UC Santa Barbara Magazine | Fall/Winter 2024 by UC Santa Barbara

Where the thingswild are

Conservation stories from California's eastern Sierra

Fall/Winter 2024

Vantage point

Discoveries in the humanities from overlooked and underestimated spaces

Making memories Sisters’ birthright informs their special film project

Between chaos and cactus

An artist journeys into motherhood in a botanical paradise

From the Editor

My dad loved the outdoors. Hiking, camping, sitting quietly on a lakeshore or in a grove of trees — it didn’t matter what or where. Nature was his happy place.

It was my dad who introduced me to John Muir, his favorite writer. Born 100 years apart, they were birds of a feather, so reverent both were of the wild.

“Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees,” Muir wrote in 1894. “The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

That’s from “The Mountains of California,” Muir’s first book, and something of a love letter to the Sierra Nevada. He wrote passionately about the range and the need to conserve all that it comprises, which is what got me thinking about Muir as we worked on this issue.

Among the many features you’ll find inside is a trio of inspiring conservation stories from the eastern Sierra, starring the Owens Valley pupfish, Yosemite’s mountain yellow-legged frogs, and the sage-grouse of Long Valley Caldera. Nature also gets a nod in our art feature, set in Ojai’s gorgeous Taft Gardens.

We’d like to think Muir would be proud. I know my dad would be.

Thanks for being here,

Shelly Leachman ’99 EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Living History

From the Editor

Wax cylinders offer rare glimpses into ancient Chinese languages

News & Notes

On Campus

Chancellor and Dilling Yang greet families every year during move-in weekend. They share stories about campus and even help students move in their belongings. After three decades on campus, the Chancellor will step down following the 20242025 academic year and return to teaching and research as a professor.

PHOTOS: MATT PERKO

NEWS & NOTES

1

Led by physics professor Phil Lubin, Team H.E.L.P.S. (High Efficiency Long-Range Power Solution) won the $1 million grand prize in NASA’s Watts on the Moon Challenge, which seeks solutions to transmit and store energy on the lunar surface. The academic experimental cosmology group designed a solution that can operate within a wide temperature range, opening the possibility to seamlessly employ power distribution and energy management through lunar days and nights.

Inspired by the logic and beauty of nature, late Southern California architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg designed striking structures — some of the most celebrated ever built — seeking to blend them with their natural environments. A gift to the campus’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum brings his archive to the public, housed in the museum’s Architecture and Design Collection (ADC). The acquisition helps to grow and diversify the ADC’s holdings with the work of underrepresented figures and presents an opportunity to foster the study of nature-inspired architecture.

Working toward a clean energy future, and advancing on the University of California’s systemwide goal of decarbonization, UC Santa Barbara has completed its Clean Energy Master Plan. The plan will help guide the campus as it seeks a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in operations through the elimination of natural gas, and by adding electrification. Today, 93% of UCSB’s operational greenhouse gas emissions are a result of combustion of natural gas on campus for heating and cooling.

2

Student-athlete and women’s tennis phenom Amelia Honer won her first professional title by topping the field at the International Tennis Federation 2024 Bakersfield Women’s Open, defeating multiple world-ranked players along the way. The 14th-ranked singles player in college tennis, Honer in 2024 won the ITA Tennis Southwest Regional Championship, reached the quarterfinals of the NCAA Singles National Championships and was named an All-American — the first Gaucho women’s player since 1996 to achieve the honor.

5

Known for immersive sound and visual experiences, the AlloSphere Research Facility at the campus’s California NanoSystems Institute partnered with Getty PST ART: Art and Science Collide, a landmark regional event, to present public screenings of “Sketches of Sensorium.” Inspired by late environmental artist Newton Harrison’s project, “Sensorium for the World Ocean,” the Allosphere uses scientific climate and ocean health data to produce ocean sounds, ship-engine noises and synthesized audio, creating an auditory journey that immerses viewers in the environment it seeks to protect.

Shellphish, the hacker collective that began in the Cyber Security Group led by computer science professors Giovanni Vigna, Christopher Kruegel and Wenbo Guo has qualified for the finals of the AI Cyber Challenge, which asks teams to develop novel AI-driven systems that can find and repair the software components supporting the nation’s critical infrastructure. The group’s ARTIPHISHELL AI, a cutting-edge cyber reasoning system, won them $2 million and a shot at the grand prize in August 2025.

The university has hired its first-ever Hispanic-Serving Institute (HSI) director in alum Veronica Fematt PhD ’17, a first-generation college student and community college transfer student whose journey took her from Rio Hondo College to UCLA and later to UCSB’s Gevirtz Graduate School of Education. She brings both personal and academic insights to her new role, in which she is tasked with uniting efforts across campus to enhance “servingness” — an HSI model that goes beyond enrollment numbers to truly support the success of Latiné students.

Bringing professional soccer to the campus, and the entire region, Harder Stadium — aka “Soccer Heaven” — will serve as the home of Santa Barbara Sky FC, part of USL League One. Having the club on campus will present opportunities for students to intern and learn the world of professional sports, and to give back to the community. The 17,000-seat stadium has previously served as a training facility for the U.S. Women’s National Team and, in summer 2024, host of a friendly match between English clubs Wrexham FC and Bournemouth AFC.

Podcast recommendations

from Liz Carlisle, associate professor of environmental studies

KCRW’s “Good Food”

L.A. chef Evan Kleiman hosts this weekly podcast about everything food: politics, culture and sustainability, along with some great restaurant and food truck tips. Kleiman knows the food system backward and forward and she always seems to draw out a surprising angle you might not hear elsewhere.

“California Foodways“

This podcast only comes out every few weeks, but it’s worth the wait! Reporter Lisa Morehouse is traveling to every county in the state to uncover hidden gems of the food scene that only locals know about, like the go-to spot for Hmong and Cambodian street food in Stockton and the spinach and cheese dumpling that is the delicious legacy of Napa’s Italian-American heritage.

“Throughline“

As a food and agriculture scholar, I spent a long time agonizing over the environmental and social problems in the food system before realizing that history had a lot to teach me about how to solve them. So I really appreciate this weekly podcast that’s all about taking a deep dive into history to understand a contemporary political or social challenge. The original music and rich storytelling give each episode a documentary feel.

“California Report Magazine“

When I just want to hear a great story, I turn to this weekly podcast, hosted by KQED reporter Sasha Khokha. She has a real knack for finding the most interesting, inspirational Californians. For instance, there’s the ultramarathoner who became the first person to complete the Western States Endurance Run in a hijab, the Fresno woman who proudly proclaims herself the state’s first “drag king,” and the Oakland harpist who took her first lesson at age 30 and now leads her own jazz trio. Listening to this show always inspires me to get to know my UCSB students a little better; you never know what incredible things they’re up to unless you ask!

Liz Carlisle teaches courses on food and farming. Born and raised in Montana, she got hooked on agriculture while working as an aide to organic farmer and U.S. Senator Jon Tester. She has published three books and numerous articles on topics like incentivizing soil health practices, regenerative farming and agroecology.

A critical look inside ‘the back room’

BY NORA DRAKE

IF YOU’VE SPENT EVEN FIVE MINUTES on any social media platform, you have probably stumbled upon hateful comments and rhetoric. They permeate the internet landscape, with 52% of adults reporting that they have been harassed online, according to some studies.

UC Santa Barbara undergraduates now have a class to help them process some of the troublesome issues related to those divisive and derogatory comments: Perspectives on Online Hate Speech. This upper-division communication course delves into the research and theory behind online hate messages, which include racist and sexist postings, harassment and toxicity. Students dissect online hate as an interactive social process, uncovering what drives it and examining what can and cannot be done to stop it.

“We are interested in the social dynamics involved between the hater and the audience, how audiences respond among themselves and particularly important to me is how haters collude with one another,” says Joe Walther, professor of the course and Mark and Susan Bertelsen Presidential Chair in Technology and Society. “The internet has made it easier to find likeminded individuals, to find people who enjoy this sort of mutual antagonism. I don’t think anyone would argue that what we see now is worse than the atrocities we’ve seen throughout history, but even the worst bigots know to keep their bigotry in the back room. The internet is the back room.”

Walther says that students who take the course come into it with a wealth of prior knowledge of the problem, and that

they come ready to analyze the nuances of online spaces. “I think that students come to the class out of intellectual interest but also because, unfortunately, they have a personal experience with this topic,” he says. “The course shows them that it is probably worse than they thought. I show transcripts of what is online, and I think they’re shocked at how horrid it really is.”

Walther continues, “But I also think all of the students come out understanding the topic better, and with

“...even the worst bigots know to keep their bigotry in the back room. The internet is the back room.”

a deeper understanding of the tensions between American freedom of speech protections, the constraints of social media to regulate, and the desires of people to offend.”

Carly Armitage, a third-year student double-majoring in dance and communication who took the class last year, confirms Walther’s hunch. “The most interesting thing I learned in this class was about the boundaries of freedom of speech in relation to online hate speech,” she says. “It’s difficult to discern the line of constitutional freedom of speech in an online environment, and whether that line differs from where it stands in a face-toface scenario.”

Armitage says that, as a result of the class, she is now even more aware of how social dynamics play out online. “I think the class helped increase my awareness of how many hateful

comments people write on posts,” she says. “It became increasingly obvious to me that there really is harm in the anonymity of comments. I noticed that people are less likely to care that others are harmed by their words when it does not affect people’s perceptions.”

The class encourages students to participate freely in discussions about topics like the social organization of online hate, specific hate collectives and platforms, and how to deter online hate. Walther is also partnering with the California Civil Rights Department Commission on the State of Hate, which was established to strengthen California’s efforts to stop hate and promote mutual respect. Through their work in the class, students have a chance to advocate for social change and promote understanding in our digital society.

“I think it is so important that classes such as these are taught as the internet and social media become increasingly important in our society,” says Armitage. “Being educated about online hate speech will be significant to us and our futures. For one, it increases a general awareness of when it is occurring in online spaces. And it provides context into how we can combat these problems in the future.”

For his part, Walther hopes and believes that his students will be the ones to help combat the scourge of online hate. “I cannot tell you how much I admire the students for the maturity with which they deal with these topics,” he says. “Their curiosity and empathy is so impressive. I would love for them to come out of the course feeling inspired to become a computer scientist or a lawyer — or both — to figure out what to do about online hate speech.”

OFF THE CLOCK

The economy of running

To win medals, this professor had to learn to pace himself

BY NORA DRAKE

ROD GARRATT LOVES RUNNING

so much that he sometimes listens to podcasts about running while he’s running. He loves it so much that sometimes he can’t stop running even when his body tells him to.

An expert on currency and payment systems in his day job as a professor of economics, Garratt sees parallels between his career and his passion. “Sports are really only interesting as long as you can improve in them,” he says. “To relate it to economics, if you want to optimize, you want to look at where the potential improvements are the greatest. So even though most of us prefer to do the things we are the best at, I keep training so I can work on the stuff I’m not as good at.”

Garratt’s dedication was rewarded earlier this year, when he won a bronze medal in the Men’s 60+ 4x400-meter relay at the 2024 World Athletics Association Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden, and a gold medal in the 2024 USA Track & Field Masters indoor 400-meter dash.

Unusual for a master’s athlete, Garratt only became serious about the sport in his 50s. Though both his father and daughter were elite track and field athletes, he wasn’t able to pursue the sport when he was young. “I started running in high school,” he says, “but I only ran one track meet before discovering I had a heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. They didn’t really know how to diagnose it back then, so it prevented me from continuing on with competitive running. It wasn’t until I came to Santa Barbara many years later that I was able to get it diagnosed and to have surgery to correct it.”

He started taking distance running more seriously once his heart condition was cured, training with a local run club until the mileage started to wear his body out. “I also play hockey and bike,” Garratt explains, “and I tore my ACL playing hockey. Once I got that fixed, I decided that the running I had been doing was too much and I should go back and try track and field. Then I tore my quad.”

Despite these setbacks, Garratt persisted. He trained (and cross-trained) for at least an hour per day, stayed healthy, and showed up at the indoor championships last year just hoping to get a medal of any color. He was pleasantly surprised by the results. “The way the race unfolded, there was a runner who had come in with a better time than me, but he went out too fast and I was able to finish strong,” says Garratt. “I went from dead last in the first lap to winning. I was elated.”

In addition to his training, he also credits some of his success to the slow march of time. Being an economist, he has examined the relevant data and has concluded that his dominance isn’t entirely due to natural talent. “I wasn’t that fast when I was younger, but for my age now, I am pretty fast,” he explains. “My success is really just due to getting slower at a lesser rate than other people.”

