans call for growing that force to 70. In all, that’s fewer than 500 social workers for more than 2.2 mil-

viewing and diagnostic skills. A proof-of-concept prototype called So last fall USC unveiled the nation’s first (and only, to date) Military Social Work and Veterans Services Program. The brain- Sgt. Justina already exists on ICT flat screens. Built on the template child of Flynn, and fleshed out by her right-hand man R. Paul of a sulky teenage sexual-assault victim, she sports military fatigues Maiden, vice dean and professor of social work, it revolves and an attitude. ICT programmers are currently adapting her to around four specialized courses to be taken in the second year model a variety of military-related mental health problems. Next up for development are agents representing the military of the two-year Master of Social Work (MSW) degree program. Highly evidence-based, the courses train future therapists in family: husband, wife and child. Eventually, students will be able to the diagnosis and treatment of PTSD and traumatic brain injury; choose from a library of 50 to 100 virtual patients. Plans also call for prepare therapists to address the special needs of military spouses a virtual clinic, a digitally enhanced space where students can interand children; give an overview of military culture; and cover health- act with life-sized virtual patients on a large field-of-view screen. management policy and preventive-care issues in a military setting. Military-specific material is also Vice Dean R. Paul being worked into 10 social work electives, including Maiden has overseen courses on substance abuse; domestic violence; psythe rollout of the military social work track. chopharmacology; and loss, grief and bereavement. The military track – which can be integrated with any of the school’s five major concentration areas – culminates in a 600-hour internship at a military hospital, VA hospital, Vet Center or military base school. The program originally was to be offered only in San Diego, where traumatized servicemen and the agencies that cater to them are in abundance. Camp Pendleton alone employs 60,000 military and civilian personnel. Though more troops are discharged out of the San Diego area than any place else in America, the region is starved for licensed clinical social workers. Before USC showed up, it had just one MSW program, at San Diego State University. (The Los Angeles area has 11, including those at UCLA and USC.) USC opened its San Diego Academic Center in Rancho Bernardo in fall 2009, and already 45 MSW students are enrolled, a third of them in the military track that is headquartered there and chaired by Jose Coll, a Reconnaissance-Marine-turned-social work-professor. But demand has been so high that the courses Americans deployed in Iraq now rotate through facilities on the University Park and Afghanistan will return with serious mental trauma, campus, at USC’s Orange County Academic Center and the school’s City Center facility on Hill Street in which tends to express itself in substance abuse, depression, downtown Los Angeles. Across the school, there are domestic violence, suicide and, once in a while, murder. now more than 80 graduate students in the military track and many others taking the specialized courses Down the road, virtual patients will be remotely accessible, and as electives. Enrollment will almost certainly spike when distanceclinical experiences with them will be integrated into the program’s education versions debut in fall 2010. For mid-career social workers seeking to come up to speed on distance-learning modules. Another major project is “Virtual Iraq,” an immersive environcombat-stress issues, USC is rolling out a postgraduate certificate program. Built around condensed versions of the four specialized ment that puts combat-stressed patients back on street patrol or in the convoys that saw their initial trauma. A Wizard of Oz control military social work courses, the certificate will be offered in an accelerated format as a USC summer institute; it also will be avail- panel lets therapists customize the experience, adding a helicopter here, an improvised explosive device there, helping patients work able online in the near future. Flynn’s and Maiden’s idea of “distance education” should not through their fears and begin to heal. Adapted from Full Spectrum Warrior, a real-time tactics video be confused with the usual bland PowerPoint fare. They have teamed with the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) – a game originally created by ICT in 2003 to train commanders in field operations, the system employs the latest in virtual-reality goggles, USC research unit that specializes in designing interactive tools for a gun-shaped joystick, scent machines and a vibrating platform to the U.S. Army – to take military social work into the 21st century. elicit the feel of a war zone. Backed by $7 million in Congressional earmarks and a $3.3 million A version is already in use by clinical psychologists at 44 sites grant through the Lincy Foundation, the two units are collaborating on a string of bleeding-edge virtual-reality projects for classroom, across the country, yielding dramatic improvements in PTSD patients after just 10 therapy sessions. A new release designed for clinical and Web use. wide-scale use by social workers will feature a non-stressed Sgt. One major project is the first-ever psychiatric virtual patient, an autonomous agent with which students can hone their clinical inter- Justina as a digital trainer, teaching social work students to operate

Nearly one in three

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

ACCORDING TO THE Council on Social Work Education, there are

currently 198 accredited MSW programs in the United States, 17 of them in California. Amazingly, USC is the only school in the nation that has a military track, though USA Today reports that stand-alone PTSD workshops and continuing-education courses are popping up here and there. (The Army has contracted with Fayetteville State University in North Carolina to administer an MSW program for soldiers at nearby Ft. Bragg, but that’s not open to civilians.) Why aren’t more universities stepping up to the plate? Many can’t afford to. “It’s not cheap to develop a military social work curriculum,” says Jose Coll, who was the new program’s first hire. “You need expertise – that means you need to hire.” Two years ago, Paul Maiden, the military track’s chief architect, recruited Coll to lead the fledgling effort and establish its headquarters at the new San Diego Academic Center. In 2008, Maiden invited Lt. Col. Valvincent Reyes to join the faculty. A medical company commander in the U.S. Army Reserves and a clinical expert on PTSD, Reyes designed the military track’s PTSD course. Clinical social worker Eugenia Weiss, a USC alumna with a large military practice near Camp Pendleton, came on board to develop and teach the course on military families. And just six months ago, Maiden persuaded Hassan, who was heading up the Air Force Academy’s Master of Social Work pro-

gram for commanders of cadets, to hang up his uniform so he could launch the Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families, a national hub for military social work scholarship. Rather than jealously guarding its resources, USC is reaching out to social work schools around the country, sharing curricula and administrative know-how. “I can tell you that everybody sees USC right now as leading the way for military social work,” says Hassan. He intends to keep it that way. Hassan has lofty goals for his new center at USC. “I want to be the national leader in education and training in this area,” he says. There’s little standing in his way. The Council of Social Work Education, the profession’s accrediting body, appointed him to chair the committee that is scheduled to release the Advance Practice Competencies for Military Social Work. This document, to be released this spring, will set out the professional standard for military social work. Oxford Press has contracted with Hassan to edit a book of leading scholarly essays on military social work. A national conference at USC is in the planning. Another valuable hire was Master Gunnery Sgt. Isaac Ford, who heads up recruitment efforts for the military track. With 25 years’ experience in the Marine Corps, 17 of them as a recruiter, Ford has easy access to military bases, which turn out to be great sources of prospective students. Transition programs are teeming with newly discharged vets, all pondering what to do with their lives. Many want to stay connected with the military somehow, says Coll, and see military social work as a way to do it. Coll’s own career is proof. When his Force Recon career abruptly ended in 1999 after “a bad jump” left him with a broken back, he reluctantly retired. “I wanted to stay in,” he recalls. “I loved the Marine Corps.” A

Mars and Minerva ANY MARRIAGE between social work and the military is bound to have its bumps. Some might say the two are hopelessly incompatible. Minerva and Mars. At the most basic level, one is about healing wounds, the other about inflicting them. “There is a very strong trend historically of pacifism in the profession,” says USC Social Work dean Marilyn Flynn, a fact borne out by her own school’s mission statement, which contains phrases like “value-driven” and “social and economic justice.” That pacifism, Flynn contends, is “not directed against the people who gave their lives or the families who were impacted.” It’s more a principled rejection of war itself. Most troubling to idealists, perhaps, is counseling service members before deployments to assess and assist in “military readiness.” “A lot of social workers ask, ‘Why are we helping people pre-

Mars, Roman god of war

pare to go to war?’” says Vice Dean R. Paul Maiden. “But that’s not what social workers do. It’s helping patients manage their trauma, the things they’ll encounter. And anybody who goes to war is going to be impacted. It doesn’t matter how healthy you are.” These tensions may help explain why USC remains the only military social work program in the country

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

at a major research university. “There are some folks that still don’t want to touch this,” Maiden says. If you develop a military social work program, will the faculty support it? By creating the program, are you somehow endorsing the military, endorsing the wars? “One thing has really nothing to do with the other,” observes Anthony Hassan, a clinical associate professor in the program, who sees military personnel as no different from any other societal subgroup with specific counseling needs. A social worker does not implicitly endorse their lifestyle by agreeing to treat them. Conversely, one can understand the reluctance of a hard-bitten combat veteran to spend time in the company of a shrink. What would his buddies say? In Hassan’s experience, overcoming these fears and prejudices depends on how well military

social workers relate to their patients, how much energy and time they put into establishing those relationships. “Nowadays, we’re right there with them,” says the U.S. Air Force veteran, who deployed to Iraq as a combat stress-control officer in 2004. “We’re not walking patrols with them, but we may be in a convoy with them, fly in a helicopter with them. We live in the same tent, eat the same food.” Well, not always the same tent. According to the Council on Social Work Education, there were 24,000 people enrolled in MSW degrees in 2007. Eighty-seven percent of them were women. Social work remains a heavily female profession. And the military population remains predominantly male: Only 14 percent is female. It can be harder, Hassan admits, for a battle-scarred man to let his guard down around a woman social worker. Hard, but not impos-

MARS E N G RA V I N G : C O R B IS IMA G ES / MI N ER V A E N G RA V I N G : G E T T Y IMA G ES

the system’s sophisticated control panel. These aren’t dream projects that may emerge in some distant future. They’re already built or being built right now. “Our responsibility is to rapidly deliver something as far-reaching as possible,” says Anthony Hassan. “That’s what we agreed to do for the Congressional appropriation.”

In 2004, Anthony Hassan (right) was deployed to northern Iraq as a combat-stress officer. “It was so rewarding, so free, so casual,” he says. “No layers of bureaucracy. I was needed, and I was wanted.”

vocational rehab officer at the VA turned him on to social work, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. He was chairman of the social work department at Saint Leo University in Florida when he got the call from Maiden inviting him to USC. “What really attracted me to come to the West Coast, lead this program and develop the academic center in San Diego was the opportunity to stay connected to the military that I love so much,” he says. “I still have a lot of friends who are in the Marine Corps, who have had multiple deployments, and I see what they’re going through. I see the need in that everybody sees USC right now our communities. What better way to give back?” as leading the way for military social work,” says retired Air At a December information session attended by 25 prospective students in San Diego, Coll counted Force Col. Anthony Hassan, who was recruited from the six or seven like-minded veterans. One active-duty Air Force Academy last fall to launch USC’s Center for Marine captain with three deployments under his Research and Innovation on Veterans and Military Families. belt described transitioning into military social work as a way to “still provide service for my troops, still be engaged in the Marine Corps, but from a civilian perspective, not in ketable degree. The same is true at the VA. It will not hire anyone a uniform.” Isaac Ford also managed to recruit himself. He entered other than an MSW or a Ph.D.” the MSW program in the fall. He and Coll currently are working with the Department of Another demographic that naturally gravitates toward the new Defense to develop a direct pipeline for graduates of USC’s proprogram, according to Hassan, is military spouses. They know that gram to be employed though the Navy and Army. “Hopefully our wherever the next assignment may take their family, they will be program will be that catalyst where we build more social workers in highly employable. “On every base, the military hires licensed the defense department,” says Coll. “It’s exciting.” social workers,” explains Hassan. “They don’t hire people with a master’s in counseling. They don’t hire people with a master’s in ONE BIG DIFFERENCE between today’s wars and past wars relates marriage and family therapy. They only hire MSWs. It’s a very marto major advances in trauma medicine. During World War II, the

P H O T O C O UR T ES Y O F a nthony h a s s a n

“I can tell you

sible. “It all comes down to how you carry yourself and the credibility you can establish with the patient,” he says. When patient and therapist just don’t click, Hassan says, the military makes an effort to assign a different therapist. Sometimes there’s no choice. “We have female social workers deployed to the war – on a compound where there may be only 10 other women,” he says. “Yet they are still the [mental

Minerva, Roman goddess of healing

health] resource.” While in Iraq, Hassan learned to break down all kinds of patient barriers. “There was a male Army sergeant who did not want to see me because of my last name,” he recalls. A Chicago-born Catholic whose father had been Muslim, Hassan bears a common Arabic family name. In the case of that sergeant, Hassan insisted on a brief meeting before assigning a different therapist to his case. And, he says, “It worked out that he ended up seeing me.” Flynn traces society’s disaffection with its military to the unpop ular Vietnam War, which sparked “this idea that you can’t separate the warrior from the war.” During and after the Vietnam era, people in uniform found themselves unwelcome in some settings. “Social workers who would wear their uniforms to a professional conference would

be talked about, ridiculed,” says Hassan. “People wouldn’t get in the elevator with them.” There are social workers right now who were Vietnam veterans, and they will tell you these stories as if they happened yesterday.” Fordham University dean of social work Peter Vaughan is one of them. According to Maiden, the Jesuit school’s dean only recently “came out” about his military service. And no wonder. Vaughan returned from Vietnam with a bad case of PTSD, Flynn relates. One of his first days back home, he was riding on a bus when a stranger asked him: “How many babies did you kill?” Someone else spat on him. But the times, they are a-changin’.“Now he’s a leader, the dean of a very large school in New York,” says Flynn. “And I think he’s influenced his faculty. There are a

lot of people in his age group who are in leadership positions who remember.” There are others, like Maiden, who feel regret. Not that Maiden ever taunted a Vietnam veteran, but his experiences as a VA social work intern in 1978 left him disheartened. “We had all these guys coming in with all these problems: substance abuse, mental health problems, family issues, domestic violence, suicidal ideation,” he recalls. “And we didn’t treat them very well. We didn’t know how to. That was before they had even diagnosed PTSD.” The profession now is much better equipped to help. “We learned a lot from Vietnam,” says Flynn. “I really think today’s more compassionate orientation is drawn from the extended suffering and consequences of what we did to veterans of Vietnam. People don’t want that to happen again.” – DK

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

ratio of wounded in combat compared to those killed was 2 to 1. In Vietnam, it was 3 to 1. In Iraq, the wounded-to-killed ratio is 8 to 1. While this is good news, it has profound social implications. Already more than 60,000 troops have returned from Iraq with significant injuries, four-fifths of them with traumatic brain injuries also involving catastrophic damage to the arms and legs. Many suffer multiple traumas, resulting in two- and three-limb amputations, severe burns and blindness. “What we’re seeing is casualty rates are a lot lower, but the injuries are much, much more serious,” says Maiden, who recently toured the Center for the Intrepid at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, a state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility that treats the most severely wounded veterans. “The technology is just incredible.” The higher survival rates go hand in hand with the need for more ongoing disability management. Injured veterans receive a lot of intensive therapy when they’re discharged, but chances are they won’t make a full recovery. “They will have difficulties all their lives,” says Maiden. “Social workers will be helping them manage their problems through their life cycle.” Homelessness is another long-term problem. Los Angeles has the largest population of homeless veterans in the country. On any given night, there are about 75,000 homeless people in L.A., and 35 to 40 percent of them are veterans. In designing the military social work track, Dean Marilyn Flynn and Maiden made numerous fact-finding trips to military research

with the Forward Deployed Combat Stress Control Team. In 2004, he was sent to Fort Irwin in San Bernardino, charged with developing the post’s first PTSD treatment program for redeployed Operation Iraqi Freedom combat soldiers. In civilian life, Reyes was a California juvenile parole officer specializing in the system’s psychiatric caseload. But the toughest assignment by far came last November, when he was deployed to do grief counseling at Fort Hood, where an Army psychiatrist’s murderous rampage left 13 soldiers dead, 30 injured and hundreds traumatized. Reyes led a team of psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists and behavioral science technicians who counseled 600 affected soldiers and 100 civilian medical workers over two weeks. “We were going back on a personal mission of mercy,” he says. Personal because Reyes’ unit, the 113th, had originally been called up to go to Iraq with the same group – mostly mental health workers like himself – that was being processed the day of the massacre. The orders had been cancelled when it turned out the 113th had not received adequate “dwell time” (down time between deployments), but 17 of Reyes’ comrades volunteered to go anyway. Among the dead was Capt. John Gaffaney, a 56-year-old psychiatric nurse from Reyes’ unit; one of Reyes’ enlisted sergeants was among the wounded.

