University of California

President’s and Chancellors’ Postdoctoral Fellowship Programs

ABSTRACTS

2015 Academic Retreat

Saturday, April 25, 2015

UCLA Lake Arrowhead Conference Center

Group I Pineview Room, Main Lodge

9:00 – 9:40 Alicia Cox (American Literature, American Studies, Native American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies) ‘To Make Love without Fear’: Reading a Sovereign Erotic in Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian

9:45 – 10:25 Jasmine Syedullah (Antislavery Abolition, Antiprison Abolition, Women of Color Feminisms, Queer of Color Theory) After Attica: The Alderson Sisters and other abolitionist loopholes of solidarity

10:30 – 11:10 Xóchitl Chávez (Oaxaca, Indigenous Migrants, Performance Studies, Musical & Festival) Booming Bandas of Los Angeles: Oaxacan Women and Youth as New Cultural Bearers of Philharmonic Brass Bands

11:15 – 11:55 Joseph Morales (Race, Religion, Latina/o Studies) Latina/o Religions after 9/11: Richard Rodriguez’ Concept of the Abrahamic

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch

1:00 – 1:40 Manijeh Moradian (West Asian Diasporas, Transantional Feminism, Politics of Affect and Memory) Neither Washington, Nor Tehran: Afro-Iranian Solidarity and U.S. Cold War Empire

1:45 – 2:25 Lila Sharif (Settler-Colonialism, Transnational Race Theory, Cultural Studies, Food Studies) Neoliberalism, Branding and the Consumption of Palestine

2:30 – 3:10 Jaye Austin Williams (Drama Theory, Black Studies, Critical Race Theory, Cinema Studies) Alienated Flesh: Excavating Dereliction and Imperceptible Loss in Suzan-Lori Parks’ One-character Short Play, ‘Pickling’

3:15 – 3:30 Wrap-up and Networking

3:30 Free Time!

Alicia Cox President’s Postdoctoral Fellow Department of English, UC Davis

‘To Make Love without Fear’: Reading a Sovereign Erotic in Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian

Don Talayesva’s life narrative, Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, was edited by anthropologist Leo Simmons and published by Yale University Press in 1942. Making a case for the analysis of this text as a work of Hopi literature rather than a mere anthropological case study, I consider Sun Chief from the perspective of Native American literature scholars who explore the histories and legacies of American Indian peoples’ strategic uses of writing in English to disseminate their stories among and beyond their tribal communities. Through an engagement with theories of sexuality, sovereignty, and biopower at the intersection of queer theory and Native American studies, my close readings of Sun Chief focus on the text’s narration of a traditional, non-binary Hopi gender system; Talayesva’s resistance to sexual disciplining in Indian boarding schools; and Talayesva’s attempts to defy the U.S. federal Indian policy of assimilation and recover a “Sovereign Erotic.” Demonstrating that Talayesva’s identity as “twins,” a person who embodies a male and a female essence within one body, poses a fundamental challenge to the Euro-American ideology of individualism, I argue that Sun Chief critiques settler colonial attempts to acculturate Native Americans and exemplifies how Native American peoples’ gender and sexuality are matters not only of personal consequence but of tribal sovereignty.

Jasmine Syedullah President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of English, UC Riverside

After Attica: The Alderson Sisters and other abolitionist loopholes of solidarity

A man identified in historical record only as “nameless black prisoner” took the microphone on the last day of negotiations during the Attica rebellion in 1971, and said, “To oppressed people all over the world… We got the solution! The solution is unity!” In the morning Attica was engulfed by sounds of siege and the massacre of more than 40 men. As news of the dead reached the prisoners at Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women in West Virginia, the women acted immediately, staging a sit-in that became a general strike lasting five days before it was arrested by assault, tear gas and the immediate transfer of sixty-six women, 10% of the prison’s population, out of state and across the country. While the violent repression of prisoner solidarity at Attica remains hyper-visible in the national memory, the extent to which the state repressed national memory of the incidents at Alderson in the days that followed leaves much of that story unknown and unknowable. As the Alderson women conclude in their 42 demands to prison officials, “the overall system of prisons from the court to the institution is designed primarily against a selective group of people… The ultimate goal is abolishment of the prison system.” My paper introduces the incidents at Alderson as a kind of political moment made possible by a lineage of abolitionism whose roots are in antebellum movements to end slavery and whose dreams of justice are still not yet realized. Specifically this project thinks the gendered protocols of self-defense enacted at Alderson in the inaugural moments of the prison abolition movement alongside the gendered protocols of testimony, solidarity and retreat authored by Harriet Jacobs in the writing and publication of her 1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In an effort to imagine the kinds of futures women’s traces of abolitionisms make possible my project poses the questions – Can abolition de-center liberal notions of sovereignty and personal freedom such that the self-defense of people the law can’t or won’t recognize as persons becomes possible? How might the “we,” prison abolition raises transform the meaning of both captivity and freedom such that the binary buckles under generations of unanswered demands, referred and forgotten? How might we read the archive of abolitionist feminism as a genealogy of action that resists forgetting – a praxis of collective self-determination that is radical precisely because it is designed to displace liberal fears of death with the abolition of modern reliance upon domination.

Xóchitl Chávez President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Music, UC Riverside

Booming Bandas of Los Angeles: Oaxacan Women and Youth as New Cultural Bearers of Philharmonic Brass Bands

My research on Oaxacan indigenous communities in California explores how indigenous diasporic communities reproduce cultural practices such as the annual La Guelaguetza festival that showcase regional communal dances and musical forms. Focusing on these forms of cultural expression and the transmission of traditions to both adults and youth illuminates the ways in which communities actively claim cultural citizenship on both sides of the U.S. and Mexico border. Through a case study of five Zapotec community-based Bandas Oaxaqueñas (Oaxacan Brass Bands) this paper addresses the significance and proliferation of second generation Oaxacan philharmonic brass bands in Los Angeles. Imperative in this work are the forms of collective action amongst Oaxacan immigrant communities and highlighting how women and youth now fill the ranks of musicians and new leadership. The presence of second generation Bandas Oaxaqueñas further exemplifies the diversity of Oaxaca’s ethno-linguistic communities and how they strive to maintain their ethnic identity and a linguistic plurality within a bustling urban space.

Joseph Morales Chancellor’s ADVANCE Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of English, UC Irvine

Latina/o Religions after 9/11: Richard Rodriguez’ Concept of the Abrahamic

Religion in Latina/o literatures can be read as a representation of cross-racial relations, both domestically and globally. In Richard Rodriguez’ post-9/11 memoir Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013), the foremost question is: how do Arab Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims relate to Latinas/os? Are representations of religion in Latina/o literature part of the problem or solution in the pursuit of cross-racial anti-racist alliances? Scholars have demonstrated that the concepts “religion” and “spirituality” should be a site of critical reflection for Latina/o literary and cultural studies. The prevailing trend is to approach these concepts as examples of oppositional beliefs and practices. However, the social and political contradictions of such beliefs and practices are rarely interrogated. This paper considers how Richard Rodriguez’ construction of a post-9/11 “Judeo-Christian-Muslim” narrator in Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography is refracted through the twin discourses of Islamophobia and Orientalism. Following Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s notion from Racial Formation in the United States (2015) that the “the race concept” is continually being made and remade, I argue that the “war on terror” – and its concomitant product of a “Brown Threat” – have contributed to a re-articulation of religious elements in Latina/o literatures. This suggests that religious elements in Latina/o literatures might be reconfigured as concepts of race and racism are reconfigured – and by extension, that the Latina/o religious subject is bound in an ethical relationship with its textual others.

Manijeh Moradian President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Asian American Studies, UC Davis

Neither Washington, Nor Tehran: Afro-Iranian Solidarity and U.S. Cold War Empire

From 1953 to 1979, the U.S. turned Iran into one of its most loyal and lucrative client states, a laboratory for economic modernization policies intended to counter communism, a training ground for police torture methods, and an enforcer of U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond. The alliance between US imperialism and the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran also created the first

western education and form a new technocratic professional class upon their return home. Instead, hundreds of these students dedicated themselves to exposing and ending U.S. support for the Shah as a necessary step towards his overthrow. Their efforts to publicize U.S. complicity with torture, repression, and poverty in Iran intersected with the efforts of African American activists to organize against police violence, to free political prisoners, and to end the system of racialized dispossession in the U.S. This talk will examine the transnational processes that facilitated cross-pollination and affiliation between the Black radical movement and the anti-Shah movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. Based on in-depth interviews with former anti-Shah activists and archival materials from Iranian and other student movements, I argue that the lived experience of repression and resistance in Iran traveled with Iranian foreign students to the U.S. as feelings, losses, and memories that enabled identification and empathy with the Black freedom movement. The feeling and practice of solidarity, which my research recuperates and theorizes, challenges the clash of civilizations narrative that has governed U.S.-Iran relations since 1979. At the same time, this marginalized history gestures towards possibilities for a transnational politics of solidarity that can contend with the current conjuncture of post-colonial dictatorships and the ongoing vice grip of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.

Lila Sharif President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Neoliberalism, Branding and the Consumption of Palestine

What happens when indigenous commodities become consumed transnationally through fair trade, organic, and other alternative food movement circuits? What are the impacts of these evolving consumption practices on native producers and consumers, and how can this contribute to what we know about the processes of settler-colonialism? I use the olive as an optic, I analyze the production, circulation, and consumption of indigenous commodities from the West Bank that are marketed to Western consumers using a transnational feminist framework that ties materiality of land loss and environmental degradation with ideas about indigeneity and authenticity. Palestinian livelihoods are contingent upon the thriving of the olive and its extractions for culinary, bodily, spiritual, and cultural purposes. As Palestinians continue to experience the decimation of their lands, the consumption of Palestinian olive oil has become increasingly popular through transnational fair trade circuits that have allowed Palestinian olive oils, soaps, and tapenades to appear on shelves at Whole Foods markets and elsewhere. In this presentation, I examine the racialized and gendered tropes of Palestinian indigeneity—through which Palestine is made brandable and digestible to Western consumers. As such, I introduce the concept of vanishment as a way to describe the processes of transforming, disappearing, replacing, and depoliticizing native subjectivities and claims to land. I introduce the concept of “vanishment”—a process of erasure that relies on the appropriation of the earth’s natural resources including land and water, the removal of native landscapes, and the erasure of indigenous culture through a system of apparent cooptation and inclusion. This presentation offers new ways of understanding the complexities of settler-colonialism, one in which food can be understood as a site of knowledge production and anticolonial praxis. Through performance ethnography including olive oil tasting, participating in the olive harvest in the West Bank, interviews with major olive producers, olive oil exporters, and living with farmers and their families, I offer insight into the ways in which settler colonialism, and the processes of vanishing native peoples and their subjectivities, co-resides with neoliberal, multicultural tropes of contingent humanity. In this way, this presentations illuminates the ways in which settler-colonialism is both material and cultural—in the case of Palestine, racial and gendered formulations of abject native subjects that functions through a transnational nexus of power within this current moment of empire, bringing postcolonial theory into conversation within post 9/11 militarization and neoliberal capitalism. I demonstrate how material manifestations of settler-colonialism co-reside comfortably within this current moment of advanced, globalized capitalism. Within these intricate webs of power, native subjects are not dormant or passive recipients of vanishment; instead, they act against vanishment in the most intimate moments and sites; where food is prepared, where stories are told, and where olives are pickled.

Jaye Austin Williams Chancellor’s ADVANCE Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Drama, UC Irvine

Alienated Flesh: Excavating Dereliction and Imperceptible Loss in Suzan-Lori Parks’ One-character Short Play, ‘Pickling’

This performance-paper incises the core of suffering, human and natal alienation that concertize imperceptibly within and through the figure of “Miss Miss” in Suzan-Lori Parks’ 1988 one-character play, Pickling. At first blush, the play appears to be a narrative about a middle-aged woman suffering the latent trauma of having witnessed her mother’s sudden death. The dramatic arc comprising her “recovery” from this pivotal event is revealed through her labyrinthine adhesion of the shards of traumatic memory as she opens the sundry canning jars that both entomb and buttress her. At play’s end, Miss Miss commences her “ascent” out of her interment by releasing the memories imprisoned in the jars and, by extension, herself. This Platonic trace -- this notion of “ascent” into the “light” of redemption -- was the dramaturgical anchor-tenant of my critically acclaimed performances of the play in New York from 1999-2003, and now constitutes the theoretical point of departure at which I find myself in re-thinking Parks’ richly enigmatic text. In re-examining this rarely performed work, a layer deeply subtending the narrative becomes legible, wherein an isolated Black being, ensconced in fossilized signifiers of her trauma and proximity to death, inaudibly resides. This classifies the “dig” as ontological rather than merely existential, thus enabling an intricate ensemble of questions about Miss-Miss’s relation to human existence, corporeal integrity, avowed loss, and more broadly, about what the loss of “Mother” represents beyond natality. These questions, in turn, allow for a deeper meditation on the source of her suffering, and on what precisely constitutes her “relief” in the end.

Group II Library, Main Lodge

9:00 – 9:40 David Gonthier (Ecology, Environmental Science, Agriculture) Managing biodiversity in agriculture

9:45 – 10:25 Roberto Tinoco (Immunology) PSGL-1, an Immune Checkpoint Regulator that Promotes T Cell Exhaustion in Chronic Viral Infection and Cancer

10:30 – 11:10 Russell Corbett-Detig (Evolutionary Genetics) Next-Generation Population Genomics

11:15 – 11:55 Andreas Chavez (Evolutionary Biology & Ecology) Studying natural hybridization to understand adaptation and speciation

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch

1:00 – 1:40 Rayna Bell (Evolutionary Biology) The evolution of a novel coloration phenotype in African reed frogs

1:45 – 2:25 Gabriela Monsalve (Molecular Endocrinology and Gene Regulation) Transporters for Glucocorticoids

2:30 – 3:10 Nicholas Olivas (Neurobiology) Flexible Sensory Encoding Strategies in V1 Microcircuits

3:15 – 3:30 Wrap-up and Networking

3:30 Free Time!

David Gonthier President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, UC Berkeley

Managing biodiversity in agriculture

Agriculture is implicated as the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, user of fresh water, and driver of biodiversity loss. These facts have spurred a new movement to diversify agricultural lands, which promises to maintain environmental quality while also securing sustainable livelihoods. My research evaluates diversified practices through novel field experiments and synthesis of existing literature. I show that diversification can conserve biodiversity without sacrificing agricultural yields. On farm conservation, however, requires diversifying agricultural landscapes at both small and large scales in order to promote multiple taxonomic groups of biodiversity. In addition, crop diversification also promotes pest control services through diluting resources for pests and augmenting populations of natural enemies of pests. Finally, increasing crop diversity may provide a buffer to crop yields against climate change. Thus my research challenges the notion that conservation and production are incompatible and offers examples of where and how biological diversity can improve the sustainability of farming environments and livelihoods.

Roberto Tinoco Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Biology, UC San Diego

PSGL-1, an Immune Checkpoint Regulator that Promotes T Cell Exhaustion in Chronic Viral Infection and Cancer

Chronic viruses, including HIV and hepatitis B and C, can survive in humans by inducing T cell dysfunction. Using a murine chronic virus that models human infections, we investigated the function of the adhesion molecule, P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-1 (PSGL-1) that is upregulated on responding T cells. PSGL-1-deficient mice unexpectedly cleared the virus due to dramatic increases in the intrinsic survival of multifunctional effector T cells that had downregulated PD-1 and other inhibitory receptors. Notably, this response resulted in immunopathology requiring CD4+ T cells. Mechanistically, PSGL-1 ligation on exhausted CD8+ T cells sustained PD-1 expression and diminished their survival during TCR stimulation. In a model of malignant melanoma where T cell dysfunction also occurs, PSGL-1 deficiency led to PD-1 downregulation, improved T cell responses and tumor control. Thus, PSGL-1 not only plays a fundamental role in balancing viral control and immunopathology, but also functions as a checkpoint that regulates T cell function in the tumor microenvironment.

Russell Corbett-Detig Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley

Next-Generation Population Genomics

Although many fundamental questions in evolutionary genetics have been theoretically well posed for decades, until recently relatively little data on natural genetic variation has been available for direct hypothesis testing. Next-generation sequencing is rapidly changing that. These data are revolutionizing the field of evolutionary genetics and are increasingly cost effective to obtain. Hence data analysis and interpretation has become the central challenge of population genetics. Within that vein, I will present my work developing population genomic and bioinformatics methods to study three central, longstanding questions in population genetics genetics. (1) The detection and evolutionary impacts of chromosomal inversions. (2) The evolution and phenotypic consequence of gene-gene interations—epistasis—within populations. (3) Estimating the efficacy and impacts of natural selection in shaping patterns of neutral genetic variation across a wide variety of species using a novel comparative population genomic framework.

Andreas Chavez President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley

Studying natural hybridization to understand adaptation and speciation

A large goal in evolutionary biology is to study how natural forces shape adaptation and speciation processes. My research examines the ecological and evolutionary response of mammalian populations to environmental change. To do this research, I use population genetic, phylogenetic, ecological and behavioral studies to understand the biogeography, adaptation, and diversification in natural populations. I am largely focused on a group of tree squirrels that inhabit different types of coniferous forests throughout North America. These squirrels have diverged in several ecologically important traits, such as coloration, skull shape related to bite force, and vocalization. I have investigated lineage diversification, hybridization, and adaptation in these squirrels and my current research is examining the genetic bases of ecologically important traits that have diverged in these squirrels. Furthermore, these squirrels are very tractable organisms for behavioral and ecological research and I aim to link these approaches with genomic research in the future to advance our understanding of the types of genetic changes that occur when animal populations respond to environmental change and diverge from one another.

Rayna Bell Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley

The evolution of a novel coloration phenotype in African reed frogs

A fundamental goal in evolutionary biology is to understand how genotypes (genetic make-up of organisms) interact with selective environments to form novel phenotypes (traits of organisms). Coloration is a key way in which organisms interact with their environments and is subject to both natural selection (e.g. cryptic or warning coloration) and sexual selection (e.g. species recognition and communication); therefore, coloration phenotypes are a model for investigating adaptive evolution in wild populations. Nonetheless, the genetic architecture of color phenotypes is still poorly characterized. This missing link limits inferences of how selection acts on color gene pathways within populations and how color pathways have evolved at macroevolutionary timescales. As a Presidential Fellow, I am investigating the genetic architecture and ecological function of a novel color phenotype (sexual dichromatism) in a diverse group of frogs.

Gabriela Monsalve President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, UC San Francisco

Transporters for Glucocorticoids

For decades, the prevailing view has been that the majority of small lipophilic steroids, such as glucocorticoids (GCs), diffuse across plasma membranes and into the cytoplasm, where they encounter cognate protein targets, and influence cellular responses. This view persisted despite previous biochemical, genetic, and cell biological evidence consistent with the mediated transport of steroidal molecules (herein referred to as any process that moves molecules across plasma membranes, including active transport, endocytosis/pinocytosis, passage through pores or channels, and/or coupling to carrier proteins). Lipophilic steroids themselves are shepherded by carrier proteins in the bloodstream, underscoring how proteins mediate relay of lipophilic molecules from circulation to target cells. If protein machineries regulate the uptake of steroids, it seems likely that those carriers contribute to the cell specificity of hormones. In principle then, mis-activation and -regulation of these factors could lead to unexpected outcomes, including endocrine diseases. To identify and characterize machineries and mechanisms underlying mediated transport of GCs across plasma membranes, we are using [1] candidate-gene approaches and complementary genetic screens; [2] unbiased chemical binding assays and; [3] in vivo analysis of selective GC transport. We predict that the identification of this new process would force re-evaluation of cellular access to other such molecules physiologic, pathologic and pharmacologic, including environmental toxins.

Nicholas Olivas President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Brain Research Institute, UC Los Angeles

Flexible Sensory Encoding Strategies in V1 Microcircuits

Linking neuronal microcircuit function to perception requires longitudinal surveillance of networks of neurons during awake behavior. Information encoding in primary visual cortex (V1) is principally characterized by the preferred orientation of individual neurons however less is known concerning how visual information is represented across intact V1 microcircuits. Here we employ a combination of in vivo resonant scanning 2-photon microscopy and calcium imaging via fast genetically encoded calcium indicators (GCaMP6) in awake behaving mice to examine the emergent response patterns from repetitive visual stimuli in visual cortex L2/3 microcircuits. During quiescent periods, orientation selective neurons responded to less than half of preferred stimulus presentations while viewing repetitive static gratings whereas locomotion increased the reliability of visually evoked responses significantly. Visually evoked response patterns to repetitive gratings measured across networks of similarly tuned neurons revealed trial-to-trial variability near chance levels which was reduced by half during locomotion. In contrast, L2/3 neurons faithfully reported repetitive sequences of natural scenes independent of behavioral state with negligible trial-to-trial variability. Eye tracking across experiments revealed heightened arousal states while viewing natural scenes compared to static gratings based upon pupil dilations. Our data provides insight into state-specific flexible coding strategies used in cortical circuits between different visual stimuli and reveals the optimal requirements to evoke stable activity in V1 microcircuits.

Group III Alumni Room, Arts & Craft Building

9:00 – 9:40 Renee Williams (mass spectroscopic analysis of atmosphere and ocean chemistry) A Missing Source of Atmospheric Glyoxal: An Algal-derived Mechanism

9:45 – 10:25 Anoklase Ayitou (Photoresponsive Molecular Rotors) Light-Induced Rotational Dynamics in Photoresponsive Molecular Rotors

10:30 – 11:10 Indara Suarez (Experimental High Energy Physics) Search for top-squarks at the Large Hadron Collider

11:15 – 11:55 Flip Tanedo (Theoretical Particle Physics, Dark Matter, Supersymmetry, Collider Physics) Particle Physics in the Dark

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch

1:00 – 1:40 Jessica Oakes (Biological Fluids, Medical Imaging, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Aerosols) Multi‐Domain Aerosol Delivery Predictions in the Whole Lung

1:45 – 2:25 Felipe Godinez (Medical Imaging) High Spatial Resolution PET Imaging with Hybrid DOI Detectors

2:30 – 3:10 Sabbie Miller (Civil Engineering) Engineering sustainable infrastructure materials: how concrete design can influence global warming potential

3:15 – 3:30 Wrap-up and Networking

3:30 Free Time!

Renee Williams President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC San Diego

A Missing Source of Atmospheric Glyoxal: An Algal-derived Mechanism

Glyoxal has been implicated as a significant contributor to the formation of secondary organic aerosols, which play a key role in our ability to estimate the impact of aerosols on climate. Elevated concentrations of glyoxal over remote ocean waters suggests that there exists an additional source, different from urban and forest environments, which has yet been identified. Herein, we demonstrate that marine algae can contribute both actively and passively to the levels of glyoxal in the atmosphere. Based on mass spectroscopic analyses of nascent gas-phase molecules, sea spray aerosols, and the sea surface microlayer generated during a naturally occurring algal bloom, we provide evidence that phytoplankton can excrete toluene as stress response to nitrogen-starvation and bacterial attach, which is then transferred across the air-water interface where it is oxidized, and decomposed into glyoxal. Moreover, we demonstrate that during the algae death phase of the bloom their phospholipids are enriched in the SSML and undergo autoxidation thereby generating glyoxal as a degradation product. We propose that the life cycle of an algal bloom could serve as an important and currently missing source of glyoxal in the atmosphere.

Anoklase Ayitou Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC Los Angeles

Light-Induced Rotational Dynamics in Photoresponsive Molecular Rotors

ENERGY (in the form of heat or light) that is used as an input in a macroscopic machine is converted to WORK. This WORK is a result of coordination among the essential components that attribute to the machine a particular function. To emulate the function of a macroscopic machine at the molecular level, we have designed and synthesized photoresponsive molecular rotors with the purpose of controlling their rotational dynamics using light (Figure 1). The essential component(s) in our molecular rotors are: i) a central (dipolar) rotator that could re-orient itself freely and ii) a photochromic dithienylethene moiety, which upon UV-Vis irradiation would undergo structural changes viz. 6π-photocyclization and would affect the ability of the central rotator to re-orient. To assess the fatigue resistance of the rotor, we investigated perhydrogenated and perfluorinated dithienylethene systems, with the later system having amazing fatigue resistance properties. Also, as a higher photostationary state (PSS) of this material was necessary to truly survey the rotational dynamics in the closed-state of the dithienylethene photochromic moiety, we performed triplet-sensitized irradiation of the open form in the presence of biacetyl; this enabled us to reach PSS > 95% with respect to the close form of system under study. Using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy techniques, we have shown that the rotational dynamics of this material could be impacted through UV-Vis irradiation. Moreover, we envision to make use of electric field to tune the rotational dynamics and the dielectric and optical properties of the materials. The presentation will highlight the synthesis, photochromic properties and rotational dynamics of photoresponsive molecular rotors in the crystalline phase.

Indara Suarez President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Physics and Astronomy, UC Santa Barbara

Search for top-squarks at the Large Hadron Collider

In 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This important scientific milestone represents the culmination of a nearly half-century effort that has consistently confirmed, through precision experimental measurements, the correctness of the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics. However, questions surrounding the mass value of the newly discovered Higgs boson as well as astronomical evidence for dark matter suggest that there are new particles and interactions awaiting discovery. Supersymmetry (SUSY), an extension to the SM that predicts the existence of "superpartners” associated with the SM particles, is a well-motivated scenario that resolves many of the problems with the SM. Searches for the supersymmetric partner of the top quark (top-squark) are amongst the most relevant studies that will be conducted during the second phase of the LHC data taking beginning later this year. A relatively light top-squark (~ 1 TeV) could explain the observed value of the Higgs mass as well as have ties to the SUSY dark matter candidate. The collisions at higher rate and energy that will be provided by the LHC will allow us to extend the reach of previous searches to > 1 TeV top-squark mass giving us a unique opportunity to probe physics beyond the SM.

Flip Tanedo Chancellor’s ADVANCE Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Physics, UC Irvine

Particle Physics in the Dark

‘Dark matter’ has long been a synonym for the unknown. However, recent experimental progress in particle and astro-particle physics—including the Nobel prize winning discovery of the Higgs boson—as pushed dark matter into the limelight. From the fiery first few seconds of the universe to the icy depths of the Antarctic, from the explosive collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to the faintest whispers from the center of the galaxy, exciting progress in dark matter ties together some of the most extreme ‘laboratories’ in science. In this talk we present current research in theoretical models for the dark sector drawing upon these recent results. We demonstrate how the ’dark frontier’ ties into a possible story of the future of particle physics including the upcoming Run II of the Large Hadron Collider and third generation experiments underground and in space.

Jessica Oakes President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley

Multi‐Domain Aerosol Delivery Predictions in the Whole Lung

What are the health consequences of airborne toxins (e.g. air pollution and cigarette smoke)? Can we optimize drug delivery to treat lung (e.g. asthma and emphysema) or whole body diseases (e.g. diabetes)? The goal of this work was to develop novel numerical models to predict aerosol fate in the lung. Recent advances in computational resources have enabled sophisticated airflow and particle transport simulations in the pulmonary airways, however it is not currently feasible to solve for transport for all length and time scales of the lung. Furthermore, while there has been significant focus on predicting particle transport during inspiration [Oakes et al. Annals of Bio. Eng., 2014, 44: 899-914] there is limited knowledge on particle deposition during expiration. In this paper we present a new framework that couples 3D and 1D flow and transport models, enabling predictions of whole lung particle deposition throughout respiration. The model incorporates image-based airway morphometry (3D domain) and lobar-specific dimensions that expand and contract throughout respiration (1D domain). Lobar deposition fractions agreed well with in vivo experimental data in healthy rat lungs [Oakes et al. J. of Appl. Phys., 2014, 116:1561-1568] for particles with diameter of 1.2 microns. This framework may be applied in future studies to determine lung burden in diseased lungs (e.g. patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) or asthma).

Felipe Godinez Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Davis

High Spatial Resolution PET Imaging with Hybrid DOI Detectors

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a molecular imaging modality capable of imaging trace amounts of radiolabeled molecules targeting biomarkers. Accurate PET studies of small targets require high image spatial resolution, for example, imaging small objects such as cancer lesions in early breast cancer detection and inflamed joints in Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). It has been shown that PET can measure the degree of inflammation in the synovium compartment of joints. PET imaging can also be used in pre-clinical research to study murine models of arthritis. However, imaging arthritic mouse paws poses a significant challenge, since a very high spatial resolution is required to accurately quantify the uptake in the paw joints. Imaging applications like these have set the need for the development of high-resolution detectors. These detectors should have depth of interaction (DOI) encoding capabilities to maintain resolution uniformity across the image. The focus of this work is the development and characterization of high-resolution DOI capable PET detectors and scanners for breast imaging and mouse paw imaging. The two PET detectors presented in this work were composed of arrays with LSO crystals of 1.5 x 1.5 x 20 mm3 and 0.5 x 0.5 x 8 mm3, coupled to a position sensitive photomultiplier tube on one end and an avalanche photodiode on the opposite end. The array with the smaller crystal pitch was used to build the mouse paw scanner called PawPET. The performance characterization of both detectors is presented in terms of their spatial, DOI, energy, and timing resolution. In this work, a description of the scanner gantry design for the breast scanner and PawPET scanner are given along with descriptions of the fabrication techniques used, such as rapid prototyping using 3D printing technology.

Sabbie Miller President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley

Engineering sustainable infrastructure materials: how concrete design can influence global warming potential

In recent years, increasing urban populations and consumption have resulted in a growing demand for infrastructure materials. Of these infrastructure materials, concrete has experienced the greatest growth by mass due to its desirable mechanical and rheological properties. Yet, there are considerable greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of cement, the typical binder in concrete. The increasing demand for concrete and the emissions associated with production of its constituents have led many researchers to investigate methods for reducing associated greenhouse gas emissions. These efforts typically fall within three main categories: (1) reduction of emissions from cement production; (2) technological breakthroughs to change classic concrete manufacture; (3) replacement of cement with alternative binders that have lower associated greenhouse gas emissions. While all of these categories bear merit, research in these areas typically does not account for changes to greenhouse gas emissions and changes to mechanical properties as well as concrete durability associated with alterations concurrently. This presentation will discuss a framework developed for linking environmental impact, mechanical properties and durability, and material constituent selection. Current application of the framework to cementitious material engineering will be introduced, including presentation of comparison indices that account for material properties and environmental impacts as well as concrete mix proportion design for reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Springing from this research, future directions for research to broaden our ability to engineer composite infrastructure materials for desired service-performance and reduced environmental impact will be discussed.

Group IV Lakeview Room, Main Lodge

9:00 – 9:40 Caitlin Patler (Immigration, Incarceration and Detention, Laws and Legality) Young and Undocumented: The Impacts of Legal Status on the Educational Incorporation of Latino Immigrant Young Adults

9:45 – 10:25 Jerry Flores (Criminology, Sociology, Feminist Studies, Latina/o Studies) Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance and Wraparound Incarceration

10:30 – 11:10 Juan Herrera (Latino Studies, Immigration, Nonprofit Organizations) Disciplining Space: Racism, Illegality, and the Regulation of Informal Labor

11:15 – 11:55 Doris Maldonado (Place Based Identity, Critical Race Studies, Indigeniety, Colonialism) Local Memories, Local Pasts: Place-Based Identity in Archaeology

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch

1:00 – 2:10 Katherine Beane (American Indian History and Cultural Studies, Indigenous Language Revitalization, Oral History) Woyakapi Kin Ahdipi "Bringing the Story Home'": A Dakota Family Story of Survivance

2:15 – 2:55 E. Mara Green (Anthropology, Linguistics, Sociality, Communication) Willingness and Refusal: The Ethics of Deaf-Hearing Conversations in Nepali “Natural Sign”

3:00 – 3:40 James Battle (Science, Technology and Society, Health Disparities, Bioethics of Race, Gender, and Exchange) Diversity Science: Race, Gender, and the Gift in Genomic Research

3:45 – 4:00 Wrap-up and Networking

4:00 Free Time!

Caitlin Patler President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Criminology, Law, and Society, UC Irvine

Young and Undocumented: The Impacts of Legal Status on the Educational Incorporation of Latino Immigrant Young Adults

Sociological research has theorized a widening gap between undocumented and documented immigrants, and also between citizens and non-citizens generally. However, research on Latino immigrants’ educational outcomes has been largely unable to distinguish between immigrants’ legal statuses, which may explain why studies of immigrant advantage have come to inconsistent conclusions for Latinos. Using unique survey data from native-born, naturalized citizen, legal resident noncitizens, and undocumented Latino young adults in California, I analyze how legal status and citizenship impact educational outcomes. I find evidence that noncitizen youth (undocumented and legal resident) are relatively more disadvantaged and exhibit lower educational outcomes than their native-born or naturalized citizen peers, with the greatest disadvantages experienced by undocumented youth. I then zero in on the mechanisms through which undocumented students experience such extensive educational penalties. Drawing from 100 in-depth interviews with undocumented young adults, I interrogate how fear of discovery leads students to conceal their status from teachers, counselors, and peers during high school, with consequences for social network formation and access to academic resources. Taking together, findings from this study suggest that scholarship on immigrant integration should pay closer attention to legal contexts of reception, including immigrants’ legal and citizenship status not only at the time of arrival, but also over the life course and within different institutional settings.

Jerry Flores President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, UC San Francisco

Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance and Wraparound Incarceration

Using qualitative research methods, including participant observation, focus groups and in-depth interviews, I examine the lives of 50 Latinas confined in “El Valle” juvenile detention and its “sister institution,” the “Pathway” community school, which is intended to serve students who have been expelled from a traditional school setting. Pathway is one of 282 community schools that service over 23,000 students across the state of California. Unlike other alternative schools, there is a steady flow of incoming and outgoing youth from El Valle detention center. Pathway school officials grant probation officers unfettered access to their students in return for financial support. In the eyes of school and detention center administrators this partnership allows these two institutions to provide their students with “wraparound services” that are aimed at helping youth stay out of detention. However, my research revealed that these well-intentioned services more closely resembled what I describe as wrap-around incarceration: an unintended consequence of this partnership that makes it difficult for youth to escape the surveillance of formal detention even after leaving the physical boundaries of the detention center. My work describes how wraparound services lead girls to get “caught up” between these two institutions. I also highlight the unique set of gendered, racialized and socioeconomic challenges that shape the pathways of Latina girls into and away from the criminal justice system. My detailed examination of these institutional connections provides an original contribution to literature on deviant pathways, surveillance in schools, and research on gender, crime and mass incarceration.

Juan Herrera President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Chicana/o Studies, UC Los Angeles

Disciplining Space: Racism, Illegality, and the Regulation of Informal Labor

Day laborers are perhaps the most highly visible and well-researched examples of contemporary informal labor in the United States. In both academic and popular conceptions, these workers are framed as a homogenous group of Latino “illegal” laborers with shared conditions of suffering. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Guatemalan and Mexican day laborers in Oakland, California, this paper analyzes how anti-indigenous racism shapes how workers organize themselves at hiring zones, and impacts their relationship with the host community. I first demonstrate how workers’ employment solicitation practices render them visible to both federal immigration officials and local agencies intent on regulating informal labor. Then I focus on how day laborers regulate themselves by analyzing the role of race and racism between indigenous Guatemalan and non-indigenous Mexican day laborers. I reveal how these practices deploy spatial discipline—the demarcation and organization of space—to shape workers’ experiences of illegality. I argue that migrants’ experience of illegality must be seen as coterminous with other forms of difference that produces new modes of discrimination not solely reducible to legal status.

Doris Maldonado President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Native American Studies, UC Davis

Local Memories, Local Pasts: Place-Based Identity in Archaeology

The advent of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGRPA) in 1990 brought about an impetus for collaboration with Native American communities in the United States. Over the last 20 plus years these collaborative efforts have generated a number of different approaches to the practice of archaeology and the inclusion of Native American and descendant communities in various aspects of archaeological research. As many have noted in their contributions to the changing landscape of archaeological practice and the inclusion of local communities, there is no single recipe for community-based or collaborative archaeology. Equally important is the understanding that the composition of local communities is more complex than “indigenous” or “descendant communities.” In this presentation, I argue for a concept of place-based identity, based on ethnographic interviews I conducted in Northwestern Honduras, under the auspices of the Proyecto Arqueologico Currusté, in 2007 - 2009. This talk presents some of the ethnography that demonstrates how people who are not recognized as "descendant communities" nonetheless form significant connections to archaeological sites as places in their history. It suggests broadening the discourse of participatory and community archaeology to grapple with this wider range of voices to avoid perpetuating an archaeological position of deciding who has the right to be heard about the places archaeologists view as archaeological sites.

Katherine Beane President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of History, UC Santa Cruz

Woyakapi Kin Ahdipi "Bringing the Story Home'": A Dakota Family Story of Survivance

This work traces my ancestral Dakota family story back to the Minnesota homeland we were exiled from after the Dakota-United States War of 1862. Beginning with the history of an agricultural lakeside village led by my grandfather Mahpiya Wicasta (Chief Cloud Man) in 1820’s Bdeota (Minneapolis), I cover a one hundred year time frame and follow four generations, in order to parallel the doctrine of Mahpiya Wicasta’s traditional leadership tactics with later philosophies rooted in survivance that his grandchildren adhered to, as exiled Christian Dakota families residing in twentieth century Flandreau, South Dakota. Previous research in Dakota history, and biographical work on my grandfather Charles Eastman in particular, have often been written by scholars that come from outside of our community, and a lack of familiarity with our spiritual and cultural traditions and has led to an overgeneralized binary interpretation of our family and tribal story. This is done by placing our community in opposition to one another as Christian or Traditional, rather than identifying the ways in which we both held unto our cultural roots as well as modified new religion practices in accordance with the old. With this work I draw on my ancestral family members own words as much as possible and utilize both the published as well as unpublished writings of my grandfather Charles Eastman, the personal letters of his brother John Eastman (which I have translated into English from the Dakota language), as well as the diaries kept by John’s daughter, my great grandmother Grace Moore. These writings are used to uncover the details of our family experience during the 1862 diaspora, and to help determine the ways in which Dakota life was viewed in the subsequent reservation era.

E. Mara Green President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Linguistics, UC San Diego

Willingness and Refusal: The Ethics of Deaf-Hearing Conversations in Nepali “Natural Sign”

This talk argues that in situations characterized by the use of only partly conventionalized linguistic codes, referential understanding depends not only on shared linguistic knowledge and sociocultural context but also on conversational participants' orientations toward or away from the work of communication. By analyzing embodied modes of engagement and disengagement as ethical actions that undergird semiotic exchanges, this work builds on recent work in anthropology that locates ethics in everyday practice. The first Nepali school for deaf children was established in 1966; graduates from this school founded the first deaf-run organization in 1980. During these years and in the decades that followed, through interactions among successive generations of deaf children and adults in a growing number of school and deaf associations, Nepali Sign Language (NSL) emerged and spread. Currently 5-10,000 deaf Nepalis use NSL – a young but fully conventional language – as their primary communicative mode. This number constitutes a small minority of all deaf Nepalis, most of whom use what NSL signers call natural sign: limited repertoires of signs that are widely shared by deaf and hearing people. Analyzing deaf NSL signers' metalinguistic insights demonstrates that they consider natural sign to be both powerful, because it enables communication with a broad range of both deaf and hearing people, and problematic, because hearing people in particular are not always willing to engage in signed conversation. Interactional data from a rural community where about 1% of the population are deaf demonstrates that indeed natural sign conversations are marked by both ease and difficulty. Moreover, tracking hearing signers' eye gaze, sign production, metalinguistic evaluations, and translations, it becomes evident that the very possibility of exchange, let alone the achievement of mutual understanding, is contingent on whether and how they take up or refuse the shared work of communicating in natural sign.

James Battle President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

Diversity Science: Race, Gender, and the Gift in Genomic Research

In this presentation, I engage the ways the language of genetic diversity and history of racial admixture in the United States frame the logic of African American female participation in genomic research. I define participation here as a form of gift exchange. Following Hyland (2009), I situate gift exchange in culture, not the law. I borrow the term “Diversity Science” from one of my narrators to describe knowledge production emerging from the recruitment of biological and racial difference in genomic research. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork I present two interrelated examples: I begin with an ethnographic narrative outlining the imagined strategic role of diversity in pharmaceutical research. The second example engages how researchers in my project viewed US African Americans both in terms of tracing sub-Saharan ancestry as well as an admixed population. I show that race served as a proxy in these narratives of diversity, sub-Saharan ancestry and genetic admixture. I submit that historical inequalities embedded within these narratives reflect complex sets of social relationships of biological consequence. These social relationships, I will summarize, shape forms of exchange and notions of trust. I emphasize that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry and admixture underlines the methodological importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race.