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Josie and Joe Bruin welcome one of the newest Bruins.

Nearly 14,000 high school students and their families attend Bruin Day

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Josie and Joe Bruin welcome one of the newest Bruins.

Josie and Joe Bruin welcome one of the newest Bruins.

Josie and Joe Bruin welcome one of the newest Bruins.

UCLA was transformed this past weekend, as about 14,000 people came to campus for Bruin Day, which offers a sample of what it might be like to become Bruins.

Everywhere on campus on April 13, there were sights and sounds that showcased the best of UCLA and campus life. The agenda included information fairs, 40 presentations, faculty lectures, campus tours and open houses of the residence halls. Admitted high school seniors and their families and supporters could learn about academic programs, financial aid, student activities, housing options, campus safety and more while getting a sense of the broad diversity of the student population.

Students ready to commit were able to formally submit their statements of intent to register and have their pictures taken with Joe and Josie Bruin.

Dickson Plaza was a prime spot for families on Bruin Day.

Dickson Plaza was a prime spot for families on Bruin Day.

Photo of Justin Caram, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College, and graduate student Dayanni Bhagwandin.

New UCLA fellowship aims to make environmental science more inclusive

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Photo of Justin Caram, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College, and graduate student Dayanni Bhagwandin.

Justin Caram, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College, and graduate student Dayanni Bhagwandin.

 

Climate change touches every life on the planet — so why are so many environmental scientists white men?

Last year, UCLA became the first university to launch a center for diversity in environmental science to counter the problem. Its goal: to inspire a generation of leaders that actually matches the demographics of the U.S. population.

This year, the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science’s first class of fellows takes flight, building a critical mass to ensure students and faculty of diverse backgrounds have what they’ll need to succeed, from funding to a supportive community of scientists with similar backgrounds.

“With challenges like climate change, the stakes have never been higher for ensuring we have scientific literacy coupled with representation and innovation,” said Aradhna Tripati, the center’s founder and a UCLA climate scientist. “We need every person’s imagination to overcome some of the greatest challenges our society has faced.”

Karen McKinnon, a professor in the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability knows only too well how that sense of isolation affects a student. As one of just a few women in her doctoral program, McKinnon experienced first-hand what it’s like to be a minority in an academic setting.

“The experience of having only a small number of female peers was challenging because you always felt just a little bit out of place,” said McKinnon, who is also a professor of statistics. “It was a visual reminder that I was not the ‘typical’ scientist.”

In the United States, 86 percent of the environmental science workforce is white and 70 percent is male, despite the fact that the EPA found in a 2018 study that non-white communities had a 28 percent higher health burden from environmental issues. Those under the poverty line had a 35 percent higher health burden.

The inaugural fellows class consists of 47 high school, undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, along with 22 faculty fellows from UCLA. The students will work in groups on research and outreach campaigns while the faculty fellows serve as mentors and role models.

Photo of Postdoctoral scientist Adeyemi Adebiyi and Jasper Kok, associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

Postdoctoral scientist Adeyemi Adebiyi and Jasper Kok, associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

The fellows aim to break barriers that prevent women and minorities from pursuing academic careers in the sciences through group collaboration, workshop training sessions and community outreach. Students are paid for their work with financial support from the National Science Foundation and private donations.

The fellows aim to break barriers that prevent women and minorities — including people of various gender identities and sexual orientations — from pursuing academic careers in the sciences through group collaboration, workshop training sessions and community outreach. Students are paid for their work with financial support from the National Science Foundation and private donations.

Ronald Thompson, a second-year environmental science student from Sacramento, said he is one of few black students in most of his classes.

“Diversity provides comfort in a work environment and shows that you can do anything despite your race, religious beliefs or sexuality,” said Thompson, who wants to pursue a research career in conservation biology. “It lets you be comfortable with what you’re doing and makes you feel like you’re not being judged or looked at differently.”

For his research component of the fellowship, Thompson works with other undergraduates in a group overseen by a doctoral candidate to analyze sediment from ancient lakes across the western United States. Their research aims to discover how those lakes persisted through past changes in climate — and how they might react to modern climate change. While the work is fulfilling, Thompson said the best part is working with others just as passionate as himself about the environment.

“People go above and beyond what is required of them out of pure passion for the work they do,” Thompson said. “Everyone wants to be a part of the change that promotes a better future.”

Next year, Thompson will be paired with a faculty fellow for one-on-one mentorship, a cornerstone of the fellowship program.