and veterans aren’t the only ones in need of counseling. Another group that disproportionately feels the strain of war is military families, and the existing system is letting them down. While resilient and mature for their years, the is the first-ever psychiatric children of service members present a special virtual patient, an autonomous agent with which students challenge to social workers. “Their experiences can hone their clinical interviewing and diagnostic skills. are completely different from those of mainstream kids,” says Eugenia Weiss, a clinical Next up for development are agents representing the miliassociate professor at USC. “With the mobility tary family. Eventually, students will be able to choose and deployments, the losses and injuries, their from a library of 5o to 1oo virtual patients. stressors are tremendous.” Weiss sees a lot of “military brats” in her San Juan Capistrano practice. When there are behavioral problems, these kids are frequently centers around the world. On a visit to Israel, they met with veterans misdiagnosed and mislabeled. “Civilian staff and faculty really of the 1973 Yom Kippur War who, 37 years out, are still struggling don’t know what to do,” says Hassan. “If the kids are acting out, with combat stress-related disorders. The Israeli Defense Force maybe they’ll attribute it to ADHD, when it’s really about ‘dad just treats PTSD as a chronic disease and so should we, Flynn believes. left’ or ‘mom just returned.’ ” “It’s a very long-term view that we have to take,” she says. The societal challenge is enormous. “These kids go to our While PTSD symptoms usually start soon after the traumatic schools; when mom or dad gets deployed, they react profoundly,” event, they may fly under the radar – and go untreated – for years. Flynn says. “But that aspect of their lives is invisible to the schools, Valvincent Reyes knows this firsthand. As a kid growing up invisible to the community, really. We have to build up the capacity in Southern California, he liked to watch old war movies with of schools, principals, teachers and social workers to respond.” his dad. Inexplicably, one particular John Wayne film, They Even at base schools, teachers and administrators tend to view Were Expendable, would reduce this rock-steady family man the brats as civilians. USC has begun to tackle this problem. “We to tears. When Reyes found the nerve to ask why, he learned have interns at all six Camp Pendleton schools,” says Maiden, with that years earlier his father – a Filipino native – had served in palpable pride. “They’ve never had social workers there before.” the U.S. Armed Forces in the Far East. He had survived the When Weiss earned her MSW from USC in 1992, she never Bataan Death March only to endure months of beatings and torimagined she would be treating active-duty soldiers, veterans, their ture at the hands of his Japanese captors. All through his childspouses and military brats. But as a provider for Tricare and Military One, the two primary insurance plans for service members and their hood, Reyes realized, his father had been suffering stoically, dependents, she estimates about 90 percent of her practice is now never seeking help, managing his trauma through the movies. military families. This knowledge inspired Reyes to become a social worker in How did she learn her specialization? “I had to do my own eduthe Army Reserve Medical Service Corps, where he has 21 years’ cation and training,” says Weiss, who later earned her doctorate in experience as a lieutenant colonel and medical company compsychology. She now teaches the USC course on military families, mander. He has seen his share of damaged psyches. In 2002, he giving her students the education she never received in school. was deployed to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he worked

One major project

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SERVICE MEMBERS

unlikely help from a team of psychologists, game designers and digital technicians with close ties to the military. At USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), Albert “Skip” Rizzo, associate director for medical virtual reality, is developing a raft of applications to advance the goal of rapidly training a new cadre of military-savvy social workers. Physicians in training have honed their skills on virtual patients for years, but in the mental health fields, no such training tool has been available. When Rizzo’s team is finished, though, social work trainees will be interacting with hundreds of artificially intelligent virtual trauma victims. Students will also train using the latest in virtual-immersion technology for exposure therapy – the leading evidence-based tool in the treatment of PTSD, according to the National Institutes of Medicine. A clinical psychologist by training, Rizzo never had the benefit of such tools in his own professional education. He learned by roleplaying with faculty supervisors and fellow graduate students. By contrast, USC military social work students will hone their skills on virtual patients. By the time therapists-in-training see their first real patients, they will have practiced on hundreds of virtual ones. And this is essential, from an ethical perspective, because, as Jose Coll puts it: “I would hate for us to use our veterans as guinea pigs. Test all you want on a virtual human.” Next generation virtual patients could come with an automated tutor – perhaps Sigmund Freud – who can interrupt the therapy if the trainee is doing something wrong. “We can analyze the language that the trainee used in the course of the interaction,” Rizzo explains. A formula could pop up at the end of a session, tallying how many self-disclosure statements, how many information-gathering statements, how many empathy statements and how many follow-up questions with reflection the trainee uttered. If there’s an imbalance, it could easily be flagged.

weiss is getting

As for the “Virtual Iraq” project, funding through ICT’s partnership with the School of Social Work will enable Rizzo’s team to upgrade the virtual environment to the latest operating system (the current version runs on 2003 software). Down the road, Rizzo wants to integrate it with devices that monitor the patient’s heart rate, skin conduction and respiration. Correlation of these vital signs with specific stressors in the simulation reduces the clinician’s dependence on patient self-reporting and greatly improves the accuracy of assessment. Other handy virtual tools also are in the works in Rizzo’s futuristic research lab, tucked away in an unassuming industrial park near ICT’s Marina del Rey campus. One system in development is SimCoach – a Web-accessible virtual human that can interact with veterans and military families wanting to learn about mental health services in a non-threatening, anonymous context. By asking simple questions, SimCoach can lead the user to appropriate information about stress, depression, brain injury, relationship counseling, substance abuse, suicide, rehabilitation and reintegration. “This is really breakthrough science,” says Flynn of her school’s collaboration with ICT. It’s a propitious marriage between digital immersive environments and clinical experience. Success will depend on matching technical scientists’ imagination and programming savvy with applied social work research and emotional modeling. The time frame is limited. “We have five more years of work,” says Flynn. “And we have millions of problems – around voice recognition, dead eyes, reactivity, the logic and the vocabulary. But if we can do this, if we can actually do this, that’s going to be a change for all of graduate education. Every other profession will benefit.” l

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

Flynn’s Way THE USC SCHOOL of Social Work has certainly flourished under Dean Marilyn Flynn. Since arriving from Michigan State University in 1997, in just 13 years she has taken the oldest school of social work in California on an amazing journey, more than tripling its endowment (from $8 million to $29 million), including nine endowed professorships (there was just one when she took the helm); more than doubling the full-time faculty (from 27 to 64); more than doubling its graduate student enrollment (from 400 to nearly 900); raising funds for a new instructional building on the University Park campus; and opening academic centers in Orange County, downtown Los Angeles, the Westside and, most recently, San Diego. With her leadership, a $5 million endowment is in place for the Hamovitch Center for Science in the Human Services, the umbrella for the school’s considerable volume of sponsored research, which has increased from $1 million to $20 million. The elite USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging is now housed in the school. Today, U.S. News and World Report ranks

USC 8th among the nation’s 200 graduate schools of social work. The new military social work track is just one of several initiatives that Flynn has set in motion. Others include global student immersion programs, a professional doctoral degree and distance-learning opportunities. Vice Dean R. Paul Maiden credits Flynn’s skill at taking advantage of the entrepreneurial, cando spirit so unique to USC. “It’s the ability to innovate,” says Maiden, who came to USC three years ago from the University of Central Florida. “It’s not having a massive bureaucratic structure you have to wade through. In Florida, every little thing had to go through. “I set foot on this campus in July 2007, and we started developing the military social work program in September. By the following May, we had our curriculum approved and our site identified in San Diego. Jose Coll was hired in July 2008. We spent the next year building out. We opened our program in August 2009 – in just two years.” – DK U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

USCGOT GAMES

Video game design has definitely entered the educational mainstream, to the extent that the Princeton Review has created a ranking of the 50 best universities in the field. Heading the list is USC, whose mix of cinematic storytelling and engineering innovation is helping create a new culture. PHOTOS BY MARK BERNDT

WHEN A VIDEO GAME developed as a student project can motivate half a million players to lobby for peace in Darfur; when officers on their way to the most dangerous parts of the world can sharpen their cross-cultural negotiation and command skills by using a computer adversary; when mobile games not only relieve the boredom of the daily commute, but also can make the commuter fitter and healthier; and when the vocabulary of gaming seeps into sociology, fine arts and education; perhaps it is time to stop referring to video games as an emerging discipline. Game design and development have been taught continuously at USC for nearly 20 years, as large, successful game studios and publishers have realized the value of creative teams trained not merely in their parents’ basements, but in a robust, inclusive academic environment. “I began teaching game design when they were still telling me it was impossible to teach game design,” says Tracy Fullerton MFA ’91, chair of the Interactive Media Division in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. “They” were game designers who were very, very good at what they did, but felt they could not explain – let alone teach – how they did it. The muse of gaming apparently could not be queried. A graduate of USC’s film production program, Fullerton balked at that stifling presumption. Even before she started teaching game design at USC in 1999 – while still working in the industry as a designer and producer of games – Fullerton knew deep down that it was preposterous to think that

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

Tracy Fullerton (in red) consults with part of the Walden design team, (from left) Kyla Gorman MFA’12, Lucas Peterson BFA ‘10 (animation), Bryan Jaycox MFA ‘10 and Kim Cagney MFA ‘11 (animation). The game recreates Thoreau’s isolation experiment.

game design was unteachable. Another former game designer, USC Cinematic Arts colleague Chris Swain, was right there with Fullerton. He, too, knew, not only that game designers could teach their discipline, but also that they must. There are only so many self-taught luminaries, such as design mastermind Will Wright (creator of The Sims) and technical wunderkind John Carmack (creator of Doom and Quake). So Fullerton and Swain set about developing curricula and

instructional tools in a field where the final product draws on all principles of storytelling. AT USC THE TWO INSTRUCTORS found

an environment geared to foster organic growth of academic programs to meet the changing needs of the day. Those changing needs include game players’ hunger for emotional content. “People want games to offer more deeply emotional, more interesting, rich characters

and situations,” Fullerton says. “In order to do that, we need to look to the history of storytelling, the methods and the kind of skills it takes to resonate with people’s lives.” This is what USC’s Game Innovation Lab is all about. Directed by Fullerton and housed in the cinematic arts school’s Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, the lab is a research space and think tank where new concepts in game design, play and usability can be developed, prototyped and play-tested free of the pres-

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

Cinematic Arts’ Chris Swain (far left) and USC Viterbi’s Michael Zyda (top) co-teach the advanced game-design course that attracts students from across the university.

representatives or visit informational sites about the genocide. More than half a million players followed through on their emotional reactions with concrete actions. Twenty to 40 new games come out of the intermediate class each year. Other games emerge from the program’s advanced projects class, co-taught with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s GamePipe Laboratory. What is the engineering school’s stake in game design? As USC Executive Vice President and Provost C. L. Max Nikias put it when he was dean of engineering: “Games pose engineering research challenges right at the limits of technology, in such important areas as artificial intelligence, 3-D visualization and immersive environments.” This broad, cross-campus base is one reason for USC’s undisputed leadership in the discipline. And it is undisputed. In February, the Princeton Review gave the cinematic arts school’s Interactive Media Division its no. 1 ranking among 500 undergraduate

sures inherent in the commercial game-development environment. “ONE OF THE REASONS we’re a pioneer is because The goal of the lab is to nurture concepts that push games beyond we have these strong programs in the Viterbi their currently defined genres, marSchool and in the School of Cinematic Arts, which kets and play patterns and to make is unique,” Fullerton says. “Getting their students breakthroughs in these areas that and our students to mix is the key. Because it’s will be valuable to lab sponsors and the industry as a whole. almost in a way about creating a new culture.” It was this focus on experimental game play that attracted renowned video artist Bill Viola, who is collaborating with Fullerton on The Night Journey, mid 1990s. The premise of the game is sim- game-design programs in North America. a grainy, evocative quest for enlightenment ple: Keep your child quiet so the menacing “One of the reasons we’re a pioneer is that that can only be called a spiritual video soldiers outside will assume your house is we have these strong programs in the Viterbi game. empty. Succeed in comforting your child and School and in the School of Cinematic Arts, That same interest in stretching games’ she makes little noise; the soldiers become which is unique,” Fullerton says. emotional range drives Fullerton’s approach disinterested, wandering farther afield, and “Getting their students and our students to her game-design classes. your family is safe, for now. The terrifying to mix is the key. Because it’s almost in a “I like to encourage students to take alternative: an uncomfortable, frightened way about creating a new culture.” risks,” she says. child crying; the clamor brings the armed OVER AT THE USC Viterbi School, Michael Working in teams of two, students in squad ever closer. Fullerton’s intermediate game projects A similar project out of the Game Zyda’s GamePipe Laboratory is built around course must envision a design goal for their Innovation Lab is Darfur is Dying, the the- the model of what is known in commercial games. Perhaps they hope to elicit an emo- sis project of Susana Ruiz MFA ’06. This interactive entertainment as the “gametional response: joy, serenity, humor or even award-winning “ethical” game went viral on development pipeline.” The lab simulates terror. the MTV University Web site and has been the process of developing a commercial One example from the intermediate class played more than two million times since game from concept to retail release, or, in is Hush, a serious game designed to open for 2007. In it, the player must send family mem- industry parlance, “shipping.” Prior to joining USC, Zyda had been players a tiny window on what it might have bers to the well for fresh water. Who will go? been like to have been the mother of a small Will he or she return safely or be captured a professor at the Naval Postgraduate child during the Rwandan genocides of the by Janjaweed militia? The game resulted in School, where he was founding director of an impressive response on behalf of Darfur’s the Modeling, Virtual Environments and This article is based on reporting by Sanford May, refugees, according to Fullerton. Simulation Institute. Zyda was instrumenCarl Marziali and Diane Krieger. Players have the option to e-mail elected tal in the success of America’s Army, a video

