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Picture of a hand gently holding a baby’s fingers.

New UCLA center promotes reproductive science and sexual health

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Picture of a hand gently holding a baby’s fingers.

Aditya Romansa/Unsplash

Holly Ober | January 30, 2023

A new center at UCLA will bring together students, scientists, educators and physicians across a wide range of disciplines to support research and education initiatives designed to improve human reproductive health, promote healthy families and to advance the well-being of society.

The UCLA Center for Reproductive Science Health and Education aims to fill a void in reproductive health knowledge while developing new technologies to improve reproductive health for all. The center’s inaugural director is Amander Clark, a UCLA professor, stem cell biologist and an expert in the field of reproductive sciences.

While reproductive health is often associated with issues of reproduction, infertility and contraception, it also includes healthy human development as well as the study and treatment of menopause and cancers related to reproductive organs. However, individuals and policymakers alike often make decisions around reproductive health that are not based on science.

“In the past several years, far too little of the dialogue and decision-making around sexual and reproductive health has been based in scientific research,” said Tracy Johnson, dean of the UCLA Division of Life Sciences. “Yet, science is the foundation by which health and policy professionals can make rational, informed decisions on topics that impact everyone. The time has arrived for an internationally recognized center for research, education and innovation in the reproductive sciences.”

Challenges in the field today include declining fertility rates, the lack of insurance coverage for infertility treatments and the need for better access to reproductive technologies for all.

• According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 2020 marked the sixth year in a row that fewer babies were born in the United States than any previous year. This is on top of a 60-year worldwide trend in declining fertility rates. In addition, there is a marked shift in the increased age of first-time parents.

• Nearly 8 million Americans of reproductive age face a diagnosis of infertility, but treatments in most U.S. states are not covered by insurance. For women over 40 who use in-vitro fertilization, the chances of having a successful pregnancy and a healthy baby are significantly reduced, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. For reasons that are not well understood, even for those under 40, sometimes IVF just doesn’t work.

• People need better and more accessible options for contraception. According to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, almost 40% of women who use contraception stop in their first year because they are not satisfied with existing options.

• There’s also a need for increased access to other reproductive technologies and medical services, especially for LGBTQ and gender-diverse Americans.

Amander Clark

Amander Clark | Don Liebig

The center’s work will include research into the reproductive and endocrine systems, contraception, infertility and pregnancy — as well as the social science of reproduction and reproductive interventions.

“Once established, this will be a home for innovative science and educational programs aimed at changing the national conversation around human reproduction and infertility,” Clark said. “We will develop new therapies toward promoting healthy parents, pregnancies and families of all genders today and for future generations.”

The UCLA Center for Reproductive Science Health and Education will operate in partnership with the division of life sciences at UCLA, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, where Clark is also a member.

The center will serve as a national and international home for training and career development of undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral and clinical fellows — and create an educational pipeline to benefit the UCLA community and beyond.

Hosted by Dean of Life Sciences Tracy Johnson, the Center for Reproductive Science Health and Education’s first event, “Let’s Talk Science: Conversations About the Future of Reproductive Health,” will be held Feb. 16 at 5:30 p.m. Register for the webinar.

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

An image from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Webb Space Telescope reveals birth of galaxies, how universe became transparent

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UCLA astrophysicists shed light on how hydrogen fog burned away after the Big Bang

An image from the James Webb Space Telescope

An image from the James Webb Space Telescope. A pair of UCLA-led studies demonstrate some of the scientific advances that the telescope is making possible. | NASA

Holly Ober | November 17, 2022

Key takeaways:
• UCLA astrophysicists are among the first scientists to use the James Webb Space Telescope to get a glimpse of the earliest galaxies in the universe.
• The studies reveal unprecedented detail about events that took place within the first billion years after the Big Bang.
• The UCLA projects were among a small number selected by NASA to test the capabilities of the Webb telescope.

The earliest galaxies were cosmic fireballs converting gas into stars at breathtaking speeds across their full extent, reports a UCLA-led study published in a special issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The research, based on data from the James Webb Space Telescope, is the first study of the shape and structure of those galaxies. It shows that they were nothing like present-day galaxies in which star formation is confined to small regions, such as the constellation of Orion in our own Milky Way galaxy.

“We’re seeing galaxies form new stars at an electrifying pace,” said Tommaso Treu, the study’s lead author, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. “Webb’s incredible resolution allows us to study these galaxies in unprecedented detail, and we see all of this star formation occurring within the regions of these galaxies.”