Tripati said that having a continuum of scientists at all levels — from high school students to professors — is an effective strategy to build professional communities that are inclusive of all forms of diversity: gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, race and ethnicity.

Lack of diversity in such programs can have global implications when it comes to environmental issues, she added.

“If you don’t have women in science, you’re missing some of that talent pool,” McKinnon said. “There remain a lot of fundamental questions to answer about how the climate system responds to human influence.”

One way to make students more comfortable in class is to encourage teachers to embrace inclusive teaching techniques, said Jasper Kok, who is one of the faculty fellows and an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences in the UCLA College. Every class includes a 10-minute exercise during which students work with their neighbors.

“Techniques that engage students and let them work collaboratively help those students who feel like they don’t belong feel more at home and more likely to stay in that field,” he said.

For student fellow Thompson, the benefits are more personal.

“It’s an opportunity to give back to communities and be a role model to other college students, high school students and middle school students,” he said.

Photo of Shane Campbell-Staton

UCLA biology professor uses superheroes to help students sift fact from fiction

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Photo of Shane Campbell-Staton

Shane Campbell-Staton, shown in his UCLA office, says comic books offer a fantastical look at biological concepts.

While Shane Campbell-Staton was working on his dissertation at Harvard in 2013, he walked into a comic book store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and saw a comic in which Superman fought Muhammad Ali. That was the first comic book he ever bought.

An evolutionary biologist, he spent his days writing about the evolution of a small green lizard that adapted from a warm, sub-tropical environment to the cold winters of Tennessee, North Carolina and Oklahoma. Before going to sleep, he read the comic book as a guilty pleasure.

“Pitting the peak of human performance in Muhammad Ali against the peak of science fiction performance in the Man of Steel, in a ring with gloves on, I had to see how that fight ended,” Campbell-Staton said. (He refuses to spoil the ending by saying who won.)

Campbell-Staton became curious about other comic book universes, and returned to buy a couple of other superhero comics, which he also read before falling asleep. He started to have strange dreams that combined the biology he was thinking about with the comic books he was reading. He had a dream about the Flash – the fastest person in the world whose super speed is coupled with superhuman reflexes – running faster than a bullet. Campbell-Staton woke up thinking about muscle fiber, friction and metabolism — things that fuel a body.

“Science fiction and comic books are a really good way of approaching classic questions in biology from a different angle,” said Campbell-Staton, a UCLA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, whose research focuses on how reptiles and other animal species adapt to extreme environments, and the physiology, biology and evolution behind that process. “Comic books offer a fantastical look at the same concepts.”

Campbell-Staton started his popular Biology of Superheroes podcast in late 2017, which was a top 20 iTunes science and medicine podcast this January.

This quarter he is teaching a new “Biology of Superheroes” course for juniors and seniors in the life sciences. He uses superheroes such as Batman, Captain America, Black Panther and Wonder Woman, as well as Jurassic Park and zombies, to teach his students the biology of aging, genetics, evolution, genetic engineering, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, the ethics of reviving extinct species, parallel universes, intelligent alien life and how biology shapes modern society.

Photo of Shane Campbell-Staton giving a lecture to students.

Shane Campbell-Staton teaches his “Biology of Superheroes” course at UCLA.

Students read peer-reviewed research journal articles, chapters from science books and comic books. They can create their own science fiction or superhero podcast for their final project, or write a paper or a superhero short novel. Campbell-Staton said he would like to include some of their podcast material on his podcast.

Campbell-Staton said he wants to push students to think about biology in ways they typically would not.

“Regardless of whether these students go into medicine, research, politics, or other fields, my job is to help them sift fact from fiction,” Campbell-Staton said. “If you can sift fact from fiction in Spider-Man, that is a training ground for asking questions about what is true, what is not, and how to tell one from the other when it comes to complex ideas they will confront later in their lives.”

His students agree.

“Usually, we learn the biology of plants and animals. This class is refreshing and cool,” Fayt Sarreal said.

Student Andy Duong said Campbell-Staton cleverly weaves science into the superhero discussions in a creative and engaging way.

In a recent class session, Campbell-Staton raised a question posed by Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould (who died in 2002): If you replay the tape of evolution, will you repeatedly get the same results or different results?

The consensus among the students was the results would be different. One said the six-mile-wide asteroid that crashed to Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and approximately 75 percent of the world’s animal and plant species, might miss the Earth in an alternate scenario, and if so, the dinosaurs likely would still roam the Earth.

