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Image of Angela Deaver Campbell with three 2019 graduates who benefited from the Scholarship Resource Center’s support, Wesley Armstrong, Sereena Nand and Austin Lee.Image credit: Alyssa Bierce/UCLA College

25 years of helping UCLA students graduate with less debt

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Scholarship Resource Center celebrates a quarter-century of connecting Bruins with financial support, mentorship, community
Image of Angela Deaver Campbell with three 2019 graduates who benefited from the Scholarship Resource Center’s support, Wesley Armstrong, Sereena Nand and Austin Lee.

Angela Deaver Campbell with three 2019 graduates who benefited from the Scholarship Resource Center’s support, Wesley Armstrong, Sereena Nand and Austin Lee. Image credit: Alyssa Bierce/UCLA College

By Jonathan Riggs | April 5, 2022

Ask Angela Deaver Campbell how she envisioned the work of the UCLA Scholarship Resource Center, which she launched in 1996, and you’ll get a fairly understated answer: “I saw us as ambassadors of goodwill helping students to graduate with less debt.”

Ask any of the hundreds of students she and her team have helped over the past 25 years, however, and their responses speak to the center’s profound impact.

“I absolutely would not be where I am today without Angela’s and the SRC’s support,” said Aleksandr Katsnelson, a 2009 graduate who went on to earn a law degree from Harvard University. “Angela wore many hats during our interactions: role model, emotional support provider and hero.”

Helping students compete for and win scholarships is the most visible aspect of their mission, but the resource center’s staff also brings a compassionate, high-touch approach to aiding students in other critical ways, including presentation skills, goal-setting and navigating complicated institutional structures.

Constantly evolving with the times, the center proved a beacon for students whose financial situations became unpredictable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was really lost as to how to navigate my financial situation, and the SRC addressed all of my questions and concerns,” said Alice Yanovsky, a 2021 graduate who, with guidance from the center, earned a Mandel and Winick Undergraduate Scholarship. “They helped me pay for my last year of school during the peak of the pandemic, which was a really scary time.”

The center’s legacy keeps growing thanks to Deaver Campbell, who still serves as director, and assistant director Rebecca Blustein, student affairs officer Mac Harris and a group of graduate students who act as student affairs advisors. And while its scope has expanded, the center’s core mission remains unchanged: to provide scholarship information, resources, mentoring and support to all UCLA students.

“Most colleges and universities do not have a center like this — we were way ahead of the curve in 1996 in reimagining the 20th century model of having students sink or swim on their own in the private scholarship process,” Deaver Campbell said. “The SRC is unique in that we provide students with high-touch, holistic service and counseling, regardless of their financial aid eligibility.”

The center’s emphasis on treating students as unique individuals, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach, hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“Starting from day one, I knew that I could go to Angela and her team with questions about my scholarship, academics or even job searches,” said Max Harrell, a 2021 graduate whose education was supported by a Thelma L. Culverson Scholarship, which covers California resident tuition and room and board. “The fact that everyone at the SRC knows your name, your goals on campus and even what classes you’re taking, demonstrates how much they want you to succeed.”

When the center opened in 1996, its sole focus was to help students locate and apply for scholarships from off-campus sources. But in 1998, staff began working with development officers at the UCLA College to support students applying for 18 private donor-funded scholarships. Today, the number of scholarships overseen by the resource center has grown to around 100; and of the approximately $5 million in donor-funded scholarships overseen by UCLA’s Division of Undergraduate Education, the center administers about half.

Key to the center’s success are the UCLA graduate students who provide writing and counseling support, and run workshops on how to secure scholarships. Over the years, more than 50 graduate students have served in that role, and many have gone on to use their skills in faculty, administrative and student support positions at other institutions — at East Los Angeles College, the University of Chicago, Brown University and the University of Oregon, to name a few.

One of the center’s current priorities is empowering more students to vie for the world’s most competitive scholarships — including the Rhodes, Marshall, Mitchell, Truman and Churchill — while coordinating the campus process for them. Leading that charge is Blustein, the assistant director, who can draw on her experience not only as a former student affairs advisor, but also as a past winner of a Mitchell scholarship.

Herman Luis Chavez, who expects to graduate from UCLA in June, is just one of the students benefiting from that approach. “Dr. Blustein was there for me every step of the way, from editing my application essays to providing mock interviews,” said Chavez, who received support from the center on his way to winning a Marshall scholarship and becoming a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship.

But beyond its ability to help students win scholarships, Blustein said, the center aims to empower all students who walk through its doors, no matter where they go or what they do after UCLA.

“The process of applying for scholarships — win or lose — was crucial to help me visualize my career goals and instrumental to prepare me for where I am today,” said Nathan Mallipeddi, a 2020 graduate who earned both Strauss and Fulbright scholarships and is now a first-year medical student at Harvard.

As the center begins its second quarter-century, Deaver Campbell has identified another important goal: securing independent support to help ensure it can continue to thrive regardless of statewide budget cuts.

“We would love for a donor to make the SRC’s funding permanent, so that no economic downturn could ever affect our ability to help change lives,” Deaver Campbell said. “Every year, more students and families come to us for solutions. Our work is too important to be vulnerable.”

Many students who have been helped by the Scholarship Resource Center have learned to appreciate the importance of philanthropy and some, like Darnel Grant, hope to become future donors themselves.

“The SRC provided me with constant support and encouragement throughout my undergraduate journey. They made me feel I was not going through my educational process alone,” said Grant, a recipient of the Eugene and Maxine Rosenfeld Scholarship who expects to graduate in June. “Now, my life’s goal is to help others to the same degree that the SRC helped me.”

