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.
Optimism that COVID-19 is finally dwindling | Los Angeles Times
“I don’t want to provide a false sense of assurance here,” said L.A. County chief science officer Dr. Paul Simon [of UCLA], who pointed out that 60% of Angelenos would remain vulnerable even if more than a third have already been infected with the coronavirus. “Unless they’ve had vaccination, they continue to be susceptible. I think we need to continue to be vigilant.” (UCLA’s Dr. Annabelle de St. Maurice is also quoted.)
What we should have learned from L.A.’s history of homelessness | Los Angeles Times
(Commentary by UCLA’s Marques Vestal and Andrew Klein) Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s campaign to “end homelessness” by 2028 — which has cost about $200 million in building shelters around the city — addresses some of the structural pitfalls ensnaring the poor. But it is far from living up to its promise of moving homeless Angelenos off the streets into permanent housing.
On John Kerry’s claim of ‘nine years left’ to avert climate crisis | Washington Post
Said Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles: “At this point in time, there is little to no evidence that climate warming, in itself, will become impossible to stop in 9 years. All future emissions reductions will still act to reduce the amount of eventual climate warming, whether they happen tomorrow or 20 years from now. On the other hand, this also means that global warming is already producing severe and harmful impacts around the world at our current level of warming — so the notion we can safely wait another nine years to treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves is also problematic.”
Women’s healthcare waylaid by COVID-19 pandemic | Los Angeles Times
Dr. Ritu Salani, a gynecologic oncology specialist at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, is concerned about women delaying preventive exams and treatments due to COVID-19. “Screening is so important,” she said.
The fight for tribal recognition simmers over Mono Lake | Los Angeles Times
California’s Native American population plunged from 150,000 to 30,000 in the mid-1800s, according to Benjamin Madley, a UCLA historian and author of “American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873.”
China’s holiday movie binge features big sales, little propaganda | Voice of America
COVID-19 interrupted film production for roughly half of last year, said Michael Berry, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Though there may not be any big budget “main melody” films this Chinese New Year, “the genre certainly is not going away,” he said in an email. Nor does their absence “necessarily signal a change in policy.”
Make sure the L.A. River Master Plan fulfills its promise | Los Angeles Times
(Commentary co-written by UCLA’s Jon Christensen and Becky Nicolaides) The intentions are good: bringing green space and cultural resources to working-class neighborhoods. But this revitalization effort must prioritize residents’ essential needs for affordable housing, decent jobs and local businesses, safeguarding against green gentrification.
A look inside the Green Book | USA Today
“It was one of many things African Americans had to develop to survive a hostile environment,” says Scot Brown, professor of African American Studies and history at the University of California-Los Angeles. ”A modern-day equivalent could be a Black GPS.”
New single-payer bill intensifies Newsom’s political peril | California Healthline
The latest estimates, based on federal data, show health care spending in California is about $450 billion a year, according to Gerald Kominski, a professor of health policy and management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. But switching to single-payer isn’t as simple as transferring those expenses to a new system, he said. Somehow, the money that employers and employees contribute to private health insurance plans needs to be funneled into a unified system.
A Black trans activist fights to shield her community from violence | CNN
As the only Black trans woman in her UCLA program, Warri is researching the ways in which social determinants like health care access, safe housing, and financial literacy impact the reality for people in her community. She explains that it’s crucial for the authors of academic publications to share lived experiences with the communities they are studying.
Residents fight financial distress as unemployment agency troubles continue | LAist
A recent study from the California Policy Lab found that workers in lower income neighborhoods are much less likely to get benefits than those in wealthier parts of the state. The researchers estimated that if workers in poorer areas had been able to obtain benefits at the same rate as those in wealthier areas, the unemployment insurance rolls in California would be 23% higher. “Increasing access to benefits to vulnerable communities is not only good for the individuals in those communities and the community as a whole, but also for the entire state,” said UCLA economist Till von Wachter, one of the study’s authors.
How the pandemic has altered school discipline | HuffPost
“I predict there will be a train wreck if we don’t staff up and provide the services, especially mental health services ... to all the kids who may need them,” said Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.
Differing gene functions across species may pose problems for autism models | Spectrum
Different cell types, for example, can be identified by the patterns of genes they tend to express — much as someone’s social network can suggest their roles in society, says lead investigator Daniel Geschwind, distinguished professor of neurology, psychiatry and human genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the new study, Geschwind and his colleagues examined how these networks vary across humans, non-human primates, mice and cultured human cells.
Police misconduct costs cities millions every year. But that’s where the accountability ends. | FiveThirtyEight
Experts say that there are a host of factors that influence the number and amount of settlements in any given place. In a recent analysis, UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz compared the Philadelphia and Houston police departments, which are similarly sized. Yet she found that Philadelphia had 10 times as many civil rights suits filed against the city and its department in a single two-year period as Houston.
How Indigenous knowledge teaches us to live in reciprocity with the land | KCRW-FM’s “Life Examined”
“But we need to acknowledge that there’s a lot of misconceptions about Indians in land and a lot of my work focuses around this. There’s this common misconception that Indians didn’t own land, is something that stems from our American political roots but not that of Indigenous peoples. We actually did have territories, we had marketplaces, we had meeting places, we shared pieces of land that were connected, we had hunting spots and fishing spots,” said UCLA’s Mishuana Goeman.
COVID-19 changed the way we use Google and Twitter | KPCC-FM
Once the coronavirus was declared a national emergency, UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield started studying the language we use on Internet searches, social media and online forums. She says the threat of job loss and illness are ever present in peoples’ choice of words.
The latest on the pandemic | KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk”
“The Moderna vaccine, which was using hubs in Tennessee and Kentucky, basically just flights cancelled, getting trucks and things to the airports, et cetera have really put things to a halt. So they’ve basically had to hold off of being able to send vaccine, so that means we’ve had to postpone some of the vaccines being used at city sites,” said UCLA’s Dr. Robert Kim-Farley (approx. 1:20 mark).
Here’s how to get the COVID-19 vaccine | Self
But exactly when and where you get your vaccine will depend on where you live. “The federal government is only distributing vaccines to states, and then it’s really up to the states,” Timothy Brewer, M.D., M.P.H., professor of medicine and epidemiology at UCLA, tells SELF.