Archive for category: College News

Portrait of Abel Valenzuela

Engaging with the world: Q&A with Abel Valenzuela, interim dean of social sciences

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Abel Valenzuela in front of door reading "UCLA"

Abel Valenzuela | UCLA

Jonathan Riggs | October 5, 2022

Abel Valenzuela Jr. has been a faculty member in the UCLA College’s Division of Social Sciences for nearly three decades, serving as a professor of labor studies, Chicana/o and Central American studies, and urban planning. He was also the director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and is a nationally recognized authority on labor issues, immigration, and urban poverty and inequality.

Last month, Valenzuela took on the role of interim dean of social sciences following the appointment of the division’s former dean, Darnell Hunt, to the post of executive vice chancellor and provost. He will remain in the position through the end of the 2023–24 academic year.

Valenzuela spoke to us about to us about charting a path forward for the division, the importance of public engagement and how working as a dishwasher and “carwashero” in his early years instilled a work ethic that still drives him.

What does it mean to follow in the footsteps of former Dean Hunt?

Darnell Hunt is a longstanding faculty member and a gifted administrator and scholar who has pushed his discipline and the social sciences division on a formidable pathway of local and civic engagement, problem-solving and driving policy. He’s done this by drawing on UCLA’s greatest talent — its faculty and student body.

During my own leadership of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, I was able to enhance our well-established reputation for engaging Los Angeles through empirical, policy-driven research and by providing our students with research opportunities on topics important to their own lives. In my work, I often consulted with Dean Hunt to share benchmarks, discuss opportunities and ensure that our work was aligned and supported by the division. He was instrumental to our growth and success.

As I look ahead to this next chapter, I feel honored to continue his mission, and I’m confident that our shared efforts will enhance and strengthen UCLA’s public mission and dedication to excellence in problem-solving in academic research, public policy and other areas that impact the world and people’s lives.

What qualities make the social sciences division special?

The division is large and robust and includes nearly 20 academic departments and programs — and it’s driven by brilliantly accomplished faculty and students who engage deeply and thoughtfully with each other.

That idea of engagement is paramount — not only within the university but, importantly, with the broader world. The research being done in our division engages every corner of our city and our world, and it has a formidable impact. I continue to be amazed, as I reflect on my 30 years at UCLA, at all the accomplishments and discoveries our division makes on a regular basis. When I travel, I marvel at the impact our alumni are having in the world — their reach is seemingly everywhere you turn.

What are your top priorities as interim dean?

Dean Hunt was an excellent steward of the division, and his visionary and steadfast focus on changing the world through local engagement and on promoting social science that matters and that focuses on the public good are all priorities that align with my own work and philosophy. In my new leadership role, that vision will continue.

In addition, his dedication to faculty recruitment and retention and to advocating for our division with senior leadership are priorities I will be embracing as interim dean.

And finally, I intend to devote my attention to two key matters: staff morale and workplace issues, and graduate student funding — both critical to maintaining excellence in our division, as well as our competitive edge.

How can the members of the division show support now and going forward?

We can build community through reaching out to each other and also by being cognizant of the fact that we are navigating uncertain times. We need to be patient, respectful of others and kind to a fault in supporting one another.

Secondly, if you have the resources and are able to give, give to UCLA so that we can redistribute your generosity in the form of fellowships, summer internships, and in other ways that build community and support our students through research and similar opportunities.

You’ve been a teacher for a long time. What does teaching mean to you?

Teaching is connecting. It’s gratifying and exhilarating. It’s also a lot of hard work. Teaching is reciprocal — you learn when you teach. Some of the best teachers and classes in the world are here at UCLA.

My favorite advice to share with students when we discuss civic, cultural and other types of interventions is that the research process is long, and when you’re trying to impact policy, that impact is incremental. Patience is a virtue, and if you have it, you can use it in meaningful and effective ways. Small, steady steps and forward movement are the key to winning — our work is a marathon, not a race.

Is there an interesting or little-known fact about you we could share?

As a teenager, I worked at McDonald’s; as a Union 76 “carwashero” — a vacuum attendant, to be precise; as a dishwasher at White Memorial Hospital in Boyle Heights; and shortly after high school graduation, I became a bank teller. Hard work and multiple skill sets have always been a part of my experience and will guide my work ethic for the division.

How will you determine whether you’ve been successful?

Beyond the standard metrics UCLA uses to evaluate deans, I’ll leave it up to my colleagues — department chairs, research unit directors, faculty members and students — to say if my work as interim dean surpassed their expectations and standards. At UCLA, we’re all very vocal!

Finally, I’ll constantly remind myself that enhancing student success and excellence in academic outcomes is a primary catalyst in all of my decision-making.

I’m honored, humbled and thankful to the campus’s senior leadership and to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Hunt for their confidence in me as I undertake this new leadership assignment.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more of Our Stories at the College, click here.

Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch

Q&A: UCLA political scientists on how the 2020 presidential campaign continues to reverberate

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Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch discuss their new book, ‘The Bitter End’

Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch

Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch say that while many describe the U.S. electorate as “polarized,” the term “calcified” is more apt. | UCLA

Jonathan Riggs | 

With the nation’s social, racial and political divisions already laid bare by the emergence of COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and other events, the 2020 presidential campaign became one of the most contentious in U.S. history.

