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Image of UCLA College Professors Robert Bjork and Rosa MatzkinUCLA

Two UCLA College faculty members elected to National Academy of Sciences

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Image of UCLA College Professors Robert Bjork and Rosa Matzkin

Left: Professor Robert Bjork, Distinguished research professor of psychology; right: Professor Rosa Matzkin, Charles E. Davidson Distinguished Professor of Economics.

Editor’s note: Congratulations to all three UCLA faculty members elected to the National Academy of Sciences, including Professors Robert Bjork and Rosa Matzkin of the UCLA College!

By Stuart Wolpert | May 4, 2022

Three UCLA professors — Dr. E. Dale Abel, Robert Bjork and Rosa Matzkin — have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. They are among the 120 new members and 30 international members announced by the academy May 3.

Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors a scientist in the United States can receive. Previous electees have included Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright and Alexander Graham Bell.

Dr. E. Dale Abel
William S. Adams Distinguished Professor of Medicine
Chair, department of medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Executive medical director, department of medicine, UCLA Health

Abel is a distinguished endocrinologist, researcher and clinician who leads UCLA Health’s largest department. His pioneering work on glucose transport and mitochondrial metabolism in the heart has guided his research on the molecular mechanisms responsible for the cardiovascular complications of diabetes. Abel’s laboratory has provided important insights into how mitochondrial dysfunction and aberrant insulin signaling contribute to diabetes-related heart failure risk. His research has been continually funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1995, with additional support from the American Heart Association and other sources. Prior to joining UCLA on Jan. 1 of this year, Abel held leadership and faculty positions at the University of Iowa, Harvard Medical School and the University of Utah. Among his many awards and honors, Abel is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He serves as president of the Association of Professors of Medicine.

Robert Bjork
Distinguished research professor of psychology

Bjork is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading scholars of human learning and memory. His research focuses on the ways in which the science of learning can inform instruction and training, including identifying techniques that can enhance long-term learning. He has served as editor of the journals Memory and Cognition, and Psychological Review. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Bjork received the Association for Psychological Science’s highest honor — the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award — in 2016, the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists and a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. He delivered a UCLA Faculty Research Lecture in 2016.

Rosa Matzkin
Charles E. Davidson Distinguished Professor of Economics

Matzkin has developed new ways of using empirical data for economic analysis. Her methods exploit properties of economic models to avoid restrictive specifications that may lead to incorrect conclusions. These methods can be used to identify and estimate unobservable variables, to test whether data are consistent with any particular model and to predict behavior and economic outcomes when economic structures change. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Matzkin is currently first vice president of the Econometric Society and is a former member of the executive committees of the Econometric Society and the American Economic Association. She is co-editor of Elsevier’s Handbooks in Economics series and of Vol. 7 of the Handbook of Econometrics. Previously, she served as chief editor of the journal Quantitative Economics, as co-editor of the Econometric Society Monograph Series and as a member of the editorial committee of the Annual Review of Economics.

The National Academy of Sciences, established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln, acts as an official advisory body to the federal government on matters of science and technology upon request. The academy is a private, nonprofit institution dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. 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

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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.

 

Researcher in UCLA Lab

UCLA’s impact on California economy is $11.06 billion

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Researcher in UCLA Lab

Among UCLA’s contributions to the state are research and technologies that have been the basis for numerous startup companies.

 

UCLA is an economic powerhouse for Los Angeles, Southern California and California overall. A study by the Beacon Economics consultancy found that UCLA generated a total of $11.06 billion in economic activity and supported more than 72,700 full-time jobs throughout the state during the 2016–17 fiscal year.

The report also found that UCLA is the fourth largest employer in Los Angeles County, behind the county itself, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the City of Los Angeles, and ahead such companies as Kaiser Permanente, Northrop Grumman and Target Corp.

“UCLA’s contributions to our state’s economic vitality are significant and widespread, from discovering life-changing technologies to employing tens of thousands of Californians,” said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. “Measuring this economic impact allows us to demonstrate how every dollar invested in UCLA pays substantial dividends back to people throughout our state.”

The UCLA Economic Impact Report also demonstrates that UCLA’s spending activity has a total impact far beyond that of its direct spending. For example, technology companies that license UCLA-developed technology and research are often valued in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

“UCLA is a source of pride for Angelenos everywhere,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. “The university’s impact can be felt all around us — in the workers it employs, the jobs it creates across our city and state, the startups it develops on campus, and the discoveries made in its labs and classrooms. Our economy and our communities benefit from UCLA’s presence and performance every day.”

Among the study’s highlights:

  • During the 2016–17 fiscal year, UCLA had a total impact of $11.06 billion on the California economy.
  • UCLA’s spending activity supported more than 72,700 full-time jobs throughout the state.
  • More than $4.15 billion in labor income (earnings) was generated by UCLA through direct, indirect and induced spending activity.
  • UCLA generated $5.86 billion in direct spending throughout California, including $2.61 billion in the City of Los Angeles alone.
  • UCLA helped generate $706.1 million in tax revenue throughout California through direct spending and secondary spending impacts.
  • UCLA had an economic impact of $2.42 billion in indirect (business-to-business) spending, including $2.31 billion in Southern California and $765.1 million in the City of Los Angeles.
  • UCLA had an economic impact of $2.79 billion in induced (household) spending, including $2.52 billion in Southern California and $718.9 million in the City of Los Angeles.
  • UCLA Health Sciences alone had a total impact of $6.49 billion on the California economy, including $6.13 billion in Southern California and $2.39 billion in the City of Los Angeles.
  • During the 2016–17 fiscal year, 24 startups launched using UCLA-developed technology.
  • For the same period, 251 U.S. patents were issued to UCLA.

With more than 45,000 students and 43,000 employees, UCLA is renowned around the world for the quality of its students and faculty, and its dedication to its mission of research, teaching and service. UCLA is consistently ranked each year as one of the best universities in the United States, including as the No. 1 public university in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and as No.1 among best-value universities by Forbes.