Archive for category: Box 3

UCLA collaboration fosters mathematical brilliance of Latino and Black middle school students

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Undergraduates work in L.A. schools to bolster math learning through innovative research electives

Middle school students presenting about STEM research in their South L.A. communities

Middle school students presented their research poster about whether there should be a vaccine mandate for teenagers. | Don Liebig/UCLA

Holly Ober | January 4, 2023

A program that brings together UCLA students, the Los Angeles Unified School District and professional engineers and technologists to enhance mathematics learning in select South Los Angeles middle schools has made its public debut.

Forget boring demonstrations of solving equations on a whiteboard or listening to long lectures about math. As part of the Applied Mathematics Mentorship Program, on Dec. 14 the middle school students presented the results of research projects that were connected to their communities. The projects included studying the impacts of heat islands and COVID-19 on their neighborhoods, and on aerospace efforts in South Los Angeles. The research investigations were created so students could apply the mathematics they learn in the classroom to investigate and analyze mathematical issues and opportunities in their neighborhoods.

“We’re trying to embed mirrors and windows into the student experience so they see mathematics as a field in which they belong,” said Heather Dallas, executive director of the Curtis Center for Mathematics and Teaching at UCLA.

Supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Applied Mathematics Mentorship Program is a collaborative effort of the Curtis Center, three LAUSD middle schools, SpaceX engineers, FieldKit environmental technologists and the UCLA Myco-fluidics Lab.

The program places UCLA undergraduates as mentors at Barack Obama Global Preparatory Academy, William Jefferson Clinton Middle School, and Western Avenue T.E.C.H. Magnet School to support student research.

“It is important to show students mathematicians from their community doing mathematics for their community to inspire them to believe: I can do mathematics, I AM a mathematician,” Dallas said.

The program innovates mathematics learning by tapping into students’ innate desire to explore and understand the world around them. The effort highlights the relevance of mathematics and shows students how their community uses math to make a difference in the world.

The investigations are the brainchild of Dallas and Travis Holden, principal of Barack Obama Global Preparatory Academy and a UCLA alumnus who earned his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics. Holden originally reached out to the Curtis Center to provide training for his mathematics department to implement a new textbook during the height of the pandemic.

The collaboration developed further when Dallas and Holden discussed a suggestion by an outside observer to involve the UCLA’s mathematics department in tutoring his middle school students.

“I told Heather I was big on not doing something remedial because I know that doesn’t work and it doesn’t excite kids,” Holden said. “I wanted to build on strengths our students already had. There’s a lot of research that says if you maintain high cognitive challenges during learning you see higher levels of learning.”

If research experiences during his time at UCLA excited him about mathematics, research could inspire his middle school students, too, he reasoned.

Dallas understood immediately, and pursued funding for a two-pronged effort: collaborate with mathematicians and scientists to develop relevant applied mathematics research investigations aligned to the school’s mathematics textbook and provide professional development for teachers and UCLA undergraduate mentors to facilitate the investigations. The Gates Foundation funded the effort and a research study of its effectiveness, which precipitated expansion to nearby Clinton Middle School and Western Avenue T.E.C.H.

Seventh-grade students collected data using devices from Los Angeles startup company, FieldKit to analyze heat islands in their communities. Heat islands occur in urban areas that experience higher temperatures compared to surrounding areas with more vegetation because buildings and roads reflect heat.

Eighth graders researched the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on their community. In the Grade 9 investigation, student learned about aerospace endeavors in South Los Angeles, highlighting the experiences of local astronauts and SpaceX engineers of color.

“The 7th grade investigation places students in the driver seat to solve challenges in their own community.  Students learn how to look at a problem, explore solutions and most importantly use their voice to bring upon change,” said Johnny Rivera, principal of Western T.E.C.H.

Cassandra Robbins, vice principal of Clinton Middle School, said that she sees students giving up on mathematics before they even start because it seems irrelevant to their goals. She said that the math interventions they have tried have not moved the students forward much, but the Curtis Center was not offering just another intervention.

“The Curtis Center came up with this idea that, similar to a physics class, you tie theory together with laboratory experience. It’s an addition to, not a replacement for regular math class,” Robbins said.

To study heat islands, for example, the students must learn about how materials absorb or reflect light, take accurate temperature readings, and apply mathematics to calculate averages. To study COVID, the students track and compare the spread of the illness in their own and surrounding communities. They do experiments and then graph, analyze and discuss the resulting data. In addition to applying grade-level mathematics, the students learn valuable lessons about teamwork and mathematical practice.

“It’s really great coaching them — they see me as a coach. They’re fully engaged,” said Jose Medel, who teaches a seventh grade elective on heat islands at Clinton Middle School.

The event, held at the Barack Obama Global Preparatory Academy, included a panel of STEM professionals of color, student research team poster presentations and a reception honoring their accomplishments.

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

Still image from a fairyland virtual reality environmentCourtesy of Jesse Rissman

When using virtual reality as a teaching tool, context and ‘feeling real’ matter

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People remember foreign vocabulary better when lessons are associated with distinct environments, UCLA study finds

Still image from a fairyland virtual reality environment

Subjects in the study were asked to learn Swahili or Chinyanja names for the objects they encountered in a fantasy fairyland, pictured here, or a science fiction landscape. | Courtesy of Jesse Rissman

Holly Ober | December 15, 2022

A new study by UCLA psychologists reveals that when VR is used to teach language, context and realism matter.