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game of the popular first-person shooter ized software tools used as resources for genre intended both as an engaging enter- subsidiary design studios. A programming tainment for avid gamers and a tool for job became available at one of those subsidenhancing U.S. Army recruiting. iary studios, Treyarch, working on the popStudents graduating from USC games ular Call of Duty military shooter franchise; programs have experience much valued by Jakatdar made the move. Not long after, he the industry and usually not earned before a jumped to the design side of the house as an couple of years into a game designer’s career artificial intelligence specialist creating the – that of taking a game from drawing board AI components of one of the finest World to fully play-tested completion. War II-themed shooters ever published, Call There’s no shortage of gaming resources at of Duty: World at War. USC Viterbi – a unique breed of university Jakatdar admits he was initially a medioengineering school that does not see itself as cre student. Yet today he is a superb game a fortified sanctuary for hyper-focused tech- designer. He fully credits USC Viterbi and nologists. his experience in the interdisciplinary “Our mandate is providing a technical GamePipe Laboratory for his postgraduate education for the entire campus,” explains experience, an exceptional mobility in an Ashish Soni MS ’03, who directs USC industry where it’s easy to get typecast. Viterbi’s Information Technology Program. Key for Jakatdar was USC’s focus on Indeed, as many as 80 percent of students in allowing students the latitude to choose some USC Viterbi programming classes are what they want to do, then go do it – all the not engineering majors. while receiving the professional instruction Soni himself designed the curriculum and resources they need for executing their for a class in Apple iPhone and iPod Touch ideas at a level deemed outstanding by top application development, the first such class commercial studios and publishers. at any university taught without employing THE USC PIPELINE continues to pump pioApple engineers as instructors. Also at USC Viterbi are two levels of neering new content into the marketplace. game-programming classes for engineer- Recently, gaming giant Konami announced ing majors as well as for students from USC that Reflection – born in the Interactive Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media Division Media Division’s intermediate projects class game-design program. The “Advanced and developed further in the advanced projTopics in Games Programming” course is ects class co-taught with USC Viterbi – will taught by Jason Gregory, better known as a generalist programmer for Naughty Dog, Inc. A studio GamePipe Laboratory founder Mike Zyda prepares students of longstanding critical acclaim for the real-world demands of the commercial game design and commercial success, Naughty industry – taking a project from concept to retail release. Dog recently released Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, perhaps the finest example of an entertainment experience seamlessly marrying the tachycardiac exhilaration of interactivity with brilliant, cinematic story production. PlayStation Magazine calls Uncharted 2 a “veritable master class of all-round game development,” and Gregory, one of the game’s creators, does in fact teach a master class in game programming at USC Viterbi. Students leave prepared to follow in the paths of their notable instructors. Three years ago, Sumeet Jakatdar completed the graduate program in computer science at USC Viterbi. He landed a job at eminent games publisher Activision, maintaining central-

Game Design at USC Teaching, research and market exposure: USC’s got it all

TEACHING Game design formally got its start at USC in 2002, when the USC School of Cinematic Arts launched its MFA in interactive media, although a core game-design workshop had been in place since 1999. In 2004, the school unveiled the Game Innovation Lab, a state-of-the-art research space and think tank for game design and creation. A B.A. in interactive entertainment was first offered in 2005. That same year, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering launched its GamePipe Laboratory, a subset of the computer science department that simulates the process of developing a commercial game from concept to retail release. Today, USC offers four degrees in video-game development at the undergraduate and graduate levels. For the game-play design-focused, the USC School of Cinematic Arts offers the Master of Fine Arts in interactive media and the Bachelor of Arts in interactive entertainment. For the more engineering-oriented, the USC Viterbi School offers the Bachelor of Science in computer science (games) and the Master of Science in computer science (game development). The two schools jointly offer a minor in videoContinued on page 49

be the publisher’s first game for DSiWare, downloadable entertainment for Nintendo’s top-selling DS handheld platform. Designed by a typically broad group of USC students, including computer science, communications, cinematic arts, music and business administration majors, the game won the Independent Games Festival’s Next Great Mobile Game Award last spring. USC Interactive Media Division game students have a history of graduating already on the fast track to industry stardom. Out of the second MFA graduating class in 2006 came flOw, an artful and appealing arcadestyle game published by Sony as a digitally distributed PS3 title available via its PlayStation Network. More important, flOw allowed USC graduates Kellee Santiago and

Jenova Chen to form their own enterprise for gaming innovation, thatgamecompany. Their company has gone on to develop another PlayStation exclusive title, Flower, completely different from flOw but just as delightful and well received. In 2009, the title won the closest thing to an Oscar in the gaming world: an award from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, for Best Casual Game. Santiago, the company’s president, credits the quality of her USC education in games as essential to the commercial success of thatgamecompany. Indeed, it was with the advice and assistance of mentors at the university that the start-up was born. Of all the skills she acquired and refined at USC, Santiago considers learning to create innovative gaming solutions and to present

those concepts with confidence and clarity in a collaborative environment as the most important. “Presentation and articulation of ideas is a big part of leadership in games development,” she says. SO IS TIMING. Years from now, historians of gaming may look back on the rise of the iPhone as a moment of ridiculous opportunity for young game developers. Cost of entry: a laptop, a $99 software-development kit for the iPhone and Zyda’s one-semester course on mobile games. Return on investment: How about $600 a day in advertising royalties? That’s what Elliot Lee makes from Brain Tuner Lite, a popular puzzle game the USC computer engineering senior developed on the side, according to Zyda.

Student Erin Reynolds in the Game Innovation Lab at the Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. The USC Roski alum worked in game design at Disney before returning for her MFA.

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Or how about one company’s offer to buy the intellectual property behind 16 iPhone games developed at GamePipe for $30,000 each? Compare that to work-study wages. “There’s an amazing amount of intellectual property coming out of the lab,” Zyda says. So great are the opportunities that a big group of recent GamePipe grads decided to skip the lucrative job market. The 15 alums founded Happynin Games, one of a few companies making 3-D games for the iPhone. Their first game, fowlplay, shipped at the end of February. Designed by Andrea Tseng ’09, a graduate of USC Viterbi’s industrial and systems engineering program, and Henry Liu ’09, an Interactive Media Division graduate who also served on the team for Reflection, the game play turns on a flying pigeon’s natural emissions. Stifle your chuckle, reader. For Liu, that pigeon is the goose that laid the golden egg. “iPhone development has caught the students’ eye,” says Zyda with more than a little understatement. Like games on any other platform, mobile games also hold potential for improving people’s lives. Interactive Media Division MFA student Erin Reynolds ’06 (who earned her B.A. in fine arts at USC’s Roski School) worked with faculty members Zyda, Marientina Gotsis of the Interactive Media

wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. So he did what he always does to gauge the direction of gaming: He asked his students. Sumeet Jakatdar MS ’07, now the AI specialist on Call of Duty, told him to go for it. So did Dhruv Thukral MS ’06, now a senior developer at EA Mobile. The two became Zyda’s first teaching assistants for the class, which was immediately oversubscribed. Later, Jakatdar came back to hire six more developers. It is important to realize that this moment of opportunity may not last. Not too long ago, all gaming was console-driven, and young developers lacked the large teams and large purses required to make new games. In a year or two, if portable tablets such as the Apple iPad take off, large teams and large purses again will be required to make the most of the tablets’ capabilities. But for now, says Zyda, “a couple of people in a garage can ship a mobile game.” Just like two now-famous Steves in Silicon Valley and their first desktop computer. Even those USC gaming students who don’t graduate with a published game and a new company to lead still will depart with what the Interactive Media Division’s Chris Swain calls “a foundation in creative leadership,” and an ability to work well in teams, both of which he believes are requirements for any game curriculum.

PAUL DEBEVEC OF ICT’S Graphics Lab is doing things in visual and animation technologies that must be seen to be believed. Or, rather, seen to have your sense of disbelief thoroughly suspended. Division and Maryalice Jordan-Marsh of the USC School of Social Work, with funding from the Humana Innovation Center, to develop a set of health-geared games. The iPhone game in the set, Entréainer, helps match a player’s food cravings with healthy choices in his or her immediate neighborhood. Another game, designed for PCs, challenges children to do exercises and make good nutritional choices to advance the wellbeing of their Pokemon-like creatures. “What we do here affects millions of people, not hundreds,” says Zyda. When Motorola first approached Zyda with an offer of $100,000 to teach a class in game development for cell phones, he

collaboration is the educational leitmotif on the University Park campus, it’s certainly daily business at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), headquartered a few miles away in Marina del Rey. Until recent years, many of ICT’s inventions have existed only in the realm of science fiction. Cliché perhaps, but at ICT, quite true. Paul Debevec of ICT’s Graphics Lab is doing things in visual and animation technologies that must be seen to be believed. Or, rather, seen to have your sense of disbelief thoroughly suspended. Debevec, in collaboration with Image Metrics, has created a demonstration of such technology

IF INNOVATIVE

game design and management. For more artistically inclined undergraduates, the USC Roski School of Fine Arts offers minors in 2-D art for games, 3-D art for games and 3-D animation. Other schools, such as the USC Thornton School of Music and the USC Marshall School of Business, offer specialized courses geared toward the game industry. Across USC, there are now hundreds of students enrolled in game-design degree programs, and the academic catalogue features dozens of courses dealing with various aspects of game design. RESEARCH Today the Game Innovation Lab has more than $1.5 million in sponsored research, including an NEA grant for a “spiritual journey” game designed in collaboration with media artist Bill Viola, and a U.S. Department of Education grant to develop a new generation of math games. Other partners include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Sesame Workshop, Sony, Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. Before there were game labs at USC, there was the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). Established in 1999 with a multi-year contract from the U.S. Army, ICT had the mandate of exploring a powerful question: What would happen if leading technologists in artificial intelligence, graphics and immersion joined forces with the creative talents of Hollywood and the game industry? The answer is a host of engaging, memorable interactive media that are revolutionizing the fields of training, education and beyond. While ICT is a research unit that does not grant degrees or offer courses, it runs a summer internship program that accepts 35 students. During the year it employs another 30 graduate research assistants, visiting student researchers and undergraduate student workers. For more information about ICT and to view some of its immersive technologies, go to http://ict.usc.edu Continued on page 51

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tor Randall W. Hill Jr., “is to have players learning more deeply and quickly from our games than they would with a more traditional medium, like a textbook.” ICT was created around a framework of ideas published in a National Research Council report – chaired by Michael Zyda while he was at the Naval Postgraduate School – highlighting the existence of numerous, untapped opportunities for collaboration among the entertainment disciplines and institutions charged with maintaining our national defense. It is no surprise, then, that many of ICT’s projects have immediate, direct applications within the military. But ICT is also a bit like NASA in its banner days, when technologies originally created for the exclusive use of the space program quickly turned into tools for improving our everyday lives. Much of ICT’s work has eventual application not only in commercial games and interactive entertainment, but also in mainstream educational environ-

One of USC’s top game-design alumni, Sumeet Jakatdar MS ‘07, works for Activision, creating AI components for the next Call of Duty release.

in something called Digital Emily. In the demonstration video, Emily expressively explains the basic concepts of the technology. It’s all terribly pedestrian until about halfway through the presentation, when various graphics-rendering filters are applied to Emily’s face. You realize it’s not really a woman, not Emily: It’s a virtual representation of Emily rendered and animated by computer. The results are stunning. Debevec and his colleagues were recently recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a scientific and engineering Academy Award for the design and engineering of the Light Stage technologies that helped produce Emily and also have been used to create believable digital faces for major films, including Avatar, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Spider-Man 2. But ICT’s achievements are more than just visually impressive. Its teams of researchers and designers have developed sophisticated models for getting computers to emulate how people behave and for enabling valuable learning to take place in virtual environments. Working with the Interactive Media Division’s Chris Swain and his students, ICT developed a PC-based educational game called BiLAT. The goal is to provide practice

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ICT WORKS WITH the USC Rossier School of Education to evaluate and refine the usefulness of its game designs intended to teach. “To determine,” says director Hill, “if players are learning better and faster from our games than they would by a more traditional medium, like a textbook.” and skill-building for conducting one-onone negotiations in tense, culturally unfamiliar environments, where creating trust and establishing relationships often can save real human lives. In collaboration with the USC Rossier School of Education, the BiLAT team is developing BiLAT AIDE, a complementary Web-based course that teaches the theories behind cross-cultural negotiation. In a similar vein, ICT’s UrbanSim is designed for training military commanders working in complex operational environments where seemingly small daily decisions can have wide-ranging and long-lasting repercussions. The game has been called “SimCity Iraq,” but unlike the famous commercial game that includes Godzilla and tornadoes, UrbanSim models the actions and reactions of hundreds of individuals and groups as they coexist in a large Iraqi city. “Our goal,” says ICT executive direc-

ments – from the secondary school level up through specialized training for medical students. The spillover to the interactive entertainment industry is inevitable. The combination of ICT’s artificial intelligence and graphics tools for the advanced virtualization of people has the potential to bring a far more human dimension to games. “As our technologies become widely available,” says Hill, “not only will game designers finally be able to undertake emotionally complex projects they’ve been considering for years, but also, more importantly, they’ll be thinking up entirely new kinds of games not yet imagined.” NO MODERN GAME is truly complete without a system for tracking statistics, a component of the experience by which players can follow their progress and analyze their skills within the game. Likewise at USC, “stats”

are an integral part of keeping the game- the art of designing games, as the latter diseducation programs fit and nimble. cipline adjusts to the changing demands of a At the USC Annenberg School for rapidly expanding audience and new techniCommunication & Journalism, research- cal innovations. ers take this process of analysis out into the The spectacular technology underpinning world, with ongoing projects designed to today’s games and interactive entertainment assess how individuals use games and the won’t be around for long. Next week, or the overall effect these games have on society. week after that, or perhaps at an upcoming Communications scholar Dmitri Williams gaming expo, an established company will ’93, MS ’96 leads a continuing effort to announce that it has purchased a potentially understand how people behave in mas- revolutionary technology from a small group sively multiplayer online virtual worlds. His of innovators – they might be USC graduworld of choice: Everquest II, a story-driven ates – and, via the greater development and fantasy game published by Sony Online distribution capacity of the larger firm, that Entertainment. this technology will be available at retail Drawing on traditional social science within a year. They’ll claim it will change theories, he forms hypotheses about human the face of gaming, and it probably will. behavior and tests them by watching how Technological resources in game develindividuals and groups interact in virtual opment are not static tools, and to remain worlds. Perhaps the most interesting thing relevant, any academic institution bent on Williams has discovered in three years of teaching game design must be a dynamic research is that, “in many cases, people entity with the wit to keep up with new behave in the game world just as they do in inventions and the wisdom to found its the real world.” game-education programs on the principle The insight has enormous implications of great ideas, instilling in its students a for social science in general, as his research second-nature sensibility for communicatsponsorships show. Game developers are ing those ideas. There’s no other way to go turning to Williams to identify the telltale about it, and there’s no university better signs of “gold farmers” – black-market traf- suited to lead the future of interactive enterfickers in game-based goods – whose com- tainment than USC. l munication behaviors, it turns out, mirror those of real-world drug dealers. Economists, If you have questions or comments on this article, law enforcement and even epidemiologists please send them to magazines@usc.edu. are eager to tap this “petri dish of social interaction,” which is how Williams views the massively Communications researcher Dmitri Williams studies how the multiplayer online virtual worlds behavior of gamers in massively multiplayer virtual worlds can serve as a predictor of human behavior in the real world. he investigates. Williams isn’t alone in this field. USC Annenberg’s communications department is home to three other media scholars specializing in games, including the illustrious Henry Jenkins III, author of Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, among a dozen other books, who recently left MIT to join the USC Annenberg faculty. THE EFFORTS OF USC’s Annen– berg and Rossier schools to quantify and qualify the evolving ways we relate to games both as individuals and as members of society are essential to maintaining the university’s excellence in gaming education. The art of teaching games must advance in step with