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

Image of two marmotsImage credit: Daniel Blumstein/UCLA

The secret to longevity? Ask a yellow-bellied marmot

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UCLA-led study shows that aging slows to a crawl when the animals hibernate
Image of two marmots

During their time hibernating, marmots’ breathing slows, they burn a single gram of fat per day, and their body temperature plummets to the point that “they feel like fuzzy, cold rocks.” Image credit: Daniel Blumstein/UCLA

By Stuart Wolpert

What if you were told there was a completely natural way to stop your body from aging? The trick: You’d have to hibernate from September to May each year.

That’s what a team of UCLA biologists and colleagues studying yellow-bellied marmots discovered. These large ground squirrels are able to virtually halt the aging process during the seven to eight months they spend hibernating in their underground burrows, the researchers report today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The study, the first to analyze the rate of aging among marmots in the wild, shows that this anti-aging phenomenon kicks in once the animals reach 2 years old, their age of sexual maturity.

The researchers studied marmot blood samples collected over multiple summer seasons in Colorado, when the animals are active above ground, to build statistical models that allowed them to estimate what occurred during hibernation. They assessed the biological aging of the marmots based on what are known as epigenetic changes — hundreds of chemical modifications that occur to their DNA.

“Our results from different statistical approaches reveal that epigenetic aging essentially stalls during hibernation,” said lead author Gabriela Pinho, who conducted the study as a UCLA doctoral student advised by Daniel Blumstein and Robert Wayne, professors of ecology and evolutionary biology. “We found that the epigenetic age of marmots increases during the active season, stops during hibernation and continues to increase in the next active season.”

This process, the researchers said, helps explain why the average life span of a yellow-bellied marmot is longer than would be expected from its body weight.

Hibernation, an evolutionary adaptation that allows animals to survive in harsh seasonal environments where there is no food and temperatures are very low, is common among smaller mammals, like marmots, native to the mountainous western regions of the U.S. and Canada.

The marmots’ hibernation alternates between periods of metabolic suppression that last a week or two and shorter periods of increased metabolism, which generally last less than a day. During metabolic suppression, their breathing slows and their body temperature drops dramatically, to the point that “they feel like fuzzy, cold rocks,” Blumstein said.

In addition, they use a miniscule amount of energy, burning about a single gram of fat a day. “That’s essentially nothing for a 5,000-to-6,000–gram (11–13 lbs.) animal,” Pinho noted. This allows them to save energy and survive long periods without food.

During their active summer season, marmots eat a lot, doubling their weight so that they have sufficient fat to survive the next hibernation period.

All of these hibernation-related conditions — diminished food consumption, low body temperature and reduced metabolism — are known to counter the aging process and promote longevity, the researchers said. This delayed aging is likely to occur in other mammals that hibernate, they said, because the molecular and physiological changes are similar.

“This study is the closest scientists have gotten to showing that biological processes involved in hibernation are important contributors to their longer-than-expected life span based on their body weight,” said Pinho, now a researcher with the nonprofit Institute of Ecological Research’s Lowland Tapir Conservation Initiative in Brazil.

“The fact that we are able to detect this reduced aging during hibernation in a wild population means the effect of hibernation on slowing aging is really strong,” said Blumstein, a member of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and a senior author of the study. “This study was possible only because we had access to blood samples from free-living animals whose ages are known. Not many wild populations have detailed information about individual chronological age, and this reinforces the importance of long-term field projects.”

There may be biomedical advantages to inducing hibernation conditions in humans or human cells, the researchers said — to preserve organs for transplantation, for example, or as part of long-term space missions.

For the current publication, Pinho and her colleagues studied 73 female yellow-bellied marmots throughout their lives and collected blood samples every two weeks over 14 active seasons, analyzing them regularly. The marmots’ chronological age was calculated based on the date at which juveniles first emerged from their natal burrows. (The age of male marmots is difficult to determine, the researchers said, because they often migrate from one area to another.)

The research is part of part of a 60-year study of yellow-bellied marmots based at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado and was funded by Brazil’s Science Without Borders program, part of the country’s National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development, and the National Geographic Society, a Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory research fellowship and the National Science Foundation.

Other senior study authors are Robert Wayne; Matteo Pellegrini, a UCLA professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology; Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics and biostatistics at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health who developed the “epigenetic clock” in 2013; Julien Martin from Canada’s University of Ottawa; and Sagi Snir from Israel’s University of Haifa. The authors received insights from UCLA’s Statistical Consulting Group.

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

Image of actor Vin Diesel with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.”Courtesy of Universal Studios

People of color helped keep movie business afloat during pandemic

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UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report emphasizes importance of minority audiences

Image of actor Vin Diesel with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.”

Actor Vin Diesel, left, with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.” The movie, which featured a cast that was more than 50% minority, was the year’s third highest-grossing film at the box office. Image Courtesy of Universal Studios

By Jessica Wolf |

A large percentage of the movie business’s box office revenue and home viewership was driven by consumers of color in 2021, according to UCLA’s latest Hollywood Diversity Report. The report examines the 252 top-performing English-language films — based on box office receipts and streaming data — during the second year that the COVID-19 pandemic forced movie studios to adopt unconventional release strategies.

The report tracks progress for women and minorities in acting, directing and writing roles, and analyzes audience segments by race and ethnicity, focusing on Asian American, Black, Latino and white audiences, and age, focusing on viewers 18 to 49.

