UCLA Professor Marissa López’s Summer Writers’ Workshop empowered young attendees to map out their unique vision of L.A.’s future history—and their role in it

What Gets Remembered

By Jonathan Riggs

Professor Marissa López examines Robert Becker’s “Diseños of California Ranchos: Maps of thirty-seven Land Grants if 1822-1846 from the Records of the United States District Court, San Francisco” in the Rare Books room at Central Library downtown. PHOTO CREDIT: Yvonne Condes

There has never been one definitive Los Angeles. Spanning hundreds of years and countless cultures, the city represents something different for everyone. It belongs to us all, as young participants in the Summer Writers’ Workshop discovered in July.

An annual offering by creative writing nonprofit 826LA, the program featured something new this year: a collaboration between 826LA, UCLA and Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies Marissa López’s Picturing Mexican America project. The weeklong workshop brought middle and high school students together to examine—and imagine—both the future history of L.A. and their roles in that history, focusing on the questions, “Who makes decisions about what gets remembered?” and “How can we bring unseen or ignored things to light?”

López and her graduate students Efren Lopez (no relation), Robert Mendoza and Gabriela Valenzuela, as well as their partners at 826LA, including program coordinator Cecilia Gamiño, created the workshop to empower young writers to think about their city in new ways and about themselves as active participants in history.

“Working together on this project underscored how the process of rewriting a history of Los Angeles must be a collaborative project rather than an individual endeavor,” Mendoza says. “We made sure to let our students know that we were excited to be coworkers with them in the production of a new type of history.”

The program began with López sharing research from her Picturing Mexican America project. Actor and writer Xavi Moreno then came in to help the students develop an “I am…” poem that described their Los Angeles—and themselves.

Examples of collaborative maps the students drew using Zoom’s whiteboard feature.

“Hearing Xavi read his poem about the sights, smells and sounds of growing up in Boyle Heights literally gave me goosebumps,” López says. “At the end of the week, we recorded the students reading their poems. Their writing was … moving, sharing such personal fears, hopes and joys. It was a remarkable experience.”

The workshop also included a session titled “Imagining Space,” led by Valenzuela, in which students plumbed the California State Archives’ Diseño Collection, a free digital resource of 493 hand-drawn maps (diseños) of nineteenth-century land grants, to compare them with surveyors’ maps of the same places after the Mexican-American War.

“I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and it was important to me to remind 826LA students, many of whom are students of color, that they have as much a right as anyone else to learn firsthand about the city in which they live,” Valenzuela says. “I hope that working with the diseños showed them that L.A. has always been a place held up by people of color, despite what systematic erasure tells us.”

She then asked students to think about what being from Los Angeles meant to them, and what places and resources they would want to archive as they drew their own maps of the city. The resulting diseños showcased local grocery stores, favorite landmarks, beloved homes and even major freeways, painting unique portraits of life in 21^st-century Los Angeles.

“It was interesting to see what was important to them and how that translates to scale, which helped them understand cartographic features of the diseños in ways that connect them on a personal level,” says López. “After all, the diseños were made by real people who lived, laughed and loved on this land that first was taken from the Tongva, then was taken from Mexican families, and now is home to things like the Glendale Galleria. Engaging with space in this deeply personal way helped the students understand land as a narrative object and to see themselves as people with world-making story power.”

After thoughtfully examining the past and the present, participants next looked to the future, exploring how artists across multiple mediums have envisioned the L.A. of tomorrow. Then, guided by Efren Lopez, students created their own vision of the future of their city, while also writing about themselves and their lives from the perspective of historians working centuries ahead.

“This project taught me that the type of historical research I do—and the public humanities overall—are translatable to other communities outside of academia and to all ages,” Lopez says. “More than ever, it is important that we give students space to think critically and historically about the world they are in, and the world they will build.”

As impactful as the workshop was for the attendees, it proved even more so for Marissa López and her graduate students.

“First and foremost, Efren, Robert and Gabriela are brilliant scholars and excellent teachers with deep roots in and powerful commitments to the city and people of Los Angeles,” she says. “As the director of Efren’s and Gabriela’s dissertations and a member of Robert’s committee, I saw the workshop experience as an occasion for career development: they were able to build out the public engagement aspects of their dossiers, broaden their professional networks and gain valuable perspective on their future career trajectories.”

Much like the students they taught, López’s graduate students came away with a renewed vision for their unique roles in shaping the future, including helping to dispel the myth that a humanities higher education only equips students to teach.

“There is a wide world of work out there and a large market for their skills. After all, our field at its core is discovering, communicating, building community and imagining new worlds into being,” López adds. “That is what scholarly research and writing is all about; it is also what organizations like 826LA do. The advanced training of a humanities Ph.D. can produce problem-solving visionaries uniquely equipped to make the world a better place in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine.”

