“I’m drawn to voices that speak for all of us,” says UCLA alumnus Juan Felipe Herrera, who was named U.S. Poet Laureate in June. To prepare for his year as the nation’s top poetry consultant — and the first Latino to hold the post — Herrera has been listening to as many people as he can.
Since the early 13th century, a slew of Williams, Richards, Johns and Roberts — plus a generous smattering of Georges, Jameses and Thomases — have served as vice chancellor of England’s Oxford University, the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Now comes the first woman to hold the post: Louise Richardson, who earned her master’s in political science at UCLA in 1980.
A new research center at UCLA will foster research and instruction on international migration. The Center for the Study of International Migration, based in the UCLA International Institute, will be led by Roger Waldinger, a UCLA distinguished professor of sociology and a well-known migration expert.
UCLA researchers announced today the Bird Genoscape Project, which will create the first maps identifying the population-specific migration paths of several bird species and their sub-groups to determine where conservation is needed most to combat the effects of climate change.
Rhetoric around immigrants has taken an ugly turn of late. Recent comments by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are but the tip of a dark iceberg. While the public rhetoric has been loosely focused on the southern border, undocumented immigrants and “anchor babies,” a toxic narrative paints with an expansive brush, tarnishing many hapless targets along its way.
With help from elderly survivors of the World War II internment camps, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center has launched the Suyama Project to gather and make available online evidence of resistance among Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to camps by the federal government, shattering the myth of the “quiet Americans” who silently accepted their fate without question.
When UCLA hosted the Special Olympic World Games this summer, a positive message of inclusion and acceptance was amplified. But unfortunately for many people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in other parts of the world, this message doesn’t resonate in their countries, where there are no pathways for them to learn work and social skills or gain independence.
UCLA professor Sharon Gerstel studies how Byzantine-era churches enhanced the performance of liturgical chants.
For UCLA biochemistry Ph.D. student Jeffrey Vinokur, science is better when shared.
To share his favorite subject broadly, Vinokur leads a dual life as complex as some of the enzymes he is studying. When he’s not looking deep into the structural analysis of mevalonate-3-kinase in the quiet of his lab, he’s a nationally known chemist-meets-hip-hop dancer named the Dancing Scientist, running a one-man-show that automatically converts every stage into a classroom for zany science experiments.
A$5 million gift from Alan Leve, a UCLA alumnus and the founder and president of Culver City, California-based Ohmega Technologies, will establish several endowments at the UCLA College’s Center for Jewish Studies. Leve said he hopes the gift, which will benefit students, faculty and the community, will honor his family’s legacy of giving — one that started with his late grandmother, Hinda Schonfeld.
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