Published twice a year — with one analysis of movies and another for TV — the Hollywood Diversity Report has consistently shown increases in the percentages of women and people of color in key jobs in front of the camera. Researchers have also tracked sustained, albeit stubborn, growth for women and minorities in Hollywood writing and directing jobs.

Chart showing that The largest single category of films considered in this report includes those that were released solely on streaming platforms12 (45.6 percent), which is down from the share of streaming-only films considered in the previous report for 2020 (54.6 percent). By contrast, only 17.9 percent of films were released solely in theaters in 2021.13 Meanwhile, 20.2 percent of films were released both on streaming platforms and in limited theaters,14 while 13.1 percent were released both on streaming platforms and widely in theaters.15 Finally, only 1.6 percent of films were released both theatrically and through transactional video on demand,16 and 1.6 percent were released on streaming after a modified theatrical release window (45+ days).17

The report’s authors noted that 2021 was the first year since they began tracking such statistics that the majority of Academy Awards went to films that were directed by people of color and featured minority actors in lead roles. And the year’s third highest-grossing film at the box office was “F9: The Fast Saga,” which featured a cast that was more than 50% minority and was directed by Taiwanese American filmmaker Justin Lin. Sixty-five percent of opening weekend ticket sales for “F9” were to minority audiences, the highest figure among all films in the top 10.

The report tracks the numbers of writers, directors and actors who identify as Asian American, Black, Latino, Middle Eastern/North African, multiracial and Native American. People in those groups make up 42.7% of the U.S. population, and they form an important consumer bloc for entertainment, including movies.

For six of the 10 top-grossing films that opened in theaters in 2021, people of color accounted for the majority of opening-weekend U.S. ticket sales.

The report also analyzed box office performance based on the diversity of the movies’ casts — whether minority actors made up less than 11% of the cast, 11% to 20%, and so on, up to 51% or more. The study revealed that films with 21% to 30% minority actors had higher median global box office receipts than films in any other tier. That echoed a pattern since the report began tracking box office performance in 2011.

The report also found that, as in previous years, films with the least diverse casts (11% or less minority) were the poorest performers at the box office.

Chart showing that Median global box office peaked for films with casts that were from 21 to 30 percent minority in 2021 ($107.4 million). Twenty-five films fell into this cast diversity interval, including Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($501.0 million), A Quiet Place Part II ($297.4 million), and Cruella ($233.3 million). In a year in which theater attendance began to rebound after a COVID-decimated 2020, theatrically released films with relatively diverse casts again outshined their less-diverse counterparts at the box office. Indeed, the 14 films with the least-diverse casts (less than 11 percent minority) were again the poorest performers in 2021. “Last year, every time a big movie exceeded expectations or broke a box office record, the majority of opening weekend audiences were people of color,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, a co-author of the report and the director of research and civic engagement for the UCLA College division of social sciences. “For people of color, and especially Latino families, theaters provided an excursion when almost everything else was shut down. In a sense, people of color kept studios afloat the past couple of years.

“Studios should consider them to be investors, and as investors, they should get a return in the form of representation.”

Overall, 43.1% of actors in the movies analyzed by the report were minorities. That’s more than double the percentage from 2011, the first year of data collected by the authors, when 20.7% of actors were minorities. And 31.0% of the top-performing films in 2021 had casts in which the majority of the actors were minorities.

“Minorities reached proportionate representation in 2020 for the first time when it comes to overall cast diversity in films, and that held true again in 2021,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of the social sciences at UCLA and co-author of the report.

Hunt said the phenomenon is probably due in part to the greater number of movies that are initially released on streaming services: Of the films analyzed in the report, 45.6% were released on streaming services only.

Chart showing that During the second full year of the pandemic, the volume of major films released via streaming platforms continued to increase, from 87 films in 2020 to 164 in 2021. Again, for all groups, median ratings were highest for relatively diverse streaming films in 2021. That is, for viewers 18-49 (3.08 ratings points) and Black households (12.49 ratings points), ratings peaked for streaming films with majority-minority casts. Seventy-two films fell into this cast diversity interval in 2021, including: Raya and the Last Dragon, Coming 2 America, Vivo, and Mortal Kombat. For viewers 18-49, though, it should be noted that streaming films with casts that were from 21 percent to 30 percent minority came in a close second (2.94 ratings points). For White (5.10 ratings points), Latinx (7.34 ratings points), Asian (5.90 ratings points), and other-race households (5.48 ratings points), streaming films that were from 21 percent to 30 percent minority also enjoyed the highest ratings in 2021. Examples of the 36 films that fell into this diversity interval include: Don’t Look Up, The Boss Baby: Family Business, and The Suicide Squad.

“We do think this dual-release strategy is here to stay,” Hunt said. “And it could have a lasting impact on diversity metrics in front of and behind the camera as studios think about how to finance content for different platforms.”

For example, the report found that women and people of color were far more likely than white men to direct films with budgets less than $20 million.

“A small production budget usually means that there is also little to no marketing and studio support, unless it’s from a production company known for making art house films,” Ramón said. “And that makes it more difficult for filmmakers to get the next opportunity if their films have to fight for attention.”

Hunt said studios are likely to bank on big-budget tentpole movies and sequels as traditional box office drivers, even as they continue to experiment with release platforms and adjust the amount of time between films’ theatrical releases and their arrival on streaming services or on DVD or Blu-ray.

Among the 2021 films released to streaming services, those with casts in which a majority of actors were non-white enjoyed the highest ratings among viewers aged 18 to 49 and in Black households. Seventy-two films with majority-minority casts were released on streaming in 2021, including “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Coming 2 America,” “Vivo” and “Mortal Kombat.”