The research is published in the journal npj Science of Learning.

“The context in which we learn things can help us remember them better,” said Jesse Rissman, the paper’s corresponding author and a UCLA associate professor of psychology. “We wanted to know if learning foreign languages in virtual reality environments could improve recall, especially when there was the potential for two sets of words to interfere with each other.”

Researchers asked 48 English-speaking participants to try to learn 80 words in two phonetically similar African languages, Swahili and Chinyanja, as they navigated virtual reality settings.

Wearing VR headsets, participants explored one of two environments — a fantasy fairyland or a science fiction landscape — where they could click to learn the Swahili or Chinyanja names for the objects they encountered. Some participants learned both languages in the same VR environment; others learned one language in each environment.

Participants navigated through the virtual worlds four times over the course of two days, saying the translations aloud each time. One week later, the researchers followed up with a pop quiz to see how well the participants remembered what they had learned.

The results were striking: Subjects who had learned each language in its own unique context mixed up fewer words and were able to recall 92% of the words they had learned. In contrast, participants who had learned both sets of words in the same VR context were more likely to confuse terms between the two languages and retained only 76% of the words.

Jesse+Rissman

Jesse Rissman | Courtesy of Jesse Rissman

The study is particularly timely because so many K-12 schools, colleges and universities moved to develop online learning platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Apps like Zoom provide a rather bland context for learning,” Rissman said. “As VR technology becomes more ubiquitous and affordable, remote learners could be instantly teleported into unique and richly featured contexts for each class.”

The experiment was designed by Rissman and Joey Ka-Yee Essoe, the study’s first author who was a UCLA doctoral student at the time.

Rissman said a key predictor of the subjects’ ability to retain what they had learned was how immersed in the VR world they felt. The less a participant felt like a subject in a psychology experiment — and the more “at one” they felt with their avatar — the more the virtual contexts were able to positively affect their learning.

“The more a person’s brain was able to reconstruct the unique activity pattern associated with the learning context, the better able they were to recall the foreign words they had learned there,” Rissman said.

Psychologists have long understood that people tend to recall things more readily if they can remember something about the surrounding context in which they learned it — the so-called “context crutch” phenomenon. But when information is tied to contextual cues, people can have trouble recalling it later in the absence of those cues.

For example, students might learn Spanish in the same kind of classroom where they learn other subjects. When that happens, their Spanish vocabulary can be tied to the same contextual cues that are tied to other material they’ve been taught, like the Pythagorean theorem or a Shakespeare play. Not only does that similar context make it easier to mix up or forget what they have learned, but it also can make it harder to remember any of the information outside of a classroom setting.

“A key takeaway is that if you learn the same thing in same environment, you’ll learn it really fast,” said Essoe, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at Johns Hopkins University. “But even though you learn fast, you might have trouble with recall. What we were able to harness in this research takes advantage of both learning fast and improving recall in new environment.”

To understand the brain mechanisms that support context-dependent learning, the researchers recruited a separate group of participants and scanned their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. As the subjects attempted to recall foreign words while in the scanner, their brain activity indicated that they were thinking about the context in which they had learned each word.

That finding suggests that virtual reality can enhance learning if it is convincingly produced and if different languages or scholastic subjects are taught in highly distinctive environments.

Rissman said although the study only assessed how people learned a foreign language, the results indicate that VR could be useful for teaching other subjects as well. Similar approaches could also be used for mental and behavioral health therapies and to help patients adhere to doctors’ instructions after medical visits: Patients might be able to remember such guidance better if they’re in their own homes while chatting online with their doctors, for example.

Said Essoe: “Variable contexts can ground information in more environmental cues.”

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

Black Americans’ COVID vaccine hesitancy stems more from today’s inequities than historical ones

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UCLA study urges medical community to pursue changes that build better trust

Woman receives vaccine shot

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Holly Ober | October 27, 2022

Key takeaways:
• Doctors and distrust. Black Americans are more likely than whites to report poor interactions with their physicians.
• Not history but here and now. These personal experiences — rather than wrongs of the past — tend to heighten their distrust of the health care system and lead to skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccination rate in the Black community lagged well behind that of whites, a gap many in the media speculated was the result of fears based on historical health-related injustices like the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

But new research by UCLA psychologists shows that vaccine hesitancy and mistrust of medical professionals among Black Americans may hinge more on their current unsatisfactory health care experiences than on their knowledge of past wrongs.

The findings, the researchers say, clearly illustrate the need for both broad and specific changes within the medical community to improve experiences and build better trust with Black patients. The research is published in the journal Health Psychology.

“History is important, no doubt, but Black Americans do not have to reach into the past for examples of inequity in health care — many have experienced it themselves,” said Kimberly Martin, who led the research as a UCLA doctoral student and is now a UC President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at UC San Francisco.

In the first of two studies, Martin and her UCLA colleagues surveyed approximately 300 Black and white participants in December 2020, just as vaccines were becoming available. Black respondents expressed less trust in medical professionals and reported significantly less positive experiences with the health care system than their white counterparts. They were also less likely to report an intention to get vaccinated.

Participants were also queried about their familiarity with the 1932–72 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. government studied Black men with syphilis without their informed consent and intentionally withheld treatment, leading to medical complications, fatalities and transmission of the disease to family members. Some 66% of Black participants and 62% of white participants said they were familiar with the study, though Black participants generally knew more about it. Familiarity, however, was not associated with greater medical mistrust or vaccine hesitancy in either group, the researchers found.