Participant Rami Gross remixed archival photos to tell his own, speculative history using an image of Margarita Reyes, daughter of Jose Isidro Reyes and Maria Antonio Villa de Reyes who owned a large tract of land in Orange County during the 19th century (from UC Irvine Library, ca 1875) engaged in a lightsaber duel on the Death Star with “A youngster wearing traditional Chinese clothing” standing next to a Chinese banner in Chinatown (from LA Public Library, ca 1900). “One of the things we asked the students to think about is what kinds of images we have in the archives and how they’re described,” says Professor Marissa López. “Why do we know Margarita’s name but the youngster is just a ‘youngster’? What does it mean to see and be seen, to be named or unnamed in the historical record?”
COLLAGE CREDIT: Rami Gross

English major Woody Brown, a precise prose stylist diagnosed with autism at age 2, wins the Christopher Zyda Creative Writing Award

August 26, 2021/in Box 4, Featured Stories, Our Stories Page /by Kristina Hordzwick

About the Author

By Jonathan Riggs

Aspiring novelist Woody Brown is going to have quite the author’s bio on a future dust jacket.

“I grew up a mighty weird autistic kid who was presumed to be retarded because I couldn’t speak,” he says. “My intelligence was not fully acknowledged until I went to Pasadena City College, where they accepted me and my upward trajectory began.”

Communicating using a letter board transcribed by his mother, Mary, his tireless champion and comic foil to his clever asides, Brown describes how his path to education, higher or otherwise, wasn’t always assured.

In fact, his mother had to wage a daily battle in and out of the classroom to get Brown the opportunity to earn an actual high school diploma, rather than a certificate of completion. Even after he proved himself and achieved this milestone, the question remained how he would fare at the college level.

“After Woody wrote his very first college paper, the professor asked to keep it to show future students,” Mary says. “Three years later Woody graduated with a 4.0 and honors, and got accepted to UCLA. Even now, when I think of where we came from—where people told me he’d never be able to learn—to where we are now, it’s indescribable.”

From his writerly beginnings as a child, making up stories about his heroic alter ego “Cop Woody,” Brown has always drawn creative inspiration from his journey and from the challenges he has and continues to overcome. In his first published work, a 2020 essay titled “Emerson and Me,” he explores the famed transcendentalist’s concept of self-reliance from the perspective of someone who seems anything but.

In this excerpt, Brown writes: “I am truly new in nature, and no one knows what I can do or where I can go, not even me. Who could have imagined, when I was a frustrated child refusing to cooperate with conformist therapists, or a frustrated adolescent throwing chairs at the ceiling of my conformist classroom, that I would become a college honors student? Emerson didn’t have someone like me in mind when he wrote about the merits of self-reliance, but I think I embody his ideal man perfectly.”

Today, Brown celebrates the “intellectual revelation” he’s experienced at UCLA as an English major, now in his senior year. Even though he hasn’t had the chance to spend time on campus due to the pandemic, being a Bruin has meant everything to him, especially after the English department honored him with the 2020-2021 Christopher Zyda Creative Writing Award.

“I was more speechless than usual—it felt like Christmas, my birthday and a miracle in one,” he says. “I had gotten good feedback on my writing from professors and classmates, but it never occurred to me that I could compete with neurotypical writers on anything near a level playing field.”

For his creative writing honors thesis, he’s working on a collection of short stories revolving around the myriad voices from an adult day care facility for people with autism. Brown recently completed final revisions on the collection’s gripping first story, “The Eloper,” narrated by a reluctant, observant client whose perspective occasionally mirrors his own.

In the story, Brown’s unnamed narrator shares, “As much as I wish I could just type my thoughts independently, that’s not how it works for most nonspeaking spellers. Our brains have trouble getting all the motor planning lined up to perform the complex actions involved in typed communication. Most people don’t even consider how many parts of the brain are activated when they speak or type. If your electronic impulses resist firing in the right order, like mine do […], the message gets lost somewhere between the thought and the finger hitting the keyboard.”

After graduating from UCLA, Brown hopes to pursue an MFA in creative writing at Columbia or NYU and to eventually support himself as a full-time author. Although he’s focusing his craft on short stories at the moment, he dreams one day of penning longer literary fiction from his unique perspective to spark empathy, inspiration and, ultimately, action.

“I am so happy that people are interested in my story,” Brown says. “Not only am I acting as a tour guide to my world for those who are unfamiliar with it, but I also have a larger mission. I want to act as a role model for others like me, to show that the door to success in the mainstream world is not locked against us.”

In memoriam: Gary Nash, 88, influential scholar of early American history

August 13, 2021/in Box 4, Featured Stories /by Kristina Hordzwick

By Sean Brenner

Gary Nash

Gary Nash, a prolific historian of early America and a member of UCLA’s history department for more than 50 years, died July 29. He was 88.

Nash’s most celebrated work was “The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution” (1979), which highlighted the importance of non-elites in bringing about American independence. The book, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, reflected Nash’s view that U.S. history was shaped by the struggles of ordinary people trying to better themselves.

