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“You have to be able to control these forces strategically,” says Jill McNitt-Gray, a professor of biological sciences and biomedical engineering at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences who studies biomechanics in Olympic and Paralympic track and field athletes. “What happens in those last couple of steps is really important.”

But McNitt-Gray explains that the long jumper’s momentum isn’t the only kind of energy that’s crucial during those fateful footfalls. There’s also the caloric energy received through nutrition. The metabolic energy invested in building up the athlete’s bones and muscles to bear the load of the forces. The mental energy cultivated through a positive mindset. And the motivating energy from the roaring cheers of the crowd.

What the Olympic long jumper illustrates in bold strokes is that our bodies are energy made manifest. Though most of us will never tackle such challenging physical feats, we all utilize energy in this multitude of forms to survive and thrive.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that when we make choices to optimize our energy — from eating healthy foods and staying active to thinking positively and nurturing meaningful connections — our well-being soars…

Continue reading the full article in USC Dornsife Magazine

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According to Tok Thompson, professor (teaching) of anthropology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the impulse to treat the eclipse as a special occasion goes beyond its mere rarity. It’s grounded in the profound meaning that humans the world over ascribe to the sun and the moon.

“A lot of cultures around the world pay very, very close attention to lunar cycles as well as solar cycles,” Thompson said.

Since time immemorial, gazing up at these two celestial bodies has been a shared human experience. Ancient civilizations began measuring months and years by tracking the moon and sun, a practice that influences the calendars in use today. These bright beacons overhead were also woven into powerful mythologies…

Continue reading the full article in USC Trojan Family Magazine

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Though there’s no consensus about which of our five senses is the most important, sight has an edge. Philosophers from Aristotle to Galileo have exalted vision above other sensory capacities, tying it to humanity’s noblest pursuits. From a neuroscientific perspective, visual processing is the most dominant sensory function in the brain. And culturally speaking, most Americans believe there could be no health outcome worse than losing their eyesight.

The perceived value of sight is reinforced by the fiercely visual nature of contemporary life. Screens are now constantly at our fingertips. They saturate us with visual information to process, and the remote social interactions they facilitate are devoid of embodied inputs like smell and touch.

Our sense of sight confers power. We use it to investigate and surveil the planet (and beyond) and take pleasure in its splendors. But sight is also a source of vulnerability. The biological processes that allow our visual system to observe the world accurately can also lead us to perceive illusions — and we don’t always know the difference…

Continue reading the full article in USC Dornsife Magazine

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Last Christmas Eve, while many Americans were at home with their families, Manuel Carmona MPA ’06 sat inside a Pasadena Public Health Department office, anxiously watching a refrigerator thermostat.

Inside the refrigerator lay a precious gift: COVID-19 vaccines.

Carmona — the department’s deputy director — and a team of nurses had convened after noticing the temperature creeping up on their first shipment of Moderna vaccines. They kept watch all night and on Christmas morning, installed security cameras trained on the thermostats. “That allowed us to monitor temperatures on our phones from anywhere,” he says. The refrigerators eventually stabilized, but he still remembers the team’s vigilance during those first few nights.

Carmona is proud of his team’s efforts to fight the pandemic, but he’s also quick to point out it’s a dedication shared among the community for more than 20 months. “This was not just a public health department response to the pandemic,” he says. “This was the city responding to the pandemic.” He mentions the librarians who served as contact tracers, calling residents who might have been exposed to the virus. The city council members who helped staff vaccination sites. And the residents who volunteered to educate neighbors about the vaccine. Before long, Pasadena boasted one of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in California. As of October, nearly 90% of eligible Pasadena residents were fully vaccinated, and nearly 94% had received at least one shot.

Behind the scenes of that achievement is the Pasadena Public Health Department and the department’s USC alumni. Five graduates from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the USC Price School of Public Policy serve on the city’s nimble health team…

Continue reading the full article in Trojan Family Magazine

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The exhibition “We Are Here: Contemporary Art and Asian Voices in Los Angeles” opened at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena to great uncertainty. Just two days earlier, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. As fear spread, so did a rising tide of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia.

The museum’s show featured seven L.A.-based female artists of Asian Pacific heritage whose artwork — such as Phung Huynh’s portraits of Southeast Asian refugees on pink donut boxes and Ann Le’s photomontages of her Vietnamese refugee family — drew on their experiences in immigrant communities recovering and starting anew after war trauma. It stayed open for only three days before the museum closed its doors.

“It was heartbreaking,” says USC Museums Interim Director Bethany Montagano, who is also director of the USC Pacific Asia Museum. “We knew that the messages of that exhibition and what these really amazing female Asian American contemporary artists had to say were really important to the AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community that was in pain due to anti-Asian hate further unveiled in the wake of COVID.”

Not knowing when — or if — the museum could welcome back visitors, Montagano and her team of 15 asked themselves: “How can we take what we do at the museum outside of the four walls and deliver a relevant and resonate experience to people’s homes?”

Art leaders across the country and the world wrestled with the same question. Pandemic closures stretched on for weeks and months, shuttering exhibitions and bringing ticket sales to a standstill.

The upshot? Art institutions shifted their creativity into high gear, finding new and innovative ways to engage with the public. Virtual art museum tours took hold, and the way we view and talk about art may never be the same…

Continue reading the full article in USC Trojan Family Magazine

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At the Roots Community Health Center in East Oakland, California, founder Noha Aboelata, M.D., is accustomed to caring for individuals and families who have been victims of gun violence. “A lot of our patients are in a wheelchair because of a bullet to the spine, or are walking around with a bullet in their body, or are dealing with chronic issues because of a shooting,” says Aboelata.

Yet, while gun violence has plagued this predominantly Black and Latinx community for many years, violent crimes have spiked markedly since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. In 2019, there were 75 shootings in Oakland; by October of 2020, there had already been 400 shootings, and homicides had increased 38% from the previous year.

Oakland is not unique in this regard. In the wake of COVID-19, cities across the U.S. have seen a surge in violent crime. The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research organization, found that homicides increased 53% and aggravated assault increased 14% across 20 major American cities during the summer of 2020. Disproportionately, this violence has impacted communities of color.

In Los Angeles, homicides increased by 38% in 2020 to reach the highest total number — 349 homicides — in over a decade. 2021 is off to a similarly grim start: In the first two weeks of January alone, the number of shootings and homicides doubled from the previous year.

Seeking ‘Law and Order’ Solutions

The bump in crime, which has come on the heels of mass protests of George Floyd’s death and police shootings of unarmed Black Americans, led to renewed calls for “law and order” — a shorthand for getting tough on crime — by former President Donald Trump and other conservatives. In fact, this rhetoric became central to Trump’s reelection platform, as he emphasized cracking down on criminals in cities.

There’s no doubt that law enforcement plays a key role in keeping violent crime in check and keeping communities safe. “We call 911 when we would like for them to show up,” Aboelata points out. “And when someone is murdered, we would like the case to be solved.”

At the same time, the rhetoric of “law and order” — a demand to meet criminal activity in BIPOC communities with a harsh and magnified police response — goes to the heart of debates about power and health in America. Public health research shows that this rhetoric not only elides the root causes of the recent uptick in violence, but also misleads the public about solutions to violence in ways that threaten the health and safety of vulnerable groups…

Continue reading the full article on KCET.org

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Since its founding in 2016, Charlie’s Acres—a farm animal sanctuary in Sonoma, CA—has been a place where visitors can make personal connections with animals who’ve been rescued from traumatic circumstances.

But in March, when Sonoma County issued shelter-in-place orders to contain the spread of COVID-19, in-person tours were cancelled. Overnight, a major source of income evaporated, and layoffs of part-time staff ensued. That, combined with a volunteer freeze, left fewer people to provide animal care.

Within a couple of weeks, “We started to realize we needed to adapt,” says Charlie’s Acres founder Tracy Vogt. Indeed, the innovations that Vogt and other sanctuaries’ leaders have spearheaded to survive in the COVID-19 era demonstrate that animal sanctuaries, while vulnerable, are also resilient—just like the animals who call them home…

Continue reading the full story in Alive Magazine

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The right to vote lies at the heart of the American political system. And yet, election after election, large swaths of eligible voters — especially young people and communities of color — sit on the sidelines, with potential consequences.

“Having a limited electorate is a huge detriment to the function of our democracy,” says Mindy Romero, a research assistant professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy who studies civic engagement and voter behavior. “Policymakers need to be listening to … a full slate of opinions.”

In 2010, the political sociologist founded the nonpartisan California Civic Engagement Project in Sacramento to investigate why some communities — particularly 18- to 24-year-olds and people of color — stay away from the ballot box.

One factor, she says, is a lack of outreach and mobilization efforts directed at these groups…

Continue reading the full article in USC Trojan Family Magazine

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We live in them. We work in them. And our planet’s getting warmer because of them.

The buildings we inhabit are major contributors to climate change—accounting for nearly 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s largely due to the energy used to heat and cool them, but a portion of buildings’ carbon contribution is generated at the construction stage. Producing (and then building with) materials like concrete and steel dumps 11 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

But Vancouver, Canada-based architect Michael Green has a vision for making buildings’ structures not only carbon-neutral, but also carbon sinks. It involves swapping concrete and steel for what he considers to be the ultimate green building material: wood…

Continue reading the full article in Alive Magazine

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