Garratt hopes to keep running as long as he is physically able, and as long as he is still learning new things. “One of the beautiful things about track is that, since I stopped in high school, I had a lot to learn, like how to use starting blocks, how to pace myself, how to race,” he says. “I’m still developing these skills, and I hope to keep competing for as long as I can.”

Professor Garratt, second from left, and his M60 x 400 relay teammates, in Gothenburg, Sweden.

When he's not teaching economics, Professor Rod Garratt is off to the races, winning a bronze medal in the Men’s 60+ 4x400-meter relay at the 2024 World Athletics Association Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden, and a gold medal in the 2024 USA Track & Field Masters indoor 400-meter dash.

THEN & NOW

Feel the thunder

They say it’s among the loudest arenas in college athletics, and the Thunderdome on game days definitely lives up to its name. Home to Gaucho basketball and volleyball, this 4,000-seat house of sport is no stranger to raucous crowds, even in the spartan days of bleacher seating. Now that it’s got a 54-foot 4K video board and, phew, padded seats, screaming fans enjoy primo comforts.

In the zone

Who needs a crowd? The bleachers may be sparse but this athlete is locked in. Judging by the short shorts, it's no surprise this shot dates to 1984, not long before the Gauchos first joined The Big West conference.

Up and away

Bigger crowds in proper seats, in a much modernized gym? Yes, please. Also note: longer shorts. What hasn’t changed is that fierce Gaucho focus, keeping the basketball program at or near the top of The Big West rankings for decades.

Serial entrepreneur and professor of actuarial science Ian Duncan gives back to campus

BY JILLIAN TEMPESTA

HEALTHCARE REPRESENTS 17% of the United States economy — a large market for entrepreneurs developing solutions and services. Ian Duncan, adjunct professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Statistics and Applied Probability (PSTAT), has sold three companies that provide healthcare data analytics software. He is a founding member of UCSB’s Innovators Circle, a network of entrepreneurs who convene to share expertise, and he established the Janet and Ian Duncan Chair in Actuarial Science as part of the Innovators Circle Founders’ Pledge to UCSB.

Duncan found that his skills and experience had evolved beyond traditional actuarial work. He began consulting independently. Soon, he realized an opportunity to re-establish himself in this niche market. There remained a need for health data analytics services.

“I started another company to do the same thing that the first company had done,” Duncan says. “One of the lessons that I’ve learned is that products create value. My companies have been sold because we developed software.”

he established the Duncan Chair to help raise the profile of the actuarial science field and to bring international recognition to UCSB. Ian’s wife, Janet, is a former insurance company executive and a current PSTAT lecturer. She was chief financial officer of Ian’s third company.

The Janet and Ian Duncan Chair in Actuarial Science is currently held by professor Gareth Peters.

Ian Duncan worked as an actuary in London and Canada before moving to the United States to work for Aetna Insurance. He then transitioned to a healthcare strategy consulting role at Pricewaterhouse. Duncan co-founded his first company with a colleague and received a sale offer in the early 2000s.

“We were small but well known; we were very focused on what we did, which is a particular kind of health actuarial work,” says Duncan, reflecting on his first chaotic experience with acquisition. “The acquiring company had raised a lot of money during the dot-com bubble and were buying businesses to demonstrate growth to their investors. In fact, they closed on yet another business the day after acquiring ours.”

After the second company sold, Duncan took concurrent roles as head of clinical research at Walgreens and as an adjunct professor at UCSB in 2011. He began teaching at the university full time in 2014, and in 2015, he launched his third company.

“I’ve been accused of being a one-trick pony, but the technology has changed so much over 20 years. Now everything is distributed in the cloud,” he says.

Meanwhile, with the proceeds from the sale of his second company,

The Innovators Circle features networking events and opportunities, a recruitment pipeline, mentorship opportunities, and access to cuttingedge research at UC Santa Barbara. Members make a nonbinding Founders’ Pledge to invest philanthropically in UCSB. Gifts are directed to the donor’s passion area anywhere on campus and are typically made after a liquidity event, such as with Duncan’s support of the endowed chair.

“I try to push my students and fellow actuaries to be more entrepreneurial,” Duncan says. “I hope that’s the message to students and graduate students and founders through the Innovators Circle. It’s better to take risks, even if you fail. That’s extraordinarily valuable.”

The Innovators Circle

Technically skilled and creative, students thrive within UC Santa Barbara’s collaborative campus culture. Many Gaucho entrepreneurs have launched companies — meet some of them on pages 56 & 57. It’s no surprise that of 58 Innovators Circle members who have taken the Founders’ Pledge, 51 are UC Santa Barbara alumni. If you would like to join the Innovators Circle, visit https://giving.ucsb.edu/founders-pledge for more information.

THE BACKSTORY

Finding common ground

Professor Tania Israel offers tools to navigate political and cultural divides

BY KEITH HAMM

BACK IN THE 1990 s , Tania Israel started a group to bring together pro-choice and pro-life people through dialogue. And for the past 25 years, as an expert on LGBTQ issues, she’s interacted with plenty of people with whom she does not see eye to eye. Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, however, Israel, a professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical & School Psychology, noticed a shift. Americans were having trouble connecting across political and cultural divides. “As a counseling psychologist who does interventions, I am not as much about investigating the problem as I am about investigating solutions,” she says. That thought sparked her new book, “Facing the Fracture: How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation” (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2024). Israel takes us through it in this Q&A.

Early in the book, you explain that people’s differences of opinion are often not as far apart as they think.

Tania Israel: We overestimate the distance between Democrats’ and Republicans’ opinions, for example. There’s decades of research showing that. People think that the big problem right now is that we have radically different views from each other. But it actually has to do with the animosity we feel toward people who hold different views than we do. That is what has increased dramatically over the last few years. Increasingly, people do not want to live near, work with, or have a family member marry someone in another political party; that’s what is really breaking apart the bonds in our society.

You also write about media literacy as a valuable tool.

People often talk about media literacy to combat misinformation, but misinformation is not as prevalent as we think it is, and it also doesn’t have as direct an impact on behavior as we think it does. We love to think that misinformation is a huge problem for the ‘other side,’ and we very seldom think that it’s a problem for ‘our side.’ But we’re not divided so much because of misinformation as by misperception. We misperceive the other side to be much more different from ourselves, and we do that because we are exposing ourselves to a very narrow range of information, and at the same time, those ‘other people’ are exposing

themselves to a very different, narrow range of information. We think, ‘Oh, they don’t have the right information; they’re misinformed.’

‘They’re ignorant.’

Exactly. And both sides think that. What we need to focus on are the narratives, the media narratives, the stories we are drawn to, and to recognize that a narrative about an issue is not the only story. There are other narratives about the same issue.

Is it practical to inform ourselves via multiple narratives on a certain topic? That sounds like a lot of work.

The trick is not to try to immerse yourself in all narratives. What you want

to do is recognize that you are being exposed to a particular narrative and ideally have some curiosity about what other narratives might be out there. What that might lead you to do is this: When you are confronted with somebody who has a different view, rather than promoting your own view, you might try to understand, like: ‘What am I missing here? What can this person share that I have not been exposed to?’

At the same time, how important is it to reduce the amount of polarizing input that we absorb?

Most of the breaking news alerts that we get on our phones can wait. Turn off your notifications. No doomscrolling before bed.

OFF THE SHELF

As always, UC Santa Barbara professors, researchers and lecturers have been busy writing books. Here’s a roundup of some of what they’ve published in 2024.

Bianca Acevedo Researcher, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

“The Science and Art of Sensory Processing Sensitivity” (Elsevier)

Matt Beane

A ssistant professor of technology management

“The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines” (HarperCollins)

Patricia Fancher Lecturer, Writing Program

“Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetorics, and Desire in the History of Computing”

(NCTE Publications)

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa P rofessor emeritus of history

“The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs” (Basic Books)

Giovanni Batz

Assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies

“The Fourth Invasion: Decolonizing Histories, Extractivism, and Maya Resistance in Guatemala”

(University of California Press)

William Davies King D istinguished professor of theater and dance

“Finding the Way to ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’: Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill at Tao House”

(Anthem Press)

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

Assistant professor of global studies, Public Voices Fellow

“Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State”

(Stanford University Press)

Rae Wynn-Grant Researcher, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, co-host of “Wild Kingdom”

“Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World”

(Get Lifted Books)

This is your brain on pregnancy

BY SONIA FERNANDEZ

PREGNANCY IS A TRANSFORMATIVE TIME in a person’s life, when the body undergoes rapid physiological adaptations to prepare for motherhood. That much we all know. What has remained something of a mystery is what the sweeping hormonal shifts brought on by pregnancy are doing to the brain. Not anymore.

Researchers in Professor Emily Jacobs’ lab have shed light on this understudied area with the first-ever map of a human brain over the course of pregnancy.

“We wanted to look at the trajectory of brain changes specifically within the gestational window,” says Laura Pritschet, a graduate student with Jacobs and lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Previous studies had taken snapshots of the brain before and after pregnancy, but never has the pregnant brain been witnessed in the midst of this metamorphosis.

Following one first-time mother, the researchers scanned her brain every few weeks, starting before pregnancy and continuing through two years postpartum. The data, collected in collaboration with professor Elizabeth Chrastil’s team at UC Irvine, reveal changes in the brain’s gray and white matter across gestation, suggesting that the brain is capable of astonishing neuroplasticity well into adulthood. Their precision imaging approach allowed them to capture dynamic brain reorganization in the participant in exquisite detail, complementing early studies that compared women’s brains

pre- and post-pregnancy. “Our goal was to fill the gap and understand the neurobiological changes that happen during pregnancy itself,” they noted.

Decrease in gray matter, increase in white matter

The most pronounced changes the scientists found as they imaged the subject’s brain over time was a decrease in cortical gray matter volume, the wrinkly outer part of the brain. Gray matter volume decreased as hormone production ramped up during pregnancy. A decrease in gray matter volume is not necessarily a bad thing, the scientists emphasized. This change could indicate a “fine-tuning” of brain circuits, not unlike what happens to all young adults as they transition through puberty and their brains become more specialized. Pregnancy likely reflects another period of cortical refinement.

Less obvious but just as significant, the researchers found prominent increases in white matter, located deeper in the brain and generally responsible for facilitating communication between brain regions. While the decrease in gray matter persisted long after childbirth, the increase in white matter was transient, peaking in the second trimester and returning to pre-pregnancy levels around the time of birth. This type of effect had never been captured previously with before-and-after scans, according to the researchers, allowing for better estimation of just how

dynamic the brain can be in a relatively short period of time.

“The maternal brain undergoes a choreographed change across gestation, and we are finally able to see it unfold,” Jacobs says.

“Eighty-five percent of women experience pregnancy one or more times over their lifetime, and around 140 million women are pregnant every year,” says Pritschet, who hopes to “dispel the dogma” around the fragility of women during pregnancy. The neuroscience of pregnancy should not be viewed as a niche research topic, she argues, as the findings generated through this line of work will “deepen our overall understanding of the human brain, including its aging process.”

And that is just what they have set out to do. With support from the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative, directed by Jacobs, the team is building on these early discoveries through the Maternal Brain Project. More women and their partners are being enrolled at UC Santa Barbara, at UC Irvine, and through an international collaboration with researchers in Spain.

“Experts in neuroscience, reproductive immunology, proteomics and AI are joining forces to learn more than ever about the maternal brain,” Jacobs says. “Together, we have an opportunity to tackle some of the most pressing and least understood problems in women’s health.”

Professor Emily Jacobs and her lab are the first to map a human brain over the course of pregnancy.

PHOTO: MATT PERKO

ON CAMPUS

LIVING HISTORY

Linguistic artifacts

BY JOHANNES STEFFENS

WIDELY CONSIDERED THE EARLIEST FORM of audio recordings, wax cylinders offer rare glimpses into how the world sounded in the distant past. Indeed, a unique collection from China, recently acquired by the UC Santa Barbara Library, provides an elusive glance into the history of the Chinese language and dialects now considered critically endangered or extinct.

The Paul Georg von Möllendorff Chinese cylinders, a collection of 16 recordings from the late 1800s, feature Möllendorff (1847-1901), a German linguist who recorded recitations of a popular, celebrated poem, “Returning Home” by Tao Yuanming, in various Chinese dialects, reflecting the differences in regional languages at the time.

The acquisition was made through the library’s Early Recordings Initiative (ERI), a public-private partnership to ensure that cylinders like Möllendorff’s are preserved and made accessible to future scholars.