“He was undeniably one of UCLA’s greatest treasures and ranks among the most prolific and brilliant historians of any generation,” said UCLA distinguished professor Robin D. G. Kelley, who holds an endowed chair established in 2008 in Nash’s name. “He never wrote for the guild — professional historians — but for readers everywhere. But he knew that being a public intellectual was not a popularity contest measured by book sales; it meant being unpopular, confronting power without concern for the consequences.”

In 1997, three years after he retired from UCLA with the title of distinguished research professor, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Over the past two decades, he continued to support students and junior colleagues across the country and to produce new scholarship.

“Writings of Warner Mifflin: Forgotten Quaker Abolitionist of the Revolutionary Era,” co-authored with Michael McDowell, was published this summer, and his last manuscript, “Our Beloved Friend: The Life and Writings of Anne Emlen Mifflin,” co-authored with Emily Teipe, was recently completed. At the time of his death, he was collaborating with co-authors Clayborne Carson and Emma Lapsansky-Werner on revisions to their 2007 book “Struggle for Freedom: A History of African Americans.”

Nash, who earned UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1990, inspired generations of students. One, Carla Pestana, who earned her doctorate under Nash’s guidance in 1987, now heads UCLA’s history department and is the university’s Joyce Appleby Professor of America in the World.

Another, Damion Thomas, is the sports curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Thomas earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UCLA in the 1990s and his doctorate in 2002, and the first course he took at UCLA was taught by Nash. Thomas was engrossed from the opening lecture.

“Fifteen minutes into the class, he said, ‘Whoever controls the present will use their power to control the past in hopes of controlling the future,’” Thomas said. “In that one sentence, I began to learn two life-changing ideas. The first is that history is about power — power to define what matters and why it matters. The second thing is that history is actually not about the past; history is about the future. Because if you can control what people think about the past, you can influence what they believe is possible.

“I learned that in Professor Nash’s class, and from that point, I wanted to be a historian.”

Born July 27, 1933, in Philadelphia, Nash earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton University before serving in the Navy for three years. (He continued his military service as a member of the Navy Reserve from 1958 through 1965.) Upon completing his doctorate at Princeton in 1964, he taught briefly there before coming to UCLA in 1966.

Among his most notable books was “Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America” (1974), a survey of early American history that reshaped historians’ approach to the American past. In addition to “Struggle for Freedom,” which he co-authored, his books on African American history included “Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840” (1988) and “The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution” (2006).

Kelley said Nash — as a citizen and as a teacher — responded emphatically throughout his career to the changing societal landscape.

After Los Angeles’ 1965 Watts Rebellion, Nash helped support groups like Operation Bootstrap, which promoted Black entrepreneurship and community-based economic cooperation in South Los Angeles. He introduced a UCLA course called Racial Attitudes in America as a direct response to the rebellion.

“He published 33 books throughout his career,” Kelley said. “But I would say the life he lived as an anti-racist activist, teacher, scholar and public intellectual should be recognized as his 34th.”

Nash’s leadership positions at UCLA included serving as dean of undergraduate and intercollege curricular development and as dean of the council on educational development. He also founded the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA, through which he worked with the National Council for History Standards to create history teaching standards with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education.

His expertise on teaching standards kept him engaged in the contentious national debate over how history is taught in K–12 schools. Pestana said historians have routinely expressed gratitude for Nash’s efforts on behalf of the discipline of history specifically and of education in general.

Nash spoke on the subject on the Economist’s “Checks and Balances” podcast in July.

“[Teachers] know you’re not going to have a very interesting, productive and useful history class if you exclude anything which would make any child uncomfortable or that would lead to any division of opinion,” he said. “In a liberal democracy, we want a division of opinion, for young people to grow up learning to express themselves, argue about [history, and] think hard about it. Patriotism is not just saluting the flag. It’s becoming responsible citizens who will take an active role in what’s going on around them.”

Nash is survived by his wife of 40 years, Cindy Shelton; his children, Brooke, Robin, Jennifer and David; and nine grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA newsroom.

Courtesy of Margaret Kivelson

Margaret Kivelson selected for 2021 James Clerk Maxwell Prize

August 9, 2021/in Box 4, Featured Stories /by Kristina Hordzwick

Courtesy of Margaret Kivelson

By Stuart Wolpert

Margaret Kivelson, professor emeritus of space physics in the UCLA College, has been honored as the 2021 recipient of the American Physical Society’s James Clerk Maxwell Prize for her contributions to the field of plasma physics.

The prize’s citation praises Kivelson for her “ground-breaking discoveries in space plasma physics and for seminal theoretical contributions to understanding space plasma processes and magnetohydrodynamics.” The award, which includes a $10,000 prize, will be presented at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in November.

“This unexpected and highly appreciated recognition should rightfully be shared with my UCLA colleagues, in my view the most exceptional group of plasma physicists in the world,” Kivelson said. “I intend to donate the prize funds to a graduate fellowship in the department of Earth, planetary and space sciences, my academic home at UCLA.”