In “The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy,” UCLA political scientists Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch, and John Sides of Vanderbilt University, assess why the campaign’s aftershocks will reverberate for decades to come. The book was published Sept. 20 by Princeton University Press.

“[H]ow leaders responded to the events of 2020 — and especially how Trump and his allies responded to the election and its aftermath — only exacerbated divisions that had been years in the making,” the authors write. “Understanding those divisions helps explain why the election came to such a bitter end, and why this bitter end may only signal the beginning of a new democratic crisis in American politics.”

The book draws observations and insights from data collected as part of Nationscape, a national political survey that the authors developed.

Now, with midterm elections upon us and a new presidential campaign on the horizon, Vavreck, UCLA’s Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy, and Tausanovitch, an associate professor of political science, discussed why the nation’s politics seem firmly stuck in place yet highly explosive.

What do you hope readers will take away from ‘The Bitter End’?

Chris Tausanovitch: One thing I hope they’ll take away is that “polarization” — a blanket term that gets thrown around a lot in the media — doesn’t really do much to explain the situation we’re in. Yes, we’re polarized. But talk to three different people, even three different political scientists, and you will get three different definitions of what polarization means. In the book, we use the term “calcification” because it better captures the features of American politics today.

Can you explain why calcification has become such an intractable problem?

Lynn Vavreck: The calcification we’re seeing today is born of four factors: The parties are farther apart than ever ideologically, voters within each party are more like their fellow partisans than ever, so many of our political conflicts are based on identity-inflected issues, and there is near balance between people who call themselves Democrats and Republicans right now.

That’s why politics feels both stuck and explosive: The stakes of election outcomes are very high because the other side is farther away than ever, and because of the balance between the parties, victory is always within reach for each side. That balance also means that when one party loses an election, instead of going back to the drawing board to rethink how they campaigned or what they offered, they don’t revamp their packages or strategies — they almost won! — they instead try to change the rules of the game to advantage their side. Preventing parties from changing the rules to erode democratic principles is the ultimate challenge to democracy.

You explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and other events in 2020 revealed divisions within the electorate …

Vavreck: No, those factors didn’t reveal divisions — they were subsumed by people’s existing adherence to their parties. That’s an important difference. Those factors should have reshaped politics, but they didn’t — people just doubled down on their party loyalty.

So do you see any hope for fixing the party-above-all mindset that has become the norm?

Tausanovitch: Politics doesn’t offer easy answers to big questions like how to address racism, regulate immigration or address a global pandemic. Our only prescription in the book is that we need to get past this period in which one major party is undermining one of the foundations of our democracy: our trust in the honesty and accuracy of our elections.

We have a lot of problems in this country, but accurately counting ballots is not one of them, so far. That could change if Republicans use election conspiracy theories as a pretext to meddle with the electoral process, and some candidates are currently running on a promise to do exactly that. But if we can get past this conspiracy-mongering, we can get back to the hard work of trying to resolve differences that are hard to reconcile.

What surprised you about the data you collected during the 2020 campaign?

Tausanovitch: Nationscape was designed in part to see how the public reacts to major events. We couldn’t have been handed a more dramatic year to study than 2020. Yet it turns out that Americans are very slow to change their political views and their priorities.

Lynn, you and John Sides have now written three books recapping presidential campaigns, but this was the first time Chris joined the collaboration. What did he add to the mix?

Vavreck: Chris brings a wonderful new dimension to our work. The Nationscape project was largely his idea, and the way we framed the survey questions that yielded some of the most interesting results was solely his idea.

Tausanovitch: Lynn and John are incredible political scientists, and I really admire their willingness to get things right, even if it means throwing away analyses we spent a lot of time on — or giving up on points we really wanted to make — because the evidence wasn’t quite good enough.

Now that the book is complete, how else are you planning to use the Nationscape data?

Tausanovitch: I’m currently using the data to expand on my work on understanding political priorities — the way they interact with primaries is really important. The more hard-line voters in each party have an outsized influence because they care more and are more likely to vote on the issues.

Vavreck: We completed 500,000 interviews for Nationscape, and a dream I have is to use the data to characterize the political landscape across the whole country: How are we different and how are we the same? I think people will be surprised by how many things people agree on.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more of Our Stories at the College, click here.

Woman and boy on floor with laptop

Kindness is contagious and these videos can help kids catch the altruism bug

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UCLA researchers create video playlist for YouTube Kids’ anti-bullying programming

Woman and boy on floor with laptop

Ivan Samkov/Pexels

Holly Ober | September 29, 2022

Key takeaways:
• UCLA researchers created a video playlist that aims to get kids to spread kindness.
• The videos are based on Bedari Kindness Institute research that shows kindness is contagious.

Some UCLA researchers think a simple, two-word message can help kids knock bullying off its feet: Be kind. The Center for Scholars & Storytellers, the Bedari Kindness Institute and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television are partnering with YouTube Kids on a series of videos that promote kind, caring behavior in everyday situations. The series is part of YouTube Kids anti-bullying programming scheduled for October, which is National Bullying Prevention Awareness Month.