Ultimately, the authors concluded, Black respondents’ trust in medical professionals had been undermined by a lack of positive health care experiences, contributing to a hesitancy to get vaccinated.

“A damaging narrative suggested in popular media has been that Black Americans were less likely to want a COVID-19 vaccination primarily because of the Tuskegee study,” said Martin, who along with her co-researchers found that the study had been mentioned 168 times in TV news reports on vaccine hesitancy between October 2020 and November 2021. “However, Tuskegee is only one of many relevant historical examples of medical mistreatment toward Black Americans, and this framing completely disregards current inequity and injustice in health care.”

Co-author Annette Stanton, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA, said implications that Black Americans can and should “get over the past” as a means to reducing health inequities are not only offensive but misguided, given the findings.

“The findings point to Black Americans’ present-day experiences in the medical system as an important factor among multiple contributors to inequities, and physicians and health systems can indeed take action to improve these experiences,” she said. “Respectful, competent and caring medical professionals can be agents of change.”

A second study, conducted several months after the first, surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 12,750 Black and white Americans and found no statistically significant racial difference in the proportion of those who had been vaccinated or were intending to get vaccinated. But once again, Black participants reported less medical trust than whites. Black respondents also reported feeling less cared-for by their physicians than white respondents, which the researchers said contributes to lower levels of trust.

Among those who were not yet vaccinated, both Black and white participants who had less trust in the medical community and felt less cared-for by their personal physician were also less likely to report an intention to get vaccinated.

The current studies add to an extensive body of research showing that Black Americans have worse health care experiences than whites. And while the vaccination gap between Blacks and whites has decreased, issues of inequitable treatment and medical mistrust remain and need to be addressed in the context of present-day experiences, the researchers emphasized.

“Characterizing race-related disparities in health care experiences as a relic of the past excludes current medical experiences and absolves the current health care system from making needed change,” said co-author Kerri Johnson, a UCLA professor of communication and psychology.

Johnson and the other authors said that going forward, health care professionals and researchers need to identify and implement changes that could provide Black Americans with more equitable and satisfying health care experiences.

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

Graphic depiction of Quantum Computing. Image by Stephan SullivanStephan Sullivan

UCLA-led team develops new approach for building quantum computers

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The building blocks of chemistry offer the potential to dramatically scale up quantum processing
An artist’s representation shows the researchers’ quantum functional groups (brightly colored spheres) connecting with larger molecules.

An artist’s representation shows the researchers’ quantum functional groups (brightly colored spheres) connecting with larger molecules. Image by Stephan Sullivan

Wayne Lewis | 

Key takeaways:

   • Stronger, faster. Quantum computers promise far greater speed and processing power than today’s most powerful supercomputers.​​​​
   • The quantum quandary. Because these next-generation computers rely on the fragile interaction of atomic and subatomic particles, scaling up their processing power has proved a challenge.​​​​​
   • A chemistry solution. Researchers have created a new molecule that has the potential to protect quantum interaction at greater scales without the need for traditional electrical engineering tools and machinery.

Quantum computing, though still in its early days, has the potential to dramatically increase processing power by harnessing the strange behavior of particles at the smallest scales. Some research groups have already reported performing calculations that would take a traditional supercomputer thousands of years. In the long term, quantum computers could provide unbreakable encryption and simulations of nature beyond today’s capabilities.

A UCLA-led interdisciplinary research team including collaborators at Harvard University has now developed a fundamentally new strategy for building these computers. While the current state of the art employs circuits, semiconductors and other tools of electrical engineering, the team has produced a game plan based in chemists’ ability to custom-design atomic building blocks that control the properties of larger molecular structures when they’re put together.

The findings, published last week in Nature Chemistry, could ultimately lead to a leap in quantum processing power.

“The idea is, instead of building a quantum computer, to let chemistry build it for us,” said Eric Hudson, UCLA’s David S. Saxon Presidential Professor of Physics and corresponding author of the study. “All of us are still learning the rules for this type of quantum technology, so this work is very sci-fi right now.”

Image of Eric Hudson in his UCLA office. | Stuart Wolpert/UCLA

Image of Eric Hudson in his UCLA office. | Stuart Wolpert/UCLA

The basic units of information in traditional computing are bits, which are each limited to one of only two values. In contrast, a group of quantum bits — or qubits — can have a vastly wider range of values, exponentially increasing a computer’s processing power. More than 1,000 normal bits are required to represent just 10 qubits, while 20 qubits require more than 1 million bits.

That characteristic, at the heart of quantum computing’s transformational potential, depends on the counterintuitive rules that apply when atoms interact. For instance, when two particles interact, they can become linked, or entangled, so that measuring the properties of one determines the properties of the other. Entangling qubits is a requirement of quantum computing.

However, this entanglement is fragile. When qubits encounter subtle variations in their environments, they lose their “quantumness,” which is needed to implement quantum algorithms. This limits the most powerful quantum computers to fewer than 100 qubits, and keeping these qubits in a quantum state requires large pieces of machinery.

To apply quantum computing practically, engineers must scale up that processing power. Hudson and his colleagues believe they have made a first step with the study, where theory guided the team to tailor-make molecules that protect quantum behavior.