Treu directs the GLASS–JWST Early Release Science Program, whose first results are the subject of the special journal issue. Another UCLA-led study in the issue found that galaxies that formed soon enough after the Big Bang — within less than a billion years — might have begun burning off leftover photon-absorbing hydrogen, bringing light to a dark universe.

“Even our very best telescopes really struggled to confirm the distances to such far away galaxies, so we didn’t know whether they rendered the universe transparent or not,” said Guido Roberts-Borsani, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher who led the study. “Webb is showing us that not only can it do the job, but it can do it with astonishing ease. It’s a game changer.”

Those findings are two of many breathtaking discoveries by UCLA astrophysicists who are among the first to peer through a window to the past newly opened by Webb.

Webb is the largest near-infrared telescope in space, and its remarkable resolution offers an unparalleled view of objects so distant that their light takes billions of years to reach Earth. Although those objects have aged by now, light from only their earliest moments has had enough time to travel through the universe to end up on Webb’s detectors. As a result, not only has the Webb functioned as a sort of time machine — taking scientists back to the period shortly after the Big Bang — but the images it’s producing have become a family album, with snapshots of infant galaxies and stars.

GLASS–JWST was one of 13 Early Release Science projects selected by NASA in 2017 to quickly produce publicly accessible datasets and to demonstrate and test the capabilities of instruments on the Webb.

The project seeks to understand how and when light from the first galaxies burned through the hydrogen fog left over from the Big Bang — a phenomenon and time period called the Epoch of Reionization — and how gas and heavy elements are distributed within and around galaxies over cosmic time. Treu and Roberts-Borsani use three of the Webb’s innovative near-infrared instruments to take detailed measurements of distant galaxies in the early universe.

The Epoch of Reionization is a period that remains poorly understood by scientists. Until now, researchers have not had the extremely sensitive infrared instruments needed to observe galaxies that existed then. Prior to cosmic reionization, the early universe remained devoid of light because ultraviolet photons from early stars were absorbed by the hydrogen atoms that saturated space.

Scientists think that sometime within the universe’s first billion years radiation emitted by the first galaxies and possibly by the first black holes caused the hydrogen atoms to lose electrons, or ionize, preventing photons from “sticking” to them and clearing a pathway for the photons to travel across space. As galaxies began to ionize larger and larger bubbles, the universe became transparent and light traveled freely, as it does today, allowing us to view a brilliant canopy of stars and galaxies each night.

Roberts-Borsani’s finding that galaxies formed faster and earlier than previously thought could confirm that they were the culprits of cosmic reionization. The study also confirms the distances to two of the farthest galaxies known using a new technique that allows astronomers to probe the beginning of cosmic reionization.

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

Inaugural faculty recipients of Mellon Foundation “Data, Justice and Society” grants

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Collage image of UCLA professors David MacFadyen, Davide Panagia, Miriam Posner, Nick Shapiro and Veronica Terriquez, recipients of the inaugural “Data, Justice and Society” course development grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

From left to right: UCLA professors David MacFadyen, Davide Panagia, Miriam Posner, Nick Shapiro and Veronica Terriquez, recipients of the inaugural “Data, Justice and Society” course development grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

By Munia Bhaumik

The following UCLA faculty members are the inaugural recipients of “Data, Justice and Society” course development grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation:

This remarkable cohort of innovative UCLA faculty proposed to develop courses across the humanities, social sciences and life sciences to enhance teaching at the intersection of data, justice and society and to augment curricular offerings engaged with data ethics and justice, community-engaged teaching and digital humanities. These courses will be offered either this academic year or next.

The courses enrich our understanding of how data technologies are increasingly a part of our everyday lives. When you buy something on Amazon, friend someone on Facebook or search on Google, data is being gathered about your choices. These courses mobilize the space of the classroom at the nation’s top public university to invite conversation and thought about social consequences and the need for justice in our data-saturated world.

Thanks to the generous contribution of the Mellon Foundation, these grants are increasing the number of course offerings across the UCLA campus for both graduate and undergraduate students to learn from professors who are working at the intersection of multiple fields. Many of the new courses will also allow students to engage with and learn from community organizations across Southern California.

The faculty grant recipients are not only world-renowned scholars in their respective fields, but also committed instructors eager to engage students around issues of academic and social relevance. They were selected by the Mellon Social Justice Curricular Initiatives steering committee, comprised of Todd Presner, professor and chair of the department of European languages and transcultural studies; Shalom Staub, director of the Center for Community Engagement; Juliet Williams, professor and chair of the social science interdepartmental program; and Munia Bhaumik, program director of Mellon Social Justice Curricular Initiatives.