“The Möllendorff cylinders are essentially a sonic Rosetta Stone that holds the key to understanding past cultures,” says John Levin, a cylinder collector and ERI co-founder. “Just as the visual arts give us a glimpse into our collective history, audio recordings can offer insight into the history of a specific time and place that is invaluable to researchers.”

The cylinders could have easily been lost to obscurity if not for the curiosity of collector Charley Hummel and the sleuthing work of two distinguished musicologists. In the early 2000s, Hummel, a renowned American collector of phonograph machines and records, came across a mysterious hide-covered box of Chinese cylinders in a phonograph

shop in Paris and was instantly intrigued. The cylinders appeared to have Chinese content on them and the box was labeled “MÖLLENDORFF.”

Hummel purchased the cylinders intending to research their history and asked historians Patrick Feaster and Xiaoshi Wei to help him unravel the mystery of their provenance. After Hummel’s death in 2023, the library’s interest was piqued by historical research from Feaster and Wei, who identified the recordings and studied their connection to Möllendorff.

In the 1890s, while serving as a diplomat and commissioner of customs at Ningbo, China, Möllendorff undertook an ambitious project to document and classify Chinese languages for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. He asked speakers representing various Chinese languages to recite the same poem into a graphophone and then transcribed the results phonetically. He then sent the cylinders to Léon Azoulay, a prominent figure in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, to feature at the exposition as part of a “phonographic museum” where visitors could take an audio tour of cultures around the world. Azoulay later published a full catalog of the museum’s contents, including the Chinese cylinders, explicitly identified as Möllendorff’s.

Feaster and Wei theorized that “Möllendorff intended to send additional sets of cylinders to London, Berlin and St. Petersburg, to complement the set he had sent to Paris, but his unexpected death on April 20, 1901, derailed these plans.”

The location of the cylinders in the following 100 years until Hummel acquired them is unknown.

As part of the library’s Performing Arts Collection, the cylinders’ long-term preservation and accessibility is ensured. As part of ERI, they will likely receive more scholarly attention. The cylinders are unique to the collection because they were created as linguistic artifacts, rather than for entertainment purposes.

“The Möllendorff cylinders are undoubtedly more valuable as part of the public domain rather than a private collection, where they would have remained largely unpublished,” says David Seubert, performing arts curator.

“At UCSB, they have the potential to influence scholarship and research with partners in France, where the remaining cylinders live, and with other international centers of musicology. This is exactly the kind of effort that is supported by ERI, which strives to prevent valuable early recordings from disappearing into obscurity.”

Wax cylinders with audio recordings from the late 1800s of various Chinese dialects were recently acquired by the UCSB Library.

PHOTO BY MATT PERKO

GOALS, GRIT, GLORY

Devin Greer, 2024 Big West Freshman of the Year, played a pivotal role in Gaucho women's soccer's first championship in 15 years. Named Co-MVP of The Big West Championships, she contributed to all five goals in the semifinal and final matches, earning a spot on Top Drawer Soccer’s Team of the Week.

Alexis Ledeaux’s game-changing plays were a driving force behind Gaucho men's soccer's success this season. From key goals to pivotal assists, Ledeaux’s efforts helped secure wins against rivals like Cal Poly, a dominant 3-0 victory over Portland, and a thrilling 3-2 comeback against UC Riverside in The Big West Championship opener, showcasing the Gauchos’ resilience and teamwork throughout their standout campaign.

PHOTOS: JEFF LIANG

Research Highlights

Time to HIIT the gym

Decades of exercise research data support the common view that steady workouts over the long haul produce not only physical benefits but also improved brain function. As it turns out, short bursts of exercise — think cycling and high intensity interval training (HIIT) — produce the most consistent effects in improvement of memory, attention, executive function, information processing and other cognitive functions. That’s according to research from neuroscientist Barry Giesbrecht and team, who found that the effects were strongest for studies that tested cognition after exercise; that the effects of exercise less than 30 minutes in duration were bigger than those that went beyond 30 minutes; and that executive functioning was the key cognitive domain impacted by vigorous exercise, such as HIIT protocols.

Are you talkin’ to me?

C’mon, get happy

A long-held theory posits that subjective well-being — “happiness” — follows a U-shaped curve over the course of one’s life: Happiness abounds throughout youth, declines and bottoms out at middle age — the so-called “midlife crisis” — and then, somewhat counterintuitively, rises again in our golden years. However, according to anthropologist Michael Gurven and collaborators, the U-shape of happiness is not as fundamental to humanity as previously assumed. In nonindustrialized societies, their research revealed, the curve is more or less flat, inverted even, over the course of one’s life, with happiness increasing into middle age, then declining in later life. Understanding the variability of subjective well-being across humanity is important, Gurven says, especially as the global population ages.

Romance is a complex affair in humans. There’s personality, appearance, seduction, all manner of physical and social cues. Mosquitoes are much more blunt. Mating occurs for a few seconds in midair. And all it takes to woo a male is the sound of a female’s wingbeats. Imagine researchers’ surprise when a single change completely killed the mosquitoes’ libidos. By knocking out one gene, researchers in biologist Craig Montell’s lab created deaf mosquitoes and found that the males had absolutely no interest in mating. The results could have major implications for how we manage disease transmission by better controlling populations of mosquito vectors that infect hundreds of millions of people every year with viruses that cause diseases.

Discover more multimedia research highlights online at news.ucsb.edu

Finding a bigger bucket

Desert fish and the legacy of Phil Pister

by Harrison Tasoff

On a hot summer’s evening, E. Philip Pister found himself carefully navigating a desert wetland, alone in the fading light, carrying two heavy buckets full of tiny fish — the totality of the world’s Owens pupfish.

While Pister was best known for single-handedly rescuing the Owens pupfish that fateful evening in 1969, his true legacy stems from more than a half century pioneering a change in American ideology from mere resource management to a true environmental ethic.

Upon his passing in January 2023, the veteran fishery biologist left his entire collection of books, slides, research papers, field notes and awards in the care of UC Santa Barbara’s Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL), a site he shared a history with. The university is now working to catalog and digitize some of these resources to support research and conservation in the eastern Sierra and beyond.

Certainly, the endeavor to revitalize the region’s rare endemic fishes is ongoing. Not two miles away from the newly appointed Pister Library at SNARL is the last natural habitat of the Long Valley speckled dace. This small fish, and others like it, used to populate many of the area’s rivers and ponds. Pister’s slides and notes will provide invaluable insights for staff at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife working at UCLA’s White Mountain Research Center to restore dace populations. That is, if they can find another home for these fish in the first place.

Photos by Elaine Miller Bond / Illustrations by Charin Park ’22

Fish Slough Ecological Reserve pupfish pools

Phil Pister

A CAREER DEVOTED TO MANAGEMENT AND CONSERVATION

Throughout his life, Pister blended strong values with scientific knowledge to champion the field of environmental ethics in eastern California. His calling was to learn how humans can thoughtfully interact with the natural world and make decisions based on our best knowledge. He spent 37 years at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), primarily managing fish populations in eastern California and the ecosystems they inhabited.

Born and raised in Stockton, Pister spent many summers during the 1930s with his family in Tuolumne Meadows, where he gained an appreciation for the eastern Sierra. He entered UC Berkeley intent on studying medicine, but a “timely nudge from his older brother Karl acquainted (him) with an exciting young professor named Starker Leopold, who was just then introducing a bold new curriculum called ‘Wildlife Conservation,’” Pister’s longtime friend Frank Baldwin recalled at his memorial service. “Phil took to it like a trout to a fly.”

A. Starker Leopold was the eldest son of famed naturalist and conservationist Aldo Leopold — author of “A Sand County Almanac” — and a luminary in his own right. The younger Leopold left a lasting impression on his student: Environmental ethics would guide Pister’s work as a fishery biologist, and he continued speaking on humankind’s moral obligation to the natural world well into his 90s.

Pister conducted his thesis on the Convict Lakes Basin at SNARL in the 1950s, when it was still the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Convict Creek Experiment Station. “I think SNARL was near and dear to his heart,” said reserve director Carol Blanchette, “and he felt that SNARL would be an appropriate place for his long-term archive.”

Indeed, he was instrumental in transferring the research station to UCSB when the federal government planned to close it in the early 1970s. “Phil was the one who called me when he heard that SNARL might become available at a discount price of $1 if we would be interested in acquiring the facilities,” recalled Roger Samuelsen, the founding director of the UC Natural Reserve System and one of Pister’s close friends.

The opportunity arrived just a year after a large parcel near Mammoth Lakes was donated to the Natural Reserve System, in the care of UC Santa Barbara. Since the Convict Creek Experiment Station was a mere 20 minutes away, UCSB seemed the natural place to administer this new reserve.

“He really believed in SNARL; he really believed in the Natural Reserve System, and he wanted to do everything he could to encourage our success,” said former SNARL director Dan Dawson.

THE PISTER LIBRARY

Pister’s career spanned over half a century, and he continued advocating for environmental stewardship to his final year. Late in life, he, his children and Samuelsen began to discuss where to donate his extensive collection. Unfortunately, they hadn’t solidified any plans before Pister passed away. While he had previously provided interviews for the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, finding a repository for his personal and professional effects was another matter. “When Carol Blanchette was so receptive to the library being at SNARL, to

remembering Phil, and to hosting the memorial service, it just became clear that it was the right home,” Samuelsen said.

The UCSB Library will digitize his slides — which number more than 24,000 — to make them more accessible to researchers, resource managers and the public. Blanchette and Samuelsen would also like to digitize Pister’s field notes, if the team can find the funding.

“Phil kept copious notes on almost a daily basis throughout his career,” Samuelsen said.

Indeed, the collection is a regional treasure trove, and its transfer to SNARL will ensure that it remains accessible to researchers and professionals in eastern California. That's a real boon for a rural area where there's typically not a lot of redundancy in the system. A single person is often the sole keeper of a lot of records.

“Phil really was ‘the desert fish guy’ for a long time,” said environmental scientist Nick Buckmaster, supervisor of CDFW’s Inland Deserts Fisheries division. “Phil’s records, the photos and the notes that he has, are sometimes the only records that exist of how things used to be.” They’re a windfall for scientists seeking to understand how the region has changed.

FISH IN THE DESERT

The eastern Sierra and California deserts may seem a peculiar place for a fishery biologist to make a career, but the region contains an unexpected diversity of unique aquatic species, relics from its wetter past.

Over the last 4 million years, eastern California has experienced climatic changes and repeated earthquakes that reshaped its geography. The region once hosted a network of lakes, which enlarged and connected during ice ages and receded and disconnected during interglacial periods. This dynamism produced times when fish were alternately dispersed and isolated, eventually sending different populations down separate evolutionary pathways.

territory under his charge: “If I left the roadhead near the base of 14,494-foot Mount Whitney at 9:00 a.m., I could make a leisurely drive to the east and have my lunch 282 feet below sea level on the floor of Death Valley,” he once wrote.

Aug. 18, 1969, stands out from the many entries in his yearly diaries — now all a part of the collection at SNARL: “Transplanted Cyprinodon at Fish Slough; purchased alkaline D-cells, $2.00.” This succinct note summarizes his great rescue of the Owens pupfish.

Millions of these fish had once thrived in the vast marshlands of Owens Valley. By 1942, land use changes and the introduction of predatory game fishes had seemingly driven them to extinction. Pister had actually helped rediscover the species in 1964, when he, along with ichthyologists Robert Rush Miller and Carl Hubbs, found a few hundred individuals holding out in a single pool in the Fish Slough marsh.

Recounting the episode years later, Pister said: “It was

Many of these fishes evolved in isolated habitats and became integrally tied to the health of their small ecosystems. “Even though they might be three inches long, they were the apex aquatic predators in their habitats,” Buckmaster explained.

PUPFISH SAVIOR

As a fishery biologist with CDFW, Pister worked on a variety of projects, from keeping sports fishermen supplied with trout to preserving the integrity of isolated desert springs. And working in eastern California placed a dramatically diverse

almost completely dried up when an alert assistant came into my office and announced: ‘Phil, if we don’t get out to Fish Slough immediately, we are going to lose the species.’ His pronouncement was no exaggeration. It was the hard truth!”

They rushed toward Fish Slough with nets and aerators and removed the remaining 800 survivors. The team secured the fish in wire-mesh cages in one of the slough’s main channels, and planned to move them later to safer locations. Pister then stopped for dinner while his teammates returned to town. He checked on the pupfish one last time before departing for the day.