“We think kindness is the best antidote to bullying, and we believe that kindness is contagious,” said Daniel Fessler, director of the Bedari Kindness Institute and associate professor of anthropology. “The collection, which is hosted by actress Tabitha Brown, is anchored by two short animated films showing people doing good things, such as helping a stranger. These are followed by selfie videos from kids who describe witnessing someone engaging in an act of kindness, or acting kindly themselves. We hope to motivate viewers to also behave kindly.”

The videos are based on Bedari Kindness Institute research that shows people often feel motivated to help others after watching a video of someone else behaving altruistically. The uplifting feeling people experience when witnessing the morally praiseworthy actions of others, which scientists call “elevation,” is known to increase an inclination toward performing positive actions. The researchers have shown in experiments that elevation can be reliably induced through exposure to prosocial behaviors.

The collection takes a different tack than many other campaigns promoting kindness, which typically prescribe behaviors thought to promote kindness.

“Many efforts to promote kindness tell kids they should be nice, or remind them how bad it feels when someone does something unkind, but we’re skeptical those efforts have an immediate impact on behavior,” Fessler said. “In my lab, we’ve worked on contagious kindness and have found that when adults witness someone engaging in prosocial behavior, many of them are inspired to be prosocial themselves. We think this applies to children, too.”

The Center for Scholars & Storytellers

The videos follow up on a 2020 collaboration between the Center for Scholars & Storytellers and YouTube Kids, in collaboration with the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Allies for Every Child and the Pritzker Center for Strengthening Families, that curated a playlist of selfie videos from former foster youth talking about their various identities. That playlist currently has around 40 million views.

Psychologist Yalda Uhls, who founded and directs the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, led the previous effort and identified the opportunity for another collaboration.

“When YouTube told us that in October they usually program content around bullying for younger children, we knew the Bedari Kindness Institute would be the perfect partner to create the messaging for this project,” said Uhls, who is an assistant adjunct professor of psychology.

Screenwriter and director George Huang, a professor of film, theater and television, helped produce the videos.

“Professor Fessler and the Bedari Kindness Institute’s work is phenomenal, and it’s a privilege to be creating content with the Center for Scholars and Storytellers that shares their work with a young audience,” Huang said. “With the help of Stacey Freeman and psychology doctoral student Ellyn Pueschel, we’ve created a playlist that will inspire, entertain and spread the word about kindness.”

In one of the animated shorts, strangers who are the recipients of kind acts “pay it forward” to other strangers. In the other animated short, an altruistic individual is eventually rewarded with kindness by two children who watched as she selflessly helped others.

Giving parents the tools

To accompany the videos, Stacey Freeman, executive director of the Bedari Kindness Institute, is developing a parent resource guide. She also recruited kids ages 6-12 to create selfie-style videos as a relatable way for kids to see other kids talking about the importance of kindness. Both the parent resource guide and the selfie videos help to amplify the kindness messages in the playlist while also helping parents guide their children toward kindness in their everyday interactions.

“At the Bedari Kindness Institute, we’re a scholarly organization that seeks to translate research and knowledge into real world applications,” Freeman said. “So we were excited when Yalda approached us with this opportunity because we think that research on kindness can inform the use of video content to help kids become a positive force in the world.”

Fessler and Uhls said the playlist is intended to be a safe place to which parents can direct their kids and watch with them. Parents will also have access to a resource guide to help them guide their children toward kindness in everyday interactions with others.

“The content will be inspiring and uplifting so parents don’t have to worry what kids are consuming,” Uhls said. “We’re trying to be a positive force.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

UCLA survey finds most teens reject glamorized lifestyles in entertainment media

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Less than 5% want to see aspirational content in TV or movies

Teens’ preferences for what they’d like to see in TV shows and movies have changed. 

Holly Ober | September 20, 2022

Key takeaways:
• Changing aspirations. Few Gen Zers want to watch shows about glamorized lifestyles.
• Real-world issues matter. Teens prefer content that deals with family dynamics or social justice.
• Positive storytelling, please. They want to see more hopeful, uplifting stories about people.

Not that long ago, teens binged on aspirational content, where the kinds of lives portrayed in “Gossip Girl” were what they wanted on their screens. But according to a recent study conducted by UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers, teens today resoundingly reject those kinds of stories. Only 4.4% in a survey of 662 diverse teens said they wanted to see this kind of content, which the researchers labeled “aspirational.” Generation Z, born from about 1997 to 2012, wants to watch content that grapples with real-world issues (21%), such as family dynamics or social justice. When asked to cast their own characters, a majority of teens lean toward wanting a black male hero (23.6%) and a white male villain (34.9%). But they also want fun, escapist content (37.8%), and one of the most popular topics they would like to see is hopeful, uplifting stories.

“Hollywood has built its young adult content on the belief that teens want to see glamorous lifestyles and rich and famous characters, but our research suggests the opposite is true,” said psychologist Yalda Uhls, director of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers. “The majority of respondents in our study feel isolated and upset when media lack accurate identity representations. This is an important change that Hollywood needs to take note of.”