Course Descriptions

David MacFadyen
“Freedom of Speech in Russia: Decentralized Tools for Musicians and Journalists”
Goal: To create a blockchain-based and anonymized publishing platform, using NFTs to protect the rights of both journalists and musicians, currently under significant pressure from state censorship during the war with Ukraine.

Davide Panagia
“#datapolitik: or, the Political Theory of Data”
This course looks to the changing nature of political thinking and judgment given the emergence of data and algorithms as the principal media in contemporary democratic life. The course introduces students to developments of new forms of critical thinking for the study of data and society by interrogating familiar concepts in the history of political thought (freedom, justice, equality, race, ethnicity, gender) in relationship to new and emerging media, and the expectations and claims these media place on users. The learning objective of the course is to study political ideas in relationship to, and embedded with, the specific medium of data.

Miriam Posner
“Data from the Margins”
Data has a long tradition as a weapon of discrimination — but oppressed communities have an equally long tradition of reconceiving, reworking and remaking data in order to fight back. We’ll consult with and hear from activists and scholars who are making change for their communities as they challenge everyone to rethink what data can do.

Nick Shapiro
“Science, Mass Incarceration and Accountability”
The course will be split into two complementary halves. First, an introduction to the extractive data practices of science that have both advanced and profited off of mass incarceration. This half of the course will facilitate the subject matter expertise needed to understand the context and critiques that the work of the second half of the course is attempting to overcome or counteract. The topics of the first half will include a general introduction to mass incarceration and what data can and can’t tell us about this archipelago of nearly 7,000 carceral facilities as well as the unethical scientific knowledge extraction from incarcerated people.

Veronica Terriquez
“Community-Engaged Research Methods:  Surveying Racially Diverse Youth and Workers”
This course will train students in designing, drafting, piloting, and administering a new survey focused on transitions to adulthood. Written in collaboration with community partners, this survey will gather data on the workforce development, labor rights, education, health, mental health, and civic engagement of young people residing in BIPOC communities disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The course will expose students to the historical development of racial statistics, the role of racial statistics in contemporary life, and critical quantitative science. It will also include testing questions on racial identity and attitudes; gender identity; workforce development; labor rights; healing and wellness; and other topics determined by community partners serving Latinx, AAPI, Black, and Indigenous youth. Additionally, students will learn about the strengths and weaknesses of different survey sampling methodologies aimed at gathering data from BIPOC youth, low-wage workers, and students.

Photo illustration of Oleg Itskhoki surrounded by floating currencies

Oleg Itskhoki is a rising star in economics

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Professor earlier this year won the John Bates Clark Medal, one of the most prestigious honors in his field

Oleg Itskhoki, UCLA’s Venu and Ana Kotamraju Professor of Economics, surrounded by floating currencies.

The John Bates Clark Medal committee honored Oleg Itskhoki for “his masterful application of empirical and theoretical tools” that offering insights into important phenomena in international economics. | UCLA

Jonathan Riggs | October 13, 2022

Why do nearly 80 countries choose to fully or partially peg their exchange rates against the U.S. dollar, and how much independence of their monetary policy do they give up by doing so?

Answers to queries like these can be elusive, whether you’re someone who feels like conversations about macroeconomics on the nightly news go over their head, or even an academic economist.

“Without having an empirically relevant model of exchange rates, it is impossible to credibly answer questions that concern, for example, the costs and benefits of common currency areas, such as the Euro Zone, which eliminate exchange rate fluctuations between their country-members,” said Oleg Itskhoki, UCLA’s Venu and Ana Kotamraju Professor of Economics. “Similarly, questions about the optimal exchange rate policy and the costs and benefits of partially managed exchange rates require such a theoretical framework as well.”

In new research, Itskhoki has developed new frameworks that will drive considerable thought in the field going forward. For these ideas, the 39-year-old whose research focuses on macroeconomics and international economics won the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. The award is given to an economist under age 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

“This is the first time a UCLA faculty member has won this prestigious award,” said Jinyong Hahn, chair of the economics department. “Oleg Itskhoki is a star in the field of international economics who solved important puzzles in exchange rates and made it possible to understand the relationship between foreign trade and income inequality.”

Although he hailed from a family of physicists and inherited the family interest in the field, Itskhoki was born in the Soviet Union and grew up during the turbulence of transition-era Russia, during which the legacy of government control over science cast a long shadow. Seeing his older sister’s success in the more stable field of economics, Itskhoki followed in her footsteps.

