Archive for category: Box 4

You are here: Home / Featured Stories / Box 4
Image of Robert and Christina Buswell

Department of Asian Languages & Cultures receives $3.7 million in gift commitments

/in , , , /by

Gifts from UCLA Buddhist Studies scholar Robert Buswell and his wife Christina will establish first permanent endowed chair in Korean Buddhist Studies outside of Korea

Image of Robert and Christina Buswell

Robert and Christina Buswell (Photo credit: Courtesy of Robert and Christina Buswell)

By Margaret MacDonald

The UCLA Department of Asian Languages & Cultures has received $3.7 million in gift commitments from distinguished professor of Buddhist studies Robert E. Buswell, Jr. and his wife, Christina Lee Buswell, a translator of Korean religious scriptures.

The couple’s gift commitments created the Chinul Endowed Chair in Korean Buddhist Studies—the first permanent endowed chair in Korean Buddhism outside of Korea—and the Robert E. and Christina L. Buswell Fellowship in Buddhist Studies in support of graduate students in the department. The endowments will be funded as a blended gift with a portion paid over five years and the balance as a deferred gift from the couple’s estate.

The endowed chair, which is currently pending Academic Senate review, is named in honor of Puril Pojo Chinul (1158-1210), the most influential monk in Korean Buddhist history. The graduate fellowship gift was augmented by $25,000 by the Humanities Division Centennial Matching Program (made possible by the Kaplan/Panzer Humanities Endowment).

Robert Buswell, who is retiring from UCLA after 36 years, holds the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Humanities at UCLA and is considered the premier Western scholar of Korean Buddhism and one of the world’s top specialists in the meditative traditions of Buddhism. He founded UCLA’s Center for Korean Studies in 1993 and Center for Buddhist Studies in 2000.

Buswell has published extensively on Buddhism and served as editor-in-chief of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhism and co-author of the 1.2-million-word Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Among his many honors, he was elected president of the Association for Asian Studies in 2008 and, in 2016, became the first (former) Buddhist monk elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“Robert Buswell’s impact on the fields of Buddhist studies and Korean studies has been unparalleled,” said David Schaberg, senior dean of the college and dean of humanities. “Not only has he built, here at UCLA, the nation’s largest programs in these two areas, he has also trained dozens of scholars now teaching and studying at academic institutions all over the world. I am immensely grateful for his leadership and for his and Christina’s extraordinarily generous gift.”

Search for meaning

Robert Buswell’s path to UCLA began with an existential quest that led him to drop out of college in 1972 and spend seven years as an ordained Buddhist monk in Thailand, Hong Kong, and finally Korea.

As a teenager raised in a non-practicing Methodist family, he’d read texts by Western philosophers and pondered such questions as “How can we live without exploiting other people?”

“On my first exposure to Buddhism when I was 16, I was thunderstruck at how closely it mirrored the philosophy of life I had been creating for myself. I’ve been completely enamored with Buddhism ever since,” he says.

During his five years as a monk at Songgwang monastery, considered the “jewel” of the monastic community in South Korea, Buswell began translating texts by its founder Puril Pojo Chinul. After finishing his first translation project during the off-seasons between Zen meditation retreats, he realized he was still deeply drawn to the scholarly study of the Buddhist tradition. He decided to return to the U.S. to resume his university education, eventually earning his Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from UC Berkeley in 1985.

Christina Buswell’s journey to Buddhism closely mirrors that of her husband. Raised a Catholic, she immigrated from South Korea to the U.S. with her family when she was 13 years old, an experience that gave rise to much reflection and angst about her cultural identity.

She says, “My experience as a Korean-American immigrant led to a quest to understand myself and ask the question ‘who am I?’ I kept looking for answers, and in the end, Buddhism made the most sense to me.”

Growing the field

In the course of earning a B.A. in Religious Studies from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an M.A. in Korean Studies from Columbia, Christina found few resources directly related to Korean Buddhism.

“It was important to both of us,” she says, “that there be at least one U.S. university with a permanent faculty chair specifically devoted to Korean Buddhism. UCLA is the ideal place for this chair since the university has played such an important role in developing Korean and Buddhist studies as fields.”

As for the name of the chair, Robert Buswell adds, “It seemed appropriate to name [the chair] after Chinul, the most influential monk in Korean Buddhist history and the inspiration for much of my own scholarly work. Chinul believed that success in Buddhist meditation demanded a solid grounding in doctrinal understanding. This rigorous combination of doctrinal study and Zen meditation has remained the distinguishing characteristic of Korean Buddhism ever since.”

Ensuring a scholarly legacy

Robert Buswell says that careful estate planning and creative philanthropy can allow faculty who have devoted their careers to building academic programs, as he has done, to ensure their scholarly legacy continues far into the future.

“With this gift, we’ve fulfilled a long-term dream of ours to have the field of Korean Buddhist studies established permanently in the U.S. The graduate fellowship adds a crucial element to the mix, as it will enable the department to recruit and train the next generation of scholars in Buddhist studies.”

Seiji Lippit, professor and chair of Asian Languages and Cultures, adds, “Buddhist studies is one of the department’s traditional strengths, but this new chair and graduate fellowship will make us that much stronger. The chair provides a solid faculty presence to support the field and train graduate students, so the two gifts really go hand in hand. We can’t thank Robert and Christina enough for their generosity.”

Robert and Christina Buswell first met in 1997 at Dongguk University in Seoul. Together, they’ve traveled the world, sharing their practice and knowledge of Korean Buddhism along the way. In retirement, they plan to do more traveling and more hiking, and will of course be continuing to attend meditation retreats together in Korea.