Kivelson discovered an ocean inside Jupiter’s moon Europa and a magnetic field generated by Ganymede, the planet’s largest moon. Her studies of Jupiter’s magnetospheric plasmas have allowed scientists to better understand the interiors of planets and their moons.

She conducted research on solar terrestrial coupling with measurement from one of the early spacecraft in the 1970s, laying the foundations for understanding how magnetospheric convection feeds Earth’s radiation belts. In the 1990s, Kivelson led NASA’s Galileo magnetometer team to a series of discoveries. In this century, she has provided insights into understanding Saturn’s system as part of the Cassini magnetometer team.

She joined UCLA in 1967 as an assistant research geophysicist, and was promoted to full professor in the department of Earth and Space Sciences in 1980.

Kivelson is UCLA’s sixth winner of the Maxwell Prize, joining Professors Warren Bicknell Mori (2020), Chan Joshi (2006), Charles Kennel (1997), Francis Chen (1995) and John Dawson (1977).

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

The researchers focused on the dynamics of a key signaling molecule in immune cells called macrophages (pictured here).

UCLA study reveals how immune cells can be trained to fight infections

July 27, 2021/in Box 4, College News, Faculty & Research, Featured Stories /by Kristina Hordzwick

The body’s immune cells naturally fight off viral and bacterial microbes and other invaders, but they can also be reprogrammed or “trained” to respond even more aggressively and potently to such threats, report UCLA scientists who have discovered the fundamental rule underlying this process in a particular class of cells.

In a study published June 18 in the journal Science, the researchers identified a key molecular mechanism within macrophages, infection-fighting cells of the innate immune system, that determines whether — and how well — the cells can be trained. Their findings could help pave the way for future targeted strategies to enhance the function of the immune system.

“Like a soldier or an athlete, innate immune cells can be trained by past experiences to become better at fighting infections,” said lead author Quen Cheng, an assistant clinical professor of infectious diseases at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. However, he noted, the researchers had previously observed that some experiences seemed to be better than others for immune training. “This surprising finding motivated us to better understand the rules that govern this process.”

Whether immune training occurs depends on how the DNA of the cell is wrapped. In human cells, for instance, more than 6 feet of DNA must fit into the cell’s nucleus, which is so small that it is not visible to the naked eye. To achieve this feat, the DNA is tightly wrapped into chromosomes.

Only selected regions of the DNA are exposed and accessible, and only the genes in those accessible regions are able to respond and fight infection, said senior author Alexander Hoffmann, UCLA’s Thomas M. Asher Professor of Microbiology and director of the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences.

However, by introducing a stimulus to a macrophage — for example, a substance derived from a microbe or pathogen, as in the case of a vaccine — previously compacted DNA regions can be unwrapped. This unwrapping exposes new genes that will enable the cell to respond more aggressively, in essence training it to fight the next infection, Hoffmann said.

The new research reveals that the precise dynamics of a key immune signaling molecule in macrophages, called NFκB, determine whether or not this unwrapping and exposing of genes occurs. Moreover, the researchers report, the dynamic activity of NFκB itself is determined by the precise type of extracellular stimulus introduced to the macrophage.

“Importantly, our study shows that innate immune cells can be trained to become more aggressive only by some stimuli and not others,” Cheng said. “This specificity is critical to human health because proper training is important for effectively fighting infection, but improper training may result in too much inflammation and autoimmunity, which can cause significant damage.”

In this image from a microscopy video, scientists track the activity of NFκB inside the cell as it responds to a stimulus. Credit: Brooks Taylor/UCLA

NFκB helps immune cells to identify incoming threats. When receptors on immune cells detect threatening external stimuli, they activate the NFκB molecule inside the cell. The dynamics of NFκB — how it behaves over time — form a language similar to Morse code by which it communicates the identity of the external threat to the DNA and tells it which genes to ready for battle.

The specific “word” of this code that NFκB uses to tell DNA to unwrap is dependent on whether NFκB is oscillatory or steady over eight or more hours after encountering a stimulus. Oscillating NFκB builds up in a macrophage’s nucleus, then moves into the cytoplasm, then returns to the nucleus in cycles, much like a swinging pendulum. Non-oscillating, or steady, NFκB moves into the nucleus and stays there for several hours.

Using advanced microscopy, the researchers followed the activity of NFκB in macrophages derived from the bone marrow of healthy mice, tracking how the molecule’s dynamics changed in response to several different stimuli. They discovered that NFκB was successful at training macrophages — unwrapping DNA and exposing new infection-fighting genes — only when the stimulus induced non-oscillating NFκB activity.

“For a long time, we’ve known intuitively that whether NFκB oscillates or not of must be important but had simply not been able to figure out how,” Cheng said. “These results are a real breakthrough for understanding the language of immune cells, and knowing the language will help us ‘hack’ the system to improve immune function.”

The researchers were also able to simulate this training process with a mathematical model, and the predictive understanding they gleaned may allow for future precision-targeted engineering of trained immunity, Hoffmann said. Mathematical modeling of immune regulatory systems is a key goal of his laboratory, in order to use predictive simulations for precision medicine.