He appreciated the opportunity to delve into scientific work that left his professional options open, giving him the security of knowing his economics research qualified him for a broader scope of work outside of academia than high-level physics specialization might have. And the puzzles and problems inherent in international economics policies fascinated him more and more the deeper he got into exploring them — especially since the field granted him more independence to follow his curiosity than he might have as part of a lab with rigidly established priorities.

“I truly enjoyed the work and as I went through school, I found myself more and more absorbed by it,” said Itskhoki, who came from Princeton University to UCLA in 2019. “I still am today — I feel so lucky having made what feels like a hobby I love into my life.”

In the official award citation listing Itskhoki’s research highlights, the association emphasized his key insight that financial market noise, rather than economic fundamentals, may be the main driver of exchange rates. This idea offers a unifying theory that solves five of the field’s major exchange-rate puzzles and provides a framework that many believe will serve as the definitive lens through which economists examine these issues going forward.

“Through his masterful application of empirical and theoretical tools, Itskhoki has revisited classic questions in both international finance and international trade, resolving long-standing puzzles and offering new economic insights into important phenomena in international economics,” the committee concluded.

Although the Clark Medal does not include a monetary award, it reflects an enormous vote of confidence from the entire field of economics. The Clark Medal is considered second only to the Nobel Prize in terms of prestige and it has long served as a precursor to winning that honor as well. Earning such a visible sign of respect from his peers means a lot to Itskhoki.

“It’s completely crazy — these things don’t happen. Well, they happen to somebody, but you never expect it to be you,” Itskhoki said. “The biggest, most pleasant part of it all is hearing from so many people that they were teaching my papers — and enjoying teaching them! I am so grateful to hear my work is influential in some ways.”

Crediting his mentors, colleagues and predecessors in the field, Itskhoki chooses to view his victory as a communal rather than personal victory. (His family, including his sister who inspired his professional journey with her own, couldn’t be prouder, he said.) Itskhoki is especially delighted to see “UCLA” now appear among the home institutions of Clark Medal winners, a list which has long been dominated by schools like Harvard and MIT.

“UCLA is a very special place, where public service, research and teaching are deeply valued,” Itskhoki said. “I find that so inspiring, and I couldn’t be prouder to see schools like us and UC Berkeley coming into their own as top national institutions for economics.”

Teaching remains a passion for Itskhoki — in addition to doctoral courses in macroeconomics at both the national and international level, Itskhoki also teaches an international finance course for third- and fourth-year undergraduates.

“Economics are in the news every day — for example, they were a big part of the COVID crisis conversation — and we discuss it all: the trade war with China, tax reform, inflation, food prices and the best way for governments to respond to it all,” he said. “The models we created cited by the American Economic Association has answers to some of these questions, and I try to keep everything grounded in real-world events. Whether or not we know it, economics affects us all so it’s important to see the state of thinking on these topics.”

As he looks to the future, Itskhoki doesn’t think in terms of awards or honors; he focuses on the next challenges he wants to tackle in his research.

“There is still a lot of work to be done on exchange rates; in particular we are now studying optimal exchange rate policies for the government using the insights from our earlier work,” Itskhoki said. “I am also fascinated by the topic of the new high-tech industries and AI technologies and the associated questions of productivity and welfare measurement in the world with proliferation of AI.”

Economists with UCLA ties have a history of top honors

Lloyd Shapley, professor emeritus of economics and mathematics, received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in October 2012. Shapley, who joined UCLA in 1981, was honored for his research on “matching theory,” which aims to improve the performance of markets by, for example, connecting prospective students with schools or aligning patients who need organ transplants with donors.

Guido Imbens, a Stanford University professor who was a UCLA faculty member from 1997 to 2001, won the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Two alumni have won the Nobel in economics: William Sharpe in 1990 and Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

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

Image of Oroville dam spillway flooding

Climate change makes catastrophic flood twice as likely, study shows

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Increased runoff could lead to devastating landslides and debris flows — particularly in hilly areas burned by wildfires
Image of Flood waters surging over the Oroville Dam spillway in California and damaging the surrounding channel on Feb. 11, 2017.

Flood waters surging over the Oroville Dam spillway in California and damaging the surrounding channel on Feb. 11, 2017. | William Croyle/California Department of Water Resources

David Colgan | 

Key takeaways:
• Climate change has already made extreme precipitation in California twice as likely, part of a trend projected to continue through 2100.
• Extreme storm sequences are projected to generate 200% to 400% more runoff by the end of the century.
• Today’s study is the first part of ArkStorm 2.0, a scenario to prepare for catastrophic flooding in the western United States.