It was a disaster. In their haste, the biologists had placed the fish away from the main current. By the time Pister realized, many of the fish had begun to suffocate for lack of oxygen. With daylight in short supply, Pister recognized he had to act immediately. He sprinted to the truck, dropped aerators into the two buckets he had left and began walking the species to safety. He later wrote about it in his essay, “Species In a Bucket”:

Although the passage of time has obscured my exact words and thoughts as I lugged two heavy buckets and their precious cargo (each weighing more than thirty pounds) over the treacherous marsh terrain, I remember mumbling something like: ‘Please don’t let me stumble. If I drop these buckets we won’t have another chance!’ I distinctly remember being scared to death. I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species. (American Currents, Vol. 40, No. 3)

Once at his truck, Pister was able to drive the totality of the world’s Owens pupfish to deeper water on the far side of Fish Slough.

A CHAMPION OF NATIVE FISHES

Aug. 18, 1969, was a particularly dramatic day in Pister’s career, but the great good he did comes from decades of relentless support for the delicate ecosystems under his care, and the unique species that evolved within them. “People always associate Phil with things like pupfish,” said CDFW supervisor Buckmaster, “but Phil was instrumental in keeping the golden trout, California’s state fish, alive.”

Conservationists laud Pister as a father of native fish restoration in America. He co-founded the Desert Fishes Council, an international scientific and advocacy society;

he testified before the Supreme Court to protect the Devil’s Hole pupfish; and he worked to remove non-native fish in Nevada and protect native fishes in Mexico. He broadened the conversation around rare fishes in the eastern Sierra and the deserts, expanding management beyond game fish to a more holistic stewardship. It was a shift that coincided with large-scale changes in America’s environmental psyche.

“What Phil did was of immense consequence,” Buckmaster said. “And it’s important to consider that in light of the times: this great awakening in American society to the value, the intrinsic value, of these resources and these species that up until then had been viewed as an impediment to progress.”

“His message is that we have a responsibility to take care of these species,” said reserve director Blanchette. It’s a principle that still guides the people and agencies that carry on Pister’s work.

TEACHING PEOPLE TO CARE

Although he was naturally a humble man, Pister’s pupfish rescue has been memorialized in articles, books and videos. He was even the star of a children’s book, “The Pupfish Hero.” But few people appreciated these fishes at the time. “My friends used to make fun of Phil for what he did,” said Gaylene Kinzy, a staff member at UCLA’s White Mountain Research Center who grew up in the nearby town of Bishop.

It’s understandable why. Many of these fish are small and inconspicuous, and the effort to rehabilitate them and other endemics continues to face issues and resistance. Many landowners have honest concerns about the impact that protected species will have on them and their properties, Buckmaster explained. Unfortunately, this has led to populations of small fishes surreptitiously disappearing in the past.

“People often asked Phil this question: ‘Oh, you study the desert pupfish. What good is a desert pupfish?’” Blanchette recounted. “Phil’s answer, verbatim, would be, ‘What good are you?’”

More than just a tit-for-tat, Pister’s response really asked people to consider why we decide to value a species — or an individual for that matter — whether a pupfish or a human being. In the case of desert fishes, these species are as unique as Darwin‘s finches in the Galapagos. Each species diverged from its neighbors as it adapted to the conditions in its own habitat over thousands of years of isolation — only instead of rocks and islands in the ocean, it’s creeks and springs in the desert.

pupfish chase

SWAPPING FISHES AT WHITE MOUNTAIN RESEARCH CENTER

For instance, consider the Long Valley speckled dace, a fish the size of a minnow whose only natural population lives a mile and a half from SNARL. The true future of this species lies 45 minutes to the southeast, where 95% of the population exists in a tarpaulin-lined pond at UCLA’s White Mountain Research Center (WMRC), one of SNARL’s sister sites in the UC Natural Reserve System.

The ponds were part of an ambitious project in the late 1980s and early ‘90s by UC Berkeley graduate student June Mire, now the director of ecological services at Tetra Tech, a Fortune 500 environmental consulting firm. The young biologist had met Pister during her master’s studies in New Orleans. His sincerity and charm soon converted her to the cause of threatened desert fishes, and she embarked on a doctoral program at Cal.

Owens pupfish were only present in two locations at the time, so Pister and Mire were concerned about the security of these habitats. She hatched the idea to create an emergency refuge for the species. “Everybody wanted this work to be done, and I was crazy enough to do it,” she recalled. Part of her aim was also to learn what these fishes needed in order to thrive. So she designed the three fish refuges to support controlled experiments.

The Owens pupfish had been officially listed as an endangered species for some time by 1989, which provided research and conservation funding for the project through CDFW. Still, construction was a massive undertaking. “White Mountain Research Center was incredibly supportive of my work,” Mire said. “They gave me space, labor, storage, everything I needed to do this.”

Jump to around the year 2000, and Phil’s successor, Steve Parmenter, was dealing with a newly discovered lineage of Owens tui chub. Although Mire’s ponds were overgrown and in disuse by this point, it was a simple matter to revitalize them and rekindle the relationship between White Mountain and Fish and Game to provide a refuge for this endangered fish.

The quick collaboration proved crucial, because, not two years after its discovery, the original population of tui chub had vanished under dubious circumstances, with dry ponds and stocked fish left in their stead.

In late 2020, Parmenter and Buckmaster converted one of the ponds into a refuge for Long Valley speckled dace, hosting fish gathered from the last population near SNARL. The hope is that the team led by Parmenter’s successor, Buckmaster, will be able to introduce these dace into other suitable habitats at some point in the future.

THE CHALLENGE OF REHABILITATING ENDEMIC SPECIES

According to Buckmaster, these rare endemic fishes face three existential threats. The first is habitat loss. “Fish need water; they need habitat,” he said. “And when they only occur in a small area, it’s very easy to lose it.” This is especially true in California, where vast infrastructure projects have rerouted water across the thirsty state.

Secondly, these species are no longer the big fish in their little ponds. Humans intentionally introduced popular game fishes — such as largemouth bass and rainbow trout — and other invasive species, like the red swamp crayfish. The eastern Sierra didn’t really have any large predatory fishes that could colonize the region in the distant past. After so long without a predator, these small endemic fishes are now easy prey for non-native species.

Lastly, these little fish make great bait. So when a fisherman brings baitfish from one watershed into another, interbreeding can reduce the distinctions between species. “With hybridization, you lose the evolutionary history of that species; you erase it,” Buckmaster said. So while there may still be pupfish, chub or dace in a stream, they’re no longer the same fish as their ancestors.

Many of these fishes also used to range throughout eastern California. “Pupfish used to number in the hundreds of millions,” Parmenter said. “They were all over the Owens Valley and in the Owens River.” But once people began stocking bass and trout, the places these native species could survive shrank to only the area’s isolated ponds and springs.

Long Valley speckled dace

Such is the circumstance of the Long Valley speckled dace. “The only thing we don’t have is a place to put these fish,” Buckmaster said as he walked toward their pond. “So they’re just kind of homeless.”

Parmenter concurred: “With habitat that small, you can’t set up a conservation scenario and then walk away and expect it to be self-maintaining.” In that sense, these species now rely on our continued management, because many of the issues humans have created are here to stay. Even if one could remove all of the bass and non-native trout, it would only last until the next avid angler dropped a few back into a creek.

In that light, WMRC has become part of a larger network of native fish sites throughout the eastern Sierra and Owens Valley. “Unfortunately, we never really stopped managing them in buckets,” reflected Buckmaster. “Now the buckets have become small ponds, and we play a shell game to keep them alive.”

ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND THE MORAL IMPERATIVE

Ironically, Pister and SNARL share some responsibility for the hardships these fishes now face. CDFW was not set up to worry about things like pupfish when Pister carried out his iconic rescue in 1969. “(They’re) no good to eat, and people don’t want to catch them, and won’t buy licenses, which is what we (were) interested in,” he said in an interview.

“It was my job as a California Department of Fish and Game aquatic biologist to provide good angling in the eastern Sierra recreation area for millions of people in Southern California, primarily through the stocking of large numbers of hatchery-reared rainbow trout — a species foreign to eastern Sierra drainages,” Pister wrote in an essay in the anthology “Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril” (2011 Trinity University Press).

entire 37-year career, I was lucky enough to live and work at least 300 miles from my nearest supervisor,” he recounted in his essay, tongue in cheek. “This allowed me much freedom of action.”

Humans have had profound impacts on our surroundings. We alter the course of events that have taken millions of years to develop. “I feel we have a moral imperative to try to correct and mitigate the impacts that we’ve had on the environment,” Buckmaster said, echoing sentiments first developed by Aldo Leopold, then championed by his son Starker, and taken up by Pister.

Throughout the years, humanity has slowly begun to recognize the importance of preserving the integrity of natural systems. America has enacted laws mandating

As a matter of fact, the initial purpose of the Convict Creek Experiment Station was to understand the success of hatchery-reared trout in native streams. “SNARL’s whole reason for being was to develop this fishing industry,” Blanchette explained. No one knew at the time how destructive non-native predators could be to these isolated ecosystems. And it seems Pister recognized the consequences of this naïveté early in his career. “Now a big focus of the research here is understanding the impact that those introduced trout have had on these native ecosystems.”

Pister’s values and education promised to make his job politically and philosophically difficult. “However, for my

Carol Blanchette

artificial streams at SNARL

various environmental protections. Representatives of the American people convened and decided that these rare species are worth saving. “We’ve got three lines of reasoning to save these animals: the ecological imperative, the moral imperative and the democratic imperative,” Buckmaster said. “There’s meaning to be drawn from any one of those, and we really should respect all three.”

Buckmaster’s predecessors would likely be proud of the young biologist’s conviction, and the work he and those at the UC Natural Reserve System continue to carry forward — because carrying forward is precisely what Pister would implore of us. “In a very real sense, we and all our planet’s life-forms are slopping in two buckets while wild and poorly understood forces carry us into the future,” Pister wrote as he concluded his essay. “The warnings have been sounded, but will we respond soon enough, and with urgency sufficient to the work?

“There are no Fish and Game trucks and aeration systems waiting at the end of the trail to save us,” he wrote. “We must do that work ourselves.”

“ The world may not have time to wait for another generation to evolve an ecological conscience . ”

— Phil Pister

Sagebrush Icons

BY HARRISON TASOFF

Researchers gain valuable environmental knowledge by studying the sage-grouse and their habitat

Tucked away in California’s high desert is an elusive bird whose fate is tightly bound to its particular habitat. The greater sage-grouse lives in, nests among and eats its namesake plant: sagebrush.

“The health of the sage-grouse population is inextricably linked to the health of the sagebrush ecosystem,” says Carol Blanchette, director of UC Santa Barbara’s Valentine Eastern Sierra Reserves in Mammoth Lakes.

UCSB’s Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab (SNARL), part of that reserve, is the operations base for researchers monitoring the southwesternmost population of this charismatic bird and changes happening to the sagebrush ecosystem. This work has enhanced our understanding of the species and informed conservation efforts along the California-Nevada border.

BALLOON CHICKENS

The greater sage-grouse is a rather plump fowl, about the weight of a domestic chicken, but with a build closer to its relative, the turkey. “Their whole lives revolve around the sagebrush: They nest in it; they eat it; and they live in it,” explains Camden McMillan, a research technician with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). As a result, studying the grouse is a great way to understand the health of the ecosystem as a whole.

Indeed, the birds’ range mirrors that of the Great Basin sagebrush, stretching south from Saskatchewan to the extreme north of Arizona, and the western edge of the Dakotas to eastern California. Most populations intermingle, but a combination of mountains, human settlement and range restrictions has caused the population in the far southwestern limit of the species’ range to become isolated. Scientists refer to this region, spanning the California-Nevada border, as the bi-state area. The bi-state population has two strongholds: Bodie State Historic Park and the Long Valley Caldera, where SNARL is located.

The UC reserve is ideally situated for the research carried out by the USGS team monitoring this part of the bi-state sage-grouse population and the vitality of the sagebrush ecosystem in this region. “We’re across the street from the majority of the mating sites,” McMillan says. “We even have grouse behind us on this hill.”

Grouse have a remarkable mating ritual called lekking. Males gather en masse at natural clearings, called leks, and dance for the females. Each lek usually has a dominant male, the king of the dance floor, as it were. Greater sage-grouse perform by bouncing two yellow air sacs on their chests, which produces a wobbling sound that “The Sibley Guide to Birds” describes as “weird.”

