Sergio Carbajo and Jun Chen,assistant professors at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering,have received Young Investigator Program Awards from the Office of Naval Research.Since 2008,the award has supported early-career faculty members who show exceptional promise and creativity in their fields.Carbajo and Chen will each receive athree-year,$750,000 grant to support their research.They join 22 other recipients honored in the 2024 award cohort.Sergio Carbajo,an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering,directs the Quantum Light-Matter Cooperative at UCLA.The award will help support his research in improving real-time control of lasers during unpredictable situations and their ability to compensate for atmospheric weather conditions using novel quantum sensing techniques.Jun Chen,an assistant professor of bioengineering,directs UCLA’s Wearable Bioelectronics Research Group.Chen’s research aims to improve wearable acoustic sensors,making them more flexible and practical for tactical communications.As an executive branch agency within the Department of Defense,the Office of Naval Research provides technical advice to the chief of naval operations and the secretary of the Navy.Recent UCLA Engineering recipients of the Young Investigator Awards include Xiang“Anthony”Chen and Kunihiko“Sam”Taira. 查看详细>>

Pamela Lewis has joined Associated Students UCLA as services director of the ASUCLA Student Union.In the role,which she started Oct.2,Lewis oversees day-to-day operations and programming of the student union.She is also the lead liaison for campus partners,including the facilitation of student government functions.“As Istep into my new role at ASUCLA,I’m reminded that success is not just adestination but ajourney of continuous growth and learning,like the student college experience,”said Lewis,who hopes to foster asense of belonging and community among the diverse student body at UCLA.Lewis joins UCLA from Cal State Long Beach,where she was most recently director of Multicultural Affairs.Prior to that,Lewis was director of Community Partnerships and the campus’s Women’s and Gender Equity Center,and previously served as assistant director of Conduct/Title IX Investigators. 查看详细>>

Tyrone Howard,professor of education and the Pritzker Family Professor of Education in the UCLA School of Education&Information Studies,has been named president of the American Education Research Association for 2023­­–24.In this position,Howard will help lead the largest interdisciplinary research organization devoted to the scientific study of education and learning in the U.S.The American Education Research Association comprises more than 25,000 national and international members who are working to advance knowledge about education,encourage scholarly inquiry and promote using research to improve education and serve the public good.Howard’s research,which focuses on equity,includes issues tied to race,culture,access and educational opportunities for minoritized student populations.It has helped bring attention to the challenges Black and Brown students face as well as the strengths they bring,in their pursuit of education and learning.Howard is also co-faculty director of the UCLA Center for Transformation of Schools,director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children&Families,and founder and director of the UCLA Black Male Institute. 查看详细>>

Justin Caram,assistant professor of chemistry at the UCLA College,is arecipient of the 2023 Journal of PhysicalChemistry and PHYS Division Leadership Awards.He is one of three professors chosen for the awards,which honor investigators researching areas related to each of the journal’s sections—The Journal of Physical Chemistry A,The Journal of Physical Chemistry Band The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.Caram was selected for The Journal of Physical Chemistry C,which focuses on energy,materials and catalysis.His fields of expertise include biophysics,materials,nanoscience,and bioenergy and the environment.The journal is apublication of the American Chemical Society;the awards will be presented in San Francisco in August at the society’s Fall 2023 meeting,where the winners will be invited to speak.Other honors Caram has received include the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award,the AXS Glenn Seabord Award and aFaculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation.He was named aCottrell Scholar in 2021. 查看详细>>

Dr.Karol Watson,professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA,has received the 2023 Bernadine Healy Leadership in Women’s CV Disease Award from the American College of Cardiology.When she began her career,Watson was interested in how to prevent,diagnose and treat heart disease in women,but the research had been conducted in men.Over the course of two decades,she has focused her research and clinical work on how heart disease presents differently in women and how to improve treatment in women.Watson,an attending cardiologist,is director of the UCLA Women’s Cardiovascular Health Center and the UCLA-Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Health Program,a center dedicated to educating women with or at risk for heart disease and conducting research to improve heart health.She is also co-director of the UCLA Program in Preventive Cardiology and director of the UCLA Fellowship Program in cardiovascular diseases. 查看详细>>