“American adolescents value media that reflects what they know about the real world, even while they prefer to see people that are different from themselves,” Yalda said. “Teens want their media to show a world characterized by genuine diversity and heartwarming experiences.”

What kinds of storylines does Gen Z want?

Hopeful, uplifting stories about people beating the odds and stories about people with lives unlike their own topped the list of topics they’d like to see portrayed in the TV shows and movies they watch, according to the study.

Other findings include:

• Friends and social groups, superheroes and parents all made the top five topic list.

• Mental health continues to register for teens, ranking No. 4 on the list. For LGBTQIA+ teens, this was one of the top two preferred topics.

• Both older and younger teens want to see more stories about family life, including relationships with parents.

• Partying and/or drugs and drinking came in second to last.

• Content about climate change came in last.

The study concludes that teens want to see authentic, inclusive and positive storytelling, and emphasizes a need for the entertainment industry to shift away from aspirational content that does not prioritize diversity. Teens’ rejection of traditionally aspirational content that valorizes higher social status and material gains may also signal a substantial shift in contemporary teens’ evolving definition of success that is different from previous generations. It also suggests that hopeful messaging could be used to engage teens with various subjects in the future, such as climate change.

“While we do not know why teens rejected climate change storylines, we believe that the portrayal of this issue is often negative and may feel overwhelming,” said Stephanie Rivas-Lara, research coordinator at the Center for Scholars and Storytellers.

The survey also asked respondents which media space does the best job at making them feel “seen.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority (55%) said social media was the space where they felt most authentic, with TikTok being the most popular social media platform.

“These findings raise the question about what factors from social media have successfully catered to teens’ need for authenticity, and how the definition of authenticity for social media versus TV shows and movies may have changed over time,” Rivas-Lara said.

The teens came from different social backgrounds and reflected a diverse mix of ethnicities, genders and sexualities. Respondents were almost evenly split between male and female, and about 6% identified as a different or no gender. Gender identity made a significant difference in who was cast as the hero with 83% of male teens choosing a male and 50% of female teens choosing a female. Teens who identified as white males were the only demographic to choose to cast white males as the hero.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Yesenia Aguilar Silvan (left) and Lauren Ng

Mentorship enhances mental health research focused on the underserved

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Psychology professor Lauren Ng and doctoral student Yesenia Aguilar Silvan help each other make a difference for others

Portrait of Psychology professor Lauren Ng and doctoral student Yesenia Aguilar Silvan

Yesenia Aguilar Silvan (left) and Lauren Ng | Photo by Stephanie Yantz

Jonathan Riggs | September 28, 2022

According to the American Psychiatric Association, people from racial and ethnic minority groups in the U.S. may be more likely to experience long-lasting consequences from mental health issues — and less likely to seek and receive treatment.

Identifying and addressing barriers to care for underserved populations is key to the work of both Lauren Ng, assistant professor of clinical psychology and director of the Treatment and Research for the Underserved with Stress and Trauma (TRUST) Lab, and her mentee, doctoral student Yesenia Aguilar Silvan.

“We actually know little about how to provide the best care for minoritized populations, who are typically also more likely to have experienced traumatic events,” says Ng, who was honored with awards in 2021 and 2022 for her contributions to the field. “My research focuses on how we make sure that people who need care but have been systematically excluded from mental health treatment, receive it. Yesenia’s research interests fit nicely with my own, although she’s taking a very novel approach.”

Part of a newer field of study known as implementation science, Aguilar’s approach focuses on getting people interested in mental health care interventions in the first place. Right now, she’s studying how best to optimize therapist websites to increase the rate of people navigating them successfully to engage in therapy.

“I conducted a survey that found that people who were interested in mental health services needed to know who the therapist was, and not a lot of the clinic websites I studied included information like that,” Aguilar says. “I’m hoping in the next year or so we can gather even more data based on these changes to the clinic websites see if they make a difference.”

Currently, it takes about 17 years for research evidence to reach clinical practice; implementation science like Aguilar’s research seeks to reduce that length of time. In part due to her own experience growing up undocumented, Aguilar is personally very motivated to make a difference like this in the real world, in real time.

“I remember asking a professor once, ‘What’s the point of research?’ And he said that for him, research was just finding something that made you mad or upset and then trying to solve it with science,” Aguilar says. “I knew from my upbringing that a lot of people are not getting mental health services when they really should, and so I asked myself: ‘How do I solve that problem using science?’”

It’s a lifelong commitment that Ng shares.

“I’m a biracial person — my dad is Chinese American, my mom is Black — and I grew up in D.C., where I sometimes felt like an outside observer, trying to understand situations from different perspectives,” says Ng. “Psychology just seemed natural to me, especially when I realized I could do more than just understand, but also create treatments and interventions to help people.”

Getting the chance to work with and learn from Ng was a huge draw for Aguilar, who graduated from UCLA in 2017, to return for her doctorate. She’s flourished here, earning multiple honors, including the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship as well as awards from the Irving and Jean Stone Fund, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the Monica Salinas Graduate Student Endowed Fund. And in Ng’s lab, Aguilar has the opportunity to serve as a mentor herself to undergraduate students.