Grouse typically return to the same lek sites year after year. This is a boon for research and conservation efforts, providing a clear focus for yearly counts. Scientists have monitored sage-grouse in Long Valley for more than 70 years. “Given the bird’s fidelity to lek sites and long history of inhabiting the bi-state area, it’s not unreasonable to assume they’ve utilized these same leks for hundreds if not thousands of years,” says Tracy Misiewicz, the bi-state sage-grouse communication and data coordinator for the Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association. In 2024, the largest lek in the Long Valley had 118 male grouse at its peak.

The work conducted out of SNARL is part of a multi-agency effort to monitor the bi-state sage-grouse, with input from federal and state agencies, public utilities and independent volunteers. Researchers at USGS catch and tag female grouse with radio collars so they can track the animals. This enables them to find the birds’ nests, which they monitor for the rest of the season, checking in roughly every three days. Chicks will often remain in family groups from the time they hatch in midspring through fall. Monitoring the birds’ reproductive success enables scientists to follow population trends, and the health of the sage-grouse population provides a good indication of the overall health of the sagebrush ecosystem.

Greater sage-grouse

Centrocercus urophasianus

A THREATENED SPECIES

A variety of factors threaten sage-grouse throughout their range. Climate change affects the sagebrush ecosystem, and the grouse that rely on it. Larger, more frequent wildfires can also wipe out the birds’ sagebrush and wet meadows habitats and food source. And human settlement and land use have placed increased stress on the species, fragmenting its habitat and disturbing its activity. Indeed, despite their size, grouse are pretty flighty birds. “In areas where there are more people, grouse tend to move out,” McMillan says.

Many of these threats interact with and amplify one another. For instance, climate change influences precipitation, fires and water use, which then affects the health and extent of sagebrush habitat. Invasive plants can muscle in on degraded habitat, exacerbating the previous challenges. What’s more, these threats vary in kind and magnitude across eastern California. “ This means there is no silver bullet when it comes to protecting sage-grouse populations,” Misiewicz says.

The bi-state sage-grouse population has decreased by about 66% over the last 50 years, and its range has contracted by about 60 square miles since the mid 1990s. Recent modeling by USGS suggests that these declines have slowed considerably in the last 10 to 15 years. That’s good news. Both the federal and California governments are currently reviewing the bi-state population for listing under their respective endangered species legislation.

“USGS monitoring has been important in guiding the vast majority of land and wildlife management work in the bistate in one way or another,” Misiewicz says. For instance,

the knowledge gleaned from their work has guided the translocation of birds to bolster shrinking subpopulations. It has also helped identify key habitat for protection and informed conservation projects such as wet meadow restoration and invasive plant removal.

Researchers at the USGS recently examined sage-grouse population growth response across more than 800 sites to evaluate the effect of conservation work in the region over the course of the last decade. Count data from 57 leks, coupled with 85 unique actions, showed that conservation increased population numbers by 4.4%, on average. So, while the bistate sage-grouse population has declined since 2012, current levels are 37.5% higher than they would have been without any conservation efforts.

“There are about 350 animal species with habitat needs that overlap with the sage-grouse,” Misiewicz says. “As a result, conservation efforts that benefit the sage-grouse have a positive impact on the sagebrush ecosystem and the many species that inhabit it.”

A CHANGING DESERT LANDSCAPE

Sagebrush has played a supporting role in this story so far, but it’s an iconic species in its own right. Coastal denizens may be familiar with California sagebrush, a fragrant plant with thinly divided glaucus leaves native to the region’s scrub, chaparral and woodland ecosystems. The desert sagebrushes

are prescription strength compared to their coastal cousin. They boast tough leaves, a bitter taste and a pungent, medicinal aroma. These species underpin the sagebrush ecosystem, a quintessential symbol of the American West that spans over 175 million acres and can handle the hot, dry summers and freezing winters of America’s Great Basin desert.

Although the height of a shrub, sagebrush grows like a tree: slow and steady. But because of its size and location on the ground, it’s vulnerable to many kinds of disturbances, from fire to competition from invasive plants to trampling by people and animals. “Sagebrush takes a long time to recover,” says Steven Mathews-Sanchez, a wildlife biologist at USGS, “making the damage it receives that much more impactful.”

Sagebrush isn’t the only plant feeling the effects of dramatic changes happening in the West. “Many of the plants in the sagebrush ecosystem — including bitter brush, rabbit brush and sagebrush — are strongly affected by changes in the climate,” explains SNARL director Blanchette. “Temperature, rainfall and snowpack can have a great influence on when these plants flower and produce leaves and seeds.”

Tracking plant life cycles can provide insights on how an ecosystem is affected by environmental changes. A group of dedicated volunteers monitors these phenomena in specific plants in SNARL’s sagebrush community during the spring, summer and fall, then submits the data to the National Phenology Network, which makes it available to researchers.

Once a week, local citizen scientists like Anne Barrett and Sherryl Taylor collect data on the life stages of different plants at SNARL. Consistency is crucial when tracking cycles, so they use standardized guidelines provided by the national network and always return to the same individual plants week after week. They record features like the first emergence of leaves, flowers and fruits, as well as the color of foliage, the ripening of seeds, and the number of buds and berries.

For Taylor, studying phenology is one aspect of properly caring for the natural world. “We do it to help us understand what’s happening to these ecosystems,” she says.

These long-term data series are critical to scientists trying to understand environmental changes and climate trajectories. Often, their true value isn’t realized until years or decades after they’ve begun. “We’re putting toward the future a seed bank of knowledge,” Barrett says. “What we’re doing today might be used 50 years from now.” The sage-grouse will directly benefit from any of the resulting conservation insights.

“Sage-grouse are a beautiful, bizarre and unique example of the amazing animal diversity that we share this world with,” says Misiewicz. Understanding how sage-grouse make use of the sagebrush ecosystem, and how the ecosystem is responding to the changing climate, provides information critical for conserving this incredible species.

ANNE AND SHERRYL

KidsComeback

BY SHELLY LEACHMAN

Once-endangered mountain yellow-legged frogs have leaped back to life in Yosemite

A remote lakeshore deep inside Yosemite National Park teems with life: coyotes, snakes, birds, tadpoles, frogs. The frogs are at the heart of this scene, which a decade ago was much different. It was quiet — and not in a good way. The frogs that are so central to this ecosystem were absent, extirpated by a deadly fungal disease known as amphibian chytrid fungus.

Now, thanks to the consistent and focused efforts of researchers and conservationists to save, then reintroduce, mountain yellow-legged frogs to this and numerous other lakes in Yosemite, their populations are again thriving.

Roland Knapp

A landscape-scale study led by UC Santa Barbara biologist Roland Knapp, with colleagues from UCSB, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Tennessee, and Yosemite National Park, details the long-term endeavor comprising 24 reintroductions across a dozen different Yosemite sites and over more than 17 years. In that time, remarkably, the frogs have developed some resistance to the chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), allowing them to persist in its presence.

“Going back to some of these lakes where frogs are now recovering, and just sitting and watching, reminds you of what has been accomplished,” says Knapp, based at UCSB’s Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory in Mammoth Lakes. “You sit on the bank and you have tadpoles all around you in the water and adult frogs sitting next to you on the shore. You have birds flying in and feeding on them, and snakes that are feeding on them. You have a lake that’s alive again.”

As it’s done to amphibians worldwide, Bd has devastated native frog populations in Yosemite. Once the most common amphibian in the high-elevation portion of California’s Sierra

Nevada mountains, the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog (Rana sierrae) has disappeared during the past century from more than 90% of its historical range. It is currently listed as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. But in their long-term study, Knapp and co-researchers were able to successfully reestablish breeding populations by translocating Bd-resistant frogs to sites where the species had been wiped out. The success of their recovery efforts is a beacon of hope for amphibian conservation.

“In our study, results from viability modeling suggest that many reintroduced populations have a high probability of persisting over 50 years,” Knapp says. “These results provide a rare example of how reintroduction of resistant individuals can allow the landscape-scale recovery of disease-impacted species, and have broad implications for amphibians and many other taxa that are threatened with extinction by novel pathogens.”

Amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate class, with more than 40% of species threatened with extinction. In less than a generation, the human-driven emergence of the Bd fungus has devastated global amphibian biodiversity, with thousands of populations in decline or extirpated, and dozens of species now extinct in the wild. Even amphibians in the most protected habitats have fallen victim to what Knapp calls an “invisible killer.”

All of which makes the success of this study even more “mind-blowing,” he says. “Considering where we were 10 or 15 years ago, when we weren’t sure if we were going to have this frog on the landscape anymore, to see how things are turning around — it’s incredible to see.”

IT ’S TAKEN SOME SERIOUSLY PAINSTAKING

WORK

TO GET HERE .

The reintroductions require careful planning; when identifying the best locations for reintroduction, team members must factor site elevation, winter severity and predation risk. And monitoring the translocated frogs is an intensive, long-term effort, often requiring researchers to hike in and capture every frog at a site multiple times per year.

REINTRODUCTION

Monitoring those translocated populations over several years, the team observed the recruitment of new adult frogs, indicating successful recovery. Conducted within the protected confines of a national park, their efforts, Knapp notes, demonstrate the importance of maintaining and restoring natural processes in these ecosystems.

What about the prospect of scaling up this approach across the entire Sierra Nevada range — even serving as a proof of concept, and potentially as a model, for similar conservation efforts elsewhere across the globe?

“It’s really important to have that broader perspective,” says Knapp. “We now have a proven strategy that is working in Sierra Nevada yellowlegged frogs and is allowing us to recover the frog at a scale of Yosemite National Park. This frog that has been pushed to the verge of extinction by this pathogen is now becoming an example of how we might recover amphibians all around the world.”

PHOTO: ROLAND KNAPP

VANTAGE POINT

Discoveries in the humanities from overlooked and underestimated spaces

In the humanities, as in life, our perspective shapes what we see. Often, the most transformative discoveries come not from grand vistas but from subtle shifts in viewpoint that reveal something surprising. Discovery is about more than just what we observe; it’s about how much we observe.

The stories that shape us aren’t always where we expect — sometimes they’re revealed in data archives, blueprints or family histories. By looking at their findings from a different angle, UC Santa Barbara humanities researchers have uncovered new layers of history that would otherwise have remained unseen. Art historian Swati Chattopadhyay reimagines India’s colonial past by studying small, often ignored spaces that sustained the British Empire. Digital artist Laila Shereen Sakr explores how Arabic data culture impacts identity, while artist H ươ ng Ngô uses art to honor her family’s refugee journey. Together, their work reveals the overlooked narratives that challenge how we think about history and culture.

BY DEBRA HERRICK

PERKO

PHOTOS BY MATT

Laila Shereen Sakr Visualizing Arabic technoculture

From blood, water and wax to pastel, oil and polymers, artists make work from the materials of their time. For digital artist Sakr, that means using data like clay.

An associate professor of media theory and practice, Sakr — who is originally from Egypt — created an archive of the internet in 72 Arabic languages, which she launched in 2009 as “R-Shief.” There, she found her clay.

“Creative ways of responding are the only way to make a real difference,” says Sakr, whose recent book, “Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives” (Stanford University, 2023), explores how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems.

Like Sakr herself, the book has two voices: “Sakr The Scholar” and VJ Um Amel, Sakr’s Arabic-speaking video jockey cyborg. Using R-Shief’s archive of data from Arabic-language social media, Sakr looks at how the logic of programming technology has influenced how social movements take shape.

The story her data tells goes beyond digital activism. As Sakr puts it, there is no longer any difference between the embodied real world and the online virtual world.

Coining the term “data body” for an individual’s data records, she explores how both “bodies” and “data” are “physically, socially and energetically actual.” From high school GPAs to driving, medical and financial records, a large part of our identities are recorded and shared.

“Data bodies have more impact on your life than your real life and your real body,” Sakr says. “There’s no difference between what happens online and what happens in our real lives. It’s one in the same.”

Sakr uses the example of “the glitch” to show how “procedural literacy” for technology can foster political and social change. It’s like “a digital banana peel”; the system slips and does something else. “Sometimes that something else can be a beautiful unpredictable outcome.”

“What other rhymes can we hear when we tune into the right frequencies?”

Hu o ng Ngô

Creating reflections of Southeast Asian refugees

Artist Ngô sought to learn about her parents’ labor as assembly-line workers in U.S. electronics factories. Her parents, along with many other Southeast Asian refugees, created capacitors, resistors and motherboards, hidden components that modulate tempo, pitch and memory in electronics.

Her latest exhibition, “Hương Ngô: Core Memory” (Sept. 27 to Jan. 26, 2025), presented by Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and The Riviera Beach House, explores the time her family spent living in Hong Kong refugee camps, and as new immigrants to the U.S.