The 2018 movie, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” addresses this question with alternate universes. The character Peter Parker is Spider-Man in one universe, while Gwen Stacy is Spider-Woman in another universe. The same characters appear in different universes, but as a superhero in one universe, a normal person in a different universe, and a supervillain in another universe. The role of determinism in evolution is a lively, ongoing debate in evolutionary biology — one this movie explores through the lens of the multiverse, Campbell-Staton said. Gould argued that replaying the tape of life repeatedly would yield different results, likely not including humans.

An earlier class session covered whether elite athletes have to be extraordinarily gifted genetically. Campbell-Staton discussed specific gene mutations that influence endurance and muscle strength. He plans to teach the “Biology of Superheroes” each year in winter quarter.

When Campbell-Staton was in high school, he took a memorable course on myths and legends that delved into broader issues. “That always stuck with me as a unique and enjoyable learning experience that forced me to push myself,” he said.

Photo of the UCLA team that built two NASA satellites to study space weather

UCLA students launch project that’s out of this world

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Photo of the UCLA team that built two NASA satellites to study space weather

UCLA aims to be one of the few universities to ever complete such a sophisticated space science mission — designed and built by students — from beginning to end.

Five years ago, a group of UCLA undergrads came together with a common goal — to build a small satellite and launch it into space. In the years since, more than 250 students — many of whom are now UCLA graduate students and alumni — have been the mechanical engineers, software developers, thermal and power testers, electronics technicians, mission planners and fabricators of the twin Electron Losses and Fields Investigation CubeSats, known as ELFIN.

Although UCLA has been building space instruments for NASA and other international space missions for more than 40 years, and members of its faculty have been critical contributors to space science, ELFIN is the first satellite mission built, managed and operated entirely at UCLA. And even more impressive, just about all of it has been done by the students.

This week, dozens of ELFINers (a nickname earned by those who’ve worked on the satellites), will drive about 150 miles up the California coast from Los Angeles to Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, to watch the product of their effort ascend into orbit.

“Just seeing all the hundreds of hours of work, that not just myself but others too, have put into this project, the many sleepless nights, the stressing out that you’re not going to make a deadline — just seeing it go up there … I’m probably going to cry,” said Jessica Artinger, an astrophysics major and geophysics and planetary science minor who will begin her fifth year this fall.

The two micro-satellites, each weighing about eight pounds and roughly the size of a loaf of bread, will help scientists better understand magnetic storms in near-Earth space. These storms are a typical form of “space weather” that is induced by solar activity, including flares and violent solar eruptions. Some solar outbursts can impact Earth, generating large amounts of invisible electromagnetic energy that transforms our local space environment.

“Magnetic storms are not just interesting space phenomena. They can energize electrons to high energies that can damage or even destroy orbiting satellites we depend on for GPS, communications and weather monitoring,” said Margaret Kivelson, UCLA professor emeritus of space physics. “They can also enhance space electrical currents which flow onto Earth, and could damage the power grid. Space weather research is also crucial for space tourism and space exploration.”

Currently, scientists’ ability to accurately model and predict space weather is in its infancy, just like meteorology was at the turn of the last century. ELFIN will make headway toward better understanding these phenomena.

ELFIN will go up as a secondary payload with the ICESat-2 mission at dawn on Saturday, Sept. 15, aboard the trusted Delta II, the final and hopefully 100th consecutive successful launch of this type of rocket. The launch will be streamed live on NASA TV’s YouTube channel, as well as on UCLA social media (follow #uclaELFIN).

Photo of Jessica Artinger

Jessica Artinger

Following the launch, many ELFINers at Vandenberg will come back to the campus command center to eagerly await the first Bruin transmissions from space, which are expected about 10 hours after blast-off. UCLA students will be directly involved in day-to-day mission activities and will have privileged access to ELFIN’s data. They will track and command the satellite via a custom-built antenna atop Knudsen Hall and will download data directly to the mission operations center located in the Earth, planetary and space sciences department. The ELFIN website will have interactive tools so the public can track and listen to the spacecraft as it passes overhead twice a day. The CubeSats are expected to remain in space for two years, after which they will gradually fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere like shooting stars.

In fall 2017, as head of ELFIN’s fabrication team, Artinger led a small team that worked tirelessly in the EPSS prototyping lab using band saws, drill presses and a CNC machine (which is used to carve and smooth metal parts) to meticulously craft tightly toleranced components to meet their completion deadline.