“It has been amazing to have the support system and resources here that have made it possible for me to pursue my dream. I feel as if I can ask Lauren anything, from specific research questions to advice on how to be a more effective mentor,” Aguilar says. “She also encourages me to be an independent researcher and to think about my own future, in and out of the lab. I continually learn so much from her.”

“UCLA’s department of psychology is so strong in large part due to the quality of our graduate students like Yesenia,” says Ng. “Yesenia started in community college and was able to transfer to UCLA and to receive the support and opportunities a student of her caliber deserves. That can only happen at a very unique place, one that feels like more than a university.”

For more of Our Stories at the College, click here.

Jean Jacket from the movie “Nope” chasing a man riding a horse in the desert.

How a UCLA fish scientist helped the alien in Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’ seem terrifyingly real

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Doctoral student Kelsi Rutledge helped make “Jean Jacket” scientifically plausible
Jean Jacket from the movie “Nope” chasing a man riding a horse in the desert.

“Jordan Peele had a vision already, inspired by some animals, but he wanted to talk to a scientist to make it plausible and real. He wanted an animal that mesmerized its prey like a cuttlefish,” said UCLA doctoral student Kelsi Rutledge. | Universal Pictures

Holly Ober | 

When Kelsi Rutledge came to UCLA to pursue graduate studies, she didn’t expect to land a side hustle in Hollywood. But her discovery of a new fish species attracted the attention of director Jordan Peele, and she enthusiastically accepted his invitation to help create a scientifically plausible alien for his latest movie, “Nope.”

The movie, which is in theaters now, tells the story of a small group of determined people who confront a dangerous species that appears to be from outer space.

Rutledge, who will receive her doctoral degree in ecology and evolutionary biology this fall, studies how rays and other fish smell chemicals in the ocean. The project was inspired by her master’s thesis on guitarfish, a type of ray that lacks a stinger.

“Someone collected these fishes in the Gulf of California and put them on the shelf at UCLA and in the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles but never examined them further,” Rutledge said. “When I was looking at them I thought some of them looked different, but I wasn’t sure at first.”

Further study showed this was a new species, which Rutledge named Pseudobatos buthi in honor of her late thesis advisor, ecology and evolutionary biology professor Donald Buth.

Discovering a new species is a big deal for a scientist at any stage of their career, even more so for a student just getting started on their graduate research. But what Rutledge did next surpassed science. She asked a professional photographer friend to take pictures of her cradling a museum specimen of the new species on the beach, and announced the discovery on Twitter in the manner of a glossy, social media-friendly birth announcement. The tweet quickly went viral and received media coverage from several prominent outlets, including Smithsonian Magazine.

In the this video, you can get a glimpse of the squid-like alien called “Jean Jacket.” | Universal Pictures

Rutledge said that one distinct feature of guitarfishes is their “weird nose,” which has many unique flap-like structures. She began comparing it to other rays and stingrays, and the project evolved into research for a doctoral degree.

“I look at it from both a biological and engineering point of view,” she said. “Why have these noses evolved to look the way they do? What are the design principles of building an underwater nose? Answering these questions could help inform underwater sensor technology.”

One mystery of ray olfaction — the sense of smell — involves how they bring scent into their noses. Dogs, humans and most other terrestrial animals have noses connected to their throats and lungs that work like a pump to pull air, and the scent molecules it contains, into their noses. But rays, like other fish, breathe through gills that are not connected to their noses or throats and yet, without a pump, they can somehow still bring odors into their nose.

“I found that the shape of their nose correlates with how the rays swim, but how do their noses actually work?” she said.

Rutledge said she checked preserved specimens out from museums “like library books” and used a CT scanner at the UCLA hospital when it wasn’t in use to create accurate digital models of nose structures. She made 3-D printed physical models from the CT-scans that she put in a water tunnel, similar to a wind tunnel, injected with dye or miniscule, reflective glass balls to observe fluid dynamics around the nose in real time.

“The water tunnel experiments showed that the nose shape alone in some rays brings in water because there’s no pump,” Rutledge said. “If we can develop artificial sensors that don’t require a pump by just changing the sensor’s geometry, it would be an inexpensive way to increase the efficiency of the system.”

Image of bigfin squid

Bigfin squid | NOAA Ocean Exploration, Windows to the Deep 2021

To do some of this research, Rutledge partnered with John Dabiri, an engineering professor at Caltech who studies fluid mechanics and flow physics. Peele had hired Dabiri to consult on the physics of his fictional alien to learn how fast it could fly and how rain would move around the animal, among other things. When Peele mentioned he was also looking for a biologist who understood how animals behaved and who had discovered a new species, Dabiri recommended Rutledge.

“Jordan Peele had a vision already, inspired by some animals, but he wanted to talk to a scientist to make it plausible and real. He wanted an animal that mesmerized its prey like a cuttlefish,” Rutledge said. “One way he wanted to display this mesmerization aspect was designing the movie’s creature with a square eyeball but he didn’t think any animals had them.”

Rutledge informed him octopuses have square pupils, and sent him reference photos.