Cheng earned his Ph.D. under Hoffmann’s guidance through UCLA’s Specialty Training and Advanced Research, or STAR, program for physician scientists.

Hoffmann and Cheng expect this research to inspire a wide range of additional studies, including investigations into human diseases caused by immune cells that are improperly trained, strategies to optimize immune training to fight infection and ways to complement existing vaccine approaches.

“This study shows how collaborations between researchers in the UCLA College and David Geffen School of Medicine can produce innovative and impactful science that benefits human health,” Hoffmann said.

The study’s co-lead author is Sho Ohta, an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo and a former postdoctoral scholar in Hoffmann’s UCLA laboratory. Other co-authors are UCLA M.D.–Ph.D. student Katherine Sheu; Roberto Spreafico, a former postdoctoral scholar in Hoffmann’s laboratory; Adewunmi Adelaja, who earned his Ph.D. in Hoffmann’s laboratory and is now working toward his M.D. at UCLA; and Brooks Taylor, a former UCLA doctoral student in Hoffmann’s laboratory.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the UCLA Department of Medicine’s STAR program.

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

‘Surfing’ particles: Physicists solve a mystery surrounding aurora borealis

June 25, 2021/in Box 4, College News, Faculty & Research, Featured Stories /by Evelyn Tokuyama

Aurora borealis in Alaska (Photo Credit: Jean Beaufort)

The spectacularly colorful aurora borealis — or northern lights — that fills the sky in high-latitude regions has fascinated people for thousands of years. Now, a team of scientists has resolved one of the final mysteries surrounding its origin.

Scientists know that electrons and other energized particles that emanate from the sun as part of the “solar wind” speed down Earth’s magnetic field lines and into the upper atmosphere, where they collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules, kicking them into an excited state. These molecules then relax by emitting light, producing the beautiful green and red hues of the aurora.

What has not been well understood is precisely how groups of electrons accelerate through the magnetic field on the last leg of their journey, reaching speeds of up to 45 million mph. In a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, that question is answered by physicists from UCLA, Wheaton College, the University of Iowa and the Space Science Institute.

A popular theory has been that electrons hitch a ride on Alfvén waves — a type of electromagnetic wave that spacecraft have frequently identified traveling Earthward along magnetic field lines above auroras. While space-based research has provided strong support for the theory, limitations inherent to spacecraft measurements have prevented a definitive test.

To overcome these limitations, the physicists conducted laboratory experiments on the Large Plasma Device at UCLA’s Basic Plasma Science Facility, a national collaborative research site supported jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.

After reproducing conditions that mimicked those in Earth’s auroral magnetosphere, the team used specially designed instruments to launch Alfvén waves down the plasma device’s 20-meter–long chamber. Because Alfvén waves are thought to collect only a small portion of electrons in the plasma of space, the physicists focused on determining whether there were electrons that appeared to be traveling at a rate comparable to the electric field of the waves.

“This challenging experiment required a measurement of the very small population of electrons moving down the chamber at nearly the same speed as the Alfvén waves, numbering less than one in a thousand of the electrons in the plasma,” said Troy Carter, a professor of physics and director of the UCLA Plasma Science and Technology Institute.

“Measurements revealed this small population of electrons undergoes ‘resonant acceleration’ by the Alfvén wave’s electric field, similar to a surfer catching a wave and being continually accelerated as the surfer moves along with the wave,” said Gregory Howes, an associate professor of physics at the University of Iowa.

Electrons surfing on Alfvén waves (yellow) streaming toward Earth collide with nitrogen and oxygen molecules (white); in upper altitudes, these collisions result in the emission of red light, while in lower altitudes the emitted light is green.

Electrons streaming toward Earth as they surf on Alfvén waves (yellow) collide with nitrogen and oxygen molecules (white); in upper altitudes, these collisions result in the emission of red light, while in lower altitudes the emitted light is green. (Photo Credit: Austin Montelius, University of Iowa)

Howes noted that these Alfvén waves appear following geomagnetic storms, space-based phenomena triggered by violent events on the sun, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These storms can cause what is known as “magnetic reconnection” in the Earth’s magnetic field, in which magnetic field lines are stretched like rubber bands, snap and then reconnect. These shifts launch Alfvén waves along the lines toward Earth.

And because regions of magnetic reconnection shift during a storm, the Alfvén waves — and their accompanying surfing electrons — travel along different field lines over that time period, ultimately leading to the shimmering glow of the aurora’s curtains of light, Carter said.

In physics, electrons surfing on the electric field of a wave is a phenomenon known as Landau damping, in which the energy of the wave is transferred to the accelerated particles. As part of their research, the team used an innovative analysis technique that combined measurements of the Alfvén waves’ electric field and the electrons to generate a unique signature of the electron acceleration by Landau damping. Through numerical simulations and mathematical modeling, the researchers demonstrated that the signature of acceleration measured in the experiment agreed with the predicted signature for Landau damping.