“There was a lot of working things out in your head before machining it, especially for safety reasons,” said Artinger, who gave a final inspection by painstakingly sanding each part and then re-measuring each and every hole, comparing them to the technical drawings for accuracy before sending them upstairs to the mechanical team for assembly. The aerospace-grade tolerance requirement across the 13.5-inch long spacecraft, she said, was two thousandths of an inch — about half the thickness of a standard sheet of paper. The team also had to machine the sensitive energetic particle detector frames to an incredibly precise 1/10,000 of an inch, she said.

Artinger, a transfer student who graduated from Orange Coast College in 2016, plans to become a community college professor and can’t wait to use her ELFIN experience to inspire a new generation of students. She says ELFIN really opened her eyes to the power of mentoring through research and further solidified her commitment to teaching topics related to space science.

“Maybe we can discover something at the community college I’ll be working at using the actual data from the satellite that I helped build,” she said. “That would be really cool.”

Photo of Ethan Tsai

Ethan Tsai

Ethan Tsai learned about ELFIN when he was a UCLA sophomore. Despite having no background in space science, the former physics major started to work on simple tasks and gained the necessary skills to become the project’s attitude determination and control subsystem lead. Now studying for his master’s in electrical engineering, Tsai is ELFIN’s project manager.

“I was pretty honored to be able to work on a mission like this,” he said, adding that he never imagined being involved in a NASA mission as an undergraduate. “It wasn’t until about two years into the project that I started to understand and appreciate the quality of the work we were doing and how it’s going to actually affect not just our mission and the students around us but the scientific community as a whole.”

Tsai said he’s excited about the infrastructure he has helped create to make UCLA a “space campus,” supporting students who will work on future satellite missions.

The project has been supported with funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA, with technical assistance from the Aerospace Corporation among other industry partners and universities.

Diagram of ELFIN components

CubeSats like ELFIN pack instruments into a loaf-of-bread sized satellite.

Those who have witnessed the aurora borealis and australis illuminate the skies, also known as the northern and southern lights, have experienced the beauty and power of space weather, likely without even knowing it.

“The aurora is sort of a TV screen that shows us what happens out in space.” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, a UCLA space physicist who got his doctorate at UCLA and serves as ELFIN’s principal investigator. “Space physicists can tell if something interesting or important is going on in space by looking at the aurora.”

Photo of Vassilis Angelopoulos

Vassilis Angelopoulos

ELFIN aims to observe the complex sequence whereby magnetic storms form waves near Earth, accelerating and forcing electrons to fall into the atmosphere, while a network of all-sky cameras across North America captures the resulting brightening of the auroral lights. The field of space science benefits from multi-satellite missions like ELFIN because of the ever-growing need to know about the dynamic conditions in space.

“Just like with atmospheric weather,” Angelopoulos said, “you need multiple space weather buoys to feed their data into our space weather models and be able to make predictions of conditions in the future.”

CubeSats fill this need because of their compact size, relative affordability ($300,000 compared to several hundred million dollars for a typical research satellite), and how quickly a team can go from prototyping to launch compared to standard-sized satellites. CubeSats uniquely allow students to witness end-to-end satellite mission development, testing and operations all within the span of their undergraduate studies.

For ELFINers, being part of an endeavor of this magnitude is reward enough, but working on this project also has professional and scientific benefits, Angelopoulos said. In addition to the leadership, interpersonal, problem-solving and technical skills they’ve developed, ELFINers are also contributing to the production of knowledge, something that is incredibly valuable to society and to their careers as scientists and engineers.

Photo of Ethan Tsai working on flight model assembly

Ethan Tsai works on the flight model assembly for the CubeSat ELFIN.

“As a researcher it’s important to not just analyze data that others collect, but to be involved in designing your own unique experiments to explore new key science questions. This is how space science started, with experiments on small rockets where students were involved in the nuts and bolts of them, and similarly with CubeSats, this is where the future of space science education is headed now,” Angelopoulos said.

Building on the opportunities that exist here at UCLA, and knowing the impact that experiential learning can have on a student’s academic life, Angelopoulos wanted to find a way to bring CubeSat development into the undergraduate experience.

