October 2024
Tricia Avant, academic coordinator and gallery manager of art, had a drawing included in HYENA, a recent HEXENTEXTE publication honoring the legacy of women in surrealism. The launch occurred at 2220 Art + Archives in Los Angeles on October 3.
Aimee Bahng, associate professor of gender and women’s studies, presented new research on “Coral Futures: Banking on Resilience” as an invited speaker to a Mellon symposium at UC Davis’s Department of Asian American Studies. The “Stars, Earth, and Coral: Pacific Entanglements and Futures Beyond the Human” roundtable was followed by a performance lecture by artist Astria Suparak: “Asian Futures, without Asians” on October 24.
Kim Bruce, emeritus Reuben C. and Eleanor Winslow Professor of Computer Science, was presented the Most Notable Paper of 2012 award for his co-authored paper “Grace: the absence of (inessential) difficulty” at the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery international symposium in Pasadena, California, on October 25. The prize recognizes a paper from the 2012 Onward! symposium that has had a significant impact on computing a decade after its publication.
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, gave a talk titled “What can chicken McNuggets tell us about symmetric functions, positive polynomials, random norms, and AF algebras?” at the Claremont Colleges Analysis Seminar on October 3.
Garcia published a paper, “What is… the Bateman-Horn conjecture?” in the November 2024 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Ernie González, Jr., lecturer in theatre, received a Best Featured Actor in a Play nomination for the 2024 Orange Curtain Review Awards for his performance of Manny/Sancho Panza in Quixote Nuevo at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California. He was also nominated for a Best Supporting Performer Los Angeles Area Broadway World Award for the same role and production.
Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, associate professor of economics, co-authored a policy brief, “How did the higher minimum wage in the City of Los Angeles impact the earnings and employment of low-wage workers?”
Christine Inzer, administrative assistant for the Office of Stewardship, published her first graphic novel Halfway There on October 15. The graphic memoir is an exploration of her mixed Japanese American identity and has received starred reviews from Kirkus and the School Library Journal.
Malkiat S. Johal, professor of chemistry, gave an invited research seminar titled “Quantatative Analysis of Protein-Ligand Interactions and Lipid Bilayer Modifications using the Quartz Crystal Microbalance” at Cal State Long Beach on October 9.
Kirk Jones, professor of physical education and head athletic trainer, was honored as the 2024-25 SCIAC Distinguished Service Award recipient. Jones has developed programs for prevention and treatment of athletic injuries and conditioning and nutritional programs for 21 varsity, intramural and club sports as well as the college community.
Tom Le, associate professor of politics, gave a lecture on Japanese politics to military personnel at the Air University (Air Force) on October 1, a talk on Japan-South Korea relations and provided graduate student advising at USC on October 2, a talk at Claremont McKenna College on politics and political writing October 5, and a talk on Japanese politics to military personnel at Pacific Air Force on October 14.
Le participated in the Institute for Global Affairs Fellowship workshop October 15.
Le co-published an article titled “Russia and North Korea’s treaty exposes blind spots in the security community” in East Asia Forum with international relations students Annalise Chang ’27 and Munique Tan ’25 on October 24.
Jon Moore, lab coordinator and associate professor of biology, presented a talk titled “A Rich Long-Running Inquiry-Based Introductory Dictyostelium Chemotaxis Teaching Lab” at the 2024 International Dictyostelium Conference on October 14 in Durham, North Carolina.
Nikki Moore, visiting assistant professor of geology, along with coauthors Conner Toth, Wendy Bohrson, Anita Grunder, and Nolan Clark ’23, published the research article “Giant plagioclase in the Steens Basalt, southeast Oregon, USA: Tracking the balance of differentiation processes in continental flood basalt evolution” in GSA Bulletin on October 30.
Adam Pearson, professor and chair of psychological science, was an invited keynote panelist for a discussion on challenges and future directions for climate activism and public engagement at the Society for Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology (American Psychological Association Division 34) 3rd Annual Global Conference on “Psychology for a Resilient Future: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Coping in a Changing World.” Xuwen Hua ’23 and Pearson co-authored and presented a conference talk at a plenary session titled “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: Lay beliefs about life adversity impact judgments of climate vulnerability and resilience.” This work began as a senior thesis. Hua was the only non-graduate/postdoctoral-level or faculty speaker of over 30 invited conference speakers.