The agreement of experiment, simulation and modeling provides the first direct test showing that Alfvén waves can produce accelerated electrons that cause the aurora, Carter said.

“This experimental confirmation of the physics behind the aurora is due to persistent ingenuity of research groups at the University of Iowa and UCLA,” said Vyacheslav (Slava) Lukin, program director for Plasma Physics at the National Science Foundation, who was not involved in the research. “From student support via an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, to the NSF CAREER program for early career faculty, to the 25-year partnership between NSF and the Department of Energy that has enabled the unique capabilities of the Basic Plasma Science Facility, this is a success story of a discovery made possible by consistent support of the university research community.”

In addition to Howes and Carter, study authors included James Schroeder of Wheaton College, Craig Kletzing and Frederick Skiff of the University of Iowa, Stephen Vincena of UCLA, and Seth Dorfman of the Space Science Institute.

Further information on the research findings is available on Howes’ website.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

Imaging technique could help identify where landslides are likely

May 27, 2021/in Box 4, College News, Faculty & Research, Featured Stories /by Evelyn Tokuyama

The Himalaya Mountains in Nepal after landslides caused by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake. (Photo Credit: Gen Li)

Each year, landslides kill thousands of people around the world and cause catastrophic property damage. But scientists are still trying to better understand the circumstances that cause them. Doing so would go a long way toward helping people predict where landslides could occur and how severe they might be.

A study led by Seulgi Moon, a UCLA professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences, could be a significant step toward that goal.

Moon and Gen Li, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar who’s now at Caltech, created a new method to understand how topographic stress — which occurs when tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface slide toward each other enough to change the landscape above —influence landslide events. Their research is published in Nature Geoscience.

The study is the first to combine information about natural processes that take place both on the surface of the Earth and at the tectonic level; previous research focused only on landslides caused by events like earthquakes and rain.

“We found that the magnitude of big landslides is affected by not only local conditions such as slope and precipitation but can be also affected by forces deep underground,” Moon said. “This implies that the interaction between what’s above and below the ground is important to better understanding surface processes of the Earth.”

For the study, the scientists developed a new adaptation of an existing technology called 3D topographic stress modeling in order to identify places deep below the Earth’s surface where rocks are weathered — meaning that they’re weakened by natural geological processes — or fractured. By identifying those spots, the model can determine which locations are most susceptible to landslides.

“Understanding earth science and geology will be critical to making mitigation plans for landslides,” Moon said.

Moon and Li conducted the research on the Longmen Mountains, on the Eastern Tibetan Plateau. Their approach uses high-resolution satellite images to detect the sizes and locations of landslides. Those satellite images are compared to the fracturing and weathering of rocks in the same locations, which Moon said can be predicted from the topography of the Earth’s surface.

Areas in which the underground bedrock is particularly weak or fractured may be vulnerable to a large landslide.

Moon’s technique, which uses high-resolution underground stress distribution data, enabled the scientists to locate fracturing that would otherwise not have been apparent because it’s so deep beneath the Earth’s surface — as much as 500 meters (or about 1600 feet) down. The high-resolution underground stress distribution data allows the researchers to distinguish areas below the ground that are damaged due to high stress.

The new technique also could be used to determine where highly sensitive construction projects — like storage facilities for nuclear energy or water — should (or shouldn’t) take place.

This article, written by Angela Estrada, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

How long is a day on Venus? Scientists crack mysteries of our closest neighbor

April 29, 2021/in Box 4, College News, Faculty & Research, Featured Stories /by Evelyn Tokuyama

Fundamentals such as how many hours are in a Venusian day provide critical data for understanding the divergent histories of Venus and Earth, UCLA researchers say. (Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Venus is an enigma. It’s the planet next door and yet reveals little about itself. An opaque blanket of clouds smothers a harsh landscape pelted by acid rain and baked at temperatures that can liquify lead.

Now, new observations from the safety of Earth are lifting the veil on some of Venus’ most basic properties. By repeatedly bouncing radar off the planet’s surface over the last 15 years, a UCLA-led team has pinned down the precise length of a day on Venus, the tilt of its axis and the size of its core. The findings are published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“Venus is our sister planet, and yet these fundamental properties have remained unknown,” said Jean-Luc Margot, a UCLA professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences who led the research.

Earth and Venus have a lot in common: Both rocky planets have nearly the same size, mass and density. And yet they evolved along wildly different paths. Fundamentals such as how many hours are in a Venusian day provide critical data for understanding the divergent histories of these neighboring worlds.

Changes in Venus’ spin and orientation reveal how mass is spread out within. Knowledge of its internal structure, in turn, fuels insight into the planet’s formation, its volcanic history and how time has altered the surface. Plus, without precise data on how the planet moves, any future landing attempts could be off by as much as 30 kilometers.

“Without these measurements,” said Margot, “we’re essentially flying blind.”