“CubeSats are ideal because they create an environment where students from all walks of life, from all disciplines, can come together and practice what they’ve learned during their formal education in the context of a realistic environment,” Angelopoulos said. “This is exactly what academia, industry and research organizations around the country need — and they tell us that. This is the kind of experience they want in people who are applying to graduate school or who are applying to work in industrial firms because these are people who think on their feet and innovate.”

10 Questions Graphic

UCLA Arts launches ‘10 Questions’ event series that invites the public into the classroom

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10 Questions Graphic

Clockwise from top right: UCLA’s Kristy Edmunds, Darnell Hunt, Tracy Johnson, Brett Steele, Ananya Roy and Peter Sellars are among the 40 scholars who will participate.

 

Giving community members a special opportunity to experience the conversations that drive innovation at the university, this fall the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture will present “10 Questions,” a hybrid academic course and public event series that brings together leading minds from across the university.

Beginning Oct. 2, every Tuesday for 10 weeks UCLA faculty members from disciplines as diverse as dance, medicine, photography, astrophysics, athletics, Chicana and Chicano studies, law, philosophy and religious studies will join UCLA Arts Dean Brett Steele to explore a fundamental question such as: What is space? What is failure? What is freedom?

A new platform for UCLA Arts, this initiative seeks to stimulate dialogue and exchange, and cultivate a greater understanding of the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of knowledge production in the 21st century.

Faculty participants include fine art photographer Catherine Opie; sociologist and co-author of the Hollywood Diversity Report Darnell Hunt, who serves as dean of the division of social sciences in the UCLA College; astronomer and MacArthur fellow Andrea Ghez; labor and immigration expert Abel Valenzuela; artist, curator and Executive and Artistic Director of CAP UCLA, Kristy Edmunds; neuroscientist and dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Dr. Kelsey Martin; theater director and MacArthur fellow Peter Sellars; artist Andrea Fraser; psychological anthropologist and dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco; architect Greg Lynn; UCLA gymnastics head coach Valorie Kondos Field; director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Ananya Roy; and Shakespeare scholar and poet Robert Watson.

“L.A. is the creative capital of the world — and California its fifth largest economy: a vibrant, productive center for the arts, architecture and culture; scientific, technological and economic innovation; urban design; social and political action; environmental conservation; and more,” Steele said. “UCLA is the place where the leading minds in all of these areas come together to experiment, forge new ideas, push the boundaries and invent the future. I find that the most innovative ideas begin with truly fundamental questions. Too often, we get stuck in our own particular concerns or disciplines. ‘10 Questions’ is an opportunity for us, as a university, to re-engage and re-imagine big questions and possible answers through conversations across diverse, multidisciplinary perspectives. What better time than now to pose these questions? What better group than the brilliant minds from across UCLA to tackle them?”

“10 Questions” debuts an innovative program format for UCLA Arts. Both an upper-level undergraduate course and a public event series, it is the first course of its kind at the school that invites the public into the lecture hall to experience firsthand exciting, interdisciplinary conversation among some of UCLA’s most esteemed faculty. Each Tuesday evening from Oct. 2 through Dec. 4, the public will join UCLA students in class for an intimate panel discussion featuring two faculty from the School of the Arts and Architecture, and two from across the university.

To further the program’s goal of helping bring the creativity and research energy of UCLA to the public, all of the lectures will be recorded for public distribution and made available on YouTube.

The course, conceived and developed by Victoria Marks, associate dean of academic affairs, with Anne Marie Burke, executive director of communications and public relations for the school, places the arts at the center of interdisciplinary scholarly discourse.

“The arts have a unique and profound ability to communicate, bring people together, and, ultimately, to transform society,” Marks said. “Now more than ever, we are facing fundamental questions and challenges, and now more than ever we need an energetic exchange of ideas to seed innovation and progress. ‘10 Questions’ puts the arts at the center of this exchange — as they should be. We designed this program to build vital cross-university conversation as we work toward understanding the unique perspectives each discipline brings to the larger equation of knowledge. It is my hope that these dialogues will better prepare us as a learning community — and as a society — for a richer and more substantial appreciation of what our different fields bring to the question of human understanding.”

