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.
Team led by UCLA engineering professor wins $7.5M prize | City News Service
The UCLA CarbonBuilt team, led by Gaurav Sant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, won the prize in the competition’s track for technologies related to coal-fired power generation. By mitigating the carbon footprint of concrete, the team’s invention could eventually be a major step in the global battle against climate change, Sant said. (Also: Forbes and PA Media.)
Chauvin verdict is a high-stakes moment for LAPD | Los Angeles Times
Isaac Bryan, executive director of the UCLA Black Policy Project, said the fact that discussion of the LAPD’s crowd-control policies comes at the same time as the Chauvin trial creates “a pretty powerful intersection” that deserves scrutiny within the broader context of the LAPD’s history of “protest suppression.”
Proportion of Black doctors in U.S. has changed little in 120 years | City News Service
A UCLA study published Monday found that the proportion of physicians who are Black in the United States has increased by only four percentage points over the past 120 years, and that the share of doctors who are Black men remains unchanged since 1940. … “These findings demonstrate how slow progress has been, and how far and fast we have to go, if we care about the diversity of the physician workforce and the health benefits such diversity brings to patients, particularly minority patients,’’ said [Dr. Dan] Ly, an assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. (Also: MyNewsLA.)
Why kids are having a hard time returning to school | Los Angeles Times
Times education reporter Nina Agrawal writes that more than three-quarters of L.A. County parents surveyed by UCLA agreed that their children have been “substantially hurt” academically or socially by distanced learning. … “The pandemic has exposed the two L.A.s again,” said former county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, which co-published the survey. (Also: KABC-TV, KCRW-FM, City News Service and MyNewsLA.)
Small moments of joy can combat work-from-home burnout | NPR’s “Morning Edition”
Working from home might not be for everyone. UCLA psychiatrist Jena Lee says it’s easy to see what makes it so taxing. There are plenty of new annoyances of remote work, like waiting for a colleague to unmute themselves on Zoom. And gone are the little rewards, like seeing those colleagues face to face, grabbing coffee or hearing the elevator ding as we headed home for the night with a sense of closure.
Will you need a vaccine passport in California? | New York Times
Dr. Michael Jerrett, a professor of environmental health science at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, told me that as long as there is “equal access” to vaccines themselves, vaccine verification could be used to help prevent workplace outbreaks in the future. (Also: UCLA’s Eugene Volokh was interviewed by KCBS-TV.)
COVID-19 herd immunity might not be possible | USA Today
“As soon as vaccination rates hit 50%, you saw cases and deaths just start to plummet,” said Christina Ramirez, a professor of biostatistics at UCLA. Data from Israel shows that the vaccinated not only are much less likely to get severely ill or die, but if they do get COVID-19, it’s almost always a mild case. ”It almost doesn’t matter if the virus is transmitted in the population if it’s not causing serious problems,” said Dr. Timothy Brewer, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
They came to NYC for acceptance. Now they need jobs. | New York Times
But people who identify as LGBTQ are significantly more likely to be unemployed, according to data from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. They are also more likely to be paid less than heterosexual and cisgender people and to live in poverty, and they face significant workplace discrimination.
L.A. hasn’t started new inspections for oil sites | Los Angeles Times
The lack of such regular inspections is “at the heart of everything else that has gone wrong,” said Michael Salman, a UCLA professor emeritus of history who has become a vocal advocate for stiffer regulation of oil and gas sites.
An Earth Day message: Move faster on climate change | Los Angeles Times
Also last week, a study from researchers at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health found that Los Angeles County neighborhoods with the worst air quality saw a 60% increase in COVID-19 deaths, compared to neighborhoods with the cleanest air. That tracked with earlier research linking worse air pollution with greater susceptibility to the coronavirus, which attacks the lungs. (UCLA’s Michael Jerrett was quoted.)
How bad will California’s fire season be? | Guardian (U.K.)
“Increasing temperatures give us increasing aridity,” [UCLA’s Glen] MacDonald said, “and we can portion a large part of that to increased greenhouse gases and climate change.”… Stephanie Pincetl, a professor and director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, agreed and said the state needed to take more steps to adapt. “California has always burned,” she said. “But we live in a hysteria about fire because we put people in the wrong place.”
Does exercise protect cognitive health? | Seattle Times
“The main reason we did this study is that we wanted to explicitly study the relation between physical activity and cognition in midlife women,” said lead study author Dr. Gail Greendale, a researcher and professor of medicine at UCLA. “The overwhelming majority of observational research — research that does not treat people, but observes what they do and collects information — about physical activity and cognitive performance has been done in people who are, on average, 70 years of age.”
New hope against an incurable eye cancer | HealthDay News
Tebentafusp has now become the first drug shown to improve overall survival in patients with uveal melanoma, said Dr. Antoni Ribas, immediate past president of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), in a HealthDay Now interview. “Uveal melanoma is a disease that until now has had no medical treatment,” said Ribas, director of the Tumor Immunology Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy Center at University of California, Los Angeles. “Nothing had shown any improvement in the last 50 years of clinical research.”
Do ‘Second Amendment sanctuaries’ threaten a constitutional crisis? | Salon
UCLA School of Law professor Adam Winkler told Salon he sees these resolutions as “mostly symbolic, mostly a way for pro-gun communities to express opposition to rising sentiment in favor of gun safety reform.”
A powerful new solution to collusion cheating | Forbes
Biggin, along with graduate student Guanao Yan and Professor Jingyi Jessica Li at UCLA, developed “Q-SID” or Question Score Identity Detection, that can analyze exam answers and pinpoint collusion. Q-SID has a 0.3% false positive rate for placing students into Collusion Groups while identifying 50% to 90% of the students who have colluded on a given exam, the tool’s website says.
Patients of female doctors more likely to receive flu vaccine | HealthDay News
Dan P. Ly, M.D., Ph.D., from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, used Medicare claims data (2006 through 2016) to estimate differences in influenza vaccination rates by patient race and sex between patients of female and male physicians working in the same outpatient practice. Ly found that adjusting for patient characteristics only, Black patients were 13.5 percentage points less likely and Hispanic patients 4.6 percentage points less likely than White patients to be vaccinated, while Asian patients were 2.3 percentage points more likely to be vaccinated.
Families frustrated by ‘wall of silence’ on mystery brain disease | CBC News
[Michael] Karanicolas, who has been president of the Right to Know Coalition of Nova Scotia since 2013 and has just been made executive director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at UCLA Law School, said the urge to limit information can be rooted in the desire to prevent alarm. ”Even saying ‘Here’s what we have, but this conclusion would be premature so don’t jump to this conclusion’ — that is still a better and more effective avenue than for the government to just say nothing,” Karanicolas said.