MARKET EXPOSURE Each year, commercial developers and creative talent from across the media industries gather for project demonstrations at USC. Students use these meetings to network with representatives from such leading brands as Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Sony Computer Entertainment, Heavy Iron Studios, Microsoft Game Studios, Disney, Naughty Dog, Zynga, Insomniac Games, Nickelodeon, Dreamworks, Legendary Pictures, LucasArts, ASAP Games and Creative Artists Agency. Many of these encounters lead to job offers, and more than a few lead to distribution deals for student-designed games. The USC GamePipe Laboratory’s last Demo Day, held in December, unveiled two dozen new student-built games. A spring show is scheduled for May. To download the DVD from the event, visit http://gamepipe.usc.edu/USC_GamePipe_ Laboratory/DemoDay.html The USC School of Cinematic Arts hosts an annual IMD Thesis Show, a weeklong exhibit that highlights the work of its graduating MFA students in game design. Last December’s in-progress show featured 10 thesis projects reflecting an eclectic mix of styles and subgenres. The finished games will be showcased in May. To see individual thesis projects, go to http://interactive.usc.edu/projects l

USC’s bariatric surgeons help patients overcome life-threatening medical conditions by performing life-changing weight-loss surgery. by sara reeve and katie neith

A Lot to Lose

US C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Photo by Philip Channing

“I

used to love to play tennis, but I haven’t played for about a year,” says Dalilah Marino, 55, of Los Angeles. “I just got to the point where I couldn’t bend over to pick up the ball.” Marino has had an ongoing battle with her weight for almost 20 years, since the birth of her third son. In the last 10 years, the extra weight meant more than larger clothes – the bigger she got, the worse her health became. Her blood pressure began to rise dramatically, and hovered around 192/187. She developed high cholesterol and started having chest pains and attacks of angina. And two years ago, she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. At 278 pounds and a height of only 5 feet 3 inches, Marino couldn’t seem to control her weight and her medical problems on her own. “I did Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, weight-loss pills like fen-phen – you name it, I tried it,” she says. “I’d lose some weight, and then it would all come back. I was just tired of being sick all the time.” After Marino repeatedly tried to lose weight on her own, her physician asked her to consider bariatric surgery. For patients desiring weight loss, the two most common surgical options are the gastric bypass and adjustable gastric banding, also known as the lap-band. While considering the surgical options, Marino attended an information session held at the Bariatric Surgery Program at USC University Hospital, and heard from doctors Namir Katkhouda

HEALTHY AGAIN Dalilah Marino is happy to be back on the tennis court after she shed 46 pounds in the first two months following bariatric surgery.

and Peter F. Crookes. The USC bariatric surgery program has received a Center of Excellence designation from the American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery and Surgical Review Corporation. “Hearing from these doctors who were so knowledgeable just gave me confidence,” says Marino. “I had looked into a couple of

other doctors, but felt like they weren’t giving me honest yet reassuring answers. But Dr. Katkhouda’s explanations were complete.” The USC bariatric surgery program is designed for individuals who are either 100 pounds overweight or 75 pounds overweight with a serious medical condition such as uncontrollable hypertension or dia-

betes. Another indicator for surgery is a body mass index greater than 40. Dalilah Marino’s index was 49.2. Marino chose to work with Katkhouda, a pioneer in the field of laparoscopic surgery who came to USC from France in 1993. Today, Katkhouda is a professor of surgery and vice chairman of the Department of

US C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

cedure and the bowel shape created by the operation, is the most common bariatric surgery performed at USC and is considered the gold standard by which the other procedures such as the lap-band are measured. Using laparoscopic techniques, the surgeon creates a small pouch about the size of a plum at the upper part of the stomach, restricting the amount of food the patient can eat. The surgeon also cuts and reroutes part of the small intestine, attaching it to the new small pouch. Bypassing the first part of the small intestine means that the body absorbs fewer calories from food. Bariatric surgery has become an increasingly available option for people, such as Marino, with serious medical conditions. Recent research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association supports the clinical results seen by surgeons at USC – weight-loss surgery can send diabetes into remission. “The impact of these operations on diabetes is incredible,” says Katkhouda. “For the first time, there is a procedure that has the potential to reverse type 2 diabetes. This could mean no more pills or shots. It’s almost unbelievable.” Katkhouda is currently pursuing research into the disease process of diabetes, and how it is changed by bariatric surgery. Current results show that for about 70 percent of patients who are within seven years of onset of diabetes, gastric bypass surgery could lead to a reversal of the condition, sometimes as soon as they leave the hospital following gastric bypass surgery. “We have really passionate surgeons – myself and my partner and friend Peter Crookes, we’re completely immersed in what we do,” says Katkhouda. “Not only is our passion translated into the clinical component, but we also are researchers. And that sets us a bit apart from all the other surgeons in

INSIDE VIEW Namir Katkhouda watches onscreen via a tiny camera in the abdomen. While the surgery is a serious commitment for patients, it is often the best decision for their health.

community non-academic hospitals. We’re trying to understand the physiology and give our patients access to our scientific discoveries.” Crookes, associate professor of surgery at the Keck School, is another surgeon who appreciates a challenge. In the late 1990s, when weight-loss surgery wasn’t nearly as popular as it is today, Crookes was recruited to become part of a growing bariatric surgery program at USC. “I didn’t know much about it, but I did realize that bariatric surgery could be a huge growth area and had enormous potential for clinical care,” says Crookes, who at the time was doing a lot of surgery for diseases such as gastric cancer and peptic ulcers. “I also saw that it might lead to interesting opportunities to answer research questions.” Today, he is an expert in the field, performing research on a wide variety of problems related to morbid obesity, diseases of the esophagus and stomach, and the metabolic changes associated with different types of bariatric surgery. Like Katkhouda, Crookes performs the typical types of laparoscopic bariatric surgeries, but he also provides for patients who have conditions or circumstances that demand specialized care, such as high-risk patients. This can include patients weighing more than 500 pounds, from whom it can be difficult just to collect diagnostic information. “They do not fit into CT scans, X-rays do not penetrate well and anesthesia is hard,” says Crookes. “They can’t move around well so they have a higher risk of blood clots and wound infection. In addition, many often have an underlying psychological problem that enabled them to get to that size.” Crookes also treats a subset of high-risk patients who need bariatric surgery in order to receive another lifesaving procedure: for example, patients with heart or kidney disease who need a transplant but are morbidly obese. “If their weight is prohibiting them from receiving the care they need, bariatric surgery is probably the only way they will ever get a transplant,” he says. In addition, Crookes treats people from across California and beyond who have problems after bariatric surgery. They may have symptoms they didn’t have before – maybe their weight is coming back or they have some other problem with their gastrointestinal tract. He enjoys problemsolving and has a flourishing practice of re-do surgeries.

Photo by Philip Channing

Surgery at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. He is also the chief of the Division of General and Laparoscopic Surgery and the director of the USC bariatric surgery program. Katkhouda, an innovative general surgeon, says he decided to pursue a laparoscopic approach to bariatric surgery for the challenge. “We had already rewritten the books on general surgery with laparoscopic surgery,” he says. “There was one area that wasn’t rewritten, and that was bariatric surgery. Bariatric surgery, before laparoscopy, was not popular among general surgeons. I didn’t want to do anything with big cuts, and that’s where laparoscopy comes in.” He introduced laparoscopic weight-loss surgery at USC University Hospital in 2001. He has since performed more than 1,600 weightloss procedures. During laparoscopic surgery, the surgeon makes five small incisions and threads a tiny camera into the abdomen. He inserts long tools through tubes placed into the incisions, and watches the organs on a screen as he operates. The Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, so named for the surgeon who first described the pro-

vided by the bariatric surgery program. “The early post-operative phases are critical in helping ensure diet tolerance while adjusting to their new surgical change,” she says. “For the long-term post-operative goal, I consistently encourage and educate my patients to make behavioral modifications and healthy lifestyle changes, which are essential in ensuring optimal outcomes with weight-loss management.” follow-up care is achieved in various ways. First, Tavoukjian visits patients prior to their discharge from the hospital, and then follows up with them after two weeks in the program’s post-operative clinic. She also attends the program’s monthly Bariatric Patient Support Group, where she makes herself available as a resource. “I offer an open communication policy; patients can reach me via e-mail, telephone or a one-on-one nutritional counseling appointment,” says Tavoukjian. “Followup care is imperative in guiding our patients along the road to successful weight-loss management.” Dalilah Marino feels that the follow-up care she has received has been instrumental in her personal success. “The USC team was really supportive of me,” she says. “They made sure I was prepared with nutritional information and all the vitamins I would need. Whenever I’ve had any questions, they have been there with great answers.” Two months after surgery, Marino has already shed 46 pounds and several inches. While the changes in her appearance have lifted her spirits, the changes in her health have been even more dramatic. “I just feel completely different,” Marino says. “I feel lighter when I’m walking and don’t have difficulty breathing. My health has improved so much.” With her blood pressure stabilizing and her blood sugar dropping from 200 to 110, Marino has been able to reduce the number of medications she takes from 14 to two. “My doctors have told me that if my health continues to improve, I could be completely off my diabetes medication in two months,” she says. “For anyone thinking about this surgery, I’d say: ‘Get it done. Go for it.’ It was the best thing I could do for myself and my health.” l Post-operative dietary

A NEW WAY OF LIFE Peter Crookes tells his patients that they need to maintain a healthy lifestyle, get regular exercise and take vitamin supplements daily after bariatric surgery.

The USC bariatric surgery program en compasses more than surgeons. The postoperative care, for weeks, days and even years after surgery, is instrumental in the program’s success. “Some people think that the operation on its own is all it takes; the operation will do it all,” says Katkhouda. “But I don’t want you to be skin and bones after the operation. So I need to send you to the gym two times a week, and I want you to eat healthy. You have to follow up with us in the clinic on a regular basis, and I also want you to follow up with the dietician, and you have to go to the support group.” As a bariatric dietitian, Ojenee Tavouk jian provides education and support to patients for their pre- and post-operative nutritional needs. Before their operation,

she conducts dietary evaluations to ensure that the patients are suitable candidates, and then she guides their diet plans to help them achieve their pre-operative weightloss goals. “Common dietary issues that I see with my patients are consuming large portions, eating high-calorie, high-fat foods, eating at restaurants or fast food frequently, emotional eating – whether it be happy, sad, bored, lonely – and lack of exercise,” says Tavoukjian. After surgery, she continues to follow the patients as needed to ensure compliance with their diet, exercise and vitamin regimens. Tavoukjian points out that in order for patients to achieve maximum weight loss and to maintain good health, it is vital for them to comply with the diet that is pro-

Photo by Geoff Johnson

Myths & Misconceptions According to Namir Katkhouda, most people have several misconceptions about bariatric surgery. “I think the first myth in the public and even in the minds of the doctors is that it is a very invasive procedure,” he says. “People imagine complex surgery with big cuts and large scars. But the advances of laparoscopic surgery mean that I make five small incisions, and I’m done with most procedures in 90 minutes. It does not mean that it is not advanced surgery. It is just not as invasive as people want to depict it.” Another myth that persists in a time when celebrities publicly deny weight-loss surgery rumors is

that surgery is only for people with no willpower. “Our genes, throughout the history of mankind, have been tweaked to preserve mankind,” says Katkhouda. “And therefore, when we lose weight, our bodies perceive it as starvation. Whereas, if you gain weight, you make your body happy. Our genes have been tweaked to prevent starvation, because starvation equals death, equals a dying out of the species. So you diet, you lose weight, but you don’t keep it off. It comes back again, sometimes with a vengeance. This is the yo-yo effect. Weight-loss surgery stops the vicious circle of yo-yo dieting.” l

For more information about the USC bariatric surgery program, please visit www.uschospitals. com/weightloss

US C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Family Ties news from the usc alumni association

A Conversation with Taylor Hackford

A Trojan and a Gentleman Director receives top alumni honor.

In the 32 years since he won an Academy Award for his live-action short Teenage Father (1978), Taylor Hackford ’67 has directed such hit films as An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), The Devil’s Advocate (1997) and Ray (2004), which earned him two Academy Award nominations. The 2010 recipient of the Asa V. Call Alumni Achievement Award, he recently spoke with the USC Alumni Association’s Cheryl Collier and Timothy O. Knight. What drew you to attend USC? I grew up working class in Santa Barbara. If I were going to attend a university, it would have to be on scholarship. In 1963, USC awarded something called a trustee’s scholarship to 10 worthy students. I had good grades, played basketball and was student body president of my high school, so I applied for this scholarship, which gave you a full ride – full tuition, room and board and a stipend for spending money. Also, ’SC invited all the student body presidents of Southern California high schools to spend a day on campus. We met student leaders and went to an ’SC football game. I liked what I saw, so when I received a trustee’s scholarship, I took it and came to USC. What prompted you to major in international relations? During my first semester, I took an introductory class on international relations from Norman R. Fertig, who was provocative, funny and challenging. He spent extra time with me, explaining how the School of International Relations had carved a niche for itself in global politics. That inspired me to major in IR. Is it true you began your career in the KCET mailroom? Yes, and there’s an ’SC connection there. When I was student body president at USC, I appeared on a KCET show with other student leaders. I had been planning to go to law school when I got back from serving in the Peace Corps; in fact, I did go to law school for two weeks before I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I started hanging out with USC film students my senior year and looking at film in a different way. I wasn’t one of those people who had grown up in movie theaters; I liked movies, but they weren’t a passion. But while I was in the Peace Corps outside La Paz, Bolivia, I began reading and thinking about the power of film. After dropping out of law school, I called KCET about working at the station. They had nothing except a mailroom job; I took it, and KCET turned out to be my film school. I worked my way out of the mailroom to become a producer/reporter for the station’s public affairs magazine show. How did you make the leap from KCET to Hollywood? The social organization Children’s Home Society of California had produced several educational films about teenage pregnancy from the girls’ point of view. They hired me to write, direct and produce a film about teenage fathers. I wanted it to be a dramatic film that would really impact kids, so I made it look like a documentary. Teenage Father (1978) won the Academy Award for Best which led to An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). What do you look for in a script when you’re considering a project? All my films are different, but they’re always about working-class people struggling to get ahead. That’s

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

photo by Philip Channing

Live-Action Short Film. I got an agent and landed my first feature film, The Idolmaker (1980),

my background; my mother was a waitress, and she raised me alone. Is there one USC professor or administrator who made a lasting impression? USC President Norman Topping. As student body president, I could talk to him. I had some controversial ideas, like initiating the first student evaluation of faculty, but he supported me. He gave students the chance to have a real voice in campus life. What does receiving the Asa V. Call Alumni Achievement Award mean to you? Going to USC was a seminal experience for me; it defined me as an adult. I’m very proud of USC and think President Sample has done a brilliant job. To be recognized by the alumni association is quite an honor. We saw a picture of your wife, Helen Mirren, at an ’SC football game. Is she a fan of the Trojans? One year I took her to President Sample’s party before an ’SC game. After the party we went to the game and she got completely into it. At one point we were on the field and the cheerleaders took her over to the cheering section and she got her picture taken with some defensive linemen. From that day on, she became an honorary ’SC alum. l

back to school

Never Too Old to Learn USC’s Half Century Trojans celebrate their second annual Going Back to College Day.