“They are images of the weather and waves of the day,” says Ngô, a lecturer of art, who created cyanotypes to reflect the refugee body. Cyanotypes, made from sun and water, are stand-ins for the refugee experience, she says, “battered by the elements and an artifact of their resilience.”

Her parents worked night shifts, overtime and holidays as assembly-line laborers. “As a child, I had

no idea what they were even making until we visited their factories one day and they passed around their products: tiny, colorful electronic components with metal wires on both sides,” she writes in the recent exhibition “Hương Ngô: This Space Is for Lost Time” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago. Using similar vintage components, she created sculptures with circuits that gesture toward her parents’ creativity — skills, she says, that were not reflected by their wage labor.

Sometimes Ngô’s dad brought home sculptures fashioned from wire, or her mom “drew a connection between the fineness of embroidery and the tiny objects at work.” But they also brought home books. “To keep their jobs, they had to study whenever their production changed,” Ngô says. “As technology developed, the volumes got bigger and bigger, their testing more frequent. The lines between skilled and unskilled labor blurred for me as their expertise grew. My dad’s workshop slowly filled with tools and curious objects.”

Swati Chattopadhyay

Recasting India’s architecture of empire

Ask any undergraduate or high school student and they will tell you empires are big and vast territorial entities. But that’s overlooking a lot of what makes up an empire, and how an empire’s bigness is construed.

That’s according to Chattopadhyay, a professor of architecture and urban history. Her latest book, “Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire” (Bloomsbury, 2023), takes a granular approach to the architecture of the British Empire in India, paying close attention to what has been overlooked in histories of colonialism and empire. She examines spaces that have been deemed insignificant because of their small size, their marginal location or the minor role they seemingly played in the larger social and political scene.

But these were also spaces that made the British Empire in India possible.

“What fascinated me is that most of the spaces — and that could be storage spaces, kitchens, verandahs, servants’ quarters — never really figured in narratives of

empire, even though they were essential to its everyday functioning,” says Chattopadhyay, who for years jotted down her notes in the margins of her research into the British Empire’s big problems, key players and major colonial cities like Calcutta and New Delhi.

“To work around this scalar and dimensional prejudice of empire, you have to shift vantage,” she says. To do so, she tells stories of marginalized people — servants, women, children, subalterns and racialized minorities — who held up the infrastructure of the empire.

Exploring an array of overlooked places and spaces, from cook rooms and slave quarters to outhouses, medicine cupboards, rooftop terraces and bookshelves, she reveals how and why these kinds of minor spaces are so important to understanding colonialism, and how these “adjunct” spaces contributed to long-distance trade and became related to foodways and famine, among other things. In doing so, “Small Spaces” is an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale.

“To work around this scalar and dimensional prejudice of empire, you have to shift vantage”

Making Memories

Sisters’ birthright informs their special film project, ‘Mapping Alzheimer’s’

BY SONIA FERNANDEZ

There’s a set of childhood memories that Cristina Venegas returns to once in a while, recollections that stand out because of their peculiar nature.

LOCATION PHOTOS (FROM TOP): VGALLEGO66, CARLOS CRISMATT MOUTHON

PHOTOS OF MARISA AND CRISTINA VENEGAS, COURTESY

“I have memories of being a child in Montería, which is an interesting city, and it’s on the banks of the Sinú River,” she says of a municipality in her native northern Colombia. “I remember the town square facing the church where sometimes you could escape the heat and humidity. And there I can almost still see people who would sit in the park who appeared to be mentally … gone … and people referred to them as ‘crazy.’ There was also an old man who taught me how to play the guitar. The wife walked around with a cardboard on her forehead all day repeatedly asking what time it was.”

This bit of surreality is not hers alone; it’s embedded in the cultural memory of South America. Colombian master storyteller Gabriel García Márquez alluded to it in his 1967 tour de force “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” calling it “a plague of forgetfulness” that sweeps a fictional remote Colombian town, wiping memory, identity and meaning from its denizens. In the 1980s, Colombian neurologist Francisco Lopera would begin to assemble a real-life medical puzzle, following reports of young people complaining of memory loss, and finding entire families with the same symptoms going back for generations. He concluded it was an early-onset form of Alzheimer’s disease, encoded in the families’ genes.

So when Venegas, a film and media studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, learned about a collaboration in the foothills of the Colombian Andes between Dr. Lopera and UCSB neuroscientist Kenneth S. Kosik, something blossomed in her own brain — a story that she and her sister, Emmy Award-winning science journalist Marisa Venegas, were uniquely equipped to tell.

A clear path

“Serendipity” is probably the word that most aptly describes neuroscientist Kosik’s career: If he hadn’t traveled to the University of Antioquia School of Medicine in Medellín to lecture on the biology of Alzheimer’s disease in 1992, he wouldn’t have been introduced to Francisco Lopera. If he hadn’t met Lopera, he wouldn’t have been let into the insular world of the paisa — the name the locals of Antioquia have taken for themselves. And if he hadn’t been let into their lives, he perhaps wouldn’t have embarked on what he calls “an odyssey both geographical and personal” — tracing the path of mutations to the presenilin 1 gene around the world and backward in time.

“I’m enchanted,” Kosik says. “That’s why I’ve gone back for 30 years. It exerts some sort of draw over me.”

“There are so many dimensions to this story that tap into our history and our background,” Cristina Venegas says, “about how this disease has ravaged the region, and not only the region, but worldwide.” With the working title “Mapping Alzheimer’s,” the Venegas sisters’ in-depth, long-term film project aims to tell a story that spans centuries and reaches around the world, to document a fight that has been joined by numerous scientists and advocates, and to highlight the bonds that provide hope for a future without the disease.

“I’m humbled by what they all go through,” Cristina adds, “and that’s the story we need to tell.”

Indeed, the enchantment has drawn him deep into the lush and rugged landscapes of the Colombian Cordillera Central, even at the height of violence in the recent history of the country. The clinical and scientific collaboration has navigated its way around tense situations in conflict zones and conducted exploits worthy of any popular thriller. He’s visited rough, poor neighborhoods and taken family histories marked by the collateral damage caused by nearly half a century of internecine conflict.

Physician-scientists Kosik and Lopera and their research teams have lived with one foot in each of two worlds — the highly controlled domain of the lab and the tumultuous field environment. Their goals? To not only investigate the genetic origins of Alzheimer’s, but also to pave the way for a cure.

At the heart of the researchers’ work is an extended family of about 6,000, each of whom bears a heavy burden: Each is destined to develop Alzheimer’s by the time they’re about 45 years old, or they will bear witness to the inevitable decline of parents, siblings and cousins … often both. This genetic version of Alzheimer’s — as opposed to the “sporadic” type people get much later in life — is autosomal dominant, which means each individual need inherit only one copy of the mutant gene from either parent to develop the dementia themselves. In the presence of the gene, the disease is nearly inevitable, coming on like clockwork.

PHOTOS FROM TOP: DR. FRANCISCO LOPERA, COURTESY GNA PROJECT; PROF. KENNETH KOSIK, MATT PERKO

Because of this kindred’s size and homogeneity, they provide an ideal population through which to home in on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that lead to the development of the sticky plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that are the hallmarks of the disease. Thanks to Lopera’s dedication and relationship-building over the years, the family has time and again volunteered to cooperate with the scientists, welcoming them into their homes, participating in clinical trials, offering their blood and, at the ends of their lives, their brains.

These conditions set the stage for some difficult dilemmas

University School of Medicine. For the trials, they will all receive the FDA-approved anti-amyloid drug lecanemab as well as either an experimental anti-tau agent or a placebo, requiring the wouldbe participants to know their status in order to enroll. Members of Lopera’s group have prepared for this effort by receiving specialized training in genetic counseling.

Giving the past a future

for the researchers, who have the power to predict who will develop Alzheimer’s but not to cure or even mitigate the condition. They build family trees and run gene tests; to date, there are a rather astonishing 12 extended families found in Colombia, each with its own distinct mutations to the same gene. In the early days of the collaboration, the researchers had to grapple with whether to deliver the harsh news or remain silent. Kosik wrote about this experience in a 1999 account for the journal The Sciences:

“I told the grown children that we could now determine which of them would get the disease,” he wrote, “and I asked whether they would want to take the test. ‘Before answering,’ I told them, ‘remember that there is no treatment.’ All the children said they would want to take the test. ‘What would they do differently once they knew the result?’ I asked. At that point no one had an answer, except 23-year-old González, who later told our nurse that if his test were positive, he would shoot himself.”

Into this maze of high stakes and errant genes, clinical trials and incremental progress plunge the Venegas sisters, who since 2019 have followed the scientists onto the field and into the lab as they trace and chronicle the origins of the disease and piece together the puzzle that is Alzheimer’s. Along the way, the documentary team has uncovered clues about Latin America’s colonial past and the role it played in the emergence of such a high concentration of genetic anomalies in a relatively small part of the world. Importantly, they highlight the relationships that don’t show up in clinical trials and in scientific papers but nevertheless are the reason for and the foundation of the scientists’ progress.

“We wanted to focus on the scientists and this transcultural and collaborative experience of doing research over such a long period of time,” Cristina Venegas explains. “And out of that comes this friendship and incredible bond, and the kinds of discoveries that they’ve been able to make because they’ve been working together,

Two decades later, and thanks to the modest promise some drugs have shown in slowing down the disease, some of Lopera’s asymptomatic families have been invited to participate in clinical trials with the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network Trials Unit (DIAN-TU), a project of the Washington

bringing different kinds of methodologies and cultural situations that have led them to ask new questions.” Teaming up with awardwinning documentary filmmaker Marc Shaffer, the storytellers have traveled far and wide within Colombia — as well as Mexico, the United States and Europe — to follow the scientists’ efforts to advance the field of Alzheimer’s research.

“But the whole point is to concentrate on Latin America," Cristina Venegas adds," and on the idea that these communities are participants in science and are giving their lives and histories to participate in this long-running research process."

There have inevitably been highs and lows. A recent 10-year clinical trial provided disappointing results, but the research has also given gifts, like the woman with the presenilin 1 mutation who managed to live well into her 70s without developing dementia. Thanks to her family’s donation of her brain, Kosik and colleagues across the globe are unraveling the mystery that has drawn filmmakers.

“Although part of my motivation for embarking on this project stemmed from seeing several members of my significant other’s family succumb to the disease, I have been fascinated with Alzheimer’s disease since I began my career as a science journalist,” Marisa Venegas says, adding that she and Cristina are grateful to have no personal concerns about the genetic mutation. “Seeing so many newly identified families with the mutation in the area so close to where I was born certainly makes me realize how fortunate we are to have been spared its grip.”

Faith, fortitude, family, fellowship

Everyone involved is aware that, despite all efforts, their subjects face overwhelming odds. The filmmakers said they hope to complete their project — finances allowing — in the next couple years, which of course isn’t nearly enough time for a real happy ending.

“Obviously, we’re not going to get to a point in the story where they solve the mystery,” Cristina Venegas says. Everyone knows it’s like building a cathedral; it will take ages, in a quest to benefit future generations of the Colombian families — and by extension everyone afflicted by the disease.

Yet in this unique story of faith, fortitude, family and fellowship, the filmmakers and researchers agree that beyond the challenges, there is much joy to glean from the paisa.

“Their attitude toward all of this is incredible,” neuroscientist Kosik says. “They just have a wonderful way of mixing tragedy with love for life.”

Filmmaker Cristina Venegas says she’s marveled at how, after spending their days grappling with the worst news of their lives, the paisa can drop their heavy burdens for a few precious hours at night, softening the boundaries between researcher and subject, to chat, share stories and dance in the moonlight.

Those times are grand for everyone. “It’s just incredible to see Ken (Kosik) talking in Spanish and dancing,” Venegas says. Dubbing him an honorary Colombian for the deep connections he has developed with the families in Antioquia, she says, “He’s in his element.”

EPILOGUE: Dr. Francisco Lopera died on Sept. 10, 2024, at his home in Medellín. He was 73 years old.

To learn more about the film in progress, visit the 'Mapping Alzheimer’s' website

UCSB neuroscientist Kenneth Kosik, center, embarked on a real-life medical puzzle with Colombian neurologist Francisco Lopera, at far left.

