UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription to view. See more UCLA In the News.
Black students in 14 L.A. County districts face serious equity barriers | Los Angeles Times
Black students in Los Angeles County continue to face a multitude of barriers to an equitable education, including concentrated poverty, high suspension rates and housing insecurity, a UCLA report released Wednesday found. … The report by the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools builds on a previous study that found schools serving Black students lacked critical resources — counselors, nurses, social workers, highly qualified teachers — and students’ home and community environment played a role in their academic success. (UCLA’s Stanley Johnson and Joseph Bishop were quoted.)
Newsom: J&J vaccine pause won’t affect California reopening | Associated Press
The decision to pause J&J inoculations show the agencies are working hard to reassure the public, but anything that raises concerns about vaccine safety could increase vaccine skepticism, said Dr. Timothy Brewer, a professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Medicine. “Our case rates are still pretty low, our hospitalization rates and mortality rates are very low relative to what they were in January,” Brewer said. “So I think we’re still moving forward.” (Brewer was also quoted by the Orange County Register.) And UCLA’s Anne Rimoin was interviewed on KNBC-TV (approx. 1:25 mark).
Vice Chancellor Mary Osako interviewed | PR Week “Coffee Break”
“At UCLA, I think 2021 into Q1 of 2022 will be a year for us focused on what I have been calling with my team, ‘kitchen table talk.’ To me, it’s health, housing, and jobs and justice. When I say health, I don’t mean just vaccines and physical wellness. It’s mental wellness,” said UCLA’s Mary Osako. … “For us to focus on what I think are the four thematics for not only UCLA but our society at large, I think those will be the stories we focus in on.”
UCLA scholar examines fatigue in new book | MyNewsLA
“Sick and Tired – An Intimate History of Fatigue,” authored by Dr. Emily K. Abel, a prize-winning historian of medicine and public health at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, was published this week in hardcover and paperback by the University of North Carolina Press. “Medicine finally has discovered fatigue,” said Abel, a professor emeritus at FSPH.
Can you get pregnant while you’re already pregnant? It’s rare, but yes. | USA Today
Dr. Ilina Pluym, an assistant professor of maternal and fetal medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the condition is so rare doctors don’t know the prevalence of the phenomenon. “There’s only been a handful of reports of it in the world’s literature,” Pluym told USA Today. “It’s more common in fish, rodents and bunnies.”
Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the U.S. | PBS NewsHour
The steady rise in the Asian American population in the U.S. should also be of interest to corporations and other business entities, said Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, deputy director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Businesses should be thinking about where Asian Americans are migrating, including places in the American South where they’re increasingly becoming part of the fabric of the region, she explained.
NASA funds interstellar probe and space habitats made from fungi | Gizmodo
A plan to deploy CubeSats powered by solar sails will also move forward. The idea, proposed by Artur Davoyan from the University of California, Los Angeles, would enable an entirely new way of exploring the solar system and possibly even interstellar space. “It’s thought that super-light CubeSat solar sails could travel 60 times the Earth-Sun distance in a year, which is 20 times the velocity of Voyager 1 — currently the farthest spacecraft of all — and could reach Jupiter in five months,” according to a UCLA statement. “That journey currently takes five years.” (Davoyan was also cited in Forbes.)
A Fresno-area county saw 90% increase in Latino immigrant deaths in 2020 | Fresno Bee
“They work hard, have strong family values, don’t use welfare, are healthy, don’t drink, don’t smoke, etcetera — but for all that work ethic, they are very poorly rewarded,” said Dr. David Hayes Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA’s medical school. “The harder Latinos work, the poorer they are, the less likely they are to have health insurance. They get punished for good behavior.”
The grim compassion of searching for missing migrants in the desert | The New Yorker
This grim humanitarian mission is the subject of “Águilas,” a new documentary by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Maite Zubiaurre, who are both professors at the University of California, Los Angeles. Guevara-Flanagan, a filmmaker who has spent two decades covering Latinx communities, teamed with Zubiaurre, whose interdisciplinary research project about border death, art, and activism led the pair to the Águilas. (Guevara-Flanagan and Zubiaurre were quoted.)
New initiative aims to improve portrayals of marginalized communities | The Wrap
Additionally, in partnership with the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA, the Initiative will conduct a study, to be published later this year, that will look at 1,000 movies over 10 years to examine how telling diverse and inclusive stories impact success metrics such as box office, critical ratings and awards. “Research finds that stories can inspire, change behavior in both positive and negative ways, shape perceptions of social norms and both lift up and marginalize some groups,” added Yalda T. Uhls, executive director of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers.
COVID-19 variants: Not the same disease | Global News (Canada)
“Small interactions, smaller breaches in your protocols of social distancing and wearing masks do matter,” says Dr. Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the UCLA School of Public Health.
California races to get ahead of another bad fire season | The Hill
“We have 100 years of legacy in this state and we have a lot of federal land over which the state does not have a lot of power. So it has to be a coupled effort between the feds and the state to address the accumulated brush and understory growth,” said Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA.
L.A. traffic is back. Why didn’t people change their habits? | KCRW-FM’s “Greater LA”
That’s a step in the right direction, according to Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. But he thinks LA needs to go much further when it comes to prioritizing alternatives to the car. “As someone who studies this, but also as a cyclist and a pedestrian, Los Angeles has a very long way to go,” he says. “We are not a bold moving city in this regard at all.” He points to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia as examples of cities that are taking back space from cars and making more room for bikes, pedestrians, and buses.