Chart showing that Among the White,24 Black, Latinx, multiracial, and MENA directors helming 2021 films, women lagged far behind men. Only among Asian and Native directors did women approach or reach parity with their male counterparts in securing these important positions.

“In 2021, diversity in front of the camera did not equate to more opportunities behind the camera for filmmakers who are women and people of color,” Ramón said. “They continue to receive less financing, even when they make films with white lead actors. Most of these filmmakers are relegated to low-budget films. For women of color, directing and writing opportunities are really the final frontier.”

Of the filmmakers who directed the movies analyzed in the report, 21.8% were women and 30.2% were people of color. Among the screenwriters for those films, 33.5% were women and 32.3% were people of color. Diversity in both jobs increased incrementally from 2020.

Out of the 76 minority directors of 2021’s top films, just 23 were women. And among Black, Latino and multiracial directors, at least twice as many were men as women in each racial or ethnic classification.

Although there was gender parity among Asian American and Native American directors, the overall numbers of directors from those groups were very small: just 17 Asian American directors and and just two Native American directors were represented in 2021. Among white directors, 32 were women and 143 were men.

The authors counted one trans woman among the directors of the 2021 films they analyzed.

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

UCLA Geography Aerial ArchivesUCLA Geography Aerial Archives

A bird’s-eye view of history

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Iconic aerial photo archives from the UCLA Department of Geography are a rich resource for researchers and the public

UCLA Geography Aerial Archives

UCLA Geography Aerial Archives

By Jonathan Riggs

Today, anyone with a drone can capture dazzling images of the Earth below. But it wasn’t so long ago that would-be aerial photographers had to swing nearly 50-pound aerial cameras out of single-engine plane windows to do the same. The UCLA Department of Geography owns a huge number of such images in its Benjamin and Gladys Thomas Air Photo Archives, many of which detail California life and landscapes as far back as 1920. These remarkable images are as valuable artistically as they are historically.

In fact, the department has launched a new website featuring images from two of its collections, which are among the world’s best. Breathtaking images of Los Angeles and New York City—everything from a gorgeously moody shot of clouds over Manhattan on Oct. 15, 1931 to a view of UCLA and Westwood on Jan. 13, 1950—are available to purchase as fine art prints.

“The department was given these collections and has been maintaining them as best as possible for decades. However, some of the negatives are now over 100 years old and deserve better long-term treatment than we can give them,” says department chair Greg Okin. “Proceeds from the sale of images will allow us to preserve the physical images for posterity. It will also allow us to digitize them in order to ease access to the collection for generations to come.”

Overall, the Aerial Archives contain 120,000 black and white negatives, 100,000 black and white prints, and several hundred color images. What makes these collections so special is that they are exclusively oblique aerial photos, meaning they were taken from the side, rather than looking straight down as on a Google map. This angle captures a richness of detail that allows viewers to read signs, identify specific cars and even see what people were wearing.

UCLA Geography Aerial Archives

UCLA Geography Aerial Archives

In addition to bringing the past to vivid life for members of the public, these archives are an incredible scholarly resource.

“We have students and faculty across the university as well as people in many industries who use this unique resource for their research,” Okin says. “We can see, for example, the development of the Los Angeles River as it was channelized. We can identify areas of beach erosion. We can see how specific areas of Los Angeles have changed through time. We can see how the city developed into the complex place that it is now as well as map the legacies of policies and attitudes in the region. The potential uses are endless.”

Another devoted user of the Archives is Kelly Turner, assistant professor of Urban Planning and of Geography and co-director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. She’s leading a multifaceted project to explore how the racist policy of redlining—and hundreds of other seemingly unrelated and everyday actions by homeowners and developers alike—caused the L.A. neighborhood of Watts to become nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the overall city average.

“Our project aims to use innovative, interdisciplinary methods to say what land change occurred, why and how much it changed the temperature,” Turner says. “We hope to arm the community of Watts with data, and to enable them to pinpoint specific elements that can be effectively changed.”

UCLA Geography Aerial Archives

UCLA Geography Aerial Archives

Turner and her team, which includes anthropologist Bharat Venkat collecting oral histories and historian Marquis Vestal with expertise in the intersection of race and land transactions, are using the Archives to create a painstakingly accurate model of historic Watts over the years. By simulating the built environment so accurately, they are able to replicate the past microclimate conditions and determine how the temperature felt for the average citizen on the street on a given day.

“This project wouldn’t be possible without these archives. We need to know the exact placement of features like walls and sidewalks to build the model,” Turner says. “This high resolution imagery allows us to revisit a place with methods that were not available in the 1920s or ’50s to glean new insights that are relevant to contemporary debates about heat and environmental justice.”

“Archival photos reveal the history of planning decisions,” adds Tiffany Rivera, an urban and regional planning graduate student who is assisting on the project. “I look at these images to inform more sustainable and equitable urban designs.”

It’s fitting that these collections landed at UCLA: Los Angeles was a nexus for early aerial photography, and early motion pictures used aerial photography starting in the 1920s. These two iconic industries essentially grew up together just a few miles from campus, making the Archives especially meaningful for the UCLA community.

“We invite anyone interested to check out this incredible world-class resource, either on our website or to reach out and make an in-person visit,” says Okin. “It’s a remarkable opportunity for everyone to see what the collection, and UCLA, have to offer while also providing the chance to own beautiful pieces of history.”