The new radar measurements show that an average day on Venus lasts 243.0226 Earth days — roughly two-thirds of an Earth year. What’s more, the rotation rate of Venus is always changing: A value measured at one time will be a bit larger or smaller than a previous value. The team estimated the length of a day from each of the individual measurements, and they observed differences of at least 20 minutes.

“That probably explains why previous estimates didn’t agree with one another,” Margot said.

Venus’ heavy atmosphere is likely to blame for the variation. As it sloshes around the planet, it exchanges a lot of momentum with the solid ground, speeding up and slowing down its rotation. This happens on Earth too, but the exchange adds or subtracts just one millisecond from each day. The effect is much more dramatic on Venus because the atmosphere is roughly 93 times as massive as Earth’s, and so it has a lot more momentum to trade.

The UCLA-led team also reports that Venus tips to one side by precisely 2.6392 degrees (Earth is tilted by about 23 degrees), an improvement on the precision of previous estimates by a factor of 10. The repeated radar measurements further revealed the glacial rate at which the orientation of Venus’ spin axis changes, much like a spinning child’s top. On Earth, this “precession” takes about 26,000 years to cycle around once. Venus needs a little longer: about 29,000 years.

With these exacting measurements of how Venus spins, the team calculated that the planet’s core is about 3,500 kilometers across — quite similar to Earth — though they cannot yet deduce whether it’s liquid or solid.

Venus as a giant disco ball

On 21 separate occasions from 2006 to 2020, Margot and his colleagues aimed radio waves at Venus from the 70-meter–wide Goldstone antenna in California’s Mojave Desert. Several minutes later, those radio waves bounced off Venus and came back to Earth. The radio echo was picked up at Goldstone and at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.

“We use Venus as a giant disco ball,” said Margot, with the radio dish acting like a flashlight and the planet’s landscape like millions of tiny reflectors. “We illuminate it with an extremely powerful flashlight — about 100,000 times brighter than your typical flashlight. And if we track the reflections from the disco ball, we can infer properties about the spin [state].”

Muhammad Nadeem, Jean-Luc Margot/UCLA and NASA

The complex reflections erratically brighten and dim the return signal, which sweeps across Earth. The Goldstone antenna sees the echo first, then Green Bank sees it roughly 20 seconds later. The exact delay between receipt at the two facilities provides a snapshot of how quickly Venus is spinning, while the particular window of time in which the echoes are most similar reveals the planet’s tilt.

The observations required exquisite timing to ensure that Venus and Earth were properly positioned. And both observatories had to be working perfectly — which wasn’t always the case. “We found that it’s actually challenging to get everything to work just right in a 30-second period,” Margot said. “Most of the time, we get some data. But it’s unusual that we get all the data that we’re hoping to get.”

Despite the challenges, the team is forging ahead and has turned its sights on Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede. Many researchers strongly suspect that Europa, in particular, hides a liquid water ocean beneath a thick shell of ice. Ground-based radar measurements could fortify the case for an ocean and reveal the thickness of the ice shell.

And the team will continue bouncing radar off of Venus. With each radio echo, the veil over Venus lifts a little bit more, bringing our sister planet into ever sharper view.

This research was supported by NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Science Foundation.

Other researchers who contributed to the study are Donald Campbell of Cornell University; Jon Giorgini, Joseph Jao and Lawrence Snedeker of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Frank Ghigo and Amber Bonsall of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia.

This article, written by Christopher Crockett, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

Million Dollar Hoods is already influencing policing in Los Angeles

January 28, 2021/in Box 4, College News, Faculty & Research, Featured Stories /by Evelyn Tokuyama

Students, staff and faculty members of Million Dollar Hoods. Less than five years old, the effort has nevertheless helped shape Los Angeles and California law enforcement policy in several areas. (Photo Credit: Leroy Hamilton)

In less than five years, Million Dollar Hoods has already begun to influence criminal justice and policing in Los Angeles.

The program, launched in 2016, produced research on cannabis enforcement that shaped the development of the city’s Social Equity Program, which addresses the impact of disparate enforcement of cannabis prohibition. Its research on the money bail system, the first to document the scale of money bail in a large U.S. city, was instrumental to the passage of California legislation ending money bail for misdemeanor and nonviolent felony cases.

Its report on the Los Angeles School Police Department helped persuade the Los Angeles Unified School District to stop arresting children 14 and younger. And its analyses of Los Angeles Police Department arrests of homeless people unmasked the fact that arrests are outpacing the growth of the city’s homeless population — revealing an escalating focus on policing homeless persons.

Million Dollar Hoods is a big-data research initiative based at UCLA that uses Los Angeles police and jail records to monitor how much authorities are spending to lock up residents, neighborhood by neighborhood. In some communities, that figure is more than $1 million per year.

And not every neighborhood is affected equally by Los Angeles’ massive jail system. Data from arrest records shows that Los Angeles’ jail budget, nearly $1 billion per year, is largely devoted to incarcerating people from just a few neighborhoods.

Million Dollar Hoods researchers have researched and written dozens of “rapid response reports” in response to concerns from community members. Each report is made available on the program’s website.