“There’s a lot of marine animal inspiration in the way the alien moves, especially in its unfurled form, which is very similar to a bigfin squid, which have a beautiful billowing fin on their head. The alien moves in the sky like an octopus or squid, and its saucer form is directly modeled after the sand dollar. The creature’s ability to camouflage itself as a cloud is also based on octopuses, who have special skin cells that change color to blend in with the background,” Rutledge said.

Some of the most horrifying moments in the movie occur after the creature, called “Jean Jacket,” consumes its live prey, who scream from within the creature’s guts.

“The digestive system is based on that of an ocean creature called the giant larvacean, and also on birds’ digestive systems,” Rutledge said. “Birds swallow their food whole and store it in a crop. It passes into the gizzard where it is ground up by grit and rocks the birds have swallowed. As in larvaceans and birds, food is swallowed whole and passes through a labyrinth of canals.”

Using high-powered lasers to illuminate tiny particles in water, we can visually see the fluid dynamics of odor capture, which is the green particles going into the nose of a ray. | Kelsi Rutledge

With help from Rutledge and Dabiri, Peele created a world that looked like the one we are used to but felt like a marine environment, in which a predator above hunted smaller creatures living in the sand. To escape predation, people had to learn how to predict and deflect “Jean Jacket’s” behavior, as wild prey animals must. The result is a monster that terrifies and kills without true malice, a beautiful animal simply living the life nature meant it to live.

Rutledge’s work for “Nope” is not done yet.

Together with the movie’s main characters, Rutledge will co-author a fake scientific paper about the new species. The narrative will be that the characters reached out to Rutledge at UCLA to help them describe and name “Jean Jacket” for the scientific community. Rutledge will write it exactly as a real scientific paper — she has experience publishing about a new species, after all. The fake manuscript will take the form of a coffee table book with a cover that looks like the journal “Nature,” one of the world’s top scientific journals. “Jean Jacket’s” scientific name will be “Occulonimbus edoequus,” which means “hidden dark cloud, stallion-eater” in Latin.

After finishing her doctoral studies this fall, Rutledge hopes to join Dabiri’s Caltech lab as a postdoctoral scholar. And though her first and foremost passion is science, she’s ready to step up next time Hollywood comes calling.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Related story: The nature of innovation: Marine scientist Kelsi Rutledge explores new possibilities for bioinspired design

Image of Manuscript of religious commentary. In this image, al-Taftāzānī’s sharḥ (commentary) on al-Nasafī’s al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafīyya (the creed of an-Nasafī) can be seen within the textblock. In the marginalia and between the text, glosses on this commentary and intertextual references by several different scholars can be found.

Students make remarkable finds in UCLA’s ‘Encountering Arabic Manuscripts’ course

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The collaboration between the Islamic studies program and UCLA Library continues to enrich the field and the world
Image of Manuscript of religious commentary. In this image, al-Taftāzānī’s sharḥ (commentary) on al-Nasafī’s al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafīyya (the creed of an-Nasafī) can be seen within the textblock. In the marginalia and between the text, glosses on this commentary and intertextual references by several different scholars can be found.

Scholars’ notes surround a central box containing a 14th-century Persian scholar’s commentary on a 12th-century Islamic religious tract. | UCLA Library Special Collections

Jonathan Riggs | 

If there was any question that UCLA Library Special Collections’ vast array of handwritten medieval manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and early Ottoman Turkish contained undiscovered historical gems and unique avenues for groundbreaking research, just ask doctoral student Brooke Baker.

While studying an untitled text as part of UCLA’s “Encountering Arabic Manuscripts” course, Baker found that it contained a work by Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha’rani, the 16th-century mystic and scholar who founded an Egyptian order of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam. Thinking she might have stumbled onto something rare, she showed it to Associate Professor Luke Yarbrough, who teaches the course.

“On a hunch, Brooke and I shared this discovery with Adam Sabra, the King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies at UC Santa Barbara, who has worked extensively on Sha’rani,” Yarbrough recalled. The verdict? “He knew of only three other manuscripts of this type in the world — two in Egypt and one in Saudi Arabia — and was unaware of UCLA’s.”

This remarkable discovery is just one of several that have been made in the course, an ongoing collaboration between UCLA’s Islamic studies program and UCLA Library. Library Special Collections, which houses a world-class assortment of archives, books, manuscripts, photographs and other materials available to students, faculty and the public, provides an invaluable resource for such partnerships.

“The UCLA Library’s Middle Eastern and Islamic manuscripts collection is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world, totaling at least 8,000 manuscripts,” said Ginny Steel, UCLA’s Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian. “These collections encompass rare and beautiful illuminated manuscripts, poetry and literature, significant medical and scientific tracts, and works of historical importance.”

Images of Luke Yarbrough, Jet Jacobs and Ginny Steel

From left: Luke Yarbrough, Jet Jacobs and Ginny Steel. | Smadar Bergman and Elena Zhukova

The course itself began with a conversation between Yarbrough, who studies early and medieval Islamic history, and Jet Jacobs, the head of public services, outreach and community engagement for Library Special Collections.

“Since 2018, Library Special Collections has taught or facilitated over 300 classes using our materials. This means more than 10,000 students have interacted with over 25,000 rare and unique items, leading to a number of discoveries and research pathways,” Jacobs said. “The majority of these were undergraduate classes; it’s important to embed primary-source literacy into the undergraduate curriculum so that students feel empowered to conduct original research and envision themselves as knowledge creators.”