Details:

  • Tuesdays, Oct. 2 through Dec. 4 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
  • UCLA campus, Glorya Kaufman Hall theater (room 200)
  • Free and open to the public (RSVP Required)
  • Pay by space parking available on campus adjacent to Kaufman Hall (Structure 4)

Oct. 2: What is space?
Dana Cuff, urbanist and architectural theorist; Andrea Ghez, astronomer; Rodrigo Valenzuela, artist; Paul Weiss, nanoscientist

Oct. 9: What is time?
Rebeca Méndez, designer and media artist; James Newton, composer, flutist, conductor; Asma Sayeed, scholar of Islamic studies; Scott Waugh, UCLA executive vice chancellor and provost

Oct. 16: What is beauty?
J.Ed Araiza, writer, director, performer; Paul Barber, evolutionary and conservation geneticist; Marla Berns, scholar and curator of African Arts and Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA; Kathleen McHugh, feminist media theorist and critic

Oct. 23: What is freedom?
Andrea Fraser, artist; Lauren McCarthy, media artist; Ananya Roy, social justice scholar; Seana Shiffrin, moral and political philosophy expert

Oct. 30: What is memory?
Darnell Hunt, sociologist; Kelsey Martin, neuroscientist; Polly Nooter Roberts, scholar and curator of African arts; Peter Sellars, theater director

Nov. 6: What is a body?
Susan Foster, choreographer and scholar; Jennifer Jay, environmental engineer; Tracy Johnson, molecular, cellular and developmental biologist; Greg Lynn, architect

Nov. 13: What is failure?
David Gere, arts activist; Valorie Kondos Field, head coach, UCLA gymnastics; Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, scholar of racial and ethnic politics; Janet O’Shea, author and martial artist

Nov. 20: What is work?
Willem Henri Lucas, designer; Catherine Opie, artist; Alfred Osborne, global economy and entrepreneurship expert; Abel Valenzuela, labor and immigration expert

Nov. 27: What is knowledge?
Kristy Edmunds, artist, curator, and executive and artistic director of CAP UCLA; Victoria Marks, choreographer; Todd Presner, digital humanist and cultural critic; Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, psychological anthropologist

Dec. 4: What is a university?
Bryonn Bain, performing artist and scholar; Jerry Kang, legal scholar and UCLA vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion; David Schaberg, scholar of comparative literature; Robert Watson, Shakespeare scholar and poet

For more information, please visit https://arts.ucla.edu/10questions

The launch of the UCLA-student-built ELFIN satellites

We have liftoff of student-built satellites

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The launch of the UCLA-student-built ELFIN satellites

The launch of the UCLA-student-built ELFIN satellites aboard a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 6:02 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 15.

 

For the dozens of UCLA students, faculty, staff and alumni braving the chilly temperatures near Vandenberg Air Force Base on Saturday morning, the brilliant ray of white that radiated across the predawn horizon was the best goodbye ever.

At 6:02 a.m. a Delta II rocket lifted off from the base in Lompoc, California, carrying ELFIN — twin micro-satellites, each weighing about eight pounds and roughly the size of a loaf of bread — into orbit aboard NASA’s ICESat-2 mission.

Saturday’s launch was the culmination of years of planning, dreaming, fabricating, designing, assembling, testing and programming, virtually all of it done by more than 250 UCLA students, most of whom were undergraduates.

“It’s really been a very emotional moment for a lot of students here,” said Ethan Tsai, UCLA graduate student in electrical engineering and ELFIN’s project manager. Tsai, more than two dozen other current students, alumni and faculty, including Vassilis Angelopoulos, professor of space physics and ELFIN’s principal investigator, watched from the VIP area.

“There’s half of my brain that’s trying to stick with the professional mode … and then part of me is just like I can’t believe this thing is launching and I can’t believe this thing is in space,” Tsai said. “I don’t know that it’s sunk in yet. But it’s really emotional for me.”

Luis Frausto, 34, a 2010 UCLA mechanical engineering graduate, who worked on early prototypes of ELFIN, said he was in “total awe” watching the launch from a public viewing site near Vandenberg Middle School.

Frausto, now a design engineer at TAE Technologies, Inc., was one of more than 200 (a record for the Vandenberg public viewing site, according to a base spokesman) who braved the chilly temperatures, including about 40 UCLA ELFINers and a few of their friends, who counted down to zero as the launch went off, sending the crowd into cheers and applause.

“You can’t compare it to watching it on TV. It was like a feeling inside my chest, like I was out of breath,” said Frausto, who left his home in Irvine at 12:30 a.m. to drive the 200 miles northwest to Lompoc. “I’m here and I’m honored to be around everyone who worked on ELFIN.”