Half Century Trojans president Seymour Canter ’55 at the celebratory dinner at USC Town & Gown

bachelor’s degree from any university at least 50 years ago – ample opportunity to experience a typical day at today’s USC. This year, however, in addition to lunchtime presentations by university deans, campus tours and afternoon lectures, Going Back to College Day featured a special presentation: the dedication of the Norman H. Topping Commemorative Monument on Trousdale Parkway. USC President Steven B. Sample joined alumni association CEO Scott M. Mory and the Class of 1959 Reunion co-chairs, Scott Fitz-Randolph and Alli Lockwood Solum, for the unveiling of the monument, a 50th Reunion legacy gift from the Class of 1959.

Amanda Pittman ’48 and Katherine Mosley Moore ’55 at the Topping monument dedication ceremony

USC President Steven B. Sample, alumni association CEO Scott M. Mory and Class of 1959 Reunion co-chairs Alli Lockwood Solum and Scott Fitz-Randolph unveil the monument of Norman H. Topping.

p h o t o s b y D a n Av i l a

“A man is not old as long as he is seeking

something.” So wrote French philosopher Jean Rostand, expressing a credo that nearly 150 members of USC’s senior alumni community recently took to heart. On Feb. 4, they returned to campus, seeking to reconnect with their alma mater and former class-

mates at the second annual Half Century Trojans Going Back to College Day. Hosted by the USC Alumni Association with the generous support of several USC schools and divisions, the daylong program gave Half Century Trojans – USC alumni, no matter their degree(s), who earned a

Although many of the attendees, such as Masako Miura ’36, MD ’41 and Ethel Pattison ’47, return to campus frequently, others, like Peter Kling ’54, had not visited in years. Drawn back to USC by the event’s “compelling invitation,” Kling was amazed by the “size and scope of the campus … the open space and the architecture.” His sentiments were echoed by Robert MacKinnon ’59, who wanted “to see the massive changes” at the film school. As for the Going Back to College Day program, MacKinnon gave it high marks: “Today has refreshed my interest in associating more actively with USC!” – Timothy O. Knight

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

california buzz

The Alumni SCene

4 1. Anchors Away! In San Diego last Dec. 10, the USC Alumni Association helped mark the launch of the USC School of Social Work’s military social work program and new San Diego Academic Center. In an event co-sponsored by the alumni association, the school and the USC Alumni Club of San Diego, members of the Trojan Family celebrated aboard the aircraft carrier USS Midway, now a museum in San Diego harbor. Pictured from left are Anthony Hassan, director of the USC School of Social Work Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families; School of Social Work vice dean Paul Maiden and Dean Marilyn Flynn; Jose Coll, director of the new San Diego center; USC School of Cinematic Arts professor James Egan, a member of the national board of the Wounded Marine Careers Foundation; and retired U.S. Marine Corps sergeants Anh Nguyen and Raul Espinosa.

photo by Stephen Law

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

photo by Rod Halimi

p h o t o b y Be n n e t t S e l l - K l i n e

p h o t o b y Br i a n G o o d m a n

From San Diego to San Francisco, Trojans are on the go.

2. Trojan Service Day On Jan. 23, USC Friends and Neighbors Service Day, sponsored by the USC Volunteer Center and the alumni association, gave alumni and student volunteers a chance to assist with service projects across Los Angeles. The volunteers pictured here are at the Blazers Learning Center in South L.A., where they helped with clean-up and gardening projects. Founded in 1969, the Blazers began as a youth basketball and academic tutoring program and expanded to include an after-school learning center for inner-city youth. 3. Hooray for Hollywood More than 300 young alumni and friends, including the five revelers pictured here, descended on Tinseltown to usher in a new decade at the 2010 Kick-off Party at Les Deux on Hollywood Boulevard on Jan. 10. Hosted by the USC Alumni Club of Bev-

erly Hills-Hollywood, the party raised more than $5,000 in scholarship funds that the university proceeded to match two to one. This meant the club was able to award a total of $15,000 to new and continuing students at USC.

4. Private Audience with King Tut Northern California Trojans and friends enjoyed a private viewing of Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the de Young Museum in San Francisco on Feb. 11. The exhibition featured more than 130 priceless artifacts dating back to ancient Egypt’s 18th Dynasty (1555-1305 BC). Prior to the tour, Lynn Swartz Dodd, a lecturer and curator with the USC Archaeology Research Center, gave a special presentation in the museum’s Hamon Tower on the center’s work, as well as her own research. To read about Dodd’s work, go to page 17. l

sisterhood central

Women Empower Women The USC Women’s Conference brought 550 attendees to campus to explore what matters to women today. proved an apt theme for the USC Alumni Association’s second annual USC Women’s Conference, held on March 12 at Bovard Auditorium and various other University Park campus locations. Gloria Burgess PhD ’80, MBA ’86, author of Dare to Wear Your Soul on the Outside, delivered a stirring keynote at the conference’s “Power Lunch” at USC Town & Gown. Her moving rendition of two poems about self-discovery brought many in the audience to tears. Burgess, whose father had attended college thanks to the generosity of author William Faulkner, also spoke eloquently about her own struggles with sexism and racism.

The daylong conference was co-chaired by Jane Bensussen MA ’69 and Joyce Ukropina ’75. Elizabeth Sample MBA ’98, daughter of USC President Steven B. and Kathryn Sample, kicked off the program by welcoming attendees with a talk highlighting USC alumnae accomplishments. Following Sample’s remarks, a “Power Panel” moderated by KCAL9 news reporter Sylvia Lopez ’83 featured three self-made businesswomen who discussed how to integrate work and family life. In addition, the conference included a series of morning and afternoon workshops that focused on issues critically important to women, including heart disease, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, stress reduction, entre-

Conference participants file out of Bovard Auditorium on their way to various workshops.

Keynote speaker Gloria Burgess PhD ’80, MBA ’86 delivers an impassioned address at USC Town & Gown.

p h o t o s b y L e e s a l e m a n d R o ss M . L e v i n e

“Women Empowering Women”

Emmy Award-winning KCAL9 news anchor Sylvia Lopez ’83

Conference co-chairs Jane Bensussen MA ’69 (left) and Joyce Ukropina ’75 flank Lois Frankel PhD ’86 as she signs copies of her book Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office.

preneurship, personal branding, wealth man agement and philanthropy. To provide attendees sufficient time for networking and socializing, this year’s conference concluded with an outdoor reception featuring desserts from the LUSCious Cookbook (compiled by the women of USC’s alumnae organizations). Attendees had an opportunity to meet with one another as well as the panelists and workshop leaders, many of whom signed copies of their books. The conference was presented by the USC Alumni Association and sponsored by Bank of America. Individual sessions were sponsored by the Doctors of USC; the Resort at Pelican Hill; University Gateway; the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development; the USC Mexican American Alumni Association; the USC School of Pharmacy; the USC Marshall School of Business; and the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. – Ross M. Levine

“Power Panelists” (from left): Genoveva Arellano ’85, founder of Arellano Associates; Betsey Berkehemer-Credaire, California statewide president of the National Association of Women Business Owners; and Louise Bryson, chair of the J. Paul Getty Trust

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Class Notes who’s doing what

& where

’49 Philip J. Hodgetts published Stirring Among the Playthings, a memoir chronicling his journey from fighting in World War II to becoming a teacher and engineer. He lives in Westminster, Calif. ’51 Dean McCormick has been named

managing partner of Insight Wealth Strategies, a financial planning and wealth-management service in Irvine, Calif.

’61 Kurt Hahn, retired Healdsburg, Calif.,

city finance and redevelopment director and current board member of the North Sonoma County (Calif.) Healthcare District, was the 2009 recipient of the California Hospital Association’s Excellence in Governance award at the December 2009 board meeting of the CHA. He also was recognized for his two years of service on the CHA board of trustees.

’64 Steven J. Fogel is the author of My Mind Is Not Always My Friend, a book about using the power of your mind to find freedom and happiness. He is the principal and co-founder of Westwood Financial Corp., one of the largest owner-operators of retail properties in the United States.

›› STOOGES RUN AMoK Yup, that’s Larry, Curly and Moe running down West 34th Street on the USC campus in a 1940 short. No Census, No Feeling stars “the boys” as census takers who end up at the Coliseum during a football game – the better to poll the crowd. Mayhem predictably ensues, and the Stooges are chased by the team toward the obelisk and Stoops Hall. Notice the roof sign on the Phelps-Terkel clothing store at right. It’s currently the College Academic Services building. l

’67 James Dobson PhD, founder of Focus on the Family, stepped down as chairman of the organization earlier this year and is continuing work on his daily radio broadcast, James Dobson on the Family. ’68 John R. Tumpak of Los Angeles is a

jazz journalist specializing in the big band era. He recently published a book, When Swing Was the Thing: Personality Profiles of the Big Band Era, and he sits on the board of directors of the Big Band Academy of America.

’70 W. June Simmons MSW, chief executive officer of the Partners in Care Foundation, has been appointed to the National Advisory Council on Aging, one of several national research advisory councils that

consult and provide advice to the acting director of the National Institutes of Health. She lives in Studio City, Calif.

’71 Gary Milliman MPA was recently

named chairman of the campaign committee for Southwestern Oregon Community College’s Curry campus. He is the city manager in Brookings, Ore., and a political science instructor at the college.

’72 Leo Wolinsky, an editor and reporter at the Los Angeles Times for 31 years, was recently named editor of Daily Variety magazine in Los Angeles. ’74 Steven T. Case PhD, professor of

biochemistry and associate dean for medical school admissions at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, was appointed to a three-year term as chair of the national committee on admissions for the Association of American Medical Colleges.

’75 Greg Mix, a 26-year veteran of the

home-building industry, was named president of the Northern California division of home-building company Warmington Residential California. He lives in Danville, Calif. • Mike M. Nemechek, president of Hospital Management Corp. in Overland Park, Kan., was elected to the board of trustees for the Command and General Staff College Foundation, a nonprofit educational foundation that provides resources and support to the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in the development of future military leaders.

’78 David Bohnett has been named

chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. • Mark Rios is a founding principal in Rios Clementi Hale Studios, a landscape architecture firm based in Los Angeles. The firm was named a finalist in the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum 2009 National Design Awards in the landscape design category.

We welcome news items from all USC alumni. Please include your name, street address, e-mail address, degree and year of graduation with each submission. Mail to: USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790 or e-mail us at: magazines@usc.edu. Please note that, because of our long production schedule and the heavy volume of submissions, it might be several months before your notice appears.

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

’79 Cynthia Kadohata of Los Angeles, win-

alumni profile

Flying High In August 2009, the annual convention for the Tuskegee Airmen featured a special guest. Stayce D. Harris ‘81 was already a frequent attendee to these conventions, but this time was different: She had general stars on her shoulders, having recently become the first African-American female pilot to achieve the rank of general in the armed services. Born in Los Angeles, Harris grew up a military brat – her father was career Air Force – and she traveled the world with her family. She won an Air Force ROTC engineering scholarship and transferred to USC in her sophomore year. Yet despite the Air Force in her blood, it was not until college that she took up flying. She had been focused on engineering until an ROTC instructor pulled her aside to ask if she’d considered becoming a pilot. “That’s why I’m a firm believer in exposing youth to different opportunities,” says Harris. “It was that exposure to that opportunity that whetted my desire to fly.” Attracted by its formidable reputation, Harris studied industrial and systems engineering at USC and started flight training at Santa Monica Airport. She also relished learning from the university’s many diverse cultures and populations. Looking back, she calls USC “a golden institution” embodying a tradition of “loyalty and devotion and commitment” – much like the Air Force. Selected to attend pilot training after graduation, Harris veered off course when her eyes failed to pass the commissioning physical. It was a devastating blow, but one that Harris took in stride. Set on becoming a pilot, she went on active duty as an Air Force civil engineer and focused on improving her eyesight. “It sounds corny, but I did eye exercises. I ate carrots.” A year later, she passed the physical, competed for and was selected again for the Air Force Pilot Training Program. Since she became a pilot, Harris’ career has taken her all over the world, from Djibouti to Antarctica. She has had two jobs since 1990: one with United Airlines and one with the Air Force Reserves. Recently, she was appointed the mobilization reserve assistant to the commander of the U.S. Africa Command. No matter where her career has taken her, one constant has been the inspiration Harris draws from the Tuskegee Airmen, the legendary unit whose distinctive record in World War II helped racially integrate the armed forces. Though she officially became a brigadier general in April 2009, as a tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen legacy, Harris delayed the pin-on ceremony until their August convention, where the airmen pinned the stars on her shoulders. “For me, everything has always been a tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen and to the Women Airforce Service Pilots,” Harris says. “It is really life-changing to go to a convention and see hundreds of your heroes that you can reach out and touch and talk to, and thank them for the barriers they tore down in order for me to even go to flight training as a black female.” Today, she is trying to pass on the inspiration to a younger generation. The Los Angeles chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen established the annual Tuskegee Airmen-Stayce Harris Award, given to a top Air Force ROTC cadet at USC. She hopes soon to start a financial scholarship as well. With her new position at the Pentagon and a full schedule flying the Dubai and Beijing routes for United, she has little free time. But to Harris, it doesn’t feel like work. She still revels in the exhilaration of flying. “It really takes your breath away, every takeoff, every flight,” she says. “It’s a dream come true.” – Blaise Nutter

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

ner of the 2005 Newbery Medal, recently published her fifth children’s book, A Million Shades of Gray, a novel about the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a young boy who works as one of the elephant handlers for his tribe in Vietnam. • Gary L. Kreps PhD was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Health Behavior in recognition of his extensive research in health communication and health promotion. He was also appointed a University Distinguished Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., where he holds the Eileen and Steve Mandell Endowed Chair in Health Communication, chairs the Department of Communication, and directs the Center for Health and Risk Communication. • Mark P. Thompson, who serves on the boards of several neighborhood and political groups, was recently elected chair of Manhattan Community Board 6, representing the East Side of Manhattan. He is also vice president of Capalino+Company, a government and community relations advocacy firm, acting as government relations advisor to a range of corporate and nonprofit organizations. He recently served as project manager for the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City.

’80 Michael P. Bishop was named associ-

ate superintendent for business services with the Santa Ana (Calif.) Unified School District. He previously served as assistant superintendent of business services with Paramount Unified School District in Los Angeles County. • Hortencia Torres EdD of Corona del Mar, Calif., had a scholarship established in her name at the USC Rossier School of Education.

’82 Massoud Araghi MS ’98 was promoted

to fire marshal at the Ventura County (Calif.) Fire Department. He is a licensed fire protection engineer and has been a member of the department’s Fire Prevention Bureau since 1987. He also has been an instructor at the California State Fire Academy for the past 18 years and currently teaches a class in fire protection equipment and systems at Oxnard (Calif.) College. • Charles Harper Webb MFA, PhD ’84 published his sixth collection of poetry, Shadow Ball: New & Selected Poems. He lives in Glendale, Calif.

’83 Maurice Hamington MBA, PhD ’94

published The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams, an examination of Addams as a philosopher and a moral and political theorist. He lives in Littleton, Colo.