Robert Buswell will be the keynote speaker for the UCLA Humanities Commencement ceremonies on June 11 at Royce Hall.

If you are interested in supporting the Robert E. and Christina L. Buswell Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, please consider making a gift at giving.ucla.edu/BuswellFellowship.

Image of Alex SternImage credit: University of Michigan

UCLA names Alex Stern dean of humanities

/in , , /by
Image of Alex Stern

Alex Stern | Image credit: University of Michigan

By Sean Brenner | April 14, 2022

Alexandra Minna Stern, currently the associate dean for the humanities at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, will be the new dean of humanities at the UCLA College. Her appointment is effective Nov. 1.

Stern is the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of American Culture at Michigan, where she also holds appointments in history, women’s and gender studies, and obstetrics and gynecology. Her research has focused on modern and contemporary histories of science, medicine and society in the U.S. and Latin America, and, most recently, on the cultures and ideologies of the far right and white nationalism.

She is the founder and co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, an interdisciplinary research team that explores the history of eugenic sterilization in the U.S.

Stern has two prior connections to the University of California: She earned her master’s degree in Latin American studies from UC San Diego, and later, from 2000 to 2002, she was a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz.

Stern said she looks forward to providing creative and responsive leadership in her new role.

“I am thrilled to be the incoming humanities dean at UCLA and eager to partner with the excellent and diverse units and communities that comprise the division,” she said. “I am honored to be joining a world-class public research university that recognizes the centrality of humanities to liberal arts and the mission of higher education.”

As associate dean at Michigan, Stern enhanced humanities research, promoted curricular and funding opportunities in experimental humanities, and supported languages and global studies. Prior to that role, she held a series of other leadership positions at the Ann Arbor campus: chair of the department of American culture (2017–19), director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center/Brazil Initiative (2014–17) and associate director of the Center for the History of Medicine (2002–12). She has been a faculty member at Michigan since 2002.

Among the numerous grants and fellowships she has received are awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She is frequently quoted in prominent media outlets, from the Los Angeles Times to the Atlantic.

In a message to the campus community, Interim Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Michael Levine wrote, “Chancellor [Gene] Block and I are confident that UCLA Humanities will continue to thrive and fulfill its vital role on campus under Alex’s capable leadership and that she will be an extraordinary addition to our campus leadership team.”

In addition to her master’s from UC San Diego, Stern earned a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University and a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago.

Stern will succeed David Schaberg, who has led the humanities division since 2011. Schaberg will return to teaching and research full time after a sabbatical.

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

Image of Darja IsakssonCourtesy of Darja Isaksson

Innovation the Swedish way: Darja Isaksson delivers Possible Worlds lecture

/in , , , /by
Courtesy of Darja Isaksson

Possible Worlds lecturer Darja Isaksson is Director General of Vinnova, Sweden’s national innovation agency, and serves as a member of the Swedish government’s National Digitalization Council. Image courtesy of Darja Isaksson.

By Anushka Chakrabarti

In the latest installment of the Possible Worlds lecture series, Darja Isaksson — an internationally recognized innovation and sustainability expert — joined UCLA students, faculty and community members on March 11 to discuss innovation’s role in shaping the future. The event was held in person at Royce Hall, with a livestream reaching additional audience members virtually.

In her talk, Innovation the Swedish Way, Isaksson explored Sweden’s role as an early industrializer and examined the current narrative around innovation. She underscored the importance of the humanities in effecting change and driving new ideas.

“I think people in the humanities are often uniquely equipped with the capacity for reflection, a lot of knowledge, strong skills in narratives and storytelling — things that we need,” Isaksson shared.

A collaborative effort between the UCLA Division of Humanities and the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, Possible Worlds is a biannual lecture series that invites today’s most imaginative intellectual leaders and creators to deliver talks on the future of humanity. Isaksson’s lecture marked the fourth event in the series.

David Schaberg, dean of the Division of Humanities and senior dean of the UCLA College, explained that the lecturers in Possible Worlds aim to share insights into where we are headed as a planet and as the population of that planet.

“We’ve looked at environmental questions. We’ve looked at questions of justice. We’ve looked at questions around the future of democracy,” Schaberg said.

Isaksson is the director general of Vinnova, Sweden’s national innovation agency, and serves as a member of the Swedish government’s National Digitalization Council. She described growing up in northern Sweden with her father, a telecom engineer, in a house that she called a “late eighties, early nineties maker-space.” When her father first brought home a modem, it changed her life — and sparked her career journey.

Isaksson went on to discuss how innovation has shaped public life in Sweden, walking through the historical methods the country has successfully employed in areas ranging from climate protection to union agreements.

“Public-private collaboration and research and innovation have been essential … for us in Sweden for decades,” Isaksson said, “but also organizations, working employees, employers and unions working together.”

Isaksson’s lecture was followed by a Q&A session moderated by Tobias Higbie, UCLA professor of history and labor studies. Participants joining virtually and in person were encouraged to share their questions, which ranged from “How can young people be more innovative as they go through the education system?” to “How hard is it to have breakthrough innovation nowadays with a small budget?”

Schaberg stressed that the multidisciplinary lectures in Possible Worlds are aimed at informing a sustained and engaged public dialogue.

“These are not highly specialized, highly technical talks,” Schaberg said. “The point is to get people thinking together, from whatever position they may hold.”

View the Possible Worlds lecture by Darja Isaksson on the UCLA Humanities website and on the UCLA College YouTube channel.