PHOTO: COURTESY KENNETH KOSIK

Between Chaos and Cactus

Artist Madeleine Eve Ignon journeys into motherhood in a botanical paradise

by Debra Herrick

Not everyone knows the mathematical equation that creates the Fibonacci spiral, but most will marvel at its precision — how it organizes wilderness into elegant patterns. In late summer, golden barrel cactus flowers bloom at Taft Gardens & Nature Preserve in Ojai, creating a crownlike ring near the top of the cactus. Attracted by this beautiful order, pollinators ensure the cactus’s survival in a dance of nature and symmetry.

In this space between order and chaos thrives artist Madeleine Eve Ignon MFA ’19, a lecturer in the College of Creative Studies, who immersed herself at Taft Gardens during a nine-month artist residency. Blending painterly gestures with graphic elements, Ignon embraces and organizes disarray in her artwork to capture the dissonance of modern communication.

But her latest journey — into motherhood — has added new layers of complexity to her practice, prompting her to explore how art can help make sense of personal transformation. The beauty of Taft’s 15 acres of curated gardens in the foothills above Lake Casitas in the Santa Ana Canyon provided a fecund space to dwell while experiencing the beauty of transformation.

“More than ever, I see my works as journal entries that document moments of my experience,” says Ignon, who started the residency at five months pregnant and completed it with her newborn daughter in tow. While her pregnant belly features prominently in this recent work — collages, drawings and selfportrait photographs — Ignon describes feeling “cartoonishly round” and “sort of like a creature,” as her belly grew.

It was particularly urgent for her to photograph her belly isolated behind a bottle tree in the garden that has a bulge that resembles a big pregnant belly. She found herself captivated by “this funny way” her roundness echoed elements of her surroundings, and captured this sense of isolation in various settings like the bottle tree. “I did a couple more on the beach and behind a log … just the belly, to sort of paint an homage to my belly. (And it’s crazy that this creature was in there the whole time. And now she’s out.)”

Throughout Ignon’s residency, her growth has paralleled that of the gardens. “It’s been amazing to be here in this incredible garden,” she says, “seeing myself blooming in the same way, being in my body in a garden space.” The seasonal changes — “a huge spring bloom in the last few weeks … it was amazing to go into the garden, catch a glimpse of something blooming” — have mirrored her own process of “gestation, hibernation and fullness.”

Beyond Taft's cultivated gardens and grounds lies almost 200 acres of California open space protected by a conservation easement with the Wildlife Land Trust. The easement provides connectivity and safe passage for wildlife who live among the surrounding protected lands.

In her studio, Ignon taped keywords that captured this period of change and new life: “sanctuary, oasis, refuge, Eden, gestation, spaciousness, bigness.” These touchstones have helped shape her work, along with a phrase that reflects her evolving view of motherhood and self: “hold on and let go.” This duality, she says, speaks to her role “not just as a person in the world, but especially as a parent, as a mother.”

Her exploration of motherhood marks a shift in her practice but also reflects the themes she has always pursued. She continues to navigate the tension between clarity and confusion, order and chaos, through what she calls “the language and process of mashup.”

Inspired by “the poetry” of her environment, Ignon’s work captures a complex portrait of growth — for herself, her family and her art.

PHOTO: MARC ALT

PHOTO: ALEXANDRA NICKLIN

Photos (clockwise from top left): Madeleine Ignon, belly 1 (bottle tree), 2024, digital photograph; Ignon, belly 2 (beach), 2024, digital photograph; Ignon, belly 3 (canvas), 2024, digital photograph; and golden barrel cactus flowers blooming at Taft Gardens & Nature Preserve in Ojai (photo by Alexandra Nicklin)

Watch UC Santa Barbara Magazine's visit to Taft Gardens with artist Madeleine Eve Ignon on our website.

* PHOTO: GRACE KATHRYN

Building on our shared legacy

A note from Executive Director Samantha Putnam

I USUALLY TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY to share highlights from our alumni community and campus news and to celebrate the pride we have in our Gaucho family. While I hope you enjoy the photo highlights from our Alumni Day of Service in September and the features on some of our remarkable alumni in this section, I want to dedicate this space to honoring our former Alumni Association Executive Director, Peter Steiner H ’05, who also served as UCSB’s assistant vice chancellor of Alumni Affairs. It is with great sadness that I share that Peter passed away peacefully at home on Sunday, Oct. 27, after a battle with cancer.

Many of you may have had the pleasure of knowing or working with Peter, who was not only a leader but a cherished friend to many. Peter served our alumni community for 15 years, from 1990 until his retirement in 2005, and in recognition of his extraordinary dedication, he was named an honorary alumnus that same year.

The role of executive director of our Alumni Association is deeply rooted in building relationships within our Gaucho community. During his time on the UC Santa Barbara campus, Peter fostered countless relationships and advocated tirelessly for UC education. A graduate of UC Berkeley, he held professional positions across several campuses, but his impact at UCSB will

Samantha Putnam Executive Director UCSB Alumni Association Executive Director, Alumni Affairs samantha.putnam@ucsb.edu

continue to resonate for generations. Under his leadership, nearly all the funds were raised for the Mosher Alumni House by the time he retired. Peter led the selection of the architect and initiated fundraising efforts that gave us our beautiful home on campus, offering breathtaking views of the Santa Barbara Airport and the mountains — a space we are grateful for every day.

Peter and his wife, Anne, were beloved by alumni, especially by those who attended the Family Vacation Center. For over 50 years, this program has brought families to Santa Barbara, creating lifelong memories and providing essential funding for the UCSB Alumni Association. Peter’s enthusiasm and support were constants in the summer program’s success, a legacy that continues to support our mission today.

A Sigma Alpha Epsilon member himself, he supported both his fraternity and Anne’s sorority, Delta Gamma, championing the meaningful connections between students and alumni — values we still build upon today. When not engaged with UCSB Athletics in his spare time, Peter could often be found on the golf course, sharing his passion with alumni friends. Peter leaves a legacy at UCSB, and I am profoundly grateful that we can carry forward his vision for a vibrant and enduring alumni community.

BRIGHT SPOT

The affable, indefatigable, endlessly curious Tom Scrivener ’93

BY SHELLY LEACHMAN

FOR A HIGH SCHOOLER GROWING UP IN

PHILADELPHIA, applying to Penn State when it comes time for college is almost a rite of passage, if not an unwritten rule of sorts. But what if you’ve had a lifelong curiosity about California?

If you’re Tom Scrivener ’93, you also apply to UC Berkeley, “because it just seemed like a cool place and super fun,” he recalls thinking at the time. He didn’t get in.

And that’s what you call kismet.

“But then came this acceptance to UC Santa Barbara,” he says. “I had never been there; I couldn’t have picked Santa Barbara out on a map. But they also sent a color photo of the campus surrounded by ocean on three sides and it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen in my life. Immediately it was, ‘I’ve got to go there.’ I was all in.”

All in, indeed.

With a voracious appetite for experience, Scrivener dove headfirst into academics, activities and the campus community and culture — and he didn’t come up for air for four years.

Two weeks into his freshman year, he’d been elected president of his residence hall, he’d taken up beach volleyball and he was getting a crash course in the California lifestyle and lingo. By week three, he’d taken a job mopping floors at Ortega Dining Commons. That was a game changer.

“My parents paid for my first year of college, but I had to pay for years two, three and four,” he says. “So for me, a lot of my experience at UCSB was about how I was going to make enough money to be able to stay there. That was a tremendous motivator and drove me to do some really cool stuff.”

Scrivener arrived on campus with pre-existing aspirations of pursuing business; his financial reality pushed him to advance on that plan sooner rather than later.

At Ortega — where he remembers thinking to himself, “I am going to crush this mopping job; I’ll be the best ever” — he was soon promoted to a serving position on the line, then promoted again to the kitchen staff. By his junior year, he was the student manager, a role he held until he graduated.

“It was the best job ever — money and free food,” he jokes. “But more so it gave me the absolute clarity that if you just roll up your sleeves and dive into whatever the job is, you will find

success somehow. That experience completely validated for me that hard work, getting it done — that’s what it’s about. I carried that right into my job at Deloitte and it worked. And I’ve carried it throughout my career.”

Majoring in business economics, Scrivener was drawn to accounting and finance. He’s still grateful for the practical knowhow he learned in his courses, including — in the pre-email days before LinkedIn and all the rest — how to craft a résumé. He credits his two years as a teaching assistant in accounting for giving him the gift of “crisp communication.”

“That ability to crisply and quickly explain something to somebody is just a beautiful skill, and absolutely that came from my experience as a TA,” he says. “I’m convinced that my success through the years was all sort of driven by my ability to communicate and to explain things to people, which is so important.”

Fresh off his graduation, Scrivener scored an accounting job at Deloitte, where he said his only request was to be assigned to “whatever’s super hard and super interesting.” He began working with mortgage companies, becoming an expert in mortgage finance and, specifically, in “off-balance sheet transactions.” Eventually he was sent to Seattle to work with Microsoft. Then came the call that would change his career.

Deloitte was hired by Enron in the wake of its whistleblower accusations. Scrivener was summoned from Seattle to help. The opportunity raised his professional profile. It also led to a prominent interview in Forbes magazine that provided another boost. Scrivener’s job prospects bloomed beyond all expectation. He became CFO of an insurance company, Balboa, which was eventually acquired by Bank of America.

Now fast-forward 15 years or so, past an array of finance jobs within BofA. Today, Scrivener is the chief operating executive of Bank of America. And yes, that would be all of Bank of America — overseeing operations and 30,000 people worldwide. His team is responsible for managing all critical processes and platforms for clients from deposits to payment products, to sales and trading, among others to name just a few.

“It’s the coolest job in the world because of how much I get to learn,” he says. “I’ve got 400 different processes. I get to go through all of them and try to continue to become an

expert on as many of them as I can. It’s the most fun job I’ve ever had.”

Scrivener has come a long way from jobs early in his career, which include working in an Alaska salmon fishery and starting his own college business selling care packages for Gaucho parents to send to their students which was so successful he hired other students to help him box and ship them.

“I had sort of pigeonholed myself as being a finance person because I had been an accountant, and then they moved me into operations, which is really assembly lines and process efficiency,” Scrivener says. “If you think about my time at UCSB — Ortega, the

care packages, the fishery — all of those experiences were more operations. I’ve sort of discovered a new career in a way, even though it happens to be at the same company.”

A new career, maybe, but it was Scrivener’s array of experiences at UCSB, he says, that paved the way for all that came after.

“The power of intellectual curiosity and trying something different, the importance of clear communication, that mindset to just get it done — and to do it as well as you can — these are my top three keys to success,” he says. “And I learned all of that in my time at UC Santa Barbara.”

PHOTOS (FROM TOP): MATT PERKO, COURTESY

Scrivener, left of center, with classmates at UCSB

Redefining immersive experiences through XR and AI

BY DEBRA HERRICK

PABLO COLAPINTO, PH.D. ’15 has spent his career at the forefront of technology, merging extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to shape how we experience sports, entertainment and beyond. Now, as the founder of his own spatial design studio, Diagonal Numbers, he’s reimagining the future.

“I work with product managers at tech companies, sports leagues, brands and entertainment studios to prototype the next generation of user, consumer and fan experiences,” Colapinto says. “On the ground, this entails finding the practical value of spatial computing and AI.”

In the sports world, Colapinto collaborates with professional leagues like the MLB and NBA, leveraging data to create augmented reality features that bring fans closer to the game. In entertainment, he aims to blend the physical and virtual, creating “meaningful encounters” like his large-scale augmented reality project with virtual band Gorillaz in Times Square.

Colapinto’s academic journey began at Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in visual and environmental studies. He then pursued a doctorate in media arts and technology at UCSB, diving into transdisciplinary research that merges art and tech. This path led him to groundbreaking work with top companies like Meta, Google, Disney and Niantic. Along the way, his innovative contributions have earned him accolades including an Emmy nomination, a Webby, a Tribeca X Award and a Cannes Lions Grand Prix. He’s worked as a VFX supervisor for the Metropolitan Opera and a futurist for Scott Free Productions; he also served as a graphics engineer at Oblong Industries and head of experience design at Nexus Studios.

“The teams I lead have done a ton of work with Meta to think through the user experience in the lead-up to their Orion glasses,” he says. “Also with Meta, at Nexus, we built Headspace XR, a ‘playground for the mind’ which uses all these interface tools to improve mental health.”

Looking ahead, Colapinto sees XR and AI as “instruments of reason” that need virtuosos to unlock their full potential. “The call is out for designers, artists, engineers and scientists to craft new ways of thinking,” he says. For him, the space between technology and human connection is ripe for innovation, and he’s eager to help shape the future.

“At one point I called all these value-adds different types of ‘spatial storytelling’ and that is sort of semantically correct,” he explains, “but it undersells the connective tissue at play. When we say something is ‘in space,’ we imply that it could be a shared experience — shared with the milieu and also others who might also be seeing the same thing. It is this public/community aspect of spatial practice that has my attention now.”

PABLO COLAPINTO PH.D.’

15

“THE CALL IS OUT FOR DESIGNERS, ARTISTS, ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS TO CRAFT

NEW WAYS OF THINKING”

GAUCHO CREATORS

Still from Gorillaz Presents, Geolocated AR Experience, 2022, Nexus Studios x Google x Gorillaz

Still from Headspace XR, A Playground for the Mind, Quest App, 2024, Nexus Studios x Headspace x Meta

Stills from Marvel’s first AR experience, iPhone Experience, 2021 Nexus Studios x Disney

BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT

Priority Bicycles From crowdfunded to crowd favorite

BY SHELLY LEACHMAN

WITH A GOAL OF RAISING $30,000 to fund the inaugural shipment of their fledgling company’s first model, Dave Weiner ’02 and Connor Swegle ’02 launched Priority Bicycles in 2014, via crowdfunding app Kickstarter. Within 30 days, they’d raised $565,000 with over 1,500 bicycles backed. Two more fully funded Kickstarter campaigns would follow, as interest grew exponentially in Priority’s “low-maintenance” bicycles, which did away with chains in favor of carbon belt drives.

Ten years on, and with Weiner, as CEO, and Swegle, as chief marketing officer, still at the helm, Priority has multiple models and ships thousands of bicycles around the world, competing with major brands like Trek and Giant. They also partner with premium resorts, educational institutions and top-rated tours in major U.S. cities and locations spanning the globe, making their bikes available in fleets to tourists, commuters and more.

The college friends turned business partners share more about Priority’s rise, in their words:

“We created a strong, independent direct-to-consumer brand over the last 10 years that has expanded organically from one casual bicycle on Kickstarter to over 30 models. We’ve done it by combining innovative product design, technology and year-round customer service to offer something new to the traditional bicycle marketplace.

“Ten years ago, we wanted to make a bicycle that was easier to ride, buy and maintain, and to make high-quality bicycles and accessories available online, directly to customers. People wanted bicycles, but didn’t have time to go to a shop, didn’t like the quality of products available at big box stores, or were worried about the upkeep of their bicycles. Priority was founded to solve those problems by focusing on a lowmaintenance design, selling direct to consumer and being available 365 days a year — yes, even taking calls from a freezing playground with our kids on Christmas.”

Dave Weiner ’02 and Connor Swegle ’02

From doubts to dreams

A

love for science and a drive to help others spark success for Julian Marc ’21

BY ELLAH FOSTER ‘24

AFTER GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL, Julian Marc ’21 was unsure where life would take him — or how he’d even get there.

“In high school, I had several counselors and teachers tell me I would never make it to college because of my learning disabilities and poor grades,” he recalls. “By the time I graduated high school and entered community college, I had no idea what I wanted to do and part of me thought they were right.”

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

Marc immersed himself in a range of classes at his local community college — engineering, astronomy, English — and eventually developed an interest in neuroscience. By the time he reached UC Santa Barbara, he was hooked.

He considered medical school, maybe a Ph.D. “But that slowly morphed into entrepreneurship as I went through my schooling,” Marc says.

“At the time, I was applying to research positions in order to bolster my application for med school,” he says. “I would go to the library every day for eight hours to apply to a few positions and then read about EEG, a neuroimaging method, and other interfaces. I had this routine for a few months before I realized the eight hours was now solely dedicated to reading. Reading about this obscure topic gave me the idea to take the opportunity to utilize the technology.”

Marc’s company, Axon Interfaces, was born of that moment.

Axon’s software “diagnoses people’s brainwaves and measures drug effectiveness using artificial intelligence technology,” he explains. “Essentially, we take a look at the electrical signals on your scalp, which allows us to diagnose neurodegenerative diseases within one minute. Additionally, we have the capability of capturing someone’s subjective mental state.”

It’s been the perfect marriage of what Marc, Axon’s CEO, describes as his longtime passions — science and helping people. He credits that same combination for keeping him motivated and focused as an entrepreneur and a leader.

Marc’s advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs?

“Early on, I put a lot of weight on titles, assuming they dictated how I should interact,” he says. “But as I built my company, I realized that the person in front of me, no matter their position, has their own challenges and aspirations. When I started focusing on genuine, human-to-human connections, it became much easier to build meaningful relationships and communicate effectively. I wish I had known earlier that authenticity beats professional posturing every time.”

PHOTO: COURTESY

What a year

Joel Raznik ’81

2022-2024 Regent | University of California

A trustee of the UC Santa Barbara Foundation and former UCSB Alumni Association Board director, Raznick completed a two-year term as a UC Regent. Raznick is president and CEO of Undivided, a strategic brand planning and marketing firm, and chief communications officer at NEFT Vodka. He earned a bachelor’s degree from UCSB in political science.

Frederick E.O. Toye ’89

2024 Emmy Award | Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series

Honored for his work on the massive FX hit “Shōgun,” Toye was nominated once before, as a producer, for HBO’s “Westworld.” Among his other recent directing credits are episodes of Amazon shows “Fallout,” “The Boys,” and “The Terminal List.” Toye earned his bachelor’s degree in film and media studies.

Miles Evans ’13

2024 Olympian | Beach Volleyball | United States

Just the third former Gaucho to make it to the Olympics in beach volleyball, Evans and his partner, Chase Budinger, were ranked 13th in the world coming out of the qualifying rounds. They notched one win in Paris, over France, but eventually bowed out in the “lucky loser” stage after falling to Norway.

Michael Boxall ’11

2024 Olympian | Soccer | New Zealand

The 2024 Games marked the third Olympics call-up for Boxall, who also was selected in 2008, while he was playing for UCSB, and again in 2020. Drafted first overall in the 2011 Major League Soccer Supplemental Draft, Boxall plays for Minnesota United. In Paris, New Zealand won their opener but finished third in their group.

Gauchos are…

RUNNING

Joshua Garelik ’22 completed the 2024 New York City Marathon, crossing the finish line in just over four hours. To qualify for this year’s race, Garelik partnered with the New York Road Runners Team for Climate, raising more than $3,000 to help reduce the carbon footprint of the 2024 TCS New York City Marathon. Garelik is currently a medical student at New York Medical College.

WRITING UP A STORM

Donald L. Cummings MA '74, Ph.D. '82 self-published the book “Steel Tigers: The 77th Armor Regiment 1940-1992,” a history of the regiment that was created in 1940 as an independent tank battalion.

Brian Haley ‘97 published the book “Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation and the Birth of a Social Field” (University of Arizona Press, 2024), addressing how the Hopi became icons of alternative spiritualities and exploring the appropriation of Indigenous identities in the 1960s.

Joanne Howard ’15 published her first book, “Sleeping in the Sun” (Simon & Schuster, 2024), a historical novel that focuses on an American boy coming of age in India during the British Raj.

Eli Neugeboren ‘04 published a full-length graphic novel, “Whatever Happened to Frankie King” (Graphic Mundi, 2024), in collaboration with his author father, Jay Neugeboren.

WORKING HARD

Alec Stone ’93 joined Hinshaw & Culbertson’s Insurance Industry group as senior counsel based in Los Angeles. Stone was previously assistant chief counsel at the California Department of Insurance.

Amber Wallace ’04 has been named to the national board of directors of the National Association of Women Business Owners, which represents 13 million women business owners nationwide. Wallace is president and CEO of Orange County-based Dowitcher Designs.

Matt Oppenheim ’75 published the book “Watershed Worlds: Eight Indigenous Models for Planetary Survival and Resilience” (InnerWorld Publications, 2024), which maps the climate crisis from a global perspective.

Ari Phillips ’06, writing under the name Philip Reari, published the novel “Earth Jumped Back” (Black Rose Writing, 2024), a time-bending story based on the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.

Lynda Beth Unkeless ’75 published her memoir, “Stronger in the End: My 70 Year Swim from Chaos to Calm” (FriesenPress, 2024), recounting her experiences traveling five continents — and, at 62, being diagnosed with two brain tumors.

Steps from The Club & Guest House, pelicans gather at the lagoon with Santa Cruz Island in the distance.

PHOTO: MATT PERKO

For four years running, UC Santa Barbara has been named a Fulbright HSI Leader by the U.S. Department of State, recognized for its strong engagement, as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, with the Fulbright Program. The U.S. government’s flagship international academic exchange program sends students and scholars around the world to teach, to learn, and to foster cross-cultural understanding. The Fulbright HSI Leaders Initiative also highlights the strength of HSIs as destinations for international students and scholars.

UCSB currently has three graduate students conducting research abroad as Fulbright Fellows:

Carlo Broderick, of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and of UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, is in Paraguay for his project, “Satellite Vision in Paraguay: Enhancing Land Use Economics Through Artificial Intelligence.”

Natalya Rodriguez, with the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, is in Japan for her project, “Threatened Threads: Weaving Values in Heritage Textile Production in Okinawa, Japan.”

Anna Boser, of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, is in Zambia, pursuing her project, “Seizing the Rain: Locally Initiated Irrigation for a More Climate Resilient Zambia.”

GOOD WORKS

Room to Grow

Securing a prestigious fellowship, doctoral student Jesse Landesman cultivates a career where academia meets avocados

BY KEITH HAMM

JESSE LANDESMAN HAS NEVER BEEN AFRAID of getting her hands dirty. As a schoolkid, she picked up trash and made mud pies during recess. Growing up, she was big on camping and hiking with her family. Fittingly today, she’s a soil scientist.

As a doctoral student in the Department of Geography, Landesman studies how elevated soil salinity takes its toll on avocados in California, home to 95% of the nation’s commercial harvest. The iconic nutrient-dense fruit is also among the top crops of Santa Barbara County’s $1.9 billion annual agricultural production. While research historically has focused on how salinity impacts the trees, Landesman is digging deeper, aiming her sampling tools and microscopes on soil chemistry and microbiology.

But for Landesman, it’s not all about number crunching in a lab coat. In its best form, she sees her work as interdisciplinary by nature, a Venn diagram centering connections between hard science, market forces and the boots-on-the-ground institutional knowledge of the growers themselves.

“I’m interested in the overlaps,” says Landesman, who earned her master’s degree at UCSB studying carbon sequestration in the restored wetlands of the North Campus Open Space. “A lot of academics like to ask their questions about more theoretical scientific concepts while farmers have different goals, like trying to figure out higher yields and less overhead. I think both of these worlds are important.”

To cultivate these connections, she was recently awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Foundation for Food & Agricultural Research (FFAR). Launched a decade ago, the FFAR helps scholars send down roots at the intersections of research, policy, industry and government via interpersonal training, professional development, mentorships and networking. Landesman is UCSB’s first FFAR fellow.

“We’re interested in supporting her interest in applicable science,” says program director Rebecca Dunning. “Looking at what’s going on in the ground and in the market and seeing how growers are dealing with a variety of challenges, from labor shortages to drought to farming equipment — that’s when her ability to communicate effectively becomes important.”

Landesman’s three-year fellowship is cosponsored by the California Avocado Commission, providing her an inside track to growers.

“There is so much research for the sake of research,” says Tim Spann, an agricultural consultant who serves on Landesman’s mentoring committee and is her main contact with the commission. “But as a scientist, when you’re having conversations within the ag industry, you understand that there’s a real connection to growers and the food supply and ultimately to the consumers.”

Much of her path, Landesman says, was revealed early on. Along with her younger brother and older sister, she was raised by adventurous parents, both school teachers, in the Altadena foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. With summers off, the family set out on outdoors adventures all over the Western U.S. “This upbringing inspired me to study environmental science and management,” she remembers.

The interdisciplinary range of UCSB’s geography department, Landesman says, allows her the leeway to connect with growers and conduct the sort of research — both in the lab and in the field — applicable to real-world problems.

Looking ahead, she sees herself working to make technical science “more inclusive and universally understandable to students, farmers and policymakers,” she says. Along the way, she hopes to encourage other women to gain the confidence to pursue research and graduate education — “and to realize their potential as dirt-loving scientists.”

PHOTO: JEFF LIANG

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Apr 15 & 16

Esther Perel, Jan 14

The Future of Relationships, Love & Desire Yuja Wang, piano, Víkingur Ólafsson, piano, Feb 28

Wynton Marsalis Ensemble, May 17 LOUIS: A Silent Film with Live Musical Performance