’84 Marcia Green DMA is founder and

current executive director of the Humanities Education and Research Association,

ph o t o b y C o r e nthia K . F e nn e ll / A n d r e ws A i r F o r c e Bas e

Class of ’81

a nonprofit organization dedicated to the teaching and understanding of the humanities across a range of disciplines. She lives in Pacifica, Calif.

’85 John Mulligan was recently named a

business consultant in e-commerce at Capital One. Previously, he led the company’s Recoveries IT development team.

’86 Elise Papazian and her husband, Scott Pritkin, of San Francisco are the founders of the recently launched GoCoffeeGo.com, a Web site featuring freshly roasted coffee sourced from all over the world. ’87 Shannon Capps of Brush Prairie, Wash.,

recently published his second novel, Train in the Distance, a story about a young television reporter and the corruption at his workplace. Capps’ book was a quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. • Kenneth Folberg recently received a master’s degree in international management from the University of Maryland. He lives in Grafton, Wis.

years

The USC Associates has a 50-year tradition of supporting USC’s academics, research and students.

Join us as we celebrate this important milestone! Members of USC Associates enjoy an exclusive network of proud Trojans dedicated to USC´s academic excellence as well as access to premier services and events across campus. Membership begins at $50,000 given within five years.

’88 Scott Engles is the producer of Bright House Sports Network in Orlando, Fla.,

USC ASSOCIATES: (213) 740-8722 • uscassociates@usc.edu • www.usc.edu/associates

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

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alumni profile

The Whole Nine Yards Jeff Byers ‘07, MBA ‘09 came to USC for the football but got so much more. When the offensive lineman was drafted into the NFL in April, he took with him a master’s degree in business administration from the USC Marshall School of Business. Byers hadn’t planned it that way. “In my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d come out of here with my MBA,” he says. One of the jewels of former USC football coach Pete Carroll’s 2004 recruiting class, a five-star player from Loveland, Colo., Byers came on a full scholarship. Football had been his life since he first strapped on a helmet in youth leagues. But that would change suddenly. Byers started the final four regular season games of his freshman season, helping USC to its second consecutive national title. He was in line to be the full-time starter as a sophomore but ended up undergoing arthroscopic surgery to remove torn cartilage in his right hip during the offseason, forcing him to redshirt. He recuperated and appeared ready to reclaim his starting position in 2006, but only lasted one game before injuring his back in practice. Sidelined for the second season in a row, Byers believed that his future in football was in doubt. So he turned his attention to academics. “The truth is, when you lose something that you really love, you’ve got to find something to fill that void,” Byers says. “I dug into the books and tried to study more, tried to forget what I was missing on the field by just working hard at school and taking more classes.” “Jeff has been a great addition to the school,” says USC Marshall School dean James G. Ellis. “He blends right in, which is hard to do for someone his size – 6 foot, 3 and 290 pounds.” After completing his bachelor’s in business administration in three and a half years with a 3.27 GPA, Byers went on to the master’s program. He made the 2009 National Football Foundation Hampshire Honor Society and twice was named to the Pac-10 All-Academic team. Byers also was selected as a semifinalist for the 2009 William V. Campbell Trophy, presented by the National Football Foundation to the nation’s top scholar-athlete. When his health finally allowed him to give football another try, Byers jumped back in. He started all 13 games in 2007, and earned All-Pac-10 second-team honors for his play in 2008. Due to his two missed seasons, he was granted a sixth year of eligibility by the NCAA and entered the 2009 season named to pre-season all-American teams by ESPN and CBS Sports. His business training has not gone to waste. Byers was elected offensive captain by his teammates two years in a row, a leadership position for which his USC Marshall School experience prepared him. “I think there are a lot of things you learn on the football field and in the classroom that relate to each other,” Byers says. “I’ve taken a couple leadership classes and group-dynamic classes that helped me understand where guys are coming from.” In his academic life, he discovered a love for the investment side of business after taking a class called “Money and Capital Markets.” He loaded up on investment classes, and thinks it could lead to a career as a portfolio manager or investment banker. Eventually. First, Byers has his eyes set on another career. But whatever happens – whether his NFL career ends this year, in five years or 15 years – he’ll be well prepared for the next stage of his life. – Matthew Kredell

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

covering all sports in the Central Florida and Tampa Bay regions. He was previously a production associate with Golf Channel. • Greg Maguire was recently promoted to captain in the U.S. Navy. He was named a Navy and Marine Association Leadership Award winner for 2009 while forward deployed to Japan as navigator of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington. • Hank Malanowski MS of the U.S. Marine Corps received the Installation Planning and Facilities Management Team Award in October while assigned as deputy branch head at the Installations and Logistics Departments headquarters of the Marine Corps in Washington, D.C. He also was recertified as a project management professional from the Project Management Institute and was awarded lifetime certification from the Institute of Supply Management as a Certified Purchasing Manager. • J. Nick Skimas II has served as the process control supervisor for 2 1/2 years at the Georgia-Pacific pulp and paper mill in Camas, Wash., and was recently promoted to IT manager at Wauna Paper Mill near Clatskanie, Ore.

’89 Rhysa M. Davis MLA retired from Vitas

Hospice in Torrance, Calif., as the manager of volunteers and moved to Leisure World in Mesa, Ariz., where she promotes the public policy program of the American Association of University Women. • Jennifer L. Johnson PhD ’03 of Calabasas, Calif., was promoted to program chair of general education for West Coast University’s three campuses in Southern California. • David Viscoli MM, DMA ’92 performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the National Sym phony Orchestra of Panama in May 2009. He also taught master classes at the University of Panama and the National Theatre in Panama as part of the third annual Festival de Musica Alfredo De Saint-Malo.

’90 David Sweet MA of Lake Forest, Ill.,

is the author of Lamar Hunt: The Gentle Giant Who Revolutionized Professional Sports, a biography of the founder of the American Football League and the Kansas City Chiefs. • Marc Yablonka MPW of Burbank, Calif., recently published his first book, Distant War: Recollections of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. He is a military journalist whose work has appeared in Stars and Stripes, Army Times, Military Heritage, American Veteran, Vietnam magazine and many others.

’91 Tiffani Crawford MPW, PhD ’05 pub-

lished the book The Effectiveness of the California Community Colleges in Local Economic Development. She lives in Mountain View, Calif. • W. Gregory Guedel chairs the Native American Group of Foster Pepper PLLC law firm in Seattle. He has been elected to

ph o t o b y william vasta

Class of ’07

the city council in Snohomish, Wash., and serves on the city and county economic development councils.

’92 Nicole Flier recently launched her own consulting firm, Flier Consulting, which specializes in business development, marketing, public relations and special events. The firm is based in Boca Raton, Fla.

courses for the McCoy College of Business Administration at Texas State University. • Ken Howard MSW has a private practice in West Hollywood, Calif., that specializes in counseling and psychotherapy for gay men, as well as those living with HIV. He also offers small-business coaching.

Elementary School in the Azusa (Calif.) Unified School District. • Bree (Morgan) Hann was recently elected a partner of Bingham McCutchen LLP, a Boston-based law firm, where she is a member of the antitrust and trade regulation group.

’95 Karin Ursula Edmondson recently

of La educación física en centros bilingües: Del establecimiento de una línea pedagógica a la elaboración de propuestas de acción, a book that combines the teaching of English to Spanish speakers through physical and values education. He is an associate professor at the Loyola Marymount University School of Education in Los Angeles.

opened her own landscape design business, Karin Ursula Landscapes, in the Catskill Mountains in New York. She specializes in using native plants, and she propagates culinary and medicinal herbs as well as edible flowers. • Dean Gualco MPA published his fourth book, The Good Manager: A Guide for the 21st Century Manager. He is the owner of Torgun Consulting and serves as the human resources manager for the City of Lodi, Calif.

’93 Jamia Jasper is the founder of the

American Israeli Shared Values Fund, a mutual fund that invests in the stocks of Israeli companies and U.S. companies that do business with Israel. Prior to starting the fund, she spent nearly a decade in investments and financial services and several years as a staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives.

’94 Ding-Jo Currie PhD was recently

’97 Mikelynn Dolores Romero ME ’02 is the

selected as the new chancellor of the Coast Community College District in Orange County, Calif. She has been president of Coastline Community College for the past seven years and served as interim chancellor for the past 10 months. • Christopher E. Hall EdD of Austin, Texas, recently retired from his position with the California State University system and now teaches management

program manager of NM Career Match, a talent attraction program funded by the U.S. Department of Labor. She also was selected as one of New Mexico’s “Women of Influence” by New Mexico Business Weekly in 2009.

’98 Robert G. Allard Jr. MS ’01 was

recently appointed principal of Paramount

’00 Francisco Ramos PhD is the co-author

’01 Brian Jacob Ramsey recently joined the

Long Beach, Calif., law firm of Kegel, Tobin & Truce. He graduated with his J.D. from Southwestern Law School in 2009.

’02 Monique Sosa Allard MS, EdD ’06 was

appointed executive director of student support and equity programs at Cal Poly Pomona. • Eric Kahnert, an award-winning broadcast journalist, was recently promoted to weekend morning anchor at the Denver, Colo., NBC affiliate KUSA.

SAVE THE DATE Friday & Saturday, October 29-30, 2010

(in conjunction with USC Homecoming)

Rediscover, Reminisce, Reconnect! �� 50th Reunion- Class of 1960 25th Reunion- Class of 1985 10th Reunion- Class of 2000

Please visit us online at http://alumni.usc.edu/reunion

Fight On!

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

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T�� USC A�� C�� N�� Y�� proudly presents

The Second Annual

’03 Edward Bryant MBA was recently

promoted to partner at the San Diego office of KPMG.

’04 Matt Slocum, a drummer and composer,

Tommy Awards

released his first jazz album, Portraits, on his own label, Chandra Records. He lives in Paterson, N.J.

J�� , ��

’06 Louis Kealoha EdD was named the new

chief of police for Honolulu. • Min Na Lee MM recently won the position of second clarinet in the Rochester (N.Y.) Philharmonic Orchestra after having been associate principal clarinet with the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra and second clarinet with Opera Pacific in California since 2008. • Melissa Sky-Eagle DMA presented the world premier of Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments by Robert Gross DMA ’08 at the University of Georgia-Athens during its 60th annual Janfest Anniversary Festival. She lives in Los Angeles, teaches undergraduate and graduate piano players, and performs frequently as a solo artist.

To purchase tickets visit

http://alumni.usc.edu/tommyawards For details e-mail

tommyawards@alumni.usc.edu

’07 Tom Prieto MBT recently published his first article, “A Limited-Time Opportunity for Small Business Stock,” in the December 2009 issue of the Journal of Accountancy. He

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a heartfelt

T�� The USC Alumni Association proudly thanks the alumni and friends who contributed to USC’s Second Annual Regional Club Scholarship Campaign in support of scholarships for current USC students. If you have not yet contributed or wish to contribute more, please visit https://giveto.usc.edu and direct your gift to your local alumni club’s scholarship program. Help our students realize their dream of a world-class education at USC. Thank you again, and Fight On!

http://alumni.usc.edu 66

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

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Class of ’92

lives in Valencia, Calif. • Gabe Veas EdD of Pasadena, Calif., recently accepted a position as the director of academic programs/western regional director of Urban Youth Workers Institute, a religious organization that trains ministers.

alumni profile

’08 Leo Leonard recently opened blanc

still feel connected to USC – even if that home is a town of 4,000

haute yogurt, an upscale frozen yogurt boutique in Beverly Hills, Calif.

’09 Carlos A. Rivera recently opened Rivera

& Rivera Gallery, a downtown Los Angeles art gallery devoted to showcasing the work of established artists alongside emerging talent. • Edward Trimis EdD is principal at City of Angels School, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s independent study school.

Flat Worlder Thomas Unterseher ’92 learned you can go home again and

people in the middle of South Dakota. Along with his wife, Heather Bohr, and USC cinematic arts grad Don Tyler ’91, Unterseher started multimedia publishing company Cultural Designs in 1990, selling ESL products with MTV-style production values. By 1994, the company was strapped for operating cash. Seeking cheaper office space, the couple moved to his hometown of Mobridge, South Dakota. While looking for a local graphic design firm, he called an ad agency in nearby Aberdeen that, unbeknownst to Unterseher, happened to be owned by another USC cinematic

Marriages David Ross Griswold Jr. ’80 and Patricia Cacho-Negrete • Brian Koshland Kahrs ’05 and Michele Ann Aguilar ’06 • Joel Watters ’07 and Julie Moseley ’08.

Births

ph o t o b y d i e tma r q uist o r f

Craig J. Crampton ’81 and Donna K. Raja-Crampton DDS ’92, a son, Walker Khosrow Chase • James Gregory Hunt

’84 and Svetlana Fadeeva, a daughter, Veronika Riona • Brian Fong MS ’86 and Kathy (Ho) Fong ’90, twin daughters, Taylor Mei-Oy and Sydney Mei-Sum • Clark Biggers ’91 and Liza Biggers, a son, Copper • Melinda Macumber Bates ’93 and Leonard Arthur Bates Jr., a son, Logan Evan. He joins sister Brooke Amanda, 3. He is the great-grandson of Doris Roose ’47 and the late Beverly Roose ’47, grandnephew of Bill Roose ’79, and nephew of Marina Macumber ’94 • Holly Clayton Hancock ’94, MFA ’97 and Greg Hancock ’94, a son, Brady Clayton. He joins brother Parker. He is the great-grandson of Val R. Moore ’23, grandson of Harold Clayton ’61, MA ’63 and Norma Moore Clayton ’62, nephew of Elise Clayton-Boppell ’88 and Todd Boppell ’88, and cousin of Marta Moore Austin ’80 and Harrison Boppell ’12 • Heather (Meylor) Dibblee ’95, MHA ’97 and Harrison Dibblee, a son, Harrison Rian • Robin (Meier) Straight ’95 and Steven Straight, a son, Carter Alan • Katheryn (Wilson) Heinz ’96 and John Heinz, a son, Luke Oliver • Lori Chan ’99, MBA ’04 and Merrick Velasco ’00, a son, Brandon Chan Velasco. He is the grandson of Betty Chan ’73 and Wayland Chan PharmD ’77 • Jeanette Kappa MacLean DDS ’03 and Timothy Allen Budd, a son, Charles Gordon.