The scientists developed small molecules that include calcium and oxygen atoms and act as qubits. These calcium-oxygen structures form what chemists call a functional group, meaning that it can be plugged into almost any other molecule while also conferring its own properties to that molecule.

The team showed that their functional groups maintained their desired structure even when attached to much larger molecules. Their qubits can also stand up to laser cooling, a key requirement for quantum computing.

“If we can bond a quantum functional group to a surface or some long molecule, we might be able to control more qubits,” Hudson said. “It should also be cheaper to scale up, because an atom is one of the cheapest things in the universe. You can make as many as you want.”

In addition to its potential for next-generation computing, the quantum functional group could be a boon for basic discovery in chemistry and the life sciences, for instance by helping scientists uncover more about the structure and function of various molecules and chemicals in the human body.

“Qubits can also be exquisitely sensitive tools for measurement,” said study co-author Justin Caram, a UCLA assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry. “If we could protect them so they can survive in complex environments such as biological systems, we would be armed with so much new information about our world.”

Hudson said that the development of a chemically based quantum computer could realistically take decades and is not certain to succeed. Future steps include anchoring qubits to larger molecules, coaxing tethered qubits to interact as processors without unwanted signaling, and entangling them so that they work as a system.

The project was seeded by a Department of Energy grant that gave the physicists and chemists the chance to cut through discipline-specific jargon and speak in a common scientific language. Caram also credits UCLA’s atmosphere of easy collaboration.

“This is one of the most intellectually fulfilling projects I’ve ever worked on,” he said. “Eric and I first met having lunch at the Faculty Center. This was born out of fun conversations and being open to talking to new people.”

UCLA postdoctoral researcher Guo-Zhu Zhu is the study’s first author. Other UCLA co-authors are doctoral students Claire Dickerson and Guanming Lao and faculty members Anastassia Alexandrova and Wesley Campbell.

The study was also supported by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

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

Image of Members of the quantum innovation hub at the UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering.Marc Roseboro/UCLA California NanoSystems Institute

$5 million from Boeing will support UCLA quantum science and technology research

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Image of Members of UCLA Quantum Innovation Hub at the CNSI Building

Members of the quantum innovation hub at the UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering. Image credit: Marc Roseboro/UCLA California NanoSystems Institute

By Jonathan Riggs |

UCLA has received a $5 million pledge from Boeing Co. to support faculty at the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering.

The center, which is jointly operated by the UCLA College Division of Physical Sciences and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, brings together scientists and engineers at the leading edge of quantum information science and technology. Its members have expertise in disciplines spanning physics, materials science, electrical engineering, computer science, chemistry and mathematics.

“We are grateful for Boeing’s significant pledge, which will help drive innovation in quantum science,” said Miguel García-Garibay, UCLA’s dean of physical sciences. “This remarkable investment demonstrates confidence that UCLA’s renowned faculty and researchers will spur progress in this emerging field.”

UCLA faculty and researchers are already working on exciting advances in quantum science and engineering, García-Garibay said. And the division’s new one-year master’s program, which begins this fall, will help meet the huge demand for trained professionals in quantum technologies.

Quantum science explores the laws of nature that apply to matter at the very smallest scales, like atoms and subatomic particles. Scientists and engineers believe that controlling quantum systems has vast potential for advancing fields ranging from medicine to national security.

“Harnessing quantum technologies for the aerospace industry is one of the great challenges we face in the coming years,” said Greg Hyslop, Boeing’s chief engineer and executive vice president of engineering, test and technology. “We are committed to growing this field of study and our relationship with UCLA moves us in that direction.”

In addition to its uses in aerospace, examples of quantum theory already in action include superconducting magnets, lasers and MRI scans. The next generation of quantum technology will enable powerful quantum computers, sensors and communication systems and transform clinical trials, defense systems, clean water systems and a wide range of other technologies.

“Quantum information science and technology promises society-changing capabilities in everything from medicine to computing and beyond,” said Eric Hudson, UCLA’s David S. Saxon Presidential Professor of Physics and co-director of the center. “There is still, however, much work to be done to realize these benefits. This work requires serious partnership between academia and industry, and the Boeing pledge will be an enormous help in both supporting cutting-edge research at UCLA and creating the needed relationships with industry stakeholders.”

The Boeing gift complements recent support from the National Science Foundation, including a $25 million award in 2020 to the multi-university NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Present and Future Quantum Computation, which Hudson co-directs. And in 2021, the UCLA center received a five-year, $3 million traineeship grant for doctoral students from the NSF.

Founded in 2018, the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering draws from the talents and creativity of dozens of faculty members and students.

“Boeing’s support is a huge boost for quantum science and engineering at UCLA,” said Mark Gyure, executive director of the center and a UCLA adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “Enhancing the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering will attract additional world-class faculty in this rapidly growing field and, together with Boeing and other companies in the region, establish Los Angeles and Southern California as a major hub in quantum science and technology.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. 

Image of Richard and Linda TurcoCourtesy of the Turcos

UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability receives $1.5 million pledge from founding director

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The gift from Richard and Linda Turco will support students engaged in environmental research

Image of Richard and Linda Turco

Richard and Linda Turco | Image courtesy of the Turcos

By Margaret MacDonald | 

Richard Turco, the founding director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and his wife, Linda Turco, have pledged $1.5 million to the institute to establish an endowment for the support of undergraduate and graduate students.