Although Library Special Collections works with faculty across campus, supporting classes in history, English, science, dance, studio art and beyond, this particular collaboration was sparked in part by the fact that the Middle Eastern and Islamic manuscripts collection has not yet been extensively catalogued — a remarkable opportunity for students and faculty to plumb its unknown depths.

Image of baker stamps - Russian stamps indicating the provenance of the paper used for a copy of a work by the 16th-century Sufi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī.

Russian stamps indicating the provenance of the paper used for a copy of a work by the 16th-century Sufi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī. | UCLA Library Special Collections

Beyond the wealth of knowledge available in each manuscript, many offer intriguing windows into the past. Marginal annotations, personal notes and even stamps from libraries across the centuries give invaluable insight to those seeking to understand specific works in their full context. Using such clues, another doctoral student in Yarbrough’s course, Hinesh Shah, was able to identify a manuscript as having belonged to specific officials of the 18th-century Mughal Empire of South Asia.

► Discover more about the unique finds by Baker, Shah and other students in the course

In fact, this research is so promising that an anonymous donor recently gave UCLA a $100,000 gift to support the preservation, cataloging and accessibility of the manuscript collection for anyone wishing to explore it. In particular, the gift will allow graduate students to further expand their cataloguing work.

“This collaboration benefits us all — we rely completely on Library Special Collections for their archival and preservation expertise, while the scholarly community can help make meaning out of the collections,” said Yarbrough. “Another important piece of the puzzle comes with members of the broader L.A. community who are interested in these manuscripts for what they represent religiously and culturally.”

After all, connecting the world with UCLA’s research and resources underpins the course, the collaboration and the work of Library Special Collections and the Islamic studies program.

“There is no end to the potential of Library Special Collections materials to encourage new areas of research and stimulate curiosity,” Jacobs said. “Our holdings consist of everything from stone tablets and medieval manuscripts to born-digital resources and contemporary artists’ books, and we are always looking for opportunities to engage our communities with these significant cultural heritage materials.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more of Our Stories at the College, click here.

Image of a blue banner depicting the Bruin bear statue, with the text: UCLA #1 Public University

UCLA ranked No. 1 public university by U.S. News & World Report for sixth straight year

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‘For veterans, there are no other institutions as approachable and supportive as UCLA,’ says medical student Nam Yong Cho

Image of a blue banner depicting Royce Hall and the Bruin bear statue, with the text: UCLA #1 Public University: The number one public university in the nation, three years in a row.

Mike Fricano and Alison Hewitt | 

As a first-generation student, Alvina Zhan knew that getting accepted to a top-tier university was only the first of her challenges. Zhan wanted to find a school that offered her a huge span of education opportunities while fostering her individual success the way a small liberal arts college would.

That alignment brought her to UCLA, where she has excelled.

“Accessibility and strong academic support are everything to me,” said Zhan, a sophomore from the Bay Area city of Fremont, California, who credits UCLA’s Academic Advancement Program and specifically the program’s student, faculty and staff mentors with helping her adjust to the rigors of higher education.

“For many first-generation students like myself, we often don’t have the luxury to explore our academic interests and instead have to focus on supporting our families throughout high school,” Zhan said. “However, UCLA provided me the space I needed to realize my academic and personal goals.”

That commitment to student success has attracted the attention not only of prospective students and their families — UCLA has been the nation’s most applied-to school for several years running — but also of U.S. News & World Report, which has once again named UCLA the No. 1 public university in the United States in its annual “Best Colleges” rankings.

This is the sixth consecutive year UCLA has been ranked No. 1.

The ranking, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said, “is a recognition of the hard work of the staff and faculty, who believe deeply in our academic mission and drive it forward, even in the most difficult periods. It is a recognition of our students’ brilliance, creativity, ambition and persistence, both in their time on campus and in their lives as alumni.”

UCLA shares the top honor among public schools this year with UC Berkeley. Four other University of California campuses are among the top 10 public universities: UC Santa Barbara (No. 7), UC Irvine (8, tied), UC San Diego (8, tied) and UC Davis (10, tied).

UCLA is ranked highest among the top 20 national universities, public or private, for social mobility, a measurement of the achievement of students from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds. U.S. News considers the number of Pell Grant recipients enrolled, the six-year graduation rate for these students and how that rate compares to non–Pell Grant recipients.

For the sixth year in a row, UCLA was named the No. 1 public university for veterans. UC Berkeley also tied with UCLA in that category.

U.S. Army veteran Nam Yong Cho made UCLA his No. 1 choice twice over, first for his bachelor’s degree and then for medical school. Now studying to be a trauma surgeon, Cho moved to California from South Korea as a child. Growing up in Irvine, he was attracted to UCLA.

“Here was one of the best schools in the country, within driving distance of home,” said Cho, now 28.