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

An image of the Madrigal family from the Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Encanto”Courtesy of The Walt Disney Studios

UCLA botanist Felipe Zapata brings Colombia’s biodiversity to Academy Award winner ‘Encanto’

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An image of the Madrigal family from the Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Encanto”

The outside walls of Colombian homes are commonly adorned with magenta-colored bougainvillea vines like those on the Madrigals’ house. Image courtesy of The Walt Disney Studios.

Felipe Zapata taps into his life’s work, as well as childhood memories, to give the animated film its distinctive flora

By Madeline Adamo

Image of Felipe Zapata, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA

Felipe Zapata, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA

Felipe Zapata can vividly recall driving from Bogota, where he grew up, to Colombia’s Cocora Valley as a child to spend holidays and summers with family. He remembers crossing the rugged terrain of the Andes mountains as well as the descent into the warmer valleys marked by coffee plantations and greener tropical plants with blooms of many colors. The sudden appearance of wax palms, the tallest palm tree in the world, would signal to Zapata and his family that their destination was near.

It was those drives and the beauty of Colombia’s biodiversity — which includes staples such as the platanilla, a close relative of the banana tree; guadua, a neotropical bamboo; the guayacán, a tree with yellow flowers similar in form to the purple jacaranda tree; the yarumo, an umbrella-like tree with impressive leaves; and the presence birds like the great kiskadee and the parrot — that inspired Zapata, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College, to become a botanist.

What he didn’t expect was that his research and lived experiences would influence the distinctive landscapes of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Encanto,” a film that tells the tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals, who live hidden in the mountains of Colombia in a magical house adjacent to a vibrant town.

“Initially, it was going to be mainly about the wax palm,” said Zapata of his early advising on the film. But it quickly sprouted into much more. “All of a sudden it became an exploration of basically all the ecosystems in Colombia, and looking for key plants that you can identify and that they can easily draw.”

Image from “Encanto” of the character Mirabel standing in front of cloud forests

“There’s a kind of magic in these places,” said Felipe Zapata of the wax palms and cloud forests characteristic of the region where “Encanto” takes place.

Zapata, who specializes in the evolution of biological diversity, was soon bringing in his old field guides to familiarize filmmakers and artists with the region (also known as the country’s coffee region) and identifying birds, and native plants that people there would eat. Zapata enjoyed seeing some of his suggestions come to life in the film, from the herbs such as yerba buena and guasca that the character Julieta, who has the power to heal through food, wears in her apron, to the rendering of hummingbirds and toucans that frequent the vivid landscapes that provide part of the visual lushness of the film.

Zapata said he can’t choose one thing he’s most proud of, but that it might be how the representations of the wax palms and cloud forests set the tone for the film’s fantastical theme.

“There’s a kind of magic in these places,” said Zapata, whose Zoom background is wax palms and cloud forests on a cascading Colombian mountainside.

Zapata, who is also on the advisory committee of the UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden, said that he was initially contacted by Disney Animation after the garden’s former assistant director mentioned his name to Disney. The studio had asked if a Colombian researcher at UCLA could consult on biodiversity for the film.

Fast-forward about three years, and Zapata found himself sitting in the Hollywood premiere for “Encanto” among the filmmakers and stars such as Stephanie Beatriz (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), Diane Guerrero (“Orange is the New Black”), John Leguizamo (“Ice Age”) and María Cecilia Botero (“Enfermeras”). Also in the audience were members of the Colombian Cultural Trust, a group of Colombian experts who advised the filmmakers throughout the production.

“That was the first time that I saw the movie from beginning to end on a big screen, with the loud music and with multiple people from Colombia,” said Zapata, who is also a member of the UCLA Latin American Institute. “It was really, really exciting to see it.”

Members of the trust consulted on culture, anthropology, costume design, botany, music, language and architecture, as well as many other aspects of the film; the setting was inspired by the Cocora Valley in the early 20th century. Amongst the trust’s 10 members, Zapata was the only botanist.

“Encanto,” which has nabbed three Academy Award nominations, has made quite an impression on Zapata’s family back in Colombia, who went to see it in theaters after its November 2021 release, he said.

“They were so excited. My little cousins were looking for me in the movie — they thought that I was in it,” said Zapata, who was not able to talk about his role with the movie or in the Colombian Cultural Trust until after the film’s release.

Zapata said that filmmakers portrayed Colombia accurately, so much so that he got nostalgic when he saw the film for the first time. One of his favorite parts of the film, besides the complex narrative of the family, was seeing the small detail of the bamboo support beams within the walls of the Madrigals’ home. For Zapata, it evoked memories of the old houses he frequented during his memorable summers in the Cocora Valley.

Zapata, who was able to return home to Colombia last November, says that he’s happy to be able to share his line of work on such a creative platform.

“I always wanted to be able to engage the public and people who are not necessarily biologists,” Zapata said. “I was always looking for opportunities to do it, and this was amazing.”

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

Psychology professor working to eliminate health disparities

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A photo of Vickie Mays

“We are all connected. The extent to which we allow members of our society to be unequal is the extent to which we endanger the health of all,” says Vickie Mays, professor of psychology in the UCLA College whose work focuses on understanding the physical and mental health challenges of underserved populations.

A vital part of the UCLA faculty since 1979, Mays is a highly regarded thinker, scholar and leader. She is director of the UCLA Center on Bridging Research, Innovation, Training and Education (BRITE) for Minority Health Disparities Solutions, an NIH-funded center with approximately 80 faculty, staff, students and community partners working to eliminate physical and mental health disparities in racial/ethnic minority populations. Last year, Chancellor Block appointed Mays as Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Black Life.