This article originally appeared on the UCLA Division of Humanities website. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Collage image of the UCLA College’s 2022 Sloan Fellows. Top row from left: Seulgi Moon, David Baqaee, and Mikhail Solon. Bottom row from left: Chong Liu, Natalie Bau, and Guido Montúfar.Image credit: UCLA

Six UCLA College faculty among 2022 Sloan Research Fellows

/in , , , /by
Collage image of the UCLA College’s 2022 Sloan Fellows. Top row from left: Seulgi Moon, David Baqaee, and Mikhail Solon. Bottom row from left: Chong Liu, Natalie Bau, and Guido Montúfar.

The UCLA College’s 2022 Sloan Fellows. Top row from left: Seulgi Moon, David Baqaee, and Mikhail Solon. Bottom row from left: Chong Liu, Natalie Bau, and Guido Montúfar. Image credit: UCLA

Editor’s note: Congratulations to all of the UCLA scholars selected to receive 2022 Sloan Research Fellowships, including six professors from the College of Letters and Science!

By Stuart Wolpert

Eight young UCLA professors are among 118 scientists and scholars selected today to receive 2022 Sloan Research Fellowships, making UCLA No. 1 among U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities in the number of new fellows.

The fellowships, among the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers, are often seen as evidence of the quality of an institution’s science, math and economics faculty. MIT, with seven new faculty fellows, had the second most.

“Today’s Sloan Research Fellows represent the scientific leaders of tomorrow,” said Adam Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “As formidable young scholars, they are already shaping the research agenda within their respective fields — and their trailblazing won’t end here.”

Miguel García-Garibay, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, said, “UCLA has an exceptional faculty — world-leaders in their fields. The quality of our faculty research is mind-boggling, and I’m delighted but not surprised that UCLA is No. 1 in faculty awarded 2022 Sloan Research Fellowships.”

UCLA’s 2022 recipients are:

David Baqaee
Assistant professor of economics

An expert in macroeconomics and international trade, Baqaee studies the role production networks play in business cycles and economic growth. His research tackles a central macroeconomic dilemma known as the aggregation problem, which involves reasoning about the behavior of aggregates composed of many interacting heterogenous parts — for instance, how shocks to oil production or trade barriers in parts of supply chains may affect real GDP. He has also studied monetary and fiscal policy, the macroeconomics of monopoly power and the macroeconomic consequences of supply and demand shocks caused by COVID-19. A faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Baqaee is also affiliated with the Center for Economic Policy and Research.

Natalie Bau
Assistant professor of economics
Assistant professor of public policy, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs

Bau studies a variety of topics in development and education economics, with an emphasis on the industrial organization of educational markets. Her research has looked at how cultural traditions affect economic decision-making, how interpersonal skills facilitate intergenerational investment, whether government policy can change culture, and the effects of human capital investment in countries with child labor. She is affiliated with the Center for Economic and Policy Research and is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Aparna Bhaduri
Assistant professor of biological chemistry, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Using bioinformatics, single-cell genomics and developmental neurobiology, Bhaduri studies how the human brain is created with billions of cells, as well as how certain cellular building blocks can reappear later in life in brain cancers. She is detailing the hundreds or thousands of cell types in the developing brain, allowing her to produce cell atlases that improve our understanding of glioblastoma. Her research is revealing how stem cells give rise to the human brain during cortical development and how aspects of this development can be “hijacked” in glioblastoma and other brain cancers.

Quanquan Gu
Assistant professor of computer science, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering

Gu leads UCLA’s Statistical Machine Learning Lab. In his research on machine learning, he is developing and analyzing what are known as non-convex optimization algorithms to understand large-scale, dynamic, complex and heterogeneous data and is building the theoretical foundations of deep learning. Gu aims to make machine learning algorithms more efficient and reliable for a variety of applications, including recommendation systems, computational genomics, artificial intelligence for personalized health care, and government decision-making. In March 2020, he and his research team launched a machine learning model to predict the spread of COVID-19 — a model that has informed predictions by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Chong Liu
Assistant professor of inorganic chemistry

Liu, who holds UCLA’s Jeffrey and Helo Zink Career Development Chair, is an authority on electrochemical systems for energy and biology. His laboratory combines expertise in inorganic chemistry, nanomaterials and electrochemistry to address challenging questions in catalysis, energy conversion, microbiota, and carbon dioxide and nitrogen — with important implications for the environment. In 2020, he received $1.9 million from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to conduct research on electrochemically controlled microbial communities, and in 2017, Science News chose him as one of 10 Scientists to Watch who are “ready to transform their fields.”

Guido Montúfar
Assistant professor of mathematics and statistics

Montúfar, who leads the Mathematical Machine Learning Group — centered at UCLA and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, in Germany — works on deep learning theory and mathematical machine learning. Through investigations of the geometry of data, hypothesis functions and parameters, he and his team are developing the mathematical foundations of deep learning and improving learning with neural networks. Montúfar is the recipient of a starting grant from the European Research Council and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and he serves as research mentor with the Latinx Mathematicians Research Community. He and his team have organized a weekly online math machine learning seminar since 2020.

Seulgi Moon
Assistant professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences

Moon studies the weathering and erosion or bedrock using various methods, including fieldwork, laboratory analysis, topographic analysis, numerical models, near-surface geophysics and rock mechanics. Among her research topics is physical and chemical bedrock weathering, which affects groundwater storage and soil nutrient supply and can result in natural hazards like earthquake-induced landslides and debris flows. Her expertise includes tectonic geomorphology, low-temperature geochemistry and quaternary geochronology, as well as quantitative geomorphic analysis and landscape evolution of Earth and other planetary bodies.