The couple’s gift commitment has been augmented by $750,000 from the UCLA dean of physical sciences’ gift matching program, bringing the total to $2.25 million.

“Thanks in large part to the dedication and pioneering efforts of Richard Turco, the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability has evolved to become a real force for environmental truth and equity,” said the institute’s current director, Marilyn Raphael. “And now we add our deep gratitude for the Turcos’ generous gift commitment, which will provide the resources to effectively recruit, retain and empower generations of students eager to become change agents in the service of a sustainable environment.”

The initial gift funds will be contributed over the next five years, with the deferred balance coming from the couple’s estate. When fully funded, the endowment will support an annual lecture, publication awards and fellowships for graduate students, and research awards for undergraduates, with priority given to first-generation students and those with demonstrated financial need.

Richard Turco is a distinguished professor emeritus at UCLA and former chair of the university’s department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. An atmospheric chemist, he joined UCLA’s faculty in 1988 and built a multidisciplinary research group focused on pressing environmental problems, including ozone depletion, urban air pollution and the impact of aerosols on climate. Those efforts eventually led to the establishment of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability in 1997, which Turco oversaw until 2003. He retired from UCLA in 2011.

The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986, Turco has also been awarded NASA’s H. Julian Allen Award for outstanding research, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize and a UCLA Distinguished Faculty Research Lectureship.

The Turcos’ pledge is the latest major donation the couple has made to UCLA. In 2017, they established an endowment to fund fellowships for outstanding graduate students in their third and fourth years of study in the department of atmospheric and oceanic studies — vitally important years in a doctoral student’s academic career. A portion of that endowment also supports an award for research papers published in scientific journals by graduate students or postdoctoral scholars. A 2019 gift from the couple established the first endowed faculty chair in the department’s history.

“The future of human civilization will best be served by education — at all levels, in all places — and the world’s great universities will be called on to provide an unshakable foundation for global progress, equity and prosperity,” Richard Turco said. “With this in mind, those, like myself, who have benefited most from past access to education should be among the most willing to support future access for others, with generosity and hope.”

Miguel García-Garibay, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences, which houses the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, lauded the Turcos’ ongoing support for students and faculty in the environmental sciences.

“Richard and Linda Turco have set a shining example of giving back, for which we are immensely grateful,” García-Garibay said. “Not only has Richard been instrumental in building UCLA’s excellence in researching environmental solutions, but he and Linda have chosen to establish a lasting legacy of financial support for this area, helping to ensure the institute’s impact for years to come.”

The building blocks of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

Aerial view of La Kretz Hall

La Kretz Hall, home of the institute. | Image credit: UCLA

As the head of the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a member of UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in the 1990s, Richard Turco was well placed to tackle the challenges of what at the time was called “global change” — the planetary-scale environmental issues beginning to take center stage internationally.

Together with a group of like-minded faculty members from academic departments across campus, he organized a multidisciplinary research program to study the growing risks posed by ozone depletion, climate warming and other hazards. Turco and his colleagues felt strongly that a top research university like UCLA could — and should — take a lead role in the quest to understand and mitigate such existential threats to civilization.

Turco spearheaded several early projects, including a large-scale research study of the Los Angeles Basin watershed and the establishment of a geographic information system, or GIS, data processing lab. In 1997, the program officially became the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, which has since grown into broad and powerful agent in the service of a sustainable environment.

During Turco’s tenure as director (1997–2003), the institute moved into the newly built La Kretz Hall (above). The building, funded by a donation from UCLA alumnus and longtime sustainability supporter Morton La Kretz, was the first on campus to receive LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Design, certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

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

Image of electrons in a Van Allen radiation belt (blue) encountering whistler waves (purple) and being sent raining toward the north pole (red). THEMIS satellites are seen near the radiation belt, while UCLA’s ELFIN hovers above Earth.Image source: Zhang, et al., Nature Communications, 2022

UCLA researchers discover source of super-fast ‘electron rain’

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The downpours, which can affect satellites and space travel, are caused by electromagnetic whistler waves, scientists say
Image of electrons in a Van Allen radiation belt (blue) encountering whistler waves (purple) and being sent raining toward the north pole (red). THEMIS satellites are seen near the radiation belt, while UCLA’s ELFIN hovers above Earth.

Electrons in a Van Allen radiation belt (blue) encounter whistler waves (purple) and are sent raining toward the north pole (red). THEMIS satellites are seen near the radiation belt, while UCLA’s ELFIN hovers above Earth. Image source: Zhang, et al., Nature Communications, 2022

By Emmanuel Masongsong and UCLA Newsroom

UCLA scientists have discovered a new source of super-fast, energetic electrons raining down on Earth, a phenomenon that contributes to the colorful aurora borealis but also poses hazards to satellites, spacecraft and astronauts.

The researchers observed unexpected, rapid “electron precipitation” from low-Earth orbit using the ELFIN mission, a pair of tiny satellites built and operated on the UCLA campus by undergraduate and graduate students guided by a small team of staff mentors.

By combining the ELFIN data with more distant observations from NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft, the scientists determined that the sudden downpour was caused by whistler waves, a type of electromagnetic wave that ripples through plasma in space and affects electrons in the Earth’s magnetosphere, causing them to “spill over” into the atmosphere.

Their findings, published March 25 in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrate that whistler waves are responsible for far more electron rain than current theories and space weather models predict.