Mays, who holds a joint appointment in health policy and management in the Fielding School of Public Health, has worked with members of Congress on a bill that would require better data on the race and ethnicity of people affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She also is conducting research on the data needed to create better models to predict the spread of COVID-19, in order to reduce the number of infections and deaths in Black communities.

Mays is co-senior author of a new UCLA-led study that found that Black men of all income levels reported experiencing higher levels of discrimination than their white counterparts. Published March 8 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, the study may help explain why increased income levels among Black men aren’t accompanied by improved physical and mental health outcomes, as they are for whites.

This article was written by Margaret MacDonald.

A photo of a Black man in suit and tie.

UCLA-led study reveals ‘hidden costs’ of being Black in the U.S.

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A photo of a Black man in suit and tie.

The study’s findings may help explain why increased income levels among Black men aren’t accompanied by improved physical and mental health outcomes, as they are for whites, researchers say. (Photo Credit: iStock.com/FlamingoImages)

A woman grips her purse tightly as you approach. A store manager follows you because you look “suspicious.” You enter a high-end restaurant, and the staff assume you’re applying for a job. You’re called on in work meetings only when they’re talking about diversity.

The indignities and humiliations Black men — even those who have “made it” — regularly endure have long been seen as part and parcel of life in the United States among the Black community, a sort of “Black tax” that takes a heavy toll on physical and mental health.

Now, a new UCLA-led study reveals these “hidden costs” of being Black in America. Researchers who analyzed a national sample of the views of Black men and white men found that Black men of all income levels reported experiencing higher levels of discrimination than their white counterparts.

“Black men face constant experiences of discrimination and disappointment when they try to contribute. They are treated like criminals in a society where they often are not allowed to achieve their full potential,” said the study’s co-senior author, Vickie Mays, a professor of psychology in the UCLA College and of health policy and management at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health.

“Successful Black men,” she said, “hope their hard work will pay off and instead are tormented to find their education and income often do not protect them from racial discrimination. The ‘return on achievement’ is reduced for Blacks in the U.S. It’s a disturbing wake-up call.”

The study, “Money protects white but not African American men against discrimination,” is published today in the peer-reviewed open-access International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

To measure perceived discrimination, the researchers analyzed data from the National Survey of American Life that assessed the mental health of 1,271 Black and 372 non-Hispanic white adults who live in the same areas across the U.S. Survey questions inquired about chronic, daily experiences over the past year. For example, respondents were asked how often in their day-to-day lives any of the following had occurred: “being followed around in stores,” “people acting as if they think you are dishonest,” “receiving poorer service than other people at restaurants” and “being called names or insulted.” Scaled response options ranged from 1 (“never”) to 6 (“almost every day”).

The results indicate that many Black men face discriminatory indignities on a nearly daily basis, year after year — and the experience is exhausting, said Mays, who directs the National Institutes of Health–funded UCLA BRITE Center for Science, Research and Policy and is a special advisor to UCLA’s chancellor on Black life. “It takes a toll on your physical and mental health. You get depleted.”

The daily discrimination measured by the survey did not include other frequently cited injustices, such as being pulled over and questioned by police officers without cause and facing discrimination in housing, education, jobs and health care, said Mays. She noted that while the study’s results were distressing, they were not particularly surprising.

“We’ve known this,” she said, “but now it’s documented. This is evidence.”

Higher incomes and achievement offer Black men little relief

While the study found that for white men, increases in household income were inversely associated with perceived discrimination, this did not hold true for Black men, who continued to report high levels of discrimination regardless of any boost in income level.

The findings may explain why Black men, even as they attain greater financial and educational success on average, don’t gain much protection against negative physical and mental health outcomes the way white men generally do, said co-senior author Susan Cochran, a professor of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health.

“In the United States, many people believe that higher levels of income and education provide relief against being treated differently, badly or unfairly,” Cochran said. “The results of our study show that is truer for white men, but it’s clearly not the case for many Black men. Structural barriers limit the benefits of Black men’s economic achievements, and perceived discrimination increases the risk of adverse physical and mental health outcomes.”

For Black men, increases in income at all financial levels actually lead to more perceived discrimination, perhaps because they come into increased contact with whites, according to lead author Shervin Assari, who conducted the analysis as a researcher with the BRITE Center for Science, Research and Policy and is currently an associate professor of urban public health and family medicine at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.

“It was upsetting to write this study,” Assari said. “Successful Blacks expect better treatment and think they deserve it but often do not get it.”

Discrimination, the authors say, is embedded in the fabric of U.S. institutions and harms Black men in their daily lives. For Mays, the damage this does to equal opportunity brings to mind the 1951 Langston Hughes poem “Harlem,” in which the poet asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”

“Change has to come faster,” Mays said. “Change has to be permanent. We are tired of hearing ‘wait your turn.’ Black men’s dreams have been deferred for far too long.”

The research was supported by the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities and the National Institute of Mental Health.

This article, written by Stuart Wolpert, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

A photo of a worker wearing a face covering on a delivery truck.

$1.3 million grant will help UCLA advance workforce equity and empowerment

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A photo of a worker wearing a face covering on a delivery truck.

The new initiative will seek ways to help build a more equitable economy after the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo Credit: Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels)

The UCLA Labor Center has received a $1.3 million grant from the James Irvine Foundation to establish the California Workforce Development Worker Equity Initiative with the National Skills Coalition.