arts alum, Troy McQuillen ‘87. “We both came back to South Dakota to start our own companies because L.A. was too expensive,” says Unterseher, 43, whose bachelor’s degree is in music recording. “And when the Internet took off, we both started doing business with the world from these small towns.” As Unterseher shipped his own products, friends began asking if he could do order fulfillment for their goods. By 1999, Unterseher’s business had shifted to providing order fulfillment, call center and e-commerce services to other companies. Now called One World Direct, it employs 75 people in Mobridge, aiming eventually to open facilities in Asia, Europe and Latin America. “One World became an example of this Friedman-esque idea that the world really is flat now,” says Unterseher, referring to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat.” We do business with companies all over, ranging from Sony and The Wall Street Journal to little dot coms.” Needing to attract qualified employees to his growing business, Unterseher became involved in Mobridge’s local politics, serving on the city council for five years. The goal: Clean up the parks and redevelop the riverfront and main street areas so people in other areas might want to pull up stakes and move to South Dakota. “The town was dying,” Unterseher says. “It’s an outdoor paradise if you like hunting and fishing. But you need certain baseline amenities if you want to attract people.” New grants totaling nearly $3 million helped accomplish those goals, though the change was slow and often came at a personal cost. With the oldest of their three children reaching school age, Unterseher and Bohr decided to return to Southern California in 2006, moving to Pasadena to be close to Bohr’s family. Unterseher opened a One World satellite office in Orange County and travels to Mobridge every month, spending the summers there, too. The idea is to get the best of both worlds. Los Angeles provides a better base for sales and, in the summers, their kids can ride their bikes around Mobridge with complete freedom. The Trojan connections continue. Unterseher recently began working with Belgium-based Micah Wolfe, who attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts, to develop One World’s European expansion strategy. Meanwhile, Tyler, Unterseher’s old business partner, has become a much-in-demand, Grammynominated mastering engineer and producer of the music for One World’s Web site and videos. “It’s amazing how quickly things have changed since we made that move to Mobridge,” Unterseher says. “Here you have all these ’SC alums coming together from all over the world – through South Dakota, of all places – working on a global Web site. Makes you wonder what the next 15 years will bring.” – Glenn Whipp

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Deaths Mary Helen Miller Pestor ’43, of Glendale,

Calif.; Aug. 20, at the age of 87. While at USC, she was a member of Alpha Gamma Delta sorority. She was active in National Charity League, Tuesday Afternoon Club, Oakmont Country Club and the USC Alumni Association. She taught in an adult literacy program and was an antique dealer and estate sale business owner. Her sister, Bee Jay Miller-Vint, and great-grandson Reef Kugies died shortly after she did. She is survived by children Judy Pestor Gibson ’66, Ron Whitney-Whyte and his partner, Fred Hutchirs, Cheryl Pestor ’73 and her partner, George LeFave, and Randy Pestor ’73 and his wife, JoAnne Speers, grandchildren Jennifer Kugies and Jim Hicks, brother Warren Miller, and many nieces and nephews. Dorothy “Dottie” Smith Stevens ’44, of San

Marino, Calif.; Nov. 15, at the age of 87. While at USC, she was a member of Kappa Delta sorority, and she was Panhellenic president, student body secretary and an Amazon. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She was affiliated with the Armed Services as a wave after college. She is survived by her son, Gary, daughter Gail Stevens Lovejoy ’71, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Ed Lindop ’47, of Pacific Palisades, Calif.;

Dec. 3, at the age of 84. He was a longtime teacher at Palms Junior High School and University High School, both in Pacific Palisades, Calif. He was also the author of more than three dozen books, including children’s books, novels and textbooks. He is survived by his wife, Esther, and daughter Laurie. William J. M. Monsanto ’47, of Santa Ana,

Calif.; Sept. 13, of natural causes, at the age of 86. Born in the Panama Canal Zone, he moved to Los Angeles to attend USC. He served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II, when he was held as a POW in Germany. After the war, he joined the Army Reserves and remained active until he retired from his long career as an accountant and auditor. He was also active in several community organizations, including Orange County Shrines Club and the Santa Ana Elks Lodge 794. He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Betty, sons Bill and Steve, daughters-in-law Rose and Dee Dee, granddaughters Jennifer, Lauren, Shelly and Tammy, great-grandchildren Cierra and Isaiah, and sister Beatrice. Mel Sloan ’47, of Van Nuys, Calif.; Jan. 12, of

pneumonia, at the age of 86. He grew up in the Bronx, N.Y., and moved to Los Angeles in 1940 to study filmmaking at USC. With

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

the outbreak of World War II, he interrupted his studies and joined the military in 1943. He was stationed in Los Angeles and was assigned to work in a film-production unit, where his duties included the editing of aerial briefing films. Following the end of the war, he returned to USC to complete his undergraduate degree. He later was instrumental in the creation of the school’s production curriculum. Over the next 51 years, he taught a variety of courses and influenced numerous filmmakers. From the late 1940s to the 1970s, in addition to teaching, he worked on documentaries and ethnographic films, two relatively new film genres at the time. In the late 1940s, he worked as a producer and editor with ethnographer/ cinematographer Conrad Bentzen on the documentary Mokil. Sloan worked on feature film productions, including Stakeout on Dope Street. He served 25 years as a member of the board of directors for the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was a training director for New Communications, a project that worked in black, Chicano and Native American communities to teach filmmaking, and he served on the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission’s Communication Committee. He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Rita, children Jeff, Len and Barry, grandchildren Alyssa, Steven and Eric, and sister Irene Golden. Thomas Ely Lasswell MS ’48, PhD ’53, of Los

Angeles; Dec. 20, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, at the age of 90. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was also a teacher at Pomona (Calif.) High School, Pepperdine University and Grinnell College before joining the faculty at USC in 1959. He spent the remainder of his teaching career at USC, serving as chair of the sociology department, director of the Marriage and Family Center and head of the Resident Honors Program. He wrote numerous textbooks and journal articles in sociology and architecture. He is survived by his daughters, M. Jane Hoff and Julia Dunn, son Thomas Ely Jr., son-in-law Mark, daughter-inlaw Barbara, grandchildren Jennifer, Thomas and Harold, and former wife Marcia. John Orval Whitaker DDS ’48, of Poulsbo,

Wash.; Sept. 13, at the age of 88. Prior to USC, he graduated from the University of Washington. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He later worked as a children’s dentist in San Pedro, Calif., for 30 years, retiring in 1978. He was president of the Harbor Dental Society and the Southern California Dental Association. He was a member of the American Academy of Pedodontics, American Dental Association, American Society for Dentistry for Children

and American College for Dentists and was a charter member of the Los Angeles Pedodontics Club. He was also a life member of the USC Associates, South Bay Trojan Club and Northwest Trojan Club, and he received the Fred B. Olds Award for service to USC. He is survived by his wife, Florence Montan Whitaker, children John Whitaker, Mary Ann Finnecy, Robert Whitaker and Nancy Muller, daughters-in-law Syd and Diana, sons-in-law Edward and Rodman, 13 grandchildren, 11 great-grandchildren, and sister Arlene Day. Gregory C. O’Brien ’49, of West Covina, Calif.; Dec. 10, of complications of pneumonia, at the age of 86. He enlisted in the U.S. Army four days after Pearl Harbor. During his service, he attained the rank of sergeant and was awarded the Bronze Star in the Aleutian campaign. Upon his military discharge, he entered USC on the G.I. Bill. He later received a Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School while teaching in the West Covina School District. He subsequently joined the faculty at Woodbury University in Burbank, Calif., teaching history and Far Eastern studies and later chairing the departments of history and political science. Upon his retirement from Woodbury in 1987, he was conferred with the lifetime title of Professor Emeritus. He is survived by his children, Gregory ’68, Catherine, Peggy and Paul, 12 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. Louis G. Taylor DDS ’49, of San Diego;

Oct. 28, at the age of 85. He practiced dentistry in Artesia, Calif., for 37 years. He is survived by his wife, Dorothy Harnly Taylor RDH ’49, children Daniel Taylor DDS ’85, Andrew Taylor, Jean Suzanne Taylor and David Louis Taylor, 17 grandchildren, and 18 great-grandchildren. E. Maylon Drake ’51, MED ’56, EdD ’63, of

Knoxville, Tenn.; at the age of 89. He was superintendent of both Duarte (Calif.) Unified School District and Alhambra (Calif.) Unified School District. From there, he went to the Los Angeles County Office of Education as deputy superintendent, then came to work at USC as a faculty member. Most recently, he was president of the Los Angeles Chiropractic College in Whittier, Calif. He was past president and a founding member of Educare and president of many other USC and community groups. He is survived by his sons, Christopher and Cameron, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. Francis Laufenberg MEd ’51, EdD ’58, of

Long Beach, Calif.; Sept. 22, at the age of 88. He served as assistant superintendent for the Oxnard (Calif.) School District before joining the Long Beach Unified School District as

assistant superintendent for business in 1960. He was superintendent of LBUSD from 1978 to 1985, and upon retiring, he served on the California State Board of Education. He is survived by his wife, Lee, son Lawrence, daughter Linda Lea Reese, daughter-in-law Dena, son-in-law Ted, two grandchildren, and several nieces and nephews. Marlin R. Overholt ’54, of Leesburg, Fla.; July

24, 2009.

Meg Seno Wemple ’54, of Los Angeles; Dec. 31, at the age of 79. She was a lyric soprano, and while a student at USC, she was a featured soloist with the USC Madrigal Singers and appeared with the University Symphony Orchestra. She was a lead in many opera productions and sang in the A Cappella Choir. After graduating from USC, she worked as an assistant to the dean at the USC School of Architecture. In 1962, she married Emmet Wemple, a Southern California landscape artist and 40-year member of the USC School of Architecture faculty. After his death in 1996, she remained an active patron for both the School of Architecture and the USC Thornton School of Music. She was a member of the national music sorority Mu Phi Epsilon, the USC Friends of Music and the USC Associates. In 2000, she established the Meg Wemple Music Scholarship for vocal arts students and later donated a VIP golf cart to shuttle concert patrons around campus. She is survived by her sister, nieces and nephews. Leon Clarke ’55, of Los Alamitos, Calif.;

Oct. 5, of pancreatitis, at the age of 76. He lettered in football for three years, leading the Trojans in receiving as both a junior and senior and earning All-Pacific Coast Conference honors in 1955. He played in the EastWest Shrine Game, Hula Bowl and College All-Star Game after his senior season. He was a second-round NFL draft pick by the Los Angeles Rams in 1956 and played with the Rams from 1956 to 1959, Cleveland Browns from 1960 to 1962 and Minnesota Vikings in 1963. He made the Pro Bowl in 1956 and 1957. After his playing career, he entered private business. He is survived by his wife, Mitzi, sons Christopher, Curtis and Kerry, stepdaughters India, Sandy and Tonya, and numerous grandchildren. Robert “Bob” Maners ’55, of Park City, Utah; Dec. 8, at the age of 76. While at USC, he was a member of the Trojan Knights, the Kappa Sigma fraternity and Skull and Dagger. He also was USC’s 1954 Yell King. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps following graduation, he worked as an executive secretary for the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America. In February 1958, he returned

to his alma mater as director of the USC Alumni Fund. In partnership with faculty and alumni, he was instrumental in putting together prospects and projects that led to tremendous successes for the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He also worked closely with trustees and volunteers and traveled extensively to the East Coast to organize the university’s first formal corporate fundraising program. After rising to the position of executive director of development, he left USC in 1986 to become president of the California State University (CSU) Foundation and executive director of development for the then 21 CSU campuses. He retired from CSU in 1992 and moved to Park City, Utah, where he volunteered as a fund-raising consultant for a variety of local charitable foundations, including the Kimball Art Center and National Ability Center. He is survived by his wife, Laura, children Dean, Wendelin ’85 and Courtney ’03, daughter-inlaw Colleen, son-in-law Eric Gustafson ’02, and twin grandchildren Will and Sydney.

teer work as a computer programmer with the Arizona Food Banks, Mesa Community College and Hands Across America. He is survived by his wife, Doris, three children, and six grandchildren.

John Scolinos MA ’55, of Claremont, Calif.;

Nov. 7, at the age of 70. After graduating from USC, he attended Creighton University Medical School in Omaha, Neb., and later completed an internship at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center. From 1969 to 1971, he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and was stationed at Twentynine Palms, Calif. He later completed a residency in radiology at Harbor General Hospital in Carson, Calif., and a fellowship in interventional radiology at Loma Linda University Medical Center in Loma Linda, Calif. He worked as a physician in various communities for more than 40 years. He is survived by his wife, Lani, children Chris, Allison and Kelly, and twin granddaughters Lucia and Sierra.

Nov. 7, at the age of 91. He played semipro baseball after graduating from high school and was signed by the St. Louis Browns, playing in the minor leagues before the start of World War II. He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1945. He then earned his bachelor’s degree at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., and his master’s degree at USC. He coached 14 seasons of baseball at Pepperdine, from 1946 to 1960. He became head baseball coach at Cal Poly Pomona in 1962, leading his team to win Division II national championships in 1976, 1980 and 1983. He also won six California College Athletic Associations championships and was named Division II coach of the year three times. He was inducted into the American Association of Collegiate Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame in 1974. In 1984, he was pitching coach for the U.S. Olympic baseball team coached by USC baseball coach Rod Dedeaux. He is survived by his wife, Helen, and daughter Violet. Patrick F. Hussey ’57, of Mesa, Ariz.; Dec. 25, at the age of 88. He joined the U.S. Navy as an aviation cadet in 1942 and was commissioned ensign in 1944. He was a veteran of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. During his sea duty, he commanded four different ships. When not at sea, he served as chief of the U.S. Naval mission to Ecuador and as naval attaché to Denmark. He was awarded two air medals, a Navy commendation medal and both the China and Vietnam service medals. Subsequent to his retirement with the rank of captain in 1974, he was honored at the county, state and national level for his volun-

Dennis Edward Mills MD ’57, of San Jose,

Calif.; July 6, 2009. He received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University prior to attending USC. He worked as an OB/GYN in private practice in Merced, Calif., after leaving the U.S. Navy. He later worked at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara, Calif., for 20 years, during which time he was physicianin-charge at Kaiser Permanente in Milpitas, Calif., for 12 years. He retired in 1993. Paul Jepperson MS ’58, of Carmichael, Calif.;

at the age of 75. He worked for the California Water Quality Control Board as a chemical engineer throughout most of his career. He is survived by his wife, Phyllis, son Brian ’89, and sister Gail. Gary Kitchings ’58, of Carbondale, Colo.;

Charles Noel Brady ’59, of Bakersfield, Calif.;

Feb. 16, at the age of 72. A trumpet player, he served a two-year tour of duty in the 52nd Army Band after graduating from USC, and then went to New York to study at The Juilliard School. He received his master’s degree at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and was principal trumpeter of the National Symphony Orchestra in the city for six years. He also toured with the Boston Pops Orchestra. During his professional career, he played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, San Francisco Opera and the New York Philharmonic. He recorded many songs and soundtracks, including for the movies Lady in the Cage and Pork Chop Hill. After moving to Bakersfield, Calif., he played with the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra as principal trumpeter for 30 years. He also played with the Bakersfield Civic Light Opera Orchestra. He taught for the Bakersfield School District, Cal State Bakersfield and at Fairfax School District for