“ELFIN is the first satellite to measure these super-fast electrons,” said Xiaojia Zhang, lead author and a researcher in UCLA’s department of Earth, planetary and space sciences. “The mission is yielding new insights due to its unique vantage point in the chain of events that produces them.”

Central to that chain of events is the near-Earth space environment, which is filled with charged particles orbiting in giant rings around the planet, called Van Allen radiation belts. Electrons in these belts travel in Slinky-like spirals that literally bounce between the Earth’s north and south poles. Under certain conditions, whistler waves are generated within the radiation belts, energizing and speeding up the electrons. This effectively stretches out the electrons’ travel path so much that they fall out of the belts and precipitate into the atmosphere, creating the electron rain.

► Curious about how whistler waves got their name? Have a listen.

One can imagine the Van Allen belts as a large reservoir filled with water — or, in this case, electrons, said Vassilis Angelopoulos, a UCLA professor of space physics and ELFIN’s principal investigator. As the reservoir fills, water periodically spirals down into a relief drain to keep the basin from overflowing. But when large waves occur in the reservoir, the sloshing water spills over the edge, faster and in greater volume than the relief drainage. ELFIN, which is downstream of both flows, is able to properly measure the contributions from each.

An artist’s rendering of one of UCLA’s bread loaf–sized ELFIN satellites in low-Earth orbit.

An artist’s rendering of one of UCLA’s bread loaf–sized ELFIN satellites in low-Earth orbit. Image credit: Emmanuel Masongsong/UCLA

The low-altitude electron rain measurements by ELFIN, combined with the THEMIS observations of whistler waves in space and sophisticated computer modeling, allowed the team to understand in detail the process by which the waves cause rapid torrents of electrons to flow into the atmosphere.

The findings are particularly important because current theories and space weather models, while accounting for other sources of electrons entering the atmosphere, do not predict this extra whistler wave–induced electron flow, which can affect Earth’s atmospheric chemistry, pose risks to spacecraft and damage low-orbiting satellites.

The researchers further showed that this type of radiation-belt electron loss to the atmosphere can increase significantly during geomagnetic storms, disturbances caused by enhanced solar activity that can affect near-Earth space and Earth’s magnetic environment.

“Although space is commonly thought to be separate from our upper atmosphere, the two are inextricably linked,” Angelopoulos said. “Understanding how they’re linked can benefit satellites and astronauts passing through the region, which are increasingly important for commerce, telecommunications and space tourism.”

Since its inception in 2013, more than 300 UCLA students have worked on ELFIN (Electron Losses and Fields investigation), which is funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation. The two microsatellites, each about the size of a loaf of bread and weighing roughly 8 pounds, were launched into orbit in 2018, and since then have been observing the activity of energetic electrons and helping scientists to better understand the effect of magnetic storms in near-Earth space. The satellites are operated from the UCLA Mission Operations Center on campus.

“It’s so rewarding to have increased our knowledge of space science using data from the hardware we built ourselves,” said Colin Wilkins, a co-author of the current research who is the instrument lead on ELFIN and a space physics doctoral student in the department of Earth, planetary and space sciences.

Image of members of the current ELFIN UCLA student team responsible for the daily satellite operations at the mission operations center, which is housed in the Geology Building on campus.

Members of the current ELFIN UCLA student team responsible for the daily satellite operations at the mission operations center, which is housed in the Geology Building on campus. Image credit: Ethan Tsai/UCLA

Read more about UCLA’s ELFIN Mission on Newsroom:

► We have liftoff: UCLA’s student-built ELFIN satellites

► UCLA students launch project that’s out of this world

► Undergrads are first to build an entire satellite on campus

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

A microscope image of HIV particlesA. Harrison and Dr. P. Feorino/CDC

UCLA-led team refines ‘kick and kill’ strategy aimed at eliminating HIV-infected cells

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Study in mice could point toward method for clearing virus from people who would otherwise depend on medication
A microscope image of HIV particles

A microscope image of HIV particles. The “kick and kill” approach uses cells that are naturally produced by the immune system to kill HIV-infected cells that hide in the body. Photo credit: A. Harrison and Dr. P. Feorino/CDC

By Enrique Rivero

In a study using mice, a UCLA-led team of researchers have improved upon a method they developed in 2017 that was designed to kill HIV-infected cells. The advance could move scientists a step closer to being able to reduce the amount of virus, or even eliminate it, from infected people who are dependent on lifesaving medications to keep the virus from multiplying and illness at bay.

The strategy, described in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications, uses cells that are naturally produced by the immune system to kill infected cells that hide in the body, potentially eradicating them, said Dr. Jocelyn Kim, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

“These findings show proof-of-concept for a therapeutic strategy to potentially eliminate HIV from the body, a task that had been nearly insurmountable for many years,” said Kim, the study’s lead author. “The study opens a new paradigm for a possible HIV cure in the future.”

Worldwide, there are currently 38 million people living with HIV, and an estimated 36 million have died of HIV-related diseases in the decades since HIV began circulating, according to UNAIDS.

People with HIV take antiretroviral medication to keep the virus at bay. But HIV has the ability to elude antiretrovirals by lying dormant in cells called CD4+ T cells, which signal another type of T cell, the CD8, to destroy HIV-infected cells. When a person with HIV stops treatment, the virus emerges from those reservoirs and replicates in the body, weakening the immune system and raising the likelihood of opportunistic infections or cancers that can lead to illness or death.