Million Dollar Hoods researchers have also interviewed nearly 200 Los Angeles residents, under the guidance of Terry Allen, the lead researcher and director of the oral history project and a recent doctoral graduate of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. The oral histories tell stories of individual experiences of dealing with police and being arrested or incarcerated, as well as the impact of incarceration on families.

Its research team is led by Kelly Lytle Hernández, a UCLA professor of history and urban planning, and includes UCLA students, staff and faculty. Every project also benefits from the involvement of community organizations; Youth Justice Coalition, Los Angeles Community Action Network, Dignity and Power Now!, and JusticeLA are among those that have contributed to recent projects.

The project has attracted a passionate collective of undergraduate researchers, said Marques Vestal, faculty advisor for Million Dollar Hoods.

“There are lines out the door to get involved with this project,” said Vestal, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow and leader on the Million Dollar Hoods team who will joins the faculty of UCLA’s department of urban planning in July 2021. “Million Dollar Hoods gives students the chance to work with big data in ways that have a reparative impact on their communities.”

Next up: Thanks to a portion of a $3.65 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Million Dollar Hoods will expand its capacity to produce oral histories — including training students to conduct interviews — and digitize more records and work with members of the community to document their experiences with and perspectives on mass incarceration.

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

Tribal leader Clara Pratte wins Pritzker Award for young environmental innovators

January 6, 2021/in Box 4, College News, Featured Stories /by Evelyn Tokuyama

Clara Pratte: “There’s a Navajo saying that when there’s a world to heal, there’s going to be a mother to do it — a woman to do it.” (Photo Courtesy of Clara Pratte)

The UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability presented the 2020 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award to Clara Pratte, a Navajo advocate for tribal communities and a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team who focuses on tribal engagement.

Pratte advises tribes across the United States on economic development issues, with the goals of alleviating poverty and advancing tribal sovereignty. She founded Strongbow Strategies, a firm that assists tribal and government clients with business and technical issues, in 2013. She is also part of the leadership team of Navajo Power, a public benefit corporation that transitions tribal lands from extractive energy industries such as coal to large-scale solar energy.

The annual award carries a prize of $100,000, which is funded through a portion of a $20 million gift to UCLA from the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation. It is the field’s first major honor specifically for innovators under the age of 40 — those whose work stands to benefit most from the prize money and the prestige it conveys.

Pratte said the award, which was presented Dec. 16 in an online ceremony, brought to mind traditional wisdom.

“There’s a Navajo saying that when there’s a world to heal, there’s going to be a mother to do it — a woman to do it,” Pratte said.

A screen shot of Pratte reacting to the announcement of her selection as the 2020 winner of the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award.

Pratte reacts to the announcement of her selection as the 2020 winner of the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award. (Photo Credit: UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability)

Through her work with Navajo Power, Pratte gathers input to make sure prospective clean energy projects serve the community’s needs. In many cases, she said, companies trying to work on Native lands fail because they lack an understanding of the everyday realities facing residents. They often communicate only with tribal leadership, which may not understand the needs of each individual community. The results create injustices, such as power lines that run over homes lacking electricity. Navajo Power makes sure that’s not the case on its projects.

The company reinvests its profits in the community — reimbursing people for the use of their land and making sure every home has electricity and water.

“I was born and raised in the Navajo community with no water or electricity, thinking that the only way we could survive is to join the capitalist community we’re part of,” Pratte said. “We destigmatize and demystify what it’s like to work on tribal lands.”

The Pritzker Award is open to anyone working to solve environmental challenges through any lens — from science to advocacy and entrepreneurism. For the second straight year, the winner represents an indigenous group and, for the third consecutive year, all three finalists were women.

In addition to Pratte, the finalists were Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, a Marshallese poet and climate activist who performed at the United Nations Climate Summit, and Leah Penniman, who co-founded a community farm centered on Black and Indigenous people that aims to end racism and injustice in the food system. A panel of UCLA faculty members selected the finalists from among 20 candidates who were nominated by an international group of environmental leaders.

Pratte was chosen as winner by a panel of four distinguished judges: Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPrize Foundation; Kevin de León, Los Angeles City Councilmember; Lori Garver, CEO of Earthrise Alliance; and Kara Hurst, head of worldwide sustainability at Amazon.

“I don’t need to convince this crowd that climate change is an existential threat,” de León said. “We cannot solve it unless all individuals can access the latest and greatest energy technologies and live in a sustainable community.”

The announcement of Pratte as the winner was made by Tony Pritzker, who founded the award and is a member of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability’s advisory board. He praised all of the nominees for their practical efforts during a difficult time.

“2020 obviously has been a different sort of year,” Pritzker said. “The word that I have in my mind is ‘grateful.’ I’m grateful for my health and the health of my family in a way I’ve never appreciated before. I’m grateful for your perseverance and dedication to the Earth and its various environmental needs. You’re all working toward solutions that can make this a better place to live.”

This article, written by David Colgan, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.