People who have long COVID-19 can experience many of the same lingering negative effects on their physical,mental and social well-being as those experienced by people who become ill with other,non-COVID illnesses,new research suggests.The findings,which were published in JAMA Network Open,are based on acomparison of people known to have been infected with COVID-19 with individuals with similar symptoms who tested negative for COVID.The researchers found that 40%of the COVID-positive and 54%of the COVID-negative group reported moderate to severe residual symptoms three months after enrolling in the study.“Many diseases,including COVID,can lead to symptoms negatively impacting one’s sense of well-being lasting months after initial infection,which is what we saw here,”said lead author Lauren Wisk,an assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.“Because these changes look similar for COVID-negative and COVID-positive participants,this suggests the experience of the pandemic itself,and related stress,may be playing arole in slowing people’s recovery from any illness.” 查看详细>>

To think Martha Gonzalez almost didn’t attend college.The 1999 UCLA graduate is now acelebrated musician-activist,college professor and feminist intellectual.And in October,she was one of 25 people to receive acoveted MacArthur Fellowship for 2022.The award,which carries aprize of$800,000 and is often referred to as the“genius grant,”is presented to scholars and artists who demonstrate exceptional creativity and whose track records promise more exciting creative work.Gonzalez was recognized for her dedication to strengthening relationships across the U.S.–Mexico border through transnational collaborative recording projects and using participatory music and art to strengthen communities.A few weeks after the award was announced,she reflected on her unconventional path to the honor.“My mother had asecond-grade education and my father did not graduate high school,”said Gonzalez,who grew up in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.“College wasn’t on my radar.I went to the Navy recruiter to enlist,but Iwas too young.He told me to come back in ayear.”A friend’s mother suggested she enroll at Pasadena City College.As astudent there,Gonzalez discovered her talents for writing and critical thinking.Today,30 years later,Gonzalez describes herself as a“Chican Artivista.”She believes fervently that music has the power to unite communities,probe the human condition and inspire action.Gonzalez’s life was shaped by music.She and her siblings were trained by their father in the tradition of ranchera singing,a popular genre of Mexican music.She learned not by reading sheet music,but by listening and repeating verses after her father.For part of her preteen years,she and her sister Claudia,sang backing vocals for her brother Gabriel;the siblings toured under the name Gabrielito González,La Actuación Infantil.“Those were experiences rich in music and culture,”Gonzalez said.“But they were sad times,too.My father was obsessed with making it in the commercial music world.That’s what capitalism as avalue system does to music culture:It associates it with upward mobility and financial success.And it drains you.”Gonzalez’s father veered into alcoholism.Her mother took her four children and left.After Gonzalez graduated from high school,supporting herself and helping her mother was atop priority.While she was at Pasadena City College,a cousin encouraged her to consider auditioning for the ethnomusicology program at UCLA.“I told my cousin Iwould never get in,”Gonzalez said.“I couldn’t even read music.”But during the application process,Gonzalez was reassured about her credentials by UCLA ethnomusicology professor Steven Loza,who told her that her musical training and experience were valuable.Gonzalez was admitted to UCLA in 1993.After spending ayear on campus,she took some time off before returning in 1997 and then earning her bachelor’s degree in 1999.Music’s ability to help form community was an important part of her success,Gonzalez said.“There were about five of us who took similar classes,especially in the ethnomusicology department’s performance ensembles,”Gonzalez said.“Whatever we learned in class,we would get together and practice afterwards.”“Music wasn’t taught in an extractive way,”Gonzalez said,referring to apedagogical method that often divorces music from context and isolates students to learn on their own.“We were taught in aconvivial way,in away that helped us see how music harbors value systems.”After graduating,Gonzalez worked on building musical community in Boyle Heights.She coordinated an after-school arts program and performed frequently with her band Quetzal.(Quetzal Flores,the band’s founder,is Gonzalez’s partner.)Those gigs with her band were ultimately what led Gonzalez to pursue adoctorate in gender studies.Academic researchers began to take an interest in Quetzal’s music,and one of those scholars asked Gonzalez to write about it for achapter in abook.She did. 查看详细>>

Thirty-nine UCLA faculty members were named among world’s most influential researchers in the sciences and social sciences today.The Highly Cited Researchers list,compiled annually by analytics firm Clarivate,identifies scholars whose work has been cited most often in papers published by other researchers in their fields over the past decade.Those chosen for the 2022 list have authored studies that rank in the top 1%in the number of scholarly citations worldwide.Several UCLA scholars were among the most highly cited researchers in more than one of the list’s 22 research categories.“The Highly Cited Researchers list identifies and celebrates exceptional individual researchers at UCLA who are having asignificant impact on the research community as evidenced by the rate at which their work is being cited by their peers,”said David Pendlebury,head of research analysis at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate.“These individuals are helping to transform human ingenuity into our world’s greatest breakthroughs—and it is an honor to celebrate their achievements.” 查看详细>>