He always knew he would serve in the military, he said, and to help his family with the cost of his education, he left UCLA in his junior year and enlisted in 2015. Serving in the Army took Cho to Afghanistan, where his work as a combat medic sparked his interest in trauma surgery. In 2019, he returned to complete his bachelor’s degree and in 2021 entered the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

“For veterans, there are no other institutions as approachable and supportive as UCLA,” Cho said. “Only UCLA has a specific Veteran Resource Center that guides you in using your veteran benefits and connects you with financial aid programs, instead of having to research it all yourself.”

The U.S. News “Best Colleges” rankings are based on 17 measures, including graduation and retention rates, class size and the average federal loan debt of graduates, as well as schools’ academic reputation, as determined by a peer assessment survey of presidents, provosts and deans of admissions at U.S. colleges.

While UCLA performs extremely well across the criteria, its excellence is also rooted in efforts not reflected in U.S. News rankings. For example, UCLA is the only campus in the UC system to guarantee housing to all students who seek it for the duration of their undergraduate education, and it regularly wins awards for its food and dining facilities. UCLA has earned a reputation as a place where people from all walks of life can shape their future success.

Emelin Vivar came to UCLA thanks to her mentor, Venezia Ramirez. During Ramirez’s senior year at UCLA, she encouraged Vivar, who was then in high school, to envision herself on campus in Westwood. The pair shared a similar background as young Latinas from South Los Angeles who had dreams of expanding their experiences at a university.

“I could have never dreamed of attending UCLA if I had not met a Latina student like Venezia,” said Vivar, who is now in her second year.

Vivar recalled that during their weekly talks, Ramirez would tell her that after graduating from UCLA she hoped to someday work for NASA or conduct research to address environmental inequities affecting her community. That type of aspirational talk left a huge impression on Vivar.

“It was my dream school since then.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Portrait of Dean Tracy Johnson

Dean Tracy Johnson receives grant to launch undergraduate stem cell training program

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Portrait of Dr. Tracy Johnson

Tracy Johnson, professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology in the UCLA College and holder of the Cecilia and Keith Tarasaki Presidential Endowed Chair. Effective Sept. 1, 2020, Johnson became dean of the division of life sciences in the UCLA College. | Photography by Hadar Goren


UCLA Newsroom | August 30, 2022

Editor’s note: This page was updated Aug. 31 with the correct figure for the grant.

Tracy Johnson, dean of the division of life sciences and a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, has received a $2.9 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to train students from underrepresented backgrounds in stem cell biology.

The four-year commitment from the state’s stem cell agency comes in the form of a Creating Opportunities through Mentorship and Partnership Across Stem Cell Science, or COMPASS, grant. With it, Johnson will found the UCLA COMPASS program, which will be open to sophomores and transfer students from two-year colleges.

Each UCLA student accepted into the COMPASS program will be matched with a faculty mentor from the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center and will engage in at least six quarters of laboratory research, gaining valuable hands-on experience and earning credit towards their degree. COMPASS scholars will also complete courses designed to equip them with the skills they need to build careers in the stem cell field, present their research at conferences and receive training in science communications and community outreach.

Applicants will initially be recruited from two UCLA programs: the Academic Advancement Program’s Transfer Summer Program and Pathways to Success, the latter of which was developed by Johnson. Pathways to Success is a four-year, honors-level program designed to support undergraduate students’ efforts in science, technology, engineering and math degree programs, academic achievement, sense of belonging in science and career goals.

“I am proud of UCLA’s efforts to create and maintain college and career readiness programs that help ensure the future success of undergraduate students who are determined to bring about positive change in the world,” said Johnson, who holds the Keith and Cecilia Terasaki Presidential Endowed Chair in Life Sciences and is a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology.

Recruiting for the UCLA COMPASS program will begin this fall.

Read the full news release about the UCLA COMPASS program.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Portrait of Lauren Ng, David Clewett, Bridget Callaghan

Three psychologists selected as 2022-23 UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows

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Portrait of Lauren Ng, David Clewett, Bridget Callaghan

From left: Lauren Ng, David Clewett and Bridget Callaghan. All are assistant professors of psychology in the UCLA College. | UCLA

UCLA Newsroom | 

Assistant professors Bridget Callaghan, Dave Clewett and Lauren Ng have been being selected as 2022–23 UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows.

The UCLA Hellman Fellows Program was established by the Hellman Family Foundation to support and encourage the research of promising assistant professors who show the capacity for great distinction in their research.

Callaghan studies how different early life experiences influence interactions between physical and mental health across the lifespan. She directs the Brain and Body Lab, which has a goal of using research that combines analysis of behavior, neural systems, gastrointestinal bacteria and health, and physiology to create better mental and physical health treatments across development.

Clewett’s research seeks to understand how arousal responses — particularly those elicited by emotional, stressful or motivating (rewarding/threatening) situations — influence:

  • what people remember: the information they selectively attend to and remember later on
  • how people remember: the way in which memories become organized and updated over time
  • when people remember: certain neurochemical and brain states, such as elevated norepinephrine and dopamine release, that are induced before, during or after an event.

Ng conducts translational psychological science and health disparities research for children, adolescents, and adults. The goal of her research is to reduce mental health disparities for underserved, minority communities in the Unitd States and in low- and middle-income countries. In addition, her research emphasizes bi-directional learning between global and local research and practice settings to improve access to and quality of care in the United States and around the world.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.