ELFIN, which stands for Electron Losses and Fields Investigation CubeSats, is designed to help scientists better understand magnetic storms in near-Earth space. These storms are a typical form of “space weather” that is induced by solar activity, including flares and violent solar eruptions. Magnetic storms can result in damage or even destruction of orbiting satellites that humans depend on for GPS, communications and weather monitoring. Space weather research is also crucial for space tourism and space exploration.

Another former ELFINer who came out was Mike Lawson, who works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on the Mars 2020 mission. Lawson slept only two hours on a couch at UCLA before he left Westwood at midnight for what he described as an “emotional” drive on U.S. 101 that included listening to David Bowie’s “Starman.”

“It’s weird. It’s surreal. It was 10 years gone in like 20 seconds,” said Lawson, who earned his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in geology from UCLA. The 37-year-old was one of the original ELFINers 10 years ago who worked on prototypes for what would become the satellites that launched this morning. Work began five years ago on the actual satellites that went into orbit, aboard NASA’s final Delta II rocket mission.

Jessica Artinger, an astrophysics major who will begin her fifth year at UCLA this fall, left at 1 a.m. from Fountain Valley in Orange County to make the trip. Since fall quarter 2017, Artinger has led the fabrication team.

“Watching this,” said Artinger, who prior to the launch had expected to cry but despite the dry eyes was nevertheless moved, “my time here means something.”

Louise Tamondong, who is part of ELFIN’s flight operations team, said she got chills watching the launch, which was easily visible for just a few seconds before the rocket was shrouded in thick clouds. About 10 seconds after the sky lit up, the crowd finally heard the roar of the rocket’s engines.

“It felt so unreal that everything that we worked for is going into space … it only felt real when we saw that bright light and everything going up,” said Tamondong. After liftoff, she headed back to Westwood to listen for the first signal from the orbiting ELFIN through an antenna on the roof of UCLA’s Knudsen Hall. They received a signal around 4:30 p.m., confirming that both probes survived the bumpy ride to orbit. The team will now begin commissioning the spacecraft systems and instruments to prepare for the science operations phase.

As a new Bruin, Sixue Xu wasn’t part of the team that designed, tested and built ELFIN. But the graduate student in space physics will be among those who stand to benefit from ELFIN’s work.

“Now it’s our turn,” Xu said, “to make that data into science.”

First-of-its kind crowdfunding campaign raises over $69,000 for undergraduate research

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A first-of-its-kind crowdfunding campaign raised more than $69,000 for the UCLA Undergraduate Research Centers in the span of two weeks, providing critical funding for students to pursue mentorship and research opportunities throughout campus.

Tama Hasson, Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Research, sees first-hand how these resources can transform a student’s career path.

“When you are in a certain major, and you’re exploring a career, undergraduate research is a way to explore your interests in that career,” she said. “Research is useful for any career. Every discipline is going to ask you to take information and synthesize it.”

Pauley Pavilion fills with students on Research Poster Day

Undergraduate Research Week is an opportunity for students across campus to share their research.

Hosted on the UCLA Spark crowdfunding site, the campaign launched just before Undergraduate Research Week, an annual event that brings student researchers from across campus to present their work. After just two weeks, more than 200 donors had contributed nationwide.

For the students who rely on the research centers to deepen their research portfolio, this funding will have a significant impact on their undergraduate experience.

“If it wouldn’t have been for undergraduate research I have no idea what my UCLA experience would have been like,” said Evelyn Hernandez ‘18, who will be pursuing her Ph.D. in the fall. “I’m just glad I got to focus on something – with the money that I got from C.A.R.E., and the fellowships – that I got to focus my extra time solely on research.”

Generations of students and faculty have relied on the Undergraduate Research Centers as catalysts for academic and professional growth. UCLA is the only university in the country to have two research centers, one focused on the sciences and another focused on the humanities, arts and social sciences. Together, the centers connect students with mentorships and opportunities to conduct research with top UCLA faculty, providing hands-on experiences that shape their careers.

The campaign also accomplished something invaluable – visibility. As a result of this dedicated effort, the Undergraduate Research Centers have built a community of supporters who are invested in the success of their students.

That community will prove vital as the centers continue their work providing crucial resources for undergraduate researchers. Whitney Arnold, Director of the Undergraduate Research Center–Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, is optimistic about the show of support. 

“What I think is the coolest thing is how people at all levels and in all places in their careers contributed to the undergraduate research campaign,” Arnold said. “It just shows you the breadth and the impact of undergraduate research.”