Michael Grunstein,a distinguished professor emeritus of biological chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA,has been awarded the 2022 Albany Prize for his groundbreaking research on gene expression.He shares the award with C.David Allis of Rockefeller University in New York.Working with his team at UCLA,Grunstein provided the first demonstration that histones—the proteins that package DNA within chromosomes—play an important role in gene expression and are not simply structures that serve as spools for DNA.In 2018,Grunstin and Allis received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for their work.Gene expression is often described as the on-off switch for genes,determining how the information encoded in agene is converted into proteins and other molecules that are key to the development of every process in the body.Grunstein’s work provided agreater understanding of histones’role in this process,which led to deeper insights into both normal and abnormal development,and opened new avenues for research and treatment. 查看详细>>

Doctors at the UCLA Gender Health Program have developed atechnique to reduce an Adam’s apple bump without leaving ascar on the patient’s neck.The advance could be an important and welcome one for transgender women and nonbinary people,for whom aneck scar can be atelltale sign of their surgery—often exposing them to discrimination,hate and violence.A study by the surgeons who developed the technique was published in the journal Facial Plastic Surgery&Aesthetic Medicine.Reviewing outcomes for 77 people who underwent the surgery at UCLA Health facilities,the authors concluded that the procedure is an effective way to optimize care for people receiving gender-affirming surgery.Specifically,they found that the procedure—which can be performed in 90 minutes by one surgeon—is effective at removing the Adam’s apple,that it can be performed using only the equipment already available in most surgical suites in addition to afew other inexpensive tools,and that it could be readily adopted by plastic surgeons and throat surgeons.The procedure is called“scarless”tracheal shave,thanks to the lack of ascar on the patient’s neck,although in actuality,it does create asmall,hidden scar on the inside of the patient’s lip.That’s the location through which asurgeon inserts cartilage-trimming forceps and apolishing tool to shave down the extra cartilage that forms the Adam’s apple.“There will always be ascar with any surgery,but this procedure creates ascar that only adentist would see,”said Dr.Abie Mendelsohn,associate professor of head and neck surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA,?and the study’s senior author.“It represents amassive shift in the ability to provide?optimal gender-affirming care for patients.”Mendelsohn said many transgender people fear going about the activities of daily life due to the threat of being“clocked,”or being identified as atrans person by others,against their wishes.“When we live in fear,that’s really no life at all,”Mendelsohn said.“With this original approach,we have the opportunity to surgically treat fear,and that’s an incredibly rewarding aspect of the work we do.”Although there are several gender-affirming procedures that can be addressed through hormone replacement therapy,the Adam’s apple is one of afew anatomical features that can only be treated with surgery.The traditional tracheal shave procedure,which was developed in the mid-1970s,involves making an incision in the neck and then using stitches to close it up.But for some transgender people,the scar created by that procedure could be as distressing?as the presence of the Adam’s apple itself.Founded in 2016,the Gender Health Program offers comprehensive medical and surgical care to transgender and gender-diverse patients from Los Angeles and across the country.It is led by Dr.Amy Weimer and Dr.Mark Litwin.The surgeries analyzed in the new study were conducted by surgeons affiliated with the program between November 2019 and April 2022.There has been limited research on other techniques that purport to reduce the Adam’s apple with minimal scarring.But those previous studies either involved very small numbers of patients or were conducted using only cadavers,and they had not demonstrated that other techniques were safe or effective.The authors of the new study recommend that fellowship-trained facial plastic surgeons and surgeons who specialize in laryngology,or throat surgery,adopt the new technique,and they suggest that surgical fellows perform about 20 supervised procedures before they attempt to operate on their own.“This is asignificant improvement to the standard of gender-affirming care that we hope other surgeons in the field will incorporate into their own practices,”said study co-author Dr.Justine Lee,UCLA’s Bernard G.Sarnat Professor of Craniofacial Biology,and an associate professor of surgery at the Geffen School of Medicine.?The study found that there were no voice changes or vocal cord damage among the patients,but further research is needed to corroborate those results,and to understand what effects the UCLA-developed technique might have on patients’quality of life and mental health.The study’s first author is Dr.Michael Eggerstedt of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.The authors did not receive any extramural funding for the study. 查看详细>>