California lives with a sleeping giant — an occasional flood so large that it inundates major valleys with water flows hundreds of miles long and tens of miles across.

Motivated by one such flood that occurred in 1862, scientists investigated the phenomenon in 2010. They called it the “ArkStorm scenario,” reflecting the potential for an event of biblical proportions.

To account for the additional flood-worsening effects of climate change, scientists from UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have completed the first part of ArkStorm 2.0.

“In the future scenario, the storm sequence is bigger in almost every respect,” said Daniel Swain, UCLA climate scientist and co-author of the paper, which is published today in the journal Science Advances. “There’s more rain overall, more intense rainfall on an hourly basis and stronger wind.”

In total, the research projects that end-of-the-century storms will generate 200% to 400% more runoff in the Sierra Nevada Mountains due to increased precipitation and more precipitation falling as rain, not snow.

The researchers used a combination of new high-resolution weather modeling and existing climate models to compare two extreme scenarios: one that would occur about once per century in the recent historical climate and another in the projected climate of 2081-2100. Both would involve a long series of storms fueled by atmospheric rivers over the course of a month.

The paper also simulated how the storms would affect parts of California at a local level.

“There are localized spots that get over 100 liquid-equivalent inches of water in the month,” Swain said, referring to the future scenario. “On 10,000-foot peaks, which are still somewhat below freezing even with warming, you get 20-foot-plus snow accumulations. But once you get down to South Lake Tahoe level and lower in elevation, it’s all rain. There would be much more runoff.”

The increased runoff could lead to devastating landslides and debris flows — particularly in hilly areas burned by wildfires.

The paper, which was coauthored by climate scientist Xingying Huang, found that historical climate change has already doubled the likelihood of such an extreme storm scenario, building on previous UCLA research showing increases in extreme precipitation events and more common major floods in California. The study also found that further large increases in “megastorm” risk are likely with each additional degree of global warming this century.

“Modeling extreme weather behavior is crucial to helping all communities understand flood risk even during periods of drought like the one we’re experiencing right now,” said Karla Nemeth, director of the Califiornia Department of Water Resources, which provided funding for the study. “The department will use this report to identify the risks, seek resources, support the Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, and help educate all Californians so we can understand the risk of flooding in our communities and be prepared.”

With drought and wildfire getting so much attention, Californians may have lost sight of extreme flooding, Swain said. “There is potential for bad wildfires every year in California, but a lot of years go by when there’s no major flood news. People forget about it.”

The state has experienced major floods over the years, but nothing on the scale of the Great Flood of 1862. During that disaster — when no flood management infrastructure was in place — floodwaters stretched up to 300 miles long and as wide as 60 miles across in California’s Central Valley. The state’s population then was about 500,000, compared to nearly 40 million today. Were a similar event to happen again, parts of cities such as Sacramento,

Stockton, Fresno and Los Angeles would be under water even with today’s extensive collection of reservoirs, levees and bypasses. It is estimated that it would be a $1 trillion disaster, larger than any in world history.

Though no flood so large has happened since, climate modeling and the paleoclimate record — including river sediment deposits dating back thousands of years — shows that it typically happened every 100 to 200 years in the pre-climate change era.

The ArkStorm flood is also known as “the Other Big One” after the nickname of an expected major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault. But, unlike an earthquake, the ArkStorm would lead to catastrophe across a much larger area.

“Every major population center in California would get hit at once — probably parts of Nevada and other adjacent states, too,” Swain said.

The effects on infrastructure would complicate relief efforts, with major interstate freeways such as the I-5 and I-80 likely shut down for weeks or months, Swain said. Economic and supply chain effects would be felt globally.

The first ArkStorm exercise concluded that it would not be possible to evacuate the 5 to 10 million people who would be displaced by flood waters, even with weeks of notice from meteorologists and climatologists. While it helped inform flood planning in some regions, the exercise was limited due to lack of organized resources and funding, Swain said.

California has already seen increases in climate-driven drought and record-breaking wildfires, Swain said. With climate change-amplified flooding, ArkStorm 2.0 aims to get ahead of the curve.

Further research and preparations to respond to such a scenario — including advanced flood simulations supported by the California Department of Water Resources — are planned to follow, Swain said.  This will include collaborations with partner agencies including the California Office of Emergency Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Researchers next hope to map out where flooding could be worst and inform statewide plans to mitigate it. That could mean letting water out of reservoirs preemptively, allowing water to inundate dedicated floodplains and diverting water away from population centers in other ways.

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