The UCLA-led study continues research on a strategy called “kick and kill,” which many of the same scientists first described in a 2017 paper. The approach coaxes the dormant virus to reveal itself in infected cells, so it can then be targeted and killed. In the earlier study, the researchers gave antiretroviral drugs to mice whose immune systems had been altered to mimic those of humans, and then infected with HIV. They then administered a synthetic compound called SUW133, which was developed at Stanford University, to activate the mice’s dormant HIV. Up to 25% of the previously dormant cells that began expressing HIV died within 24 hours.

But a more effective way to kill those cells was needed.

In the new study, while the mice were receiving antiretrovirals, the researchers used SUW133 to flush HIV infected cells out of hiding. They then injected healthy natural killer cells into the mice’s blood to kill the infected cells. The combination of SUW133 and injections of healthy natural killer immune cells completely cleared the HIV in 40% of the HIV-infected mice.

The researchers also analyzed the mice’s spleens — because the spleen harbors immune cells, it’s a good place to look for latent HIV-infected cells — and did not detect the virus there, suggesting that cells harboring HIV were eliminated. In addition, the combination approach performed better than either the administration of the latency reversing agent alone or the natural killer cells alone.

Kim said the researchers’ next objective is to further refine the approach to eliminate HIV in 100% of the mice they test in future experiments. “We will also be moving this research toward preclinical studies in nonhuman primates with the ultimate goal of testing the same approach in humans,” she said.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, the National Science Foundation, a National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences UCLA CTSI Grant and the McCarthy Family Foundation.

The study’s co-authors are Tian-Hao Zhang, Camille Carmona, Bryanna Lee, Dr. Christopher Seet, Matthew Kostelny, Nisarg Shah, Hongying Chen, Kylie Farrell, Dr. Mohamed Soliman, Melanie Dimapasoc, Michelle Sinani, Dr. Kenia Yazmin, Reyna Blanco, David Bojorquez, Hong Jiang, Yuan Shi, Yushen Du, Ren Sun and Jerome Zack of UCLA; Natalia Komarova, Dominik Wodarz and Matthew Marsden of UC Irvine; and Paul Wender of Stanford University. Sun is also a member of the faculty of the University of Hong Kong.

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

The power of two: collaboration empowered groundbreaking sleep research

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Life scientists from different fields inspired each other and pushed science forward

By Jonathan Riggs

Gina Poe and Van Savage

It can be easy for even the best ideas to get lost in a busy professor’s email inbox — the amount of correspondence, requests and paperwork that continually vie for attention is staggering.

But when Gina Poe, a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology who has conducted sleep research for more than 30 years, noticed a message in her inbox from Van Savage, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of computational medicine, it immediately caught her eye.

“Van contacted me about a paper he was co-authoring, specifically about some feedback from the peer review process,” she says. “One of the reviewers had responded that there was no REM sleep except in human adults—I wrote Van back immediately and said, ‘That’s crazy.’”

“It was terrific talking to Gina, not just because she knows way, way more about sleep than the rest of us, but because she was so open-minded about her expertise and willing to explore our theories,” Savage says. “It was a huge turning point to get someone like her aboard.”

That conversation — and their subsequent research — led to them developing the most comprehensive, mechanistic and mathematical analysis of sleep to date, showing that mammals (including humans) depend on REM sleep to build their brain’s infrastructure in infanthood, and to heal and “declutter” it throughout life.

As exciting as their findings were, Poe and Savage found it even more inspiring to work together across interdisciplinary lines, an opportunity they wish more of their colleagues could experience.

“It really teaches you that you can be a global expert in your field, but you can’t be an expert in everything — there is so much we all can learn from one another,” Savage says. “You have to be patient and brave as you basically learn a new language from your collaborator and teach them one, too. Building that groundwork alone teaches you so much about your own work before you ever get to the real questions.”

“It’s also wonderful fuel to keep you curious and passionate, which is how you become distinguished in your field in the first place,” says Poe. “I love to learn new things every day, and projects like this are an incredible way to keep yourself refreshed, engaged and excited to go to tackle challenge questions every day.”

The two are continuing their research collaboration, expanding on their previous project by focusing on the effect of temperature on sleep. The effect of temperature isn’t very pronounced on warm-blooded creatures like mammals and birds, but it’s hugely impactful on cold-blooded animals, like amphibians, reptiles, fish and insects — so Savage and Poe’s theory is that temperature affects the latter group’s sleep.

“Fortunately, in the past few years, people have been studying the sleep of more diverse organisms. One of these getting a lot of attention is fruit flies,” Savage says. “And we do see a pattern where more sleep is needed at higher temperatures. So now we’re trying to mathematically look at and quantify that, and what modifications we need in order to ask more and bigger questions.”

According to Poe, UCLA is perhaps the most qualified place possible to foster these breakthroughs.

“UCLA has been a world leader in sleep research for 50 years, for as long as the field has existed. Whenever I see a picture of our team in 1988, I laugh because that was basically everyone on earth doing sleep research at the time,” Poe says. “It means a lot that today, we are actively still pushing the envelope for the field, so much so that we can now theorize so knowledgeably about sleep across almost all animals.”

Both Savage and Poe remain incredibly ambitious, thinking ahead in terms of not just one step, but dozens…or more.