Mikhail Solon
Assistant professor of physics and astronomy

Solon, a member of UCLA’s Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics, holds the David S. Saxon Presidential Term Chair in Physics. His research explores phenomena that can be described using the mathematical and physical tools of theoretical high-energy physics. He focuses on using new and wide-ranging applications of quantum field theory to understand the nature of dark matter, the large-scale structure of the cosmos and gravitational waves. He was awarded the J.J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award, the American Physical Society’s highest honor for doctoral research in theoretical particle physics.

Sloan Research Fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of exceptional young scientists and scholars in chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Fellows receive a two-year, $75,000 award to support their research from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which was established in 1934.

Fifty-three Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, including Andrea Ghez, UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics, in 2020. Seventeen have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science and 22 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics.

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

 

Collage of images of Arthur Ashe, by Peter HovarthBy Peter Hovarth

Arthur Ashe: Champion for Justice

/in , , /by
The tennis icon spent his life fighting for the oppressed. A new oral history collection tells his story.
Collage of images of Arthur Ashe, by Peter Hovarth

By Peter Hovarth

By Delan Bruce and Mary Daily | Collage by Peter Hovarth

Arthur Ashe ’66 was a champion. Not just on the tennis court — where he won 33 titles and set world records — but throughout his life, as a warrior for justice who fought for the rights of oppressed people and devoted himself to social justice, health and humanitarian causes.

Ashe grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and was drawn to UCLA, he said, because it was Jackie Robinson’s university. He attended on a scholarship. In 1965, during his junior year, Ashe became the first African American to win an NCAA singles title. He went on to win the U.S. Open, the Australian Open and Wimbledon, among many other tournaments. He was among the greatest athletes ever to play tennis, an iconic cultural figure and the sport’s reigning champion for many years.

Fighting Apartheid

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, South Africa continually denied Ashe a visa to travel there to compete in the South African Open. He finally obtained the visa in 1973 and was the first Black man to play in the national tournament.

The visa gave Ashe permission to play in South Africa, but it did not mute his opposition to apartheid. Ten years later, he and singer Harry Belafonte founded Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid to lobby for sanctions and embargoes against the South African government. In 1985, Ashe was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., during an anti-apartheid protest, an event that helped focus international attention on that growing movement. He did so much to fight apartheid that when Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison and was asked what American citizen he would like to visit with, he said, “How about Arthur Ashe?”

Donald Dell, Arthur Ashe’s agent, tells the Arthur Ashe Oral History Project about meeting Nelson Mandela with Ashe.

Image of Arthur Ashe at hearings of the United Nations General Assembly’s Special Committee on Apartheid in 1970.

Arthur Ashe at hearings of the United Nations General Assembly’s Special Committee on Apartheid in 1970. Ashe asked the U.S., Britain, France, Australia, Germany and Italy to expel South Africa from the International Lawn Tennis Federation, as well as to bar the country from participating in the Davis Cup. Image credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images

 

AIDS Awareness

The champion took on a different cause in 1983, when he contracted HIV through a blood transfusion following surgery. In 1992, he went public with news of his infection, prompting a deluge of public attention. Ashe used the spotlight to raise awareness of the virus and its victims.

“I do not much like being the personification of a problem involving a killer disease,” he said. “But I know I must seize these opportunities to spread the word.” He founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, with the goal of eradicating the disease. The nonprofit funded research into the treatment, cure and prevention of AIDS. On World AIDS Day, he spoke before the United Nations General Assembly, lobbying for increased funding for research and addressing the illness as a global issue. Although he’d retired from tennis in 1980, Ashe was named Sports Illustrated’s 1992 Sportsman of the Year because of his unshakable support for humanitarian causes.

Ashe died of AIDS–related pneumonia in 1993, at the age of 49. Just two months earlier, he had established the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, created to address issues of inadequate health care for urban minorities. To the end, he kept fighting for what he believed was right.

Arthur Ashe Legacy at UCLA

In 2008, Ashe’s widow, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, established the Arthur Ashe Learning Center in New York, dedicated to providing a multimedia resource for understanding and promoting his legacy and the values he espoused. She created a website and an array of visual and innovative learning tools. Seven years later, she ceded the assets of the Arthur Ashe Learning Center to UCLA, where they became part of the Arthur Ashe Legacy Project. The project is under the direction of Patricia Turner, professor in the departments of African American Studies and World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Turner, whose respect for Ashe’s accomplishments dates back to her childhood, taught his autobiography at UC Davis and currently teaches a Fiat Lux seminar about him at UCLA.

The work of the Arthur Ashe Legacy Project includes managing a booth devoted to Ashe at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing, New York, where the U.S. Open is played, as well as reconfiguring a larger exhibition about his life that is currently being assembled and will likely travel to different venues.

Ashe was named Sports Illustrated’s 1992 Sportsman of the Year because of his unshakable support for humanitarian causes.

The Oral History Collection

One of the Legacy Project’s recent initiatives is the Arthur Ashe Oral History Project, designed and led by Turner. In 2019, UCLA alumna and oral historian Yolanda Hester M.A. ’17 began identifying aspects of Ashe’s life that a UCLA oral history collection could examine deeply in ways that existing Ashe archives hadn’t.

Ann Koger, who in 1973 became one of the first African American women to play professionally in the Virginia Slims Tennis Circuit, speaks about traveling through the South as a young Black tennis player in the 1960s.