William Peterson, emeritus professor of music and College organist, performed music of J.S. Bach on the Hill Memorial Organ in Bridges Hall of Music. The program included Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in C Major” (BWV 545), the “Sonata in D Minor” (BWV 527) and four chorale preludes from Great Eighteen Organ Chorales.
Peterson presented a paper, “Constructing Cultural Markers of Czechoslovak Solidarity, 1918-1928,” in a panel at the 2024 Virtual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) on October 18. The panel was titled “Liberation from Uncertainty and Instability in Eastern Europe.”
Kathy Guillen Quispe, assistant director of international student & scholar services, wore a couple of hats at the 2024 NAFSA Region XII Conference in Orange County, California, on October 19-23. She began the conference by co-leading the F-1 Student Advising for Beginners workshop. She also served on the conference planning committee’s special events and local arrangements team and volunteered to mentor seven new advisors in the field of international student advising. Additionally, Quispe had a session with members of the Southern District which she will chair starting January 2025.
Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of Russian, delivered a guest lecture, “Disrupting the Canon of Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Meet Mikita Franko,” at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich, Germany, on October 28.
Monique Saigal-Escudero, emerita professor of French, gave a presentation titled “A Jewish Holocaust Survivor’s Remarkable and Unfolding Story of Survival though Desperate Actions and the Kindness of Strangers” in the chapel of the Claremont Center for Spiritual Living.
Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Helen Roberts Prize for his article “Remembering the Cotton Screwmen: Inter-racial Waterfront Labor and the Development of Sailors’ Chanties” in Journal of the Society for American Music at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology on October 26. The Roberts Prize recognizes the most significant article published by a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published a paper on p-hacking, HARKing, and the replication crisis, “Big Data and the Assault on Science,” in International Higher Education.
Smith wrote four opinion pieces: “Presidential Pundits—a P-Hacking Parable” (MindMatters, October 7), “P-Hacking: The Perils of Presidential Election Models” (MindMatters, October 8), “The AI bubble is looking worse than the dot-com bubble” (MarketWatch, October 21) and “The World Series of Coin Flips” (MindMatters, October 22), with the MarketWatch piece being the most read article on MarketWatch in October.
Smith’s talk “AI Systems Are Still Faux Intelligence,” was selected for the O’Reilly AI Academy, which has 2.8 million active subscribers.
Luis Edward Tenorio, visiting assistant professor of sociology, published two papers: “Disclosure and the Evolving Legal Consciousness of Sexual and Gender Minority Central American Unaccompanied Minors” in Law & Social Inquiry and “Work After Lawful Status: Formerly Undocumented Immigrants’ Gendered Relational Legal Consciousness and Workplace Claims-Making” in Law & Society Review.
Tenorio published the chapter “Detained Homemaking: The Liminal Homemaking of Sexual and Gender Minority Central American Unaccompanied Youth,” in the edited volume Kids in Cages: Surviving and Resisting Child Migrant Detention published with University of Arizona Press.
Valorie Diane Thomas, emerita Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English and Africana Studies, published a chapter titled “Breath. Fugitivity. Wild Horses.: Black Ecocritical Feminist Strategies for Healing in a Predatory Empire,” in Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change, (North Atlantic Books, 2024), edited by Tessa Hicks Peterson and Hala Khouri.
Thomas delivered the keynote lecture “How to Implement Belonging in Your Organization and Curriculum” at the HERD Institute Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy and Equine Facilitated Learning retreat held at Green Chimneys in Brewster, New York.
Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, delivered “The ‘Japanese Turn’ in the Art, Architecture and Cuisine of Europe and the United States, 1860-2020” in the California Society of Culinary Historians fall lecture series at the Richard J. Riordan Central Library in downtown Los Angeles on October 12. Food historian Charles Perry introduced Yamashita and moderated the post-lecture discussion.