When sophomore Jacqueline Morales arrived at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, she had a clear vision for her future. A biochemistry major, she planned to pursue a career in medicine while exploring opportunities that blended her interests in science, health and service.

This led her to the USC Dornsife Alumni Mentorship Program, where she discovered that some of the most valuable opportunities are the ones you don’t expect.

Matched with alumnus Jorge Osuna ’13, director of technical services at Gilead Sciences, Morales found a mentor who encouraged her to pursue opportunities beyond her immediate interests and remain open to experiences that could broaden her perspective.

Acting on that guidance, Morales applied for research positions she might otherwise have overlooked and ultimately joined the lab of James Moffett, professor of biological sciences and civil and environmental engineering at USC Dornsife. Under Moffett’s direction, she helps measure levels of the rare-earth metal gadolinium in Los Angeles rivers and harbors as a tracer of municipal sewage inputs.

Morales’ story reflects the mission of the Alumni Mentorship Program, which connects students with alumni for career exploration, networking and professional development. Through conversations and activities tailored to their goals and interests, students gain insights from alumni who have already navigated many of the paths they hope to pursue.

Throughout their mentorship, Morales and Osuna, who graduated with a PhD in chemistry from USC Dornsife, discussed academic and professional goals and explored the many possibilities available to someone with a STEM background.

Osuna also partnered with fellow mentor and USC Dornsife alum Gerard Jensen ’94 to host joint Zoom meetings that brought together multiple mentors and students, creating opportunities for networking, peer learning and conversations about a wide range of career paths.

“Prior to the program, I was primarily focused on pursuing a career in medicine,” Morales says. “Through conversations with my mentors and learning about their professional experiences, I became more open to exploring opportunities in fields such as biopharmaceuticals and biotechnology.”

Alumni mentors build their legacy by helping ensure students’ success

Across USC Dornsife, alumni mentors help students build professional skills, expand their networks and gain confidence as they prepare for life after graduation.

For Osuna, mentorship is rooted in gratitude.

“My motivation to become a mentor comes from a genuine desire to help others in the same way I was helped throughout my life,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate to have educators, mentors, coaches and peers who took an interest in my development and played a meaningful role in shaping my education and career.”

Retired financial planner Leon Laub, who graduated from USC Dornsife with a BA in Spanish in 1980 and an MBA from the USC Marshall School of Business in 1990, has participated in the mentorship program for three years. He helps students strengthen résumés and LinkedIn profiles while they navigate internships, graduate school applications and career opportunities.

Shanelle Sua ’16, who leads recruiting and development at financial planning firm Strategic View Advisors, was motivated to mentor by her own experience as a USC student.

“I remember being lost and confused about my future, and the people who mentored me really helped me,” says Sua, who graduated with a degree in international relations with an emphasis in global business from USC Dornsife. “I want to do the same now that I’ve been able to establish my career.”

Meaningful connections create lasting impact

While students gain guidance and professional connections, mentors also find the experience rewarding.

“Mentorship creates a two-way exchange,” says Osuna. “Mentees gain guidance and insight, while mentors gain fresh perspectives, renewed curiosity and a sense of fulfillment.”

For Morales, that exchange gave her a broader perspective on what her future could become.

“I am more excited about discovering new fields, gaining diverse experiences and remaining open to career paths that align with my interests and strengths as they continue to develop,” she says.

Recruitment for next year’s Alumni Mentorship Program will begin over the summer, with invitations and program details shared via email. Check the program webpage frequently for updates, as well, at dornsife.usc.edu/careerpathways/mentorship-programs/.

Just weeks after graduating from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Darnell Adler won the top prize in a global innovation competition for students and first-time founders.

Adler’s startup, Lifeline AI, won Red Bull Basement’s 2026 World Final in San Francisco, earning $100,000 in equity-free funding, $25,000 in Microsoft Azure credits and mentorship from Red Bull Ventures.

The competition drew more than 135,000 ideas from 40 countries. Adler’s winning concept is a personal safety platform designed to help people discreetly call for help in moments when taking out a phone and speaking or dialing 911 may be unsafe.

For Adler, who graduated in May with a degree in economics from USC Dornsife, the victory capped a whirlwind few weeks that included final exams, graduation and two rounds of high-stakes pitching. It also brought him back to his hometown, where his family was in the audience when Lifeline AI was named the global winner.

USC Dornsife News spoke with Adler about the idea behind Lifeline AI, what it was like to win on a world stage and how his USC Dornsife experience helped prepare him to build something he hopes will make people safer.

How did the idea for Lifeline AI begin?

When you’re a guy, you don’t always think about your own personal safety as much as other people might. What really sparked the idea was that something bad happened to someone close to me. That made me realize this wasn’t just something that could happen to someone I love. It’s a global issue.

I started running surveys and talking to people. In one survey with 137 people, 99% said they wished they had a safety tool like Lifeline AI. That helped me understand how many people could use something like this and how important it is to build tools that can help make the world safer for the people we love.

What does Lifeline AI do, and how does it work?

Lifeline AI is everything in a police report delivered in seconds, without ever taking your phone out of your pocket.

It allows someone to trigger a silent SOS without anyone around them knowing. With one gesture, nobody hears it and nobody sees it, but the important information from that situation can be sent to the people who need it — friends, trusted contacts or even emergency responders.

How did the idea evolve as you developed it?

At first, I had a product that was completely different. I wasn’t necessarily thinking enough about what consumers would actually want or use.

So I went to potential users and asked them directly: “This is what I have. Would this work?” And they told me straight up, “No, this is not what we need. This is not what we would use.”

Taking that feedback completely changed the product. It pushed me to build a tool designed around the moments when people need help most.

How did you get involved with Red Bull Basement?

I had no clue what Red Bull Basement was.

I played club lacrosse at USC, and our team manager was a Red Bull student marketeer. She told me I should apply. I’m pretty sure it was one of the last days to apply, and I think I got my application in with about 15 minutes left.

Thank God I did.

What was it like to hear Lifeline AI named the global winner?

I still don’t think I have the words for it.

There was a lot going through my head. I never thought I’d be in that position. Being in my hometown of San Francisco, surrounded by the other finalists, who were all congratulating me, and hearing my family a couple of aisles away; it was surreal.

Just hearing everyone so excited, and knowing that Lifeline AI can actually help build a safer world, was an incredible feeling.

You graduated from USC Dornsife just before the World Final. What was that stretch like?

During finals week, I actually had to push some of my finals because I had the Red Bull Basement national final. I was trying to prepare my product, understand my pitch and study for five different courses at the same time.

Once I walked across the stage at graduation, I felt like a weight had been lifted. Then I went fully into build mode.

Being able to walk at graduation and then walk across the World Final stage — and receive that recognition — is hard to put into words.

Why did you choose economics at USC Dornsife?

Economics is such a broad and powerful major. It gives you the ability to go into so many different areas, including real estate, quantitative work and entrepreneurship.

I also had some of the best professors in economics. They helped me understand myself and how to think about the things I wanted to build. All credit to Dornsife.

How did your USC Dornsife education help prepare you for this moment?

Everything I learned in class helped me think about building products.

In statistics, for example, I worked on projects using regressions and thinking through real estate markets. I was always taking things I learned in class and bringing them into products I was passionate about.

USC Dornsife also gives you the ability to figure yourself out. It’s broad enough that you can explore different avenues, but it also pushes you to make the most of your time. At USC, every person you meet can open another door.

What’s next for Lifeline AI?

Because Lifeline AI deals with people’s lives, trust is the most important thing. We have to take things one step at a time and make sure we get it right.

The goal is for Lifeline AI to become the global standard for calling for help — until no one has to choose between their safety and their silence.

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The ocean is full of invisible workers. Trillions of microbes quietly break down carbon-containing organic matter, which helps to regulate Earth’s climate. But scientists have long struggled to understand how different microbes contribute to the process.

Now, researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and collaborators have developed a new way to make sense of that hidden workforce. Their study, published recently in Science Advances, identifies a small set of “metabolic niches” — or functional roles — that help explain how marine microbes grow, compete for resources and recycle carbon around the globe.

“These microbes are incredibly diverse, but we found that their behavior can be grouped into a manageable number of strategies,” said study lead scientist Naomi Levine, professor of biological sciences, quantitative and computational biology, and Earth sciences at USC Dornsife. “That gives us a much clearer way to connect microbial life to the carbon cycle.”

USC Dornsife scientists map the ocean’s invisible workforce

Marine microbes play a central role in Earth’s climate. Some of these single-cell organisms use photosynthesis to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules such as sugars, while others — including the microbes Levine’s team studied — consume those molecules as food, releasing much of the carbon back into the ocean as carbon dioxide. This cyclic process helps shape how much carbon the ocean stores versus sends back into the atmosphere.

But scientists have struggled to predict how these processes work because microbial communities are so complex. Thousands of species can coexist in a single bucket of ocean water.

“The big challenge has been figuring out how to simplify that complexity without losing what really matters,” said Levine, who holds the Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering.

To tackle this problem, the research team analyzed genetic data from thousands of marine microbes collected around the world. Using that information, they built computer models that simulate how each organism uses different types of food — sugars, amino acids or organic acids — to grow. The team then simulated how each microbe responded when certain nutrients were limited. This revealed which resources each organism depends on most.

From these patterns, the researchers used a machine learning approach to group microbes into eight broad clusters, each representing a different metabolic strategy to obtain and use nutrients.

Some clusters included fast-growing “generalists” that can use a wide range of food sources. Others consisted of slower growing “specialists” that rely on specific types of nutrients.

“It’s a little like categorizing people by how they eat,” Levine said. “Some will eat almost anything, while others depend on very particular diets. Those differences shape how they live and where they thrive.”

The eight metabolic groups help explain how microbial communities vary across the ocean.

For example, generalists were more common in nutrient-rich environments like coastal waters, especially where rivers meet the sea. In contrast, slower-growing specialists were more prevalent in the open ocean, where nutrients are scarce.

These patterns suggest that microbial communities are structured by trade-offs. Organisms that grow quickly tend to be flexible in what they eat, while those that grow slowly are often more specialized.

Why microbial groupings matter for climate

The findings could improve how scientists model the ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle.

Current climate models often struggle to represent microbial activity because of its complexity. By reducing microbial diversity into a small number of functional groups, the new framework makes it easier to include these processes in large-scale models.

That could lead to better predictions of how the ocean will respond to climate change — including how much carbon it will store in the future.

“If we want to understand climate, we have to understand the microbes,” Levine said. “They’re the engines driving carbon cycling in the ocean.”

The study builds on earlier research, including a 2025 study done in collaboration with USC Dornsife Professor of Biological Sciences Jed Fuhrman’s group and led by Emily Zakem, a former postdoc in Levine’s lab who is now at Carnegie Science.

That study used ecological models to describe how microbial communities vary across the ocean and showed that broad categories of microbes — such as fast-growing “copiotrophs” and slower “oligotrophs” — can explain large-scale patterns in carbon cycling.

The new study adds more nuance to that picture. Instead of grouping microbes based mainly on ecological traits, it identifies specific metabolic strategies based on what organisms can actually consume and how they respond to resource limits.

Together, the two studies suggest a path forward: combining ecological models with detailed metabolic information to better understand how microbial communities shape the carbon cycle.

USC Dornsife study simplifies a vast microbial world

The researchers note that their framework does not capture all microbial diversity. In particular, some groups of ocean microbes are still poorly represented because scientists lack high-quality genetic data for them.

In addition, the models rely on predictions about how microbes use nutrients, which may not fully reflect real-world behavior.

Future studies, including more laboratory experiments and improved genomic data, could refine the model and expand it to include additional microbial groups.

Still, despite these limitations, the research offers a promising step toward understanding one of the most complex systems on Earth.

By identifying a small number of metabolic strategies among these tiny but highly influential organisms, the researchers provide a new way to connect microscopic processes to global climate dynamics.

“We’re trying to take something incredibly complicated and find the underlying patterns,” Levine said. “Once you see those patterns, it becomes much easier to understand how the whole system works.”

About the study

In addition to Levine, study authors include Ryan Reynolds, Anna Weiss, Chase James, Conner Kojima and J. Cameron Thrash from USC Dornsife, and Jackie Weissman from Stony Brook University and The City College of New York.

The study was funded by Simons Foundation grants 542389, LS-SIAME-00001961 and LS-SIAME-00001997, and National Science Foundation grants EF-2125191 and OCE-1945279.

On May 28, 15 faculty and staff members at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences were recognized for their exceptional service. While their responsibilities and areas of expertise vary widely, they are united in their demonstrated commitment to academic excellence and education.

“It’s fitting that we celebrate excellence and remind ourselves of how fortunate we are to work alongside some of the most talented and hard-working people anywhere,” said USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock during the award ceremony. “Everyone in this room brings so much value to our mission.”

Ten faculty members received Albert S. Raubenheimer Awards, which recognize outstanding scholarship, teaching and service within the university.

Five staff members who demonstrated exceptional service to USC Dornsife were given Outstanding Staff Achievement Awards.

Albert S. Raubenheimer Outstanding Senior Faculty Award

Andrea Ballestero, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Ballestero is the founder and director of The Ethnography Studio, a laboratory for ethnographic research and collaboration. She is also the author of the award-winning book A Future History of Water. Her scholarship has earned support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Mellon Foundation and other prestigious sources.

Ballestero serves as the director of graduate studies for the anthropology department, where she has modernized the doctoral program. She is particularly regarded for her skills as an organizer.

“Many of her projects are collaborative and highly generative for those involved in them; her activities and contributions are in this sense more than a sum of their considerable parts,” notes her nomination.

Colleen McQuillen, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

McQuillen’s groundbreaking work on Russian modernism, cultural performance and extractive industries has significantly advanced knowledge in her field. She is also a creative teacher and department leader.

“If one were allowed only two phrases to describe Colleen McQuillen, they would be ‘unceasingly innovative’ and ‘determined to make things work,’” her nomination form states.

She has mentored struggling doctoral students to successful dissertation completion while taking on a high level of responsibility, serving  as department chair and interim Russian Language Program dDirector, and supervising the German Language Program. She is currently president-elect of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages and is working on a book, Mining the Earth, Fueling Modernity.

Carolyn Phillips, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

A leading researcher in RNA biology, Phillips has sustained an impressive record of scientific achievement through continuous federal funding while at USC Dornsife as well as honors such as the Pew Scholar Award and the March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Award. Her influential scholarship has appeared in top journals.

In her role as director of graduate studies for the molecular biology PhD program, she has provided thoughtful and steady leadership, improving student mentorship, retention and program stability, says her nomination. As co-developer of “Hypothesis Design and Scientific Writing” (BISC 546), she created an course that helped six students secure prestigious fellowships from the National Institutes of Health.

Remo Rohs, Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, Computer Science, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering

Rohs has made transformative contributions to research and education at USC Dornsife. His discoveries on DNA shape and transcription factor specificity fundamentally reshaped understanding of gene regulation and established new frameworks now widely used across regulatory genomics and machine learning.

He has published nearly 100 influential papers, secured major grant support and earned recognition as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Society for Computational Biology, and the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence.

As founding chair of the Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, Rohs built a robustly interdisciplinary structure and developed innovative programs that have become a cornerstone of quantitative biology education at USC.

Emily Smith-Greenaway, Dean’s Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and Spatial Sciences

Smith-Greenaway has advanced influential approaches to understanding bereavement, mortality, family dynamics and health inequality, producing research that has reshaped scholarly conversations and informed public understanding during the COVID-19 pandemic.

She has earned support from prestigious funding agencies as well as national recognition that includes the ASA Distinguished Early Career Award and a prestigious NSF Mid-Career Award.

At USC Dornsife, she is an award-winning educator and mentor whose courses in demography and population studies are central to undergraduate and doctoral training. Her extensive contributions include service as vice chair of sociology and Dean’s Fellow for the social sciences.

Sherry Velasco, Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Gender Studies

Velasco has spent her career developing creative and engaging approaches to early modern Spanish literature, helping students connect historical texts to contemporary visual culture and performance.

Her scholarship on gender and sexuality in early modern Spain — including pioneering books on transgender identity, female same-sex desire and gender in the Spanish empire — has been highly regarded among her peers.

Velasco has served multiple terms as department chair, with one stint overlapping with her role as chair of French and Italian, and as Divisional Dean for the Humanities. “While holding this decanal position, Sherry was invariably approachable, available and effective,” says her nomination. She is now directing the PhD program in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture.

Albert S. Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty

Jake Monaghan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Monaghan’s teaching has received rave reviews from students, who have described his classes as “fantastic,” “great” and “the best class” they have taken at USC. He’s been particularly involved in two of the philosophy department’s most popular degree offerings, Philosophy, Politics and Law, and Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), leading the creation of a new capstone course for advanced PPE students.

His scholarship has drawn significant attention, particularly his 2023 book Just Policing, which has been noted as a major contribution to contemporary debates on policing and justice. After reading his book, the Buffalo Police Department contacted Monaghan to request his assistance on pilot projects related to foot patrols.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a junior colleague demonstrate such a commitment to academic and public service so early in their career,” says his nominating form.

Christina Davidson, Assistant Professor of History

Since arriving at USC Dornsife, Davidson has significantly expanded the department’s offerings in Caribbean history, developing new courses on the Haitian Revolution, Afro–Latin America, and the cultural history of the Caribbean.

Her research examines Black internationalism, religion, race-making, and U.S. empire across the Caribbean and Atlantic world. Her award-winning first book, Dominican Crossroads, has received major recognition, and she is currently at work on her second book, Spiritual Warfare, examining the impact of missionaries in Latin America.

Davidson has contributed actively to undergraduate mentoring, departmental initiatives and professional service, serving continuously on the department’s Undergraduate Studies Committee, and is emerging as a magnet for graduate student interest.

Michael “Doc” Edge, Assistant Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology

Edge’s work uses large-scale genetic data to address pressing questions about human traits, evolution and genetic privacy. His research has appeared in leading journals and has attracted national media attention, including The New York Times and PBS News.

He has developed multiple core undergraduate and graduate courses and is widely recognized for his dedication to student learning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he met with struggling students one-on-one weekly to ensure they met objectives. His commitment to teaching is reflected in his popular textbook Statistical Thinking from Scratch: A Primer for Scientists.

He has contributed extensively to the department, including key faculty hires, the PhD Admissions Committee, and initiatives focused on culture and belonging in the scientific community.

Sam Silva, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Population and Public Health Sciences

Silva is building an ambitious research lab spanning environmental data science, atmospheric chemistry, pollution, climate and public health. His work combining machine learning with physical and chemical modeling is reshaping environmental systems research.

In a short period, he has produced an exceptional publication record and secured nearly $3 million in external funding — including a prestigious NSF CAREER Award. “Dr. Silva’s record of scholarship looks more like that of someone going up for tenure than that of someone finishing their fourth year at USC,” says his nomination form.

He has also developed a variety of new courses in environmental data science, climate and health and pollution science and serves as faculty advisor for the undergraduate geology club. Since 2025, he’s been collaborating on a soil testing project assessing the lead content of soil in areas impacted by the Los Angeles fires.

Outstanding Staff Awards

Melissa Hernandez-Beatty, Academic Program Manager, Academic Support Hub – Social Sciences

Hernandez-Beatty has demonstrated exceptional leadership skills across her nearly two decades of support to the Department of Sociology and, more recently, the Social Sciences Hub.

Since joining USC in 2007, she has advanced through multiple administrative roles, consistently demonstrating professionalism, initiative and care for students, faculty and staff alike.

During the transition to the Hub model, Hernandez-Beatty has played a central role in maintaining continuity across departments and ensuring that essential processes continue smoothly.

Katherine Guevarra, Academic Program Manager, Academic Support Hub – Humanities

Guevarra has been an indispensable presence within USC’s humanities programs for more than 15 years. Known for her calm problem-solving and deep institutional knowledge, she has managed the complexities of interdisciplinary graduate programs, supported international students through difficult visa and immigration processes, and stepped in during moments of crisis to keep departmental operations running smoothly.

As the academic program manager,, she has played a crucial role in guiding several departments through the transition to the new Humanities Hub model.

“Her drive and determination are coupled not only with exceptional acumen but also with a rare commitment to community building at all levels of the university,” notes her nomination.

Christopher Huntley, IT Director of Operations, Dornsife Technology Services

As a leader in enterprise systems and infrastructure operations, Huntley has overseen major improvements to USC Dornsife’s security environment, cloud and on-premises systems, and operational reliability. His efforts have significantly enhanced the College’s resilience in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

Beyond his technical accomplishments, Huntley is widely valued for his collaborative approach and steady leadership on high-impact initiatives. He he has become a trusted resource and key contributor to the College’s long-term strategic success.

Dieuwertje Jasmijn Kast, Director of STEM Education Programs at the Joint Educational Project (JEP)

At JEP, Kast develops hands-on learning experiences that make complex scientific ideas accessible and engaging for young students and teachers, contributing to one of the university’s most longstanding and beloved outreach programs.

Among her most influential accomplishments is the creation of the STEAM-Powered Careers children’s book series, a collaboration that has reached tens of thousands of students. She has also built strong partnerships across USC and with external organizations. Equally important is her commitment to mentorship, fostering the growth of USC student educators while cultivating inclusive and forward-looking programming.

Karen Young, Academic Program Manager, Academic Support Hub – Math and Physical Sciences

A USC alumna and longtime administrator, Young is widely admired for her extraordinary dedication to USC Dornsife.

Whether helping departments navigate the transition to the new hub model or coordinating research support in remote field locations — including funding for mules so a research team could bring samples down a mountain — Young approaches every challenge with professionalism and genuine care.

“In the almost five years that I have worked at USC in the Earth sciences department, it has become clear to me that Karen Young is the biggest reason the department functions at a high level on a day-to-day basis,” says one nominator.

The annual Communicator of the Year awards honor scholars at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences who share their expertise to help the public better understand important issues and elevate civic and cultural discourse.

This year’s honorees explored topics ranging from war and global politics to climate change, coral reefs, artificial intelligence, literature and mysterious microbial life deep beneath Earth’s surface.

Humanities: David Ulin

David Ulin, professor of the practice of English, was recognized for his extensive contributions to public literary and cultural discourse.

Last year, Ulin published essays and commentary in outlets including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and Alta, while also helping bring acclaimed writers and thinkers to USC through the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.

Following L.A.’s devastating wildfires, Ulin’s essays helped readers grapple not only with the destruction itself, but with its broader emotional and cultural implications. He also continued championing literature and public dialogue through lectures, interviews, panel discussions and the English department’s literary journal Air/Light.

Social Sciences: Robert English

Robert English, associate professor of international relations, environmental studies, and Slavic languages and literatures, has become one of USC Dornsife’s most visible public experts on global affairs in 2025.

As conflicts involving Russia, Ukraine and NATO dominated international headlines, English gave more than 100 interviews last year, appearing on CNN, BBC, NBC and broadcasters across Europe, Asia and the Middle East as well as local media.

Known for bringing historical perspective and calm analysis to politically charged issues, English helped audiences better understand some of the world’s most complex geopolitical developments while elevating USC Dornsife’s profile on the international stage.

Math and Physical Sciences: Karen Lloyd

Karen Lloyd, Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and professor of Earth sciences, was honored for helping broad audiences better understand one of Earth’s strangest and least understood ecosystems: microbial life deep beneath the planet’s surface.

Her acclaimed 2025 book, Intraterrestrials, received praise from publications including Nature, New Scientist and Popular Science, and became a Wall Street Journal holiday gift guide selection.

In addition to interviews, podcasts and public talks around the world, Lloyd engaged audiences through a Dornsife Dialogue and a Reddit AMA. Her work has helped transform highly specialized science into stories that are accessible, adventurous and full of wonder.

Life Sciences: Carly Kenkel

Carly Kenkel, associate professor of biological sciences and Wilford and Daris Zinsmeyer Early Career Chair in Marine Studies, was recognized for her extensive public engagement surrounding climate change, coral reefs and conservation.

Last year, as two iconic reef-building coral species were declared functionally extinct across Florida’s reefs, Kenkel helped audiences understand the ecological urgency and broader implications of coral loss through interviews, public talks, social media, videos and articles for general audiences.

In addition to communicating science directly to the public, Kenkel has mentored students and young researchers in science communication, helping train the next generation of public-facing scholars.

PhD Student: Jackson Trager

Jackson Trager, a PhD candidate in psychology, was honored for thoughtful public scholarship exploring artificial intelligence, morality, policing and wealth inequality.

His widely read article for The Conversation examining public attitudes toward extreme wealth was republished dozens of times and sparked interviews and broader public discussion. He also emerged as a thoughtful public voice on artificial intelligence, helping audiences better understand both its promise and its limitations in areas ranging from policing to moral reasoning.

Trager was recognized not only for the reach of his work, but for his ability to communicate politically sensitive topics with nuance, clarity and intellectual humility while engaging journalists, policymakers and public audiences alike.

More than 2,000 of the nation’s top middle and high school STEM students gathered at USC May 22–23 for the 42nd annual Science Olympiad National Tournament, one of the country’s most prestigious team science competitions and the first to be held in California.

The Olympiad brought 120 teams from across the United States to USC’s University Park Campus after they advanced through state competitions from an initial field of nearly 7,000 teams. Students competed in events spanning science, technology, engineering and math, including knowledge-based, lab and engineering challenges. A Global Ambassador Team from Okayama Asahi Senior High School in Japan also participated.

“This was a fantastic opportunity for USC to welcome some of the country’s most talented young scientists, engineers and problem-solvers,” said Selena Zhang, a neuroscience major at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and volunteer with SciBAT, a USC student organization whose members helped bring the event to campus. “Seeing them compete, collaborate and imagine what’s possible was exactly the kind of energy we hoped to bring to campus.”

More than 400 volunteers, including about 200 Trojans, supported the tournament, helping to guide teams and staff competitions, and to welcome students and families to campus.

The opening ceremony featured remarks from Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, who framed the tournament as an “Olympia of the mind and of the spirit,” with STEM as its arena of competition. He urged students to become not only problem solvers, but “trustworthy problem solvers” who combine competence with character.

In his keynote address, USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock spoke to students about the James Webb Space Telescope, using it as an example of how great engineering enables great science — and how scientific ambition can drive extraordinary engineering.

Bullock, an astrophysicist whose research explores galaxy formation, dark matter and fundamental questions about the universe, described the Webb telescope as a “civilization-defining achievement” and “perhaps the greatest engineering marvel of our generation.”

He also highlighted discoveries made possible by the telescope, from revealing how stars are formed to helping scientists study dark matter and detect galaxies that existed billions of years before Earth formed.

Looking at such an enormous and ancient universe can make people feel small, Bullock told the students — but he offered another way to see it.

“I want to remind you of something: You’re a member of the species that figured this out, and we have a lot more figuring out to do. And that’s your job.”

Throughout the tournament, which was co-sponsored by USC Dornsife and USC Viterbi, students tested their knowledge and skills in events such as Heredity, Forensics, Remote Sensing, Disease Detectives, Engineering CAD, and Water Quality. Other hands-on and device-based events included Hovercraft, Robot Tour, Electric Vehicle, Boomilever, and Helicopter.

The event also included a STEM Expo featuring hands-on activities, career exploration and college-going information from university departments and outside organizations.

The tournament ended with California teams taking top honors: Sierra Vista Middle School of Irvine earned the Division B national championship, while Monta Vista High School of Cupertino captured the Division C title.

Dan Nichols, executive director of Science Olympiad, reminded students that the event was about more than the final results.

“Science Olympiad has never been about medals or rankings or placements,” Nichols said. “It’s about learning how to persist when the answer is not obvious. It’s about trusting your teammates when the pressure is high, and it’s about discovering that growth often comes from the moments that challenge us the most.”

For many competitors, the weekend offered not only a national stage, but a glimpse of what their futures in science, technology, engineering or math could look like.

Watch highlights of the Science Olympiad at USC

Thanks to the Walt Disney Company, Pocahontas may be the most famous Native American who lived in the 17th century. The animated film version of her early life included her speaking with a willow tree, befriending animals, singing about “the colors of the wind,” and being caught up in an ill-fated romance with Captain John Smith.

The 1995 film created an enduring visual image of Pocahontas, and contained some details drawn from the historical record, though plenty is pure fiction. Smith was, in fact, one of the English colonists who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, soon after its founding in 1607. Pocahontas’ father Wahunsonacock — whom colonists and Disney called Powhatan — was the paramount chief of the Powhatans, who lived in communities along the edges of Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.

Only one portrait of Pocahontas from her lifetime exists — a sharp contrast with the Disney-drawn image most Americans know. And it speaks volumes about how the English saw colonization.

Powerful family

As I describe in my 2026 book, “Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000 to 1680,” Wahunsonacock was the most consequential political figure in early Virginia, the land Powhatans knew as Tsenacommacah. Through personal alliances and shrewd stratagems, he controlled perhaps 30 communities along the shores of Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.

Pocahontas, also known as Matoaka and Amonute, was probably about 10 or 11 years old when she encountered Smith in late 1607. At that moment he was a captive of her father, who, Smith later wrote, was about to have him killed. Though scholars believe Wahunsonacock was likely putting Smith through a ritual adoption, the colonist claimed Pocahontas saved his life.

In 1613, the English took Pocahontas captive during a conflict known as the first Anglo-Powhatan War. After obtaining his daughter’s freedom in 1614, Wahunsonacock approved her marriage to John Rolfe, who played a leading role the colony’s tobacco economy, and she converted to Christianity. Sometime between 1615 and 1617 she gave birth to their son, Thomas.

Pocahontas in England

Two years after the marriage, Pocahontas and Rolfe sailed to England, where she played a leading role in her father’s diplomatic mission.

During her stay in London, which included meeting King James I, Pocahontas sat for a portrait by the artist Simon van de Passe. Her clothing and pose echoed portraits of other elite English women of the era. The image emphasizes her tall stovepipe hat, ample lace collar, a dress with detailed embroidery or brocade, and a pearl earring dangling from her left ear.

In addition to her English clothing, Pocahontas holds a quill pen, suggesting that she had learned to write. Since Europeans considered literacy a crucial marker of civilization, the engraving highlights English hopes that Indigenous Americans could rapidly embrace the colonists’ culture.

Power of art

The engraving of Pocahontas was not the first image of Native peoples of the mid-Atlantic coastline circulating in England. Illustrations in one widely reprinted book played a crucial role in convincing the English to establish settlements in North America.

In the late 16th century, advocates of English colonization understood that descriptions of North America could make foreign territory more enticing to potential migrants. They wanted to demonstrate to English men and women that they could create profitable economies and coexist with Native peoples.

Some promoters recognized that watercolor images painted in 1585 by the artist John White depicting the Carolina Algonquians of the Outer Banks could perhaps generate interest — and investments. The promoters, who had ties to leading figures in the English court as well as to printers, also saw the benefits of an in-depth study of the region by the young English mathematician and writer Thomas Harriot, “A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia.” In 1590, the promoters worked with the Flemish printer Theodor de Bry to produce an illustrated version, which contained engravings based on White’s paintings.

The volume described Carolina Algonquians’ practices and enumerated commodities that could be extracted for profit. Some of the Native Americans depicted in these pages are clad with only a deerskin loincloth. Some of the women wear skirts but not tops.

To Europeans bred on the idea that clothing an entire body was a marker of civilization, these Alqonquians’ appearance was significant. People who colonizers considered “savages” were often depicted nude, like the Tainos whom Christopher Columbus encountered a century earlier. English men and women reading the book about the Algonquians, on the other hand, saw them as a people who would, under the right tutelage, adopt English-style culture — including Protestant Christianity.

“Some religion they have alreadie,” Harriot wrote in “A Briefe and True Report,” “which although it be farre from the truth, yet being as it is, there is hope it may been the easier and sooner reformed.”

To make the point that Native Americans could be converted to European culture, the engravers added depictions of ancient Britons, allegedly based on an old chronicle. Three of these images of Picts depicted them as nude, bearing tattoos more extensive than the Algonquians’. These individuals are also portrayed as more violent: A Pict man holds a head still dripping blood, with another head at his feet, while a Pict woman brandishes spears and a broadsword.

Reality check

When Pocahontas sat for Van de Passe, his portrait did more than create a resemblance of the young woman, who would die the following year, soon after leaving London — felled either by disease or, as a Virginia tribe’s oral history suggests, poison.

Like the images popularized by Harriot’s book, her portrait suggested that Native Americans would soon embrace English ways. Pocahontas herself, as the words on the engraving noted, had become Rebecca Rolfe after her marriage. In his writings, her husband celebrated her conversion to the Anglican faith. The proof of the model of cultural conversion seemed to be on plain view in the portrait.

Pocahontas’ father died in 1618. Four years later, the Powhatans launched a rebellion against English colonists. On March 22, 1622, under the direction of a war captain named Opechancanough, they killed approximately one-fourth of the colonists in Virginia. The English labeled the violence a “barbarous massacre” and launched a war of vengeance, which included a mass poisoning of Powhatans in 1623 — an action that the English at the time knew violated the emerging law of war.

Seeing Pocahontas poised on a chair, wearing an elegant hat and holding a quill pen, the English had assumed that Native Americans would embrace the colonizers’ ways. March 1622 proved them wrong.

Peter C. Mancall, Distinguished Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the Early Modern Studies Institute, and professor of history, anthropology, and economics, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The alumni magazine of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has earned a 2026 Bronze Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America, recognizing the magazine and its success in extending research and alumni storytelling beyond print.

The magazine earned the top award in the magazines category for its 2025 issues, themed “Life” and “Family,” which combined compelling storytelling, distinctive visual design and multimedia engagement to explore topics ranging from microbiology and neuroscience to family dynamics and alumni experiences.

The judges praised the magazine’s “multi-platform execution” and described it as a “technically sophisticated communications package” that extends “well beyond the publication itself through events, social media, video and broader institutional storytelling.”

Published twice a year by the USC Dornsife Office of Communication, the magazine is distributed primarily to alumni and is designed to make faculty research accessible and meaningful to broad audiences.

Each issue is also published as an interactive digital edition and supported through companion videos, social media storytelling, media outreach, live events and public forums. Stories are regularly amplified through channels including USC News, alumni newsletters and Dornsife Dialogues events, while an Advancement Tool Kit developed by the communications team helps fundraising staff identify stories relevant to donor interests.

“We believe in the power of print publications, but we also think of the magazine as a storytelling platform that can engage audiences across many channels,” said Jim Key, senior associate dean for communication and marketing at USC Dornsife. “This recognition reflects the creativity and collaboration of an outstanding communications team and the compelling stories we’re fortunate to tell.”

One example cited in the award entry involved a magazine feature on Professor of Earth Sciences and Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies Karen Lloyd’s research to discover and study life in unusual places. The story expanded into a Reddit AMA, explainer video and live Dornsife Dialogue, generating discussion among thousands of users. Astronaut and former International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield later shared the story with his roughly 2 million followers on X, calling it “worth reading.”

“Great research deserves great storytelling,” said USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock. “This award reflects the extraordinary work of our communication team to connect alumni and the public with the ideas, discovery and people that define USC Dornsife.”

The award also recognized measurable audience engagement and institutional impact. Judges noted the magazine’s growing digital readership, strong visual storytelling and role in supporting donor cultivation and stewardship.

Darnell Adler, a recent graduate of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been named one of three U.S. winners of a global innovation competition for students and first-time founders called Red Bull Basement.

Adler’s startup, Lifeline AI, earned him a spot in the competition’s world final, where he will represent the United States on June 3, competing against first-time founders from more than 40 countries. The overall winner will receive $100,000 to help advance their idea.

Red Bull Basement, presented in partnership with Microsoft and AMD, invites participants to develop technology-driven ideas with the support of AI tools, mentorship and pitch opportunities. This year’s U.S. competition drew more than 24,000 applications. From that pool, 65 applicants were invited to submit video pitches, 15 advanced to the national final in Detroit and three were selected to move on to the world stage.

Adler, who graduated this year with an economics degree from USC Dornsife, developed Lifeline AI as a personal safety platform designed to connect users with emergency responders and trusted contacts without requiring them to take out their phone. His concept addresses moments when calling for help may be difficult or dangerous, such as when someone is being followed, threatened or attacked.

“We’re redesigning emergency infrastructure because existing safety tools fail at the exact moments when you need them the most,” Adler told Red Bull. “This idea can genuinely save lives.”

Following his victory in the U.S. competition, Adler reflected on the scale of the achievement. “Getting to bring that mission to a world stage is something I don’t have the words for yet.”

At the world final, Adler and the other national winners will pitch their ideas to an international audience of innovation leaders, industry partners and fellow founders. This year’s competition culminates in Adler’s hometown of San Francisco — the first time the world final has been held in the U.S.

“Darnell’s success reflects the imagination, ambition and problem-solving spirit we hope every USC Dornsife student carries into the world,” said USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock. “Lifeline AI is a powerful example of using ideas and technology in service of people’s safety and well-being, and we’ll be cheering him on as he takes this innovation to the global stage.”

I teach writing and rhetoric, but my college students and I often overlook a surprisingly complicated question: What is writing?

And can artificial intelligence really do it?

Many people think of “writing” as putting words on a page. However, even from very early on, writers have seen their craft as something more. From Enheduanna, the first named author on record, to Plato and Aristotle, writing has been portrayed and defined in ways that suggest AI may not be “writing” at all.

If not, what should we call AI text? ChatGPT and I have an idea.

Praising and pleading

Enheduanna, who lived around 2,300 B.C.E., was a powerful princess, priestess and poet of the Akkadian Empire, in what is now Iraq. She has been celebrated as the earliest known writer, though the authorship of her poems and hymns is debated.

One of her poems, “The Exaltation of Inanna,” reveals a sense of what writing is and does — portraying it as a living medium that expresses experience and shapes the future.

First, the poem praises the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Inanna, who was associated with fertility and war, among other powers. “My Lady, you are the guardian / Of all greatness,” Enheduanna says, in a translation by Jane Hirschfield.

That praise may be strategic. It is followed by Enheduanna’s plea to overthrow Lugal-Ane, a rebel king who she describes exiling her and taking her post at the temple of Ur. “Now I have been cast out / To the place of lepers,” she writes, describing her suffering. “Day comes, / And the brightness / Is hidden around me.”

Grieving, Enheduanna writes a new destiny. In a translation by Sophus Helle, the priestess envisions Inanna coming to her aid and “tear[ing] off this fate, Lugale-Ane.” And her pleading seems to be successful: The end of the poem depicts Enheduanna restored to her post.

In Enheduanna’s poetry, writing does not simply communicate information. It interacts with the present and changes the future. The priestess’s pleas please the goddess, move her heart, and she restore Enheduanna to her post — though historians have little evidence of whether an exile and return really happened.

But her poetry did have real-world influence, helping to create religious and political unity in the world’s first empire. For example, her writing merged the Sumerian goddess Inanna with the Akkadian goddess Ishtar, describing a single “Queen of Heaven.”

AI writing can be used to try to create change, such as by swaying someone’s political opinion. But it lacks the human emotions that make experiences like praise, gratitude and suffering possible — the emotions and motivations that make writing a living medium with real-world effects.

Transforming over informing

Two thousand years after Enheduanna, Plato and his student Aristotle offered another influential view of writing — one that complements hers.

In the “Phaedrus,” which discusses the relationship between love and rhetoric, Plato famously defines writing as a poor copy of speech. Speech’s job is to represent thoughts; thoughts, in turn, represent knowledge and truth. Similarly, Aristotle writes, “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words.”

Even that definition marks a sharp contrast with AI, which lacks thoughts and mental experiences. Its output proceeds from data aggregation and text generation.

To understand what writing is, we also need to look at what it does. Although Plato elevates speech over writing, he suggests in “Phaedrus” that good writing may lead a learner toward truth and knowledge. Similar to Enheduanna, he employs writing as a tool for change, both inside and outside the text.

In Plato’s dialogues, characters often radically change their opinions. And today, almost 2,500 years after his death, the philosopher’s real-world impact is clear. For instance, universities and colleges today are collectively called the “Academy” because that was the name of Plato’s group, the first institution of higher learning in the West. English scholar Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote that all Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.”

Aristotle’s voluminous works, too, show writing’s purpose transcends communication. In “Rhetoric,” for instance, he details ways to make writing persuasive. Aristotle defines rhetoric as a way of “moving souls,” not just exchanging knowledge.

For both of the Greek philosophers, then, writing is more about transformation than information.

Today, however, AI tools’ popularity may make writing less dynamic and less moving. Use of AI risks a “blandification” of writing, according to a study led by computer science professor Natasha Jaques. In other words, much AI writing today lacks distinct voices, making it sound the same — which could make people’s thinking more similar, too.

‘Generwriting’

Overall, these three ancient authors agree that writing emerges from thoughts and experiences — a process that strives to create change. Enheduanna, Plato and Aristotle also agree that writing’s essence transcends the simple summaries and information transmission common to AI output today.

Although AI can generate creative texts, its writing may not “move souls” the way human writing does. Several studies show a “pro-human attribution bias” or an “AI penalty,” meaning that people prefer human writing even when AI writing is stylistically similar. People want to read what other people write, not what an algorithm pumps out.

Perhaps we need a different word for AI’s output. Common terms today include “generative content” and “synthetic text,” but I wondered if I could land on something simpler — and involve AI itself. After prompting and tweaking ChatGPT over and over, I settled on one word: “generwrite.”

Though AI is here to stay, new words may help distinguish types of text. And as Enheduanna, Plato and Aristotle remind us, there are elements of writing that may always be unique to embodied, thinking beings striving to move souls.

Ryan Leack, Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Writing, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A devastating earthquake in Myanmar is giving scientists new insight into how major quakes start, spread and grow. The findings could improve risk estimates for dangerous faults around the world.

A new study, published in the journal Science and led by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, finds that faults that appear structurally simple can produce surprisingly complex earthquakes.

The research focuses on the magnitude 7.7 quake that struck near Mandalay, Myanmar, in March 2025, killing more than 3,600 people and causing damage estimated at up to 14% of the country’s economy.

It also puzzled scientists.

The Sagaing Fault, where the quake occurred, is long and relatively smooth, without the sharp bends or major branches that often help explain why a rupture stops in one place and spreads in another.

“The Sagaing Fault looks relatively simple, but this earthquake ruptured across multiple sections of it,” said Sylvain Barbot, professor of Earth sciences at USC Dornsife and senior researcher on the study. “That raises an important question: What controls how large earthquakes grow?”

Study rattles long-held earthquake assumptions

To investigate, the scientists used satellite radar data to map how the ground shifted during the quake. They then combined those observations with computer models that simulate how stress builds up and releases along faults over hundreds to thousands of years. The rupture stretched about 450 kilometers — roughly the distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The analysis pointed to an important driver of earthquake behavior: Different parts of a fault don’t move at the same rate. Over time, even modest differences — sometimes just 10% to 20% — can build uneven stress along the fault, influencing where earthquakes start, how far they spread and whether they remain confined or jump into neighboring segments.

“Even on a relatively straight fault, small differences in how nearby sections move over time can influence whether a rupture remains contained or grows into something much larger,” said Mingqi Liu, the study’s corresponding author, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral scholar at USC Dornsife and is now at ENS Paris.

In the researchers’ simulations, those differences caused ruptures to break into segments or, in some cases, to jump from one segment to another. That may help explain why the 2025 Myanmar quake didn’t stop where scientists might have expected.

The findings also challenge the long-standing seismic gap hypothesis, which holds that a stretch of fault that hasn’t ruptured in a long time may be due for a major quake.

But in Myanmar, the rupture appears to have started outside a known seismic gap, then continued through it and beyond.

“Seismic gaps can tell you where stress might be building,” Liu said. “But they don’t necessarily tell you where a quake will start — or how far it will go.”

New earthquake insights matter beyond Myanmar

Many major faults around the world — including California’s San Andreas Fault and New Zealand’s Alpine Fault — are relatively simple in shape. If long-term differences in motion can influence earthquake behavior on the Sagaing Fault, similar processes may be at work on other major faults, as well.

That broader relevance is where the research may have practical value. “We’re getting to a point where we can start making more meaningful assessments of seismic hazard,” Barbot said. “The same kind of modeling could be applied to places like California or Turkey to better understand what future earthquakes might look like.”

The findings suggest that scientists need to look beyond a fault’s visible structure and pay closer attention to how it moves over time.

The researchers emphasize that earthquake modeling remains inherently challenging. Their simulations rely on some simplifying assumptions, and certain properties of real faults still can’t be measured directly. Even so, Barbot says the models reproduced the main features of the rupture and offer a useful framework for understanding how large earthquakes can grow.

Despite its limitations, the study highlights a broader shift in how scientists think about earthquake hazard. Rather than asking only where a fault might break, researchers are increasingly examining how the entire fault system evolves over time — and how past earthquakes leave behind stress patterns that shape the next one.

“Earthquakes have a kind of memory,” Liu said. “What happened before influences what happens next.”

Combining satellite data, geological records and advanced simulations may enable scientists to build better quake risk estimates for major faults and give communities clearer information about the hazards they face.

About the study

In addition to Barbot and Liu, authors on the study include Binhao Wang and Sezim Guvercin at USC Dornsife; Zhen Li and Teng Wang of Peking University; and Chuanjin Liu and Lingyun Ji of the China Earthquake Administration.

The study was funded by U.S. National Science Foundation grant EAR-1848192, the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc Mobility Fellowship P500PN 214251, and National Natural Science Foundation of China grants 42374019 and 42474013.

Editor’s Note: Jim Key and Darrin S. Joy contributed to this story.

After earning his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Minnesota, Charles Lehnen was about to apply to medical school when he began having second thoughts.

“I felt like I was just checking another box on my to-do list,” he recalled.

His then girlfriend, Jilla Nadimi, asked him, “What do you want to do with your life?”

“Actually,” he responded, “I’d like to go to the Galapagos Islands and study giant tortoises.”

Nadimi was shocked but supportive. She was working on elections for the City of Minneapolis but was craving a change.

Soon after that discussion, the couple sold their belongings, bought some backpacks and moved to the Galapagos archipelago off the coast of Ecuador.

“It felt like it was the place I was supposed to be,” recalled Lehnen, who as a kid was obsessed with tortoises. He had a stuffed turtle collection and loved to hunt for insects.

Now, a little more than a decade later, he’s about to receive his PhD in integrative and evolutionary biology from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

A model PhD candidate at USC Dornsife

Lehnen’s research on rewilding Galapagos tortoises to the islands has earned praise from key mentors at USC Dornsife.

“He’s done important and fascinating work,” says Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology Craig Stanford, who has conducted extensive field research on wild great apes, monkeys and reptiles.

Cameron Egan, associate professor (teaching) of biological sciences and director of undergraduate studies for the department, nominated Lehnen for an outstanding teaching assistant (TA) of the year award, which Lehnen won. Only three TAs throughout the entire university win the award each year. As a TA in Egan’s “Ecology and Biodiversity” (BISC404) course, Lehnen designed the lab.

“His expertise, dedication and initiative have been nothing short of essential to the success of this course and the enrichment of our ecological course offerings at USC,” Egan said.

Challenging field work on the Galapagos islands

Lehnen’s research while at USC Dornsife involved several three-week field studies on Santa Fe Island, a small land mass in the middle of the Galapagos Archipelago. He and his team — in conjunction with the Galapagos Conservancy and the Galapagos National Park Directorate — researched the effects of introducing tortoises from a lineage similar to that of another, extinct lineage of the cold-blooded herbivores, which can grow to weigh hundreds of pounds.

Giant tortoises once played a central role in shaping the island’s ecosystems, and the researchers hoped bringing them back would rebalance the ecosystem. For example, just this February, after more than 180 years of absence, giant tortoises returned to Floreana Island, and Lehnen’s studies help researchers predict the impacts of this reintroduction.

Lehnen says the field work is very challenging. Santa Fe Island is treeless and rocky, with almost no flat ground. It’s also home to spiders, snakes and giant venomous centipedes. And rats — lots of rats.

During each trip to Santa Fe Island, Lehnen and his three or four assistants were virtually cut off from the world save for a satellite internet connection at camp. Many days, the humidity rose to about 90% and temperatures exceeded 90 F.

There is no electricity and no fresh water, so each time a boat dropped them off, Lehnen and his team had to drag about four dozen, 5-gallon jugs up a steep hill to camp.

“It’s extremely challenging to live there — physically but also mentally,” Lehnen said. “I’ve learned how to guide people through the process.”

Galapagos island research mixes high- and low-tech

Lehnen employs sophisticated technology in his field research, including drones to detect minute changes in vegetation and machine learning to classify drone imagery. AI also is used to analyze images from camera traps set up around the island.

Lehnen and his team also perform low-tech tasks such as sampling the tortoises toenails and shells. By analyzing isotopes from these samples, they’re able to monitor the animals’ diets. They also study the interactions between the tortoises and the island’s iguanas.

The payoff for such research, Lehnen said, has been priceless.

“Throughout the world, it’s becoming more common to translocate organisms to different areas through reintroduction,” he said. “Can we develop standards for measuring the impacts? I see this as the future of conservation.”

A harrowing survival story of his own

In fall 2025, the unimaginable happened to Lehnen and Nadimi. The two were walking home from campus, about a block from home, when they were hit in the crosswalk by a car. They had been discussing dinner plans.

Nadimi rolled onto the car and smashed through the windshield.

Lehnen was flung at least 15 feet and landed in an intersection.

Nadimi had to be cut out of the windshield. It took doctors 16 hours to pluck glass fragments out of her. She suffered serious bruising and muscle atrophy and still is undergoing physical therapy. She may also require surgery.

Lehnen suffered severe back fractures that required emergency spinal surgeries.

“Doctors told me if I had tried to stand up and put weight on my spine, my spinal cord would have snapped and I would have been paralyzed at best,” he said. “They told me I came inches if not centimeters from death.”

He spent nearly a week in the hospital and underwent two weeks of inpatient rehab. He then spent months receiving at-home nursing and therapy followed by outpatient physical therapy that continues.

As a testament to his dedication, Lehnen was in the classroom this past semester despite the seriousness of his injuries, supporting students without missing a beat, Egan notes.

Nadimi also is graduating this spring with a master’s degree in public administration from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.

The couple are getting married in December. Lehnen’s goal is to have recovered enough to be able to dance at his wedding.

Value in USC’s interdisciplinary opportunities

After the wedding and honeymoon, when he completely heals, Lehnen plans to get back to field work. He is applying for post-doctorate jobs with the goal of someday becoming a professor.

Lehnen said he appreciates the interdisciplinary nature of earning a PhD at USC Dornsife. He took many courses in the geospatial program and computer science and machine learning classes at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

“I’ve worked with engineers, geographers, computer scientists and more,” he said. “They’ve given me a totally different perspective on my studies.”

And how did Lehnen spend spring break in this, his final year? Helping a fellow professor teach an ecology course on the Colorado Plateau, Utah, and in the Mojave Desert.

The course was on how to properly handle lizards.

“That’s what I do for fun,” Lehnen says.

Born three months premature at just 45 ounces, Jason Toliao spent his first weeks of life under the close watch of staff at a San Jose, Calif., hospital, a prelude to the regular interaction with doctors Toliao would endure throughout his childhood years.

As a toddler, Toliao braved weekly hospital visits to treat complications from jaundice and severe asthma. Though the frequent hospital visits subsided as Toliao matured, headaches, dizziness and MRI scans continued. Vigilant doctors, however, helped Toliao develop into an active, healthy young adult prepared to attend college 350 miles away from his childhood home.

“Because of the care and compassion doctors showed me, I wanted to be one myself,” says Toliao, a student at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences majoring in neuroscience.

Fellow USC Dornsife senior Taylor Renneker, a biological sciences major, shares a similar tale.

The Las Vegas native battled severe asthma in childhood as well as an oral allergy syndrome requiring sharp-eyed attention to her diet. As she grew into adolescence, she often felt nudged to the sidelines and discounted, questioned and analyzed.

Renneker decided to pursue a career in medicine, eager to understand her own health battles and help others navigate their own health challenges.

As their May 15 USC Dornsife graduation nears, both Toliao and Renneker are now preparing for medical school, eager to take the next steps in personal journeys motivated by childhood struggles and enlivened by USC experiences that broadened their minds and sharpened their purpose.

Graduating senior embraces a commitment to care

On Toliao’s first day at USC, he sent an email to Peter Chiarelli, a respected neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA). Toliao inquired about shadowing Chiarelli. The doctor obliged and later offered Toliao a research position. Chiarelli also introduced Toliao to Pradip Chaudhari, a CHLA-based physician and associate professor of clinical pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Powered by Chiarelli and Chaudhari’s mentorship, as well as a USC Provost’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship and a Goldwater Scholarship, Toliao pursued multiple projects across his undergraduate years centered on improving brain imaging for children. He investigated the use of rapid MRI scans as well as new, portable MRI systems. He also helped develop MRI sequences to improve care for patients with hydrocephalus, a potentially fatal condition caused by the buildup of fluid in the brain.

“The brain is one of the most important organs in the body, yet it is still very unknown, which is why I love studying it,” says Toliao, who also received the Dean Joan Metcalf Schaefer Scholarship and the Brian Phillip Rakusin Neuroscience Scholarship Award at USC Dornsife.

His research efforts have already helped others: He standardized a specialized MRI sequence, so now patients nationwide can benefit. He also has co-authored a dozen scientific papers currently in print or under peer review and is first author on seven of them — an astounding achievement for an undergraduate.

Pursuing a Spanish minor, an academic decision strategically designed to help him provide care to a broader range of patients, Toliao taught Medical Spanish classes to students at the Keck School of Medicine. In addition, he founded Conversations without Borders to connect USC students with Latin American students to teach English and promote cultural understanding.

“Improving medical care is not only about speaking the same language but understanding cultural views on health care, as well,” Toliao says.

USC Dornsife senior puts empathy into practice

Like Toliao, Renneker’s passion for medicine intensified at USC.

A USC Presidential Scholar, Renneker studied stem cells at the Keck School of Medicine and worked at East L.A.’s White Memorial Hospital through USC Dornsife’s Gateway Internship Program. At White Memorial, a safety net hospital providing care to underserved populations, Renneker gained critical exposure to various medical specialties and practiced “the nitty gritty of hospital work,” from taking vital signs to feeding and bathing patients.

“I learned firsthand how powerful it is to help those who really need it,” Renneker says.

Fueled by support from the USC Dream Dollars Program, a novel initiative empowering career exploration in nonprofit and government fields, Renneker completed a summer internship investigating anxiety disorders at the National Institutes of Health.

At USC, Renneker also found opportunities for service. She joined Trojan Health Interpretation Services as an ad hoc Spanish interpreter and served as president of the American Lung Association’s USC chapter, where she led campus-wide education and outreach on respiratory health.

“USC didn’t give me empathy; it gave me the chance to live it,” she says.

Bright futures in store for graduating USC Dornsife seniors

Renneker and Toliao now look into a future packed with compelling possibilities.

Renneker will start medical school this summer and hopes to someday open her own clinic in a still-to-be-determined specialty field.

“I’m excited to continue learning about the body and building real relationships with patients so they feel understood and supported,” she says. “I see an opportunity to support people in environments and situations that can feel overwhelming.”

Toliao, meanwhile, plans to remain at USC, enrolling in the Keck School of Medicine and continuing his research projects. Long term, he looks to land a position in academic medicine so he can pursue research and clinical care simultaneously.

“I understand the feeling of being that scared, confused patient who sought doctors for comfort and information,” he says. “Not only do I want to help my patients physically but also mentally and emotionally, as well.”

Did you know there’s a tofu variety that melts like cheese? How about one that bakes up like a pastry crust? George Stiffman ’19 is hoping that soon more Americans will be able to answer “yes.” 

A self-described “tofu evangelist,” Stiffman is introducing Americans to tofu varieties they’ve likely never encountered. For this work, he was recently included in the inaugural USC Dornsife 10 to Watch list, which highlights outstanding alumni of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Stiffman’s interest in plant-based eating started in high school. Concerns about climate change led him to ditch meat to improve his carbon footprint, but the shift was initially hard. Local vegetarian options and meat-substitutes weren’t all that exciting in his home town of St. Paul, Minnesota. “I found it really difficult to give up my favorite foods,” he says. 

Then, Stiffman spent a summer in China studying Mandarin, where he encountered a wide range of plant-based dishes. “You could go downstairs out of your apartment building for breakfast and find fresh hot tofu pudding or mung bean cakes right there,” he says. “I decided to spