Comic Relief

A storytelling course gives students a creative outlet to new worlds.

Call their work comics if you must, but for students in Keith Mayerson’s Art 312 course, their final projects are also “tearstained masterpieces” that culminated from a semester spent apart. Mayerson, chair of painting, drawing and printmaking at the USC Roski School of Art and Design, usually celebrates the end of his course with a mini comics fair where students sell printed copies. So, during the pandemic, making a digital version and having comics available to download or read online made a lot of sense, he says. The result is Indoor Ink, an anthology that showcases the class’s work on the web. From adventures in ancient Rome to robot clashes in the future, students could develop meaningful visual stories in any style or genre they wanted. Go to uscne.ws/IndoorInk to read their stories. ELISA HUANG

“4D” BY ISABELLA MELENDEZ

Inspired in part by the 19th century satirical novel Flatland by Edwin Abbott, the senior art major’s story follows a scientist on the verge of venturing into the fourth dimension. “The comic is an exploration of science, death and connection,” she says. Go to uscne.ws/4D to read the full comic.

“THE TRAGEDY OF MARKO MAVERICK”

BY KNOX LOPEZ

This comic follows the main character—a guitarist and frontman of a band—in a surreal, spacelike world. The journey captures the joys and struggles of love, mental illness and growing up. “As a queer person, I wanted to make a queer comic and unapologetically throw in LGBT romance arcs,” says Lopez, a senior art major. Read a PDF of the full comic at uscne.ws/Marko.

A Root Cause

USC’s sustainability-minded valedictorian makes it her mission to bring native plants to the University Park Campus.

From sugar bush to lemonade berry, native and drought-tolerant plants are flourishing at USC.

In small, verdant pockets throughout the University Park Campus, the landscape is slowly changing from water-craving vegetation to native shrubs, herbs and grasses. It’s all thanks to a student-led effort helmed by recent USC graduate and valedictorian Tianna Shaw-Wakeman ’20, MS ’20.

The psychology major, who also earned a master’s in social entrepreneurship, sparked the conversation by bringing Facilities Management Services together with a horticulturalist from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to brainstorm native planting opportunities.

“Native gardens give us the whole picture,” she says. “It’s about sustaining life for birds, bees, insects—the food web—and it’s also about carbon, water and waste energy. USC has more green space than much of our surrounding community, and we have a responsibility to make sure that every plant we put in the ground has a distinct purpose and serves that community positively. I think we do that with natives better than anything else.”

The native plant project isn’t the only sustainability initiative Shaw-Wakeman spearheaded at USC. As a first-year student, she joined Environmental Core, a group of like-minded environmental student-activists who advocate for progress on carbon neutrality and other strategies to combat climate change. She organized rallies, including a climate strike in 2019 attended by USC’s newly installed president, Carol L. Folt.

As part of an alliance of sustainability-focused student organizations, she pressed Folt and other university leaders to consider USC’s investments linked to fossil fuels. It led her to help establish DivestSC, a student group that called on the university to shift those investments into clean and renewable energy. The effort paid off when the USC Board of Trustees voted to liquidate its current fossil fuel investments and freeze any new investments.

“I only saw my role—working in sustainability and doing all the different things that I did—as trying to be a vessel for this energy and this vibrancy about how important sustainability is that was already there among the students,” she says.

The native plant project’s test bed near Birnkrant Residential College, featuring hand-picked shrubs like evergreen currant, proved successful. More local greenery thrives in other test zones. Shaw-Wakeman lauds their environmentally friendly nature: They use as little as one-sixth the water as other plants do, and they draw in more insects and other critters.

“My hope is that I come back in five to 10 years and I am embraced by all the natural landscapes Southern California has to offer right here on the USC campus,” she says. “That’s the dream.” RON MACKOVICH

AND GRAYSON SCHMIDT

Tianna Shaw-Wakeman makes sustainability her mission.

Promising Development

A new facility could help scientists devise and accelerate treatments for diseases like cancer and arthritis.

Finding a new treatment or cure for a disease can take decades—and a lot of labor.

But a high-tech facility being built at USC promises to streamline that winding road, speeding up the time it takes for a therapeutic approach to become a viable treatment in the marketplace.

Sprawling across more than 3,100 square feet in the basement of the Harlyne J. Norris Research Tower at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Current Good Manufacturing Practice facility, or cGMP, will be home to a team of scientists dedicated to cell therapy research and innovation.

“Cell therapies harness the sophisticated biology of cells, which have evolved over millions of years, to create treatments that can be precisely targeted to specific diseases and tailored to each individual patient,” says Tom Buchanan, professor of medicine and vice dean for research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

The collaborative effort brings the Keck School of Medicine of USC, Keck Medicine of USC and USC Norris cancer center together with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) under the umbrella of the USC/CHLA Cell Therapy Program.

“Our vision is to advance cell therapy research at USC and CHLA so they can be leading centers and a hub for this type of research,” says Mohamed Abou-el-Enein, executive director of the program. The new facility is scheduled to be completed in 2022. “Having it established here will be a great enabler for all the scientific concepts being developed to really move forward into the clinic and treat hundreds of patients with incurable diseases.”

The federal government created the cGMP designation to regulate the creation of drugs and other treatments, like cell therapies, in a safe and controlled environment. The USC and CHLA facility will include six “clean rooms”—labs where scientists can devise and produce clinical-grade medicines and therapeutics while ensuring the highest quality and potency. Their work will involve modifying living cells to treat patients based on their unique condition and needs.

“Cells are taken from the patient, modified in the cGMP facility and returned to the patient,” Buchanan says. “In some cases, they are designed to kill harmful cells—for example, cancer cells. In other cases, they can replace missing cells like cartilage in people with arthritis. It is all done with great precision that only cells can provide. This is truly precision medicine.” LANDON HALL

Pill Protection

A donation establishes a new USC center dedicated to medication safety.

Developments in modern medicine have made it possible for patients with countless diseases to live longer and pain free. But when people take the wrong medication or use the wrong dose, the consequences can be serious.

“Over $528 billion of avoidable spending occurs each year in the U.S. due to harm or inadequate results from medication, accounting for the third-leading cause of death,” says Steven Chen, associate dean for clinical affairs at the USC School of Pharmacy.

A $5 million gift to the school from the estate of Susie Titus ’60, a USC alumna who died in 2020, seeks to make drugs safer. Experts at the new USC Titus Center for Medication Safety and Population Health will collaborate with community pharmacists to ensure patients with chronic or uncontrolled diseases like diabetes and asthma take the right drugs on the right schedule.

Part of the gift will endow the Susie Titus Professorship in Medication Safety, held by a faculty member with expertise in health care data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and medication safety.

Titus came from a long line of pharmacists and was one of seven people in her family to graduate from USC. In 2004, the Titus family endowed the pharmacy department at the USC School of Pharmacy.