Leading the effort for UCLA are Betty Hung, project director at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and Ana Luz Gonzalez-Vasquez, a project manager at the Labor Center. The National Skills Coalition is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for policies and skills training to benefit workers and businesses.

The Worker Equity Initiative will collaborate with the state of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency to explore how government agencies and their partners help workers thrive in quality careers, particularly as California recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic and recession.

“The California Workforce Development Worker Equity Initiative will shed light on how to improve public sector supports and systems while specifically centering the needs and career aspirations of those who have been hit hardest by COVID-19 and racism and other discrimination,” Hung said.

The effort has already begun: The initiative is in the midst of 18 months of community engagement, planning and research, with representatives collecting input from local workers and community leaders. The initiative will then recommend state-level policy changes and highlight opportunities for Californians to push for similar improvements at the federal level.

The initiative also will engage Californians who have been most affected by the recession and those who have been excluded, underserved or marginalized by longstanding structural barriers of discrimination. By soliciting their voices, the initiative aims to increase racial and worker equity in the state’s public workforce development efforts.

“We are extremely grateful for this generous and very timely grant from the James Irvine Foundation,” Gonzalez-Vasquez said. “These funds will help us build upon our partnership with the National Skills Coalition and enable us to focus on ways our society can recover from COVID-19 to build a more equitable economy.”

In addition to the leadership of the UCLA Labor Center and National Skills Coalition, the initiative will benefit from the expertise of a statewide steering committee representing worker centers, nonprofit training providers, labor unions and local workforce boards. The committee members are:

  • Janel Bailey, Los Angeles Black Worker Center
  • John Brauer, California Labor Federation
  • Lisa Countryman-Quiroz, Jewish Vocational Services (San Francisco Bay Area)
  • Rebecca Hanson, SEIU UHW and Joint Employer Education Fund/Shirley Ware Education Center
  • Sheheryar Kaoosji, Warehouse Worker Resource Center
  • Cesar Lara, MILPA Collective and Monterey Bay Central Labor Council
  • Sam Lewis, Anti-Recidivism Coalition
  • Arcenio Lopez, Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project
  • Simon Lopez, Goodwill Southern California
  • Laura Medina, Building Skills Partnership
  • Pedro Ramirez, Central Valley Worker Center
  • Rebecca Rolfe, San Francisco LGBT Center
  • Aquilina Soriano, Pilipino Workers Center
  • Brooke Valle, San Diego Workforce Partnership

The James Irvine Foundation is a private, nonprofit grantmaking foundation dedicated to expanding opportunity for the people of California. The foundation’s focus is a California where all low-income workers have the power to advance economically. Since 1937 the foundation has provided more than $2.09 billion in grants to organizations throughout California, and it has contributed to UCLA since 1970.

This article, written by Ariel Okamoto, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

A photo of people sleeping at Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles

The history of homelessness in Los Angeles points to new approaches

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A photo of people sleeping at Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles

Among the recommendations in the new report: Officials must stop treating homelessness as a criminal act. (Photo Credit: Levi Clancy/Wikimedia Commons)

Homelessness in Los Angeles was already on the rise before COVID-19 struck. But the health and economic fallout of the pandemic has left many more low-income residents on the brink of housing insecurity.

While recent statewide legislation prevents evictions through June and creates options to help Angelenos pay back rent, the homelessness problem could worsen significantly as the pandemic and business closures continue.

A new report by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy offers recommendations for policies that the authors say could help tackle the crisis. The suggestions are based on a wealth of insights about the history of homelessness in Los Angeles County.

The report (PDF) details a complex web of causes to this crisis, whose economic, racial, social and political roots date back to the Great Depression — many other studies on the issue go back only to the 1970s. The authors write that those factors converged to disproportionately affect people of color, particularly African Americans. While white, single, older men made up a majority of Los Angeles’s homeless population prior to the 1980s, Black and Latino people began to make up a majority of the homeless population after that.

Among the report’s chief recommendations: Officials should stop treating homelessness as a criminal act, address rental and land use policies— for example, by expanding renter protection and landlord regulations and converting unused or underused property into supportive housing — and improve residents’ access to mental health and other social services.

“The report offers deep historical analysis in centering the long-term structural causes of racial and economic inequality in Los Angeles,” said David Myers, a UCLA professor of history and director of the Luskin Center. “In doing so, it calls for a new policy approach, one that recognizes the repeated failure of piecemeal, short-term and color-blind approaches. It insists that access to adequate housing is a basic human right, not a societal luxury.”

The report reveals that a lack of meaningful coordination among city and county agencies has hampered structural changes. After years of political battling on how to handle homelessness, the city and county in 1993 jointly created the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. But, the report contends, even that has not led to a long-term coordinated strategy. Solutions like permanent supportive housing have yet to take hold. A 2007 permanent supportive housing program called Project 50 was largely successful but ultimately not supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

According to the report, the Los Angeles homelessness crisis largely began during World War II, when housing development could not keep up with the city’s population growth. A rush of federal housing development and widespread rent control was enacted in 1942 in response. But redlining and exclusionary zoning practices excluded most people of color from the postwar housing boom, setting the stage for racial disparities that continue today.

Another factor was California’s shutting down of mental health care institutions beginning in the 1950s, which left few options for indigent people with mental health challenges. Many of them ended up on the streets, in jail or cycling between the two, according to the report.

And many residents with mental health struggles continue to fall through the cracks, the analysis found, as a result of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health’s reliance on a patchwork of agencies to provide mental health and drug use treatment.