“Gina’s and my expertise and skills have been so complementary that our work has been strengthened more than we could have hoped. Our collaboration has been a huge boon both to science and to us personally,” says Savage. “And there’s so much more we can do. What we want to tackle could take us to the ends of careers and beyond — and that’s how we like it.”

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

 

Image of an engineered HSC-iNKT cell (blue) attacking a human tumor cell. Photo Credit: Yang Lab/UCLAYang Lab/UCLA

UCLA scientists make strides toward an ‘off-the-shelf’ immune cell therapy for cancer

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By Tiare Dunlap

Using stem cell engineering and organoid technology, researchers produce large quantities of powerful cancer-fighting iNKT cells

Image of an engineered HSC-iNKT cell (blue) attacking a human tumor cell. Photo Credit: Yang Lab/UCLA

An engineered HSC-iNKT cell (blue) attacking a human tumor cell. Photo Credit: Yang Lab/UCLA

Immunotherapies, which harness the body’s natural defenses to combat disease, have revolutionized the treatment of aggressive and deadly cancers. But often, these therapies — especially those based on immune cells — must be tailored to the individual patient, costing valuable time and pushing their price into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now, in a study published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, UCLA researchers report a critical step forward in the development of an “off-the-shelf” cancer immunotherapy using rare but powerful immune cells that could potentially be produced in large quantities, stored for extended periods and safely used to treat a wide range of patients with various cancers.

“In order to reach the most patients, we want cell therapies that can be mass-produced, frozen and shipped to hospitals around the world,” said Lili Yang, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and the study’s senior author. “That way, doses of these therapies can be ready and waiting for patients as soon as they are needed.”

For the study, Yang and her colleagues focused on invariant natural killer T cells, or iNKT cells, which are unique not only for their power and efficacy but also because they don’t carry the risk of graft-versus-host disease, which occurs when transplanted cells attack a recipient’s body and which is the reason most cell-based immunotherapies must be created on a patient-specific basis, Yang said.

The researchers developed a new method for producing large numbers of these iNKT cells using blood-forming stem cells, which can self-replicate and produce all kinds of blood and immune cells. The team used stem cells obtained from four donor cord-blood samples and eight donor peripheral blood samples.

“Our findings suggest that one cord blood donation could produce up to 5,000 doses of the therapy and one peripheral blood donation could produce up to 300,000 doses,” said Yang, who is also an associate professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics and a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. ­­“At this yield, the cost of producing immune cell products could be dramatically reduced.”

The researchers first used genetic engineering to program the blood-forming stem cells to make them more likely to develop into iNKT cells. Next, these genetically engineered stem cells were placed into artificial thymic organoids, which mimic the environment of the thymus, a specialized organ in which T cells naturally mature in the body. After eight weeks in the organoids, each stem cell produced, on average, 100,000 iNKT cells.

Yang and her collaborators then tested the resulting cells, called hematopoietic stem cell-engineered iNKT cells, or HSC–iNKT cells, by comparing their cancer-fighting abilities with those of immune cells called natural killer cells, or NK cells. In a lab dish, the HSC–iNKT cells were significantly better at killing multiple types of human tumor cells — including leukemia, melanoma, lung cancer, prostate cancer and multiple myeloma cells — than the NK cells, the researchers found.

Even more importantly, the HSC–iNKT cells sustained their tumor-killing efficacy after being frozen and thawed, an essential requirement for widespread distribution of an off-the-shelf cell therapy.

The researchers next equipped the HSC–iNKT cells with a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, a specialized molecule used in some immunotherapies to enable immune cells to recognize and kill a specific type of cancer. In this case, they added to the HSC–iNKT cells a CAR that targets a protein found on multiple myeloma cells and then tested the cells’ ability to fight human multiple myeloma tumors that had been transplanted into mice.

These CAR-equipped HSC–iNKT cells eliminated the multiple myeloma tumors, and the mice that underwent this treatment remained tumor-free and showed no signs of complications such as graft-versus-host disease throughout their lives.

The researchers are now working to improve their manufacturing methods by moving to a feeder-free system that eliminates the need for supportive cells — such as those used in the thymic organoids — to assist blood stem cells in producing iNKT cells. Yang says she hopes this advance will better enable mass-production of the therapy and, ultimately, its clinical and commercial development.

The paper’s co–first authors are UCLA doctoral students Yan-Ruide (Charlie) Li and Yang (Alice) Zhao. Additional authors include UCLA professors Dr. Sarah Larson, Dr. Joshua Sasine, Dr. Xiaoyan Wang, Matteo Pellegrini, Dr. Owen Witte and Dr. Antoni Ribas.

The researchers’ genetic engineering of blood-forming stem cells utilized methods developed by Dr. Donald Kohn, and the artificial thymic organoids were developed by Dr. Gay Crooks, Dr. Chris Seet and Amélie Montel-Hagen, all of the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center.

The methods and products described in this study are covered by patent applications filed by the UCLA Technology Development Group on behalf of the Regents of the University of California, with Yang, Li, Yu Jeong Kim, Jiaji Yu, Pin Wang, Yanni Zhu, Crooks, Montel-Hagen and Seet listed as co-inventors. The treatment strategy was used in preclinical tests only; it has not been tested in humans or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as safe and effective for use in humans.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Concern Foundation, the STOP CANCER Foundation, a UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center Rose Hills Foundation Innovator Grant and the Ablon Scholars Program.

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