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

32 years, retiring in 2007. He was also on the board of the Bakersfield Youth Symphony. He is survived by his wife of 49 years, Eva Brady, sons Charles Brady Jr., James Brady and John Brady, daughter-in-law Tawny, grandchildren Kayla Shoultz, Christian Brady, Caylee Brady, Kaya Brady, Emily Brady, Andrew Brady and Dylan Black, sisters Barbara Paves and Gwen Goodwin, brothers-in-law Dan and Arnold, aunts Franzelle Nyhus and Billie Jean Parker, and eight nieces and nephews. Monte Clark ’59, of Detroit, Mich.; Sept. 16,

after an extended illness with a bone marrow malignancy associated with lung and liver disease, at the age of 72. He was the co-captain of the 1958 USC football team, having lettered three seasons as a right tackle. He was a fourth-round pick in the 1959 NFL draft by the San Francisco 49ers. He spent 11 seasons as an NFL defensive and offensive tackle: three with San Francisco (195961), one with the Dallas Cowboys (1962) and seven with the Cleveland Browns (1963-69). He was a member of the Browns’ 1964 championship squad. He began his coaching career as an assistant handling the offensive line with Miami from 1970 until 1975, during which time the team played in three Super Bowls, winning in 1972 and 1973. He was San Francisco’s head coach in 1976 before becoming the Lions’ head coach for seven seasons, from 1978 until 1984. In 1990, he was the Miami Dolphin’s director of player personnel and was then the offensive line coach at Stanford for two seasons. He served as a consultant for the Lions from 1999 to 2008. He also had a stint as the head coach of the Minsk Belarus Zubers, an American pro football team in the Soviet Union. Off the field, he was a broadcaster in Detroit, a color analyst for Michigan and a sideline reporter for Michigan State. He is survived by his wife of 52 years, Charlotte, sons Randy, Bryan and Eric, eight grandchildren, brother Don, and sisters Dolene and Kathy. Robert Duane Kelly ’59, of Oswego, Ill.;

Dec. 15, of heart failure, at the age of 76. From 1957 to 1958, he was a member of the USC Trojan football team. After graduating, he spent his career in advertising sales management, working for companies including The Wall Street Journal, Southern Progress and Time/Life. He was a volunteer docent for the Field Museum in Chicago and donated his personal collection of Native American artifacts and books to the museum. He worked as a Midwest fundraiser and recruiter for USC. He received the Alumni Service Award, was a past president of the Midwest Alumni Club and helped create the “SCend Off” events for incoming USC freshmen. He also was a member of the

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Trojan Football Alumni Club. He is survived by his wife, Anne, daughters Kathleen Kelly Gallegos ’89 and Patricia Kelly ’90, grandson Frank, and brothers Don and Larry. Bryan Gunning ’61, of Westchester, Calif.;

Oct. 18, of complication from Lewy-Body dementia and Parkinson’s side effects, at the age of 72. After graduating from USC, he was drafted into the U.S. Army at Ford Ord, Calif., where he spent two years as a typing instructor. He worked at Western Airlines from 1964 to 1976 in the credit department, working in sales audits and as manager of revenue accounting. He continued to work in the airline business until 1990, mostly in human resources. He then worked in accounting as a controller until he was forced to go on disability in 1998. At Western Airlines, he was involved with Junior Achievement with high school students. Within his community, he was a soccer coach for 12 years, among other activities. He was preceded in death by his son, Bryan James Gunning. He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Rosemarie, children Debra Davis and Kirk Gunning, and four grandchildren. Joyce King Stoops EdD ’66, of Laguna

Woods, Calif., Dec. 16, at the age of 86. She worked as a nurse and a technician in a chemistry laboratory, where she was in charge of analyzing flame-thrower gel for impurities during World War II while she earned her teaching credential and bachelor’s degree at Northern Illinois University. She later moved to California and earned her master’s degree at California State University, Long Beach, before attending USC. She taught fourth grade in Long Beach Unified School District schools and advanced to the position of vice principal and then principal. She was a professor of teacher education for 23 years at the USC Rossier School of Education and retired in 1987 as professor emerita. During her tenure at USC Rossier, she also served as assistant dean of student affairs and established 25 new scholarships. She was president of the all-university chapter of the national honor society Phi Kappa Phi, and in 1974, she was the first female member of the USC chapter of Phi Delta Kappa, the professional association for educators. She and her late husband, Emery Stoops, contributed $2.25 million in 1996 to the endowment in perpetuity of the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean’s Chair in Education at USC Rossier. In 1994, they created a $1.25 million trust fund to establish the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Chair in Educational Administration. She was a longtime member of EDUCARE and served on the boards of the Pacific PalisadesMalibu YMCA and the Rotary Foundation. She is also the author of four books and

numerous articles and scholarly papers. She is survived by her daughter, Amy Dundon ’72. Dan O’Bannon ’70, of Santa Monica, Calif.;

Dec. 17, of Crohn’s disease, at the age of 63. While at USC, he collaborated with classmate John Carpenter on the 45-minute student short, Dark Star, which was expanded into a feature in 1974 and won the Golden Scroll Award for best special effects. He worked as a computer animator on Star Wars and later created the story of Alien, which received an Academy Award for best visual effects. In 1985, he wrote and directed The Return of the Living Dead, and in 1990, he wrote Total Recall. His other screenwriting credits include Blue Thunder, Lifeforce, Invaders from Mars, Screamers and Bleeders. He also directed the 1992 film The Resurrected. He is survived by his wife, Diane, and son Adam. Mosi Tatupu ’78, of Plainville, Mass.; Feb.

23, at the age of 54. He was a fullback on the USC football team, lettering four years, from 1974 to 1977. He was USC’s Offensive Player of the Year and Most Inspirational Player in 1977. He was born in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and was a high school football star in Hawaii. After graduating from USC, he played in the NFL with the New England Patriots from 1978 to 1990 and with the Los Angeles Rams in 1991. He played in the 1986 Super Bowl and made the Pro Bowl that year. He set an NFL record for most games played by a running back. After his playing career, he was the head football coach at King Philip Regional High in Wrentham, Mass., and then was an assistant coach at Curry College in Milton, Mass., from 2002 to 2007. He is survived by his son, Lofa, a former USC linebacker, and ex-wife Linnea. Hans Ludwig Beer of Los Angeles; Jan. 16,

after a lengthy illness, at the age of 82. He was director of the USC Opera Theatre and a 50-year member of the USC faculty. Born in Munich, Germany, he studied opera, conducting and dramatic composition at a music academy in his hometown. After graduating, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and came to USC for a year of study in 1955. He accepted a position as lecturer in opera and conducting at USC, and eventually became associate director of the USC Opera Theatre and associate conductor of the USC Symphony. In 1967, he was promoted to chairman and director of the USC Opera Theatre. He also was promoted to associate professor of opera and conducting and became a full professor in 1982. He worked as a guest conductor for operas and symphonies across the country and throughout California. In 1986, he conducted two concerts for a live broadcast on Chinese National Television and another concert with the Shanghai Chamber

Orchestra. He is survived by his companion of more than 20 years, Andrea Kay, daughter Brigitte Ann Barbero, son-in-law Brian Barbero, grandson Phillip J. Barbero, and great-grandson Toby James Barbero. Keith Crown of Columbia, Mo.; Jan 31, at the

age of 91. He taught painting and drawing at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts from 1946 to 1984. A celebrated watercolorist, he was the head of the painting and drawing area for much of his time at the school. He grew up in Gary, Ind., and earned a bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a regimental artist with the U.S. Army, serving 45 months in the South Pacific from 1941 to 1945. He was awarded a Bronze Star, became a staff sergeant and provided combat-area illustrations for Yank magazine. Much of his wartime artwork is in a collection at Brown University. The State Historical Society of Missouri exhibited paintings and drawings spanning more than 60 years in its 2009 exhibition Keith Crown: A Retrospective. The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery displayed a major retrospective of his work in 1987. More than 100 gallery and museum shows have featured his paintings. The Phillips Collection in Washington, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, 15 university art museums and several other major collections hold his paintings. The National Watercolor Society presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, 50 years after he had been the society’s president. He was preceded in death by his daughter, Haine Crown. He is survived by his wife, Patricia D. Crown, sister Patricia Fisher, daughters Katherine and Patricia, stepson Paul S. Kennedy, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Rory Markas of Palmdale, Calif.; Jan. 4, at

the age of 54. For the past 12 years, he was the play-by-play announcer for the USC men’s basketball team. He also served the same role for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim for the past eight years. Previously, he had handled the play-by-play duties for the USC baseball team on the Trojan Radio Network, as well as pregame reporting for Trojan football. During that time, he also served as a sports reporter on KNX Newsradio 1070 in Los Angeles and a sports anchor on KTTV Channel 11. From 1994 to 1997, he was the lead announcer for the Los Angeles Clippers. He worked as a play-byplay announcer for the Milwaukee Brewers television network from 1992 to 1994 and as a substitute radio play-by-play announcer with the Brewers radio network from 1984 to 1994. He spent six seasons calling Pacific Coast League Baseball, including three years with the Salt Lake City Gulls and

three years with the Vancouver Canadians. He was honored with several broadcasting awards, including four Golden Mike Awards for radio reporting and two Associated Press Sportscasting Awards. He also received the 2008 Radio Play-by-Play Award from the Southern California Sports Broadcasters Association. He is survived by his mother, Billie, and brothers Gary and Troy. John Milner of Los Angeles; Jan. 29, at the

age of 97. A distinguished teacher with special expertise in child welfare, he was a USC professor from 1946 until his retirement in 1977. He served as acting dean of the USC School of Social Work in 1971. He also taught for 18 summers at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he held a lifetime professorship. In addition to teaching, he lectured, conducted workshops and served as a consultant in a wide range of public and voluntary settings in many states as well as in Guam, England and Canada. Well after retirement, he continued to teach seminars through the Emeriti College at USC. He received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in 1934 and his master’s degree in social work from Columbia University in 1946. He began his career in his hometown of Twin Falls, Idaho, where he worked as a consultant administering emergency relief and, later, as director of the federal transient program. He then became associate director of the Ryther Child Center in Seattle, where he helped introduce residential treatment centers to the United States. He also served as casework director for the Children’s Protective Society in San Francisco. In the 1940s, he was a psychologist in the U.S. Army. He was a founding member of the Delinquency Control Institute at USC, which provides specialized training for law enforcement professionals and others working with youth to prevent and control or correct juvenile offenders and to improve the justice system. He also directed the USC Head Start Training Program. Throughout his career, he published in numerous journals and magazines and won awards for his teaching. He was named best teacher of the year by the National Association of Social Work. Bonnie Sanborn of Laguna Beach, Calif.;

Jan. 22, at the age of 82. She was a longtime benefactor of the USC tennis teams. In memory of her husband, Art Sanborn, she donated funds for the construction of the sixth court in USC’s Marks Tennis Stadium in 2006. While a student at USC, she was a member of the Chi Omega sorority. She is survived by her children, Bruce ’71, Cristy and Bonnie, and seven grandchildren. Stephen E. Toulmin of Los Angeles; Dec. 4,

at the age of 87. One of the most influential

ethical philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century, he was the Henry R. Luce Professor for the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies at USC College. Spanning nearly six decades, his research focused on moral reasoning analyses. A leading authority on ethics, international relations, history and philosophy of the physical and social sciences, and the history of ideas, he conducted research that has widely influenced many fields, particularly clinical medical ethics, rhetoric, communication and computer science. He earned his bachelor’s in mathematics and physics from Cambridge University in 1942. Soon after, he was hired by the Ministry of Aircraft Production as a junior scientific officer, first at the Malvern Radar Research and Development Station and later at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Germany. After World War II, he returned to England to earn his master’s and Ph.D. in moral sciences from Cambridge University. In 1949, he began teaching the philosophy of science at Oxford University and went on to teach at many universities throughout the world, including Melbourne University, Leeds University and Columbia University. He came to USC College in 1993. Also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was appointed USC University Professor in 2001. In 1997, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities. He wrote numerous books, including The Uses of Argument and Return to Reason. He is survived by his wife, Donna, children Polly, Matthew, Camilla and Greg, 13 grandchildren, and sister Rachel. Teh Fu “Dave” Yen of Altadena, Calif.;

Jan. 12, at the age of 83. Raised in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in China, he received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Huachung (Central China) University before coming to the United States to further pursue his education, eventually earning his doctorate degree in organic chemistry and biochemistry from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. After a brief period on the faculty at California State University, Los Angeles, Yen joined the USC faculty in 1969 as an associate professor of biochemistry and of chemical and environmental engineering. He spent 40 years on the USC faculty as a professor in the environmental engineering program in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He was known for his research on fossil fuels and was the author, co-author, editor or coeditor of 26 books. He was also a founder of the geochemistry division of the American Chemical Society. He is survived by his wife, Shiao-Ping. l

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e summer 2010

Last Word

Batman had Robin, Sherlock Holmes had Dr. Watson, the Lone Ranger had Tonto. Literature and pop culture are replete with storied sidekicks. How well-versed are you in the lore of heroic supporting players? 1. As everyone knows, a sidekick is a close companion who serves as an assistant to the hero. Interestingly, the word’s origin traces back to 19th-century slang of the criminal underworld, referring specifically to this feature of men’s clothing. 2. The prototypical sidekick, this rotund peasant, whose name means “belly” in Spanish, hails from a classic of world literature that first appeared in 1602. 3. The flip side of the hero-sidekick relationship is the villain-henchman bond. Famous examples include the squint-eyed hunchback who assisted a German doctor bent on playing God and, in a satirical twist, the starry-eyed executive assistant who venerates his nuclear waste-spilling boss. 4. Rescued from cannibals, this Carib native becomes the indispensable servant-sidekick of the title character in what is considered the original adventure novel.

›› CONTEST RULES Name the No. 2s and No. 1s referenced in each clue, except the first, which calls for a piece of haberdashery. Up to five $30 gift certificates from Borders Books and Music will be awarded to the sidekick-worshipping Last Worders who nail the contest. If more than five perfect entries are received, five winners will be drawn by lot.

5. “I’m sorry, the position of annoying talking animal has already been taken,” snaps this animated sidekick to a potential rival in the second installment of a blockbuster fractured fairy tale franchise. 6. A jovial sewer worker played sidekick to a bus driver with anger-management issues in a 1950s television comedy that inspired a popular Hanna Barbera cartoon series set in prehistoric times.

7. Cleverly playing on these themes, a 2004 animated feature gives us an arch-villain who turns out to be the hero’s rejected sidekick-wannabe. 8. Before there was Dr. Evil and MiniMe, a popular sitcom of the late ’70s and early ’80s featured a suave, white-suited, foreign-accented hero whose diminutive sidekick – also accented, also all in white – heralded each week’s episode with a signature cry of joy. 9. The sidekick can play a pivotal role in the talk-show format. This is exemplified (indeed, defined) by the honey-voiced pitchman who for 30 years presented inexhaustible foil to the jabs of the erstwhile king of late-night television. 10. With the comic team, it can be hard to tell who is the sidekick and who is the hero: The straight man got the girl, but the sidekick got the laughs. Paramount set the standard with two enormously popular croonercomedian duos in the 1940s and ’50s. 11. Married couples can have sidekicks, too. Without their unremarkable neighbors as accomplices, a certain hare-brained housewife and her lounge singer hubby couldn’t have schemed and bullied their way into America’s heart on the CBS network. 12. A fur-covered alien with a distinctive roar got Entertainment Weekly’s nod as one of the greatest sidekicks ever. He backed a smirking smuggler-turned-reluctant-hero in the 1977 space opera that made USC’s bestknown alumnus a household name. 13. For nearly 30 years, her calming voice has taken the edge off seething rants served up daily by the original “shock jock.” l

Send your answers no later than June 15 to The Last Word c/o USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790. Submissions by fax (213-821-1100) and e-mail <magazines@usc.edu> are welcome.

U S C T R O J A N F A M I L Y M A G A Z I N E summer 2010

ILLUSTRATION BY TIM BOWER

Hurray for Number Two!