In addition, a focus on criminalizing people who live on the street — a trend that intensified nationally since the 1970s and still informs Los Angeles’ approach today — has not helped mitigate homelessness. A 1976 plan to prevent the expansion of Skid Row’s homeless population relocated homeless services to a 50-block “containment zone” and selective policing was used to discourage residents from leaving the zone. The plan was unsuccessful and the policy was formally reversed in 2016.

And, the authors write, the city’s 2006 zero-tolerance policy on crime on Skid Row had the effect of putting poor and mentally ill people into the criminal justice system and then back onto the streets.

The report also examines demographic trends and real estate policies that contributed to the issue. For example:

– While the Los Angeles population boomed again in the late 1990s, housing development did not. In 1998 and 1999, the city’s population increased by 65,000 people, but the net increase in housing units was just 1,940.

– Some real estate developers and businesses have lobbied against policies that would produce low-cost housing or establish broader rent control policies that would keep housing more affordable.

Myers said future policies must take into account the desires of homeless people themselves.

“One thing we found while looking back was the consistency with which unhoused people, across the 20th century, have proposed solutions to the problem centered on repurposing vacant land and unused or underutilized public property,” he said. “The report suggests that any policy response that doesn’t take into account the desires, demands and visions of houseless people — particularly regarding the right to autonomy and self-determination — are doomed to fail.”

Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, a visiting assistant professor of history at UCLA and co-author of the report, said the authors hope the research helps reframe housing as a basic human right.

“Looking back at almost a century of history, we indicate how intractable the problem has been and still is,” she said. “We are suggesting a need to rethink core assumptions about property and tenancy rights and, more fundamentally, who has a right to the city.”

This article, written by Jessica Wolf, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

A rendering of the NASA Perseverance rover as it would appear on Mars.

Q&A: David Paige on the Mars Perseverance landing

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A rendering of the NASA Perseverance rover as it would appear on Mars.

Rendering of the NASA Perseverance. The rover’s RIMFAX technology will use radar waves to probe the unexplored world that lies beneath the Martian surface. (Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/FFI)

NASA’s Perseverance rover is scheduled to land on Mars on Feb. 18 after a six-and-a-half month flight. Over the next two years, it will explore Jezero Crater, which is in Mars’ northern hemisphere, for signs of ancient life and for new clues about the planet’s climate and geology.

Among other tasks, it will collect rock and soil samples in tubes that a later spacecraft will bring back to Earth, and the experiments will lay the groundwork for future human and robotic exploration of Mars.

Perseverance, which is about the size of a car, is outfitted with seven different instruments, including the Radar Imager for Mars‘ Subsurface Experiment, or RIMFAX. RIMFAX will probe beneath the planet’s surface to study its geology in detail, and its deputy principal investigator is David Paige, a UCLA professor of planetary science.

In an email interview with UCLA Newsroom, Paige discussed his hopes for the mission. Some answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Why do you want to study Jezero Crater’s geologic history?

Jezero Crater is a very interesting location on Mars because it looks like there was once a lake inside the crater, and that a river flowed into the lake and deposited sediments in a delta. We plan to land near the delta and then explore it to learn more about Mars’ climate history, and maybe something about ancient Martian life. What we’ll be able to see once we start roving and what we will actually learn is anybody’s guess.

RIMFAX will provide a highly detailed view of subsurface structures and help find clues to past environments on Mars, including those that may have provided the conditions necessary for supporting life.

A photo of David Paige.

David Paige (Courtesy of David Paige)

What are you hoping to discover?

Well, the first thing to know about RIMFAX is that it’s an experiment. We’ve never tried using a ground-penetrating radar on Mars before, so we can’t really predict what types of subsurface structures we might be able to see.

But we have done some fairly extensive field testing of RIMFAX on Earth to learn how to use it and how to interpret the data. Here, ground-penetrating radars can be very useful for clarifying subsurface geology, but with any kind of imaging system, the science of ground-penetrating radar comes from the interpretation of the images, and interpretation relies on context.

Frankly, if we are able to usefully interpret anything we see in the RIMFAX data, the experiment will be a success. Any discoveries we make beyond that will be icing on the cake.

Are you hopeful of finding water, or evidence of water, beneath the planet’s surface?

There are all kinds of evidence for past liquid water all over Mars. At Jezero, there must have been a lot of water at some point, but we don’t expect that the ground beneath the rover will still be wet.

Mars today is a very cold place, and any water in the shallow subsurface should be frozen at Jezero. What we’re interested in finding are geologic features that wouldn’t be expected to form under present climatic conditions, as those would be especially interesting targets to search for signs of past life.

However, searching for past life on Mars may be very difficult, and we should not expect instant success. After all, we know the Earth was literally crawling with life, but definitive evidence for past life on Earth, especially ancient life, is very rare.

What is your role in the research? 

My role is to help plan the observations and analyze the results. Since the rover will be working on Mars time, in which the days are 24.5 hours long, responsibility for the operation of RIMFAX will pingpong between Norway and UCLA every two weeks. Having operations centers on two continents will make it easier to keep up with the mission and stay on a reasonably normal schedule.

In fact, RIMFAX was designed, paid for and built by our colleagues in Norway. I teamed up with my colleague, Svein-Erik Hamran of the University of Oslo, to propose the instrument to NASA, and it has been a rewarding experience to work with the international RIMFAX team.

Are UCLA students involved?

Yes. Mark Nasielski, a UCLA graduate student in electrical engineering, is part of our operations team. And Max Parks and Tyler Powell, graduate students in Earth, planetary and space sciences, are part of our science team.

This article, written by Stuart Wolpert, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.