UCLA’s Ashe oral history archive, which will be housed at the UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, explores his childhood years playing tennis in segregated Richmond. The interviews also document the experiences of African Americans playing tennis during the 1950s and ’60s. The oral histories delve into tennis’s seismic shift to its open era, when both amateur and professional players were finally allowed to compete for the major Grand Slam titles. In 1968, Ashe won the first U.S. Open of this new, much more lucrative era of pro tennis. Through intercontinental interviews, the recordings tell the story, too, of Ashe’s historic 1973 and 1974 trips to South Africa.

Assisting in assembling the collection is Chinyere Nwonye ’19, who in 2017 enrolled in Turner’s Fiat Lux seminar on Ashe. While she had seen the Arthur Ashe Student Health & Wellness Center on campus many times, she had never known that Ashe was Black. In the seminar, Nwonye and her classmates read Ashe’s memoir Days of Grace. They also took a tour of campus sites that are important to Ashe’s story, such as the location of his ROTC service. The course inspired Nwonye to join the oral history project after graduation.

The oral history method captures a person through others’ memories, sometimes in idiosyncratic detail. Hester and Nwonye note that the recordings take listeners inside the narrative in a way not possible through the written word.

Tom Chewning, a lifelong friend of Ashe’s, describes meeting Ashe for the first time at a tournament in West Virginia. The two teens were both rising tennis players from Richmond but had never met due to segregation. 

 

Details emerge from the interviews: One interviewee recalls competing in a match, going to pick up a ball and having felt someone spit on his hand. As a Black tennis player, he felt compelled to contain his anger, wipe off his hand and continue playing. Hester says narrators shared other instances of their struggles against, and triumphs over, subtler forms of racist resistance to tennis integration — for instance, a young player’s tournament registration paperwork would often conveniently disappear.

Images of Archival newspaper clippings: Arthur Ashe’s letter requesting approval of Otis Smith’s membership in the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Ashe featured in The New York Times in 1966.

Archival newspaper clippings: Arthur Ashe’s letter requesting approval of Otis Smith’s membership in the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Ashe featured in The New York Times in 1966. (NYT) COURTESY UCLA ATHLETICS. (LETTER) COURTESY UCLA ARTHUR ASHE LEGACY PROJECT.

Interviews Continue Through Zoom

The oral history format took on a new dimension via Zoom, with narrators in their own homes, among their personal belongings and keepsakes. Nwonye and Hester cite countless moments when narrators would stop and say things like “I’ve got to send you this!” while holding up a T-shirt they’d received from Ashe or showing a racket he’d given them.

The complete project will include interviews with more than 100 of Ashe’s associates. By midsummer of 2021, Hester and Nwonye had interviewed more than 50 people, having completed 15 pre-pandemic Q&As. In spring 2020, COVID created a dilemma. “So much of oral history is about being in the room together, communicating not just verbally but also through gesture and body language,” says Hester.

But Zoom enabled interviews with people who might not otherwise have been as accessible — those in far-flung places across the country or even abroad. This was the case with poet Don Mattera, who interacted with Ashe during the tennis star’s 1973 trip to South Africa and wrote a poem titled Anguished Spirit—Ashe. And Hester says the slower pace of pandemic life made scheduling interviews easier, so she and Nwonye moved through their list much more quickly than they had expected to.

South African poet Don Mattera recites a poem he wrote for Ashe.

How Ashe Changed Lives

One underreported facet of Ashe’s life that the interviews reveal is his business savvy. From his Safe Passage Foundation, which supported young people of color through tennis, to his role as a cornerstone of the Association of Tennis Professionals, founded in 1972, Ashe built organizational infrastructures within and outside of tennis. Hester hopes the oral history project will contextualize some of the benchmark moments coming up in the next few years regarding Ashe’s playing career and humanitarian work that reached beyond the world of sports.

Researchers, students and tennis lovers will be able to immerse themselves in the completed archive. The narrators’ stories traverse pivotal periods of recent history, such as tennis’s open era, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the women’s rights movement and the global AIDS epidemic. Nwonye sees symmetry between Ashe’s losing his life to HIV/AIDS at the height of a public health crisis and the COVID crisis challenging the world today.

If the histories are notable for their breadth, they are sometimes most striking for their intimacy. They offer reminders of how Ashe touched lives, sometimes unexpectedly. Take the case of Otis Smith ’01, now director of tennis at the Santa Barbara Tennis Club. In 1975, Smith was a rising junior tennis player who practiced often at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. The club, founded in 1920, had no African American members. Someone complained Smith was spending too much time at the club for a nonmember, forcing the 9-year-old to apply for membership.

Ashe, an honorary participant on the club’s board, learned of Smith’s plight. Fresh off his Wimbledon triumph, he dashed off a direct but characteristically polite letter advocating for Smith’s admission as a junior member — and for the 55-year-old institution to finally integrate. He presented the club’s directors with an ultimatum: They would accept Smith, or Ashe would resign his position on the board. Smith’s membership was quickly approved.

“My dad and Arthur stayed in contact,” recalls Smith, who went on to star in tennis at UCLA before playing professionally. “I met Arthur in Las Vegas, and I played tennis with him for a half-hour. He was there playing in the Alan King Tennis Classic. He changed my life.”

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

 

Photo credit: Sean Brenner

Days with hazardous levels of air pollutants are more common due to increase in wildfires

/in , , /by

In Western U.S., health risks from ground-level ozone and fine particulate matter continue to grow, study shows

Image of smoke from a wildfire turning the sky orange-brown in Los Angeles’ Mar Vista neighborhood.

In October 2017, smoke from a nearby wildfire turned the sky orange-brown in Los Angeles’ Mar Vista neighborhood. Photo credit: Sean Brenner

By David Colgan

After decades of air quality improvement due to the Clean Air Act of 1970 and other regulations since, the Western U.S. is experiencing an increase in the number of days with extremely high levels of two key types of air pollutants due to climate change.

From 2000 to 2020, the growing number of wildfires — made more intense by climate change — and the increasingly common presence of stagnant, hot weather patterns combined to increase the number of days with hazardous levels of ground-level ozone and fine particulate matter. Those conditions are creating health risks for people throughout the region, according to a paper published in Science Advances.

Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist and co-author of the paper, said the increased pollution affects densely populated regions across a broad swath of the West, including the Los Angeles basin, Salt Lake City, Denver and Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The study found that the number of days when both pollutant levels were extremely high increased in nearly every major city from the Pacific Coast to the eastern Rocky Mountains. (The scientists judged pollution levels to be “extremely high” on days when they were in the 90th percentile of their daily average for the study’s 20-year span.)

Smoke from wildfires can travel thousands of miles, harming people who don’t live directly in wildfire-prone areas.

“When we looked at satellite imagery of the whole country this past summer, we could see smoke from Western wildfires making it all the way to New York City,” Swain said. “There could be a connection with air pollution as far away as the East Coast.”

Wildfires and stagnant, hot weather patterns increase the presence of pollution classified as PM 2.5 — particles that measure less than 2.5 microns in width, the equivalent of about three one-hundredths the width of a human hair — which can make its way deep into lungs and can cross into the bloodstream. Scientific studies have linked PM 2.5 pollution to health problems such as decreased lung function, irregular heartbeat and even premature death in people with heart or lung disease.

The combination of weather patterns and wildfires also increases the formation of ground-level ozone, another threat to respiratory health. Ground level ozone forms due to chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen (such as nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide) and volatile organic compounds, both of which can come from vehicles, power plants, industrial facilities and other sources.

The researchers found that the increase in extreme levels of PM 2.5 due to climate factors increased hazardous air quality conditions by an average of 25 million person-days each year of the past two decades in the Western U.S. and adjacent areas of the Great Plains, Mexico and Canada. (A person-day refers to a single day of exposure by a single person.)

The analysis is based on pollution data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency monitoring sites, as well as atmospheric observations and data on atmospheric pressure and temperatures.

The poor air quality conditions highlighted in the paper are likely to get worse for at least the next few decades, even if drastic climate change mitigation measures are implemented, Swain said.

“It has gotten hotter, wildfire conditions have gotten worse and we’re seeing more persistent periods of high atmospheric pressure,” he said. “Each of those factors is projected to increase in the coming years.”

While mitigating emissions from wildfires and climate change will take decades, cities could still enact regulations and other programs to that would help reduce the presence of oxides of nitrogen and volatile ogranic compounds — so-called ozone precursor emissions — in the near term. Although the benefits of those changes would take years to accrue, it could be practical for cities to implement emissions-reduction measures during periods of hazardous air quality, and it would likely help reduce the dangers to human health, Swain said.

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

Image of Professor Zrinka StahuljakPhoto credit: Janja Ružić

Reimagining the scope and approach of the UCLA Center for Early Global Studies

/in , , , , /by
Zrinka Stahuljak embraces the role of ‘fixer’ as she directs the center’s transformation

By Jonathan Riggs

Photo credit: Janja Ružić

Zrinka Stahuljak in front of a 15th-century relief of the winged lion of Venice. Each quarter, she guides students through explorations of paintings, sculptures and architecture, encouraging them to find deeper meaning about the people who created them. Photo credit: Janja Ružić

Journalists, businesspeople and politicians working in foreign countries often depend on fixers — resourceful, problem-solving guides with a sophisticated grasp of local languages, cultures and customs.

Zrinka Stahuljak has long considered herself a fixer, both literally — she was a wartime interpreter in her native Croatia during the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia — and metaphorically, in her role at UCLA.

“I’m fascinated and inspired by the transcultural work of fixers, who ultimately help people make transformative connections,” she says.

It’s in that spirit that Stahuljak has overseen the thoughtful transformation of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies into the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies. As the center’s director since 2019, Stahuljak has aimed to honor the center’s illustrious past — founded in 1963, it’s one of the oldest such centers in North America — and ensure its dynamic future.

While the center’s purview will still span the third to the 17th centuries, its new name represents an expanded focus, which now takes a global perspective extending far beyond the Eurocentric view that once defined the field. As part of its new approach, research is centered around five axes: sustainability and repurposing, fluidity and permanence, bodies and performance, conversion and mobility, and communication and archive.

“This collaborative platform allows faculty studying various parts of the globe over almost 1,500 years to exchange effectively from within their fields or work together innovatively across them,” says Stahuljak, a professor of European languages and transcultural studies and of comparative literature.

The transformation makes UCLA’s center one of the first major entities in the field to adopt the new, more inclusive approach, and to employ the new methodologies and interdisciplinary orientations that come with it.

“The key to it all is recognizing and proceeding with the knowledge that none of us is alone in this world,” she says. “That’s something the study of the past can give us: an overwhelming sense of relationality to others who have lived and who will live.”

In the wake of its relaunch, the center already has begun to forge new collaborations with partners from across campus, including scholars at the departments of anthropology, Asian languages and cultures, Near Eastern languages and cultures, and world arts and cultures/dance, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Charles E. Young Research Library.

It’s work worthy of a world-class fixer like Stahuljak, who recently wrote two books on fixers: “Les Fixeurs au Moyen Age: Histoire et Littérature Connectées” (“Fixers in the Middle Ages: Connected History and Literature”), which was published in September by Éditions du Seuil, and “Medieval Fixers: Translation in the Mediterranean (1250–1500),” forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Stahuljak researched and wrote both volumes in 2017 and 2018, when she was a Guggenheim fellow.

Staying connected to Europe and her own past richly informs all Stahuljak does. Born to musician parents who valued education, she grew up with a gift for learning multiple languages, including the two she would later adopt professionally, French and English.

Her time as a wartime interpreter — including a frightening night navigating mountain paths alone after the Croatian–Slovenian border closed — interrupted her college education for a year, but it also taught her much about injustice and the need for an international community of scholarship. Stahuljak went on to earn her master’s degree from the University of Kansas and a doctorate from Emory University; after four years at Boston University, she joined UCLA in 2005.

To open her students’ eyes and intellects and perhaps inspire their empathy, Stahuljak starts each quarter by guiding them through explorations of paintings, sculptures and architecture, encouraging them to find deeper meaning about the people who created them and those who have absorbed them over centuries. Her goal: to help students connect with the subjects they’re studying, no matter the historical distance.

That thoughtful approach carries over to her vision for the Center for Early Global Studies. Even with the campus having resumed in-person instruction, Stahuljak plans to continue offering a range of programs online, too, to maintain the growing global audience it cultivated during the pandemic. She’s also investing in the next generation of scholars, for example by holding manuscript workshops to shepherd junior faculty through the often overwhelming process of producing their first books, and she is directing more funds to support graduate students in both traditional and underrepresented areas of study.

“As a fixer, I see my role as making this a community: a collective platform to empower UCLA’s extraordinary researchers, scholars and teachers,” she says. “My goal is to put myself out there and ask, ‘What do you want to do, and how can I help you make it happen?’”

Stahuljak sees her work relaunching the center as an opportunity to marry her rich understanding of the past with her hopeful view of a humane future for all.

“We cannot understand the present without the past — the contrast allows us to analyze differences, successes and failures and, ideally, to find innovation to build an informed and thoughtful future,” she says. “The CMRS Center for Early Global Studies has an investment in making the past contemporary. These lessons help us do what we fixers always seek to do: invent and make real change.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

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

From left to right: Isita Tripathi and Nisarg Shah

$100,000 Leadership Scholarships Awarded to Recent Grads

/in , /by

Currently in med school, Isita Tripathi ’20 and Nisarg Shah ’20 named inaugural Samvid Scholars

By Jonathan Riggs

From left to right: Isita Tripathi and Nisarg Shah

From left to right: Isita Tripathi and Nisarg Shah

In addition to enrolling at medical schools at their institutions of choice (Harvard and Yale, respectively), UCLA alumni Isita Tripathi ’20 and Nisarg Shah ’20 have another reason to celebrate. The two were recently selected from over 700 applicants to join the inaugural class of 20 Samvid Scholars. A new, merit-based graduate scholarship for future changemakers committed to effecting a positive change in society, the Samvid Scholars program offers two years of leadership development programming and supports up to $100,000 for graduate study.

“It’s a huge privilege and honor to be part of this community,” Tripathi says. “It has been really inspiring and thought-provoking to discuss the different approaches that each of us hopes to take to produce social change.”

“I’m excited to be working with everyone, sharing ideas, and figuring out how we can help each other achieve our goals,” adds Shah. “I feel very grateful to be part of this inaugural cohort.”

For helping them earn this honor, Tripathi and Shah say they owe a debt of gratitude to the UCLA Scholarship Research Center, a free service available to all Bruin students. Primarily assisting undergraduates, the SRC provides invaluable scholarship information, resources and support services that benefit students throughout their time at UCLA and beyond.

How did UCLA prepare you for medical school?

ISITA TRIPATHI: I really loved my education at UCLA. It was the first time I felt like I was educated about history and social inequities from the perspective of the oppressed, which motivated many of my community volunteering efforts. Those experiences helped me better understand the trauma and the systemic factors that play into someone’s experiences with the healthcare system, and made me passionate about helping people navigate it successfully.

NISARG SHAH: I think the most helpful part of my education was meeting people in classes and student groups who came from different backgrounds and learning from their diverse ways of thinking. It made me realize that the healthcare system needs to be able to accommodate many varied individual experiences. I felt motivated to pursue medicine in order to bridge those gaps, especially in terms of access to care and cost of services.

How did your minors complement your majors?

IT: Pairing my neuroscience major with a disability studies minor allowed me to understand both the biological and sociopolitical factors around neurodiversity, which shaped much of my work in the autism community. So much injustice and suffering have come from the medical field toward people with disabilities. Seeing that tension has really shaped my perspective on accessibility in healthcare, and allowed me to pursue research and advocacy that merges the social model of disability with existing medical interventions.

NS: The academically rigorous classes and invaluable research experiences in my Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics (MIMG) major helped me think about science more critically. But I wanted to understand medicine not just as a science, but also examine the critical social and personal components affecting health. With my public affairs minor, I felt challenged to think about how I could apply science to address issues in global health and public policy, which is something that I hope to continue at Yale.

How will you pay your Samvid Scholar experience forward?

IT: This program is about teaching people to play to their strengths and become visionaries in their fields, so I would love to cultivate that in future premeds, despite how rigid or prescribed the path to medicine can feel. In addition to mentorship, I want to fulfill the responsibility that has been given to me as a scholar by centering innovation for the good of society at the core of my work.

NS: Mentorship is very important to me — the mentors in my life are the reason that I was able to get to where I am and to keep moving toward my future goals. I hope to serve as a mentor for anyone who might need it. I also know how lucky I am to be getting such a great education, and I want to improve access to higher education and experiential training, especially for those in underserved communities.

What’s your advice for other Bruins to follow in your high-achieving footsteps?

IT: Being at UCLA can feel like you’re in a bit of a bubble, but it helps to get out in the community beyond campus and stay connected to the reason you wanted to pursue your major. If you are looking to take a creative route that is unusual for people in your field, don’t take “no” for an answer — find the faculty members who will nurture your growth and confidence while using criticism to understand the roadblocks you might face. In general, it can feel very tough to find your own opportunities without a lot of support at such a large institution, but that tenacity and self-starter mentality will help you so much in the future. Remember that you are valued and loved!

NS: UCLA is a great school, but also a big school. That means there are tons of opportunities, but it can be difficult to navigate. Be persistent — don’t give up even if what you’re working toward is hard to reach. Sometimes the most accessible resources are your peers, so make sure that you lean on them and ask for help. For example, I got great advice from students in classes above me just by asking what strategies they had used and what they would have done differently. And lastly, make sure that you are taking time to rest, and investing in your hobbies and health. Playing basketball and being around my friends helped me find the balance I needed to push forward.

What’s a special UCLA place for you?

IT: UCLA, hands down, has the most gorgeous campus. I was always a big fan of the Music Café in particular. Since I used to play flute in high school, it made me feel connected to a different part of myself, which was a nice escape from pre-med stress. Plus, when the doughnuts at Bombshelter sold out by 10 a.m., I could always find them at the Music Café.

NS: I met a lot of people in Dogwood and the dorms near De Neve who are still my friends today. It will always be a special place that reminds me of a fun freshman year and a lot of interesting people. I encourage everyone to make the most of their first-year experience —  those relationships will keep you grounded through all of the ups and downs of college.

To learn more about the UCLA Scholarship Resource Center, click here.

New scholarship supports undergraduate internships at community organizations

/in , /by
Image collage of Destiny Clark, Victoria Liu, Maya Desai

Destiny Clark, Victoria Liu, Maya Desai

By Robin Migdol

An unpaid summer internship is practically a rite of passage for most college students. But a new scholarship awarded this year by the UCLA Center for Community Engagement enabled four undergraduates to turn their unpaid internships at nonprofits and other community-centered organizations into paid ones.

  • Destiny Clark, junior physiological science major and public health minor, interned with Building Blocks for Kids, which promotes financial literacy and career development in low-income high school students. For her internship, she helped with curriculum development and outreach to local organizations to recruit volunteers.
  • Khushi Desai, senior sociology major and labor studies minor, interned with 826 Valencia, a nonprofit that supports under-resourced students from elementary through high school with their creative and expository writing.
  • Maya Desai, senior public affairs major and urban and regional studies minor, interned with the City of Santa Cruz’s Parks and Recreation department. She helped create a centralized database of information about all the parks, beaches and coastal access points that are run by the Santa Cruz County Parks and Planning department.
  • Victoria Liu, senior psychobiology major and global health minor, interned with South African epidemiologist Dr. White Ndwanya, who works with UNAIDS. Liu was part of a project to investigate how local NGOs provide holistic services to people with HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and she also helped create a COVID-19 epidemiological profile for the Western Cape province showing the progression of infection levels and the effectiveness of lockdowns. This internship was part of the UCLA Global Internship Program.

The four scholarship recipients noted how valuable their internships’ hands-on experience is to their overall education and career preparation. Maya Desai said working with permits, development plans and other logistical aspects of urban planning gave her a new perspective on paperwork.

“I hadn’t learned about that in any of my urban planning classes, but through this process I realized nothing gets done without it,” said Desai, who seeks a future career in transportation planning. “It was definitely a reality check for me to understand this is what a large part of being an urban planner is going to be like on a day to day basis.”

Clark said it’s important to her to include community service in her college experience. Working with Building Blocks for Kids was especially meaningful since she went through the program as a high school student.

“I remember how challenging it was for me going through my high school education, trying to come to UCLA,” Clark said, “so I want to really give tips and advice to those students just so they won’t have to go through those hard times.”

The scholarships were funded by a gift from Wendy Liberko and other generous donors. Liberko said her experience volunteering for nonprofits and serving on nonprofit boards makes the impact of her gift even more meaningful.

“You’re not living if you’re not giving. I hope this scholarship can have a lasting impact, not only with the students but with programs that they end up supporting,” Liberko said. “If working for a nonprofit or community organization is someone’s passion, then helping them be efficient and well-rounded makes such a difference.”

“The scholarship allowed me an additional avenue to pursue a nonprofit internship,” Liu said. “That sector is definitely something that I’m very interested in, especially in ways that they uplift marginalized communities and bridge a lot of the equity issues that we’re seeing in our society, specifically in healthcare.”

Shalom Staub, director of the Center for Community Engagement, said internships can be enormously impactful on a student’s development, enriching their academic learning and affording them a real-world taste of working in a prospective field of professional interest.

“I am so grateful to our donors for supporting these scholarships,” he said. “They made unpaid nonprofit internships accessible to students who might not otherwise have this opportunity at this critical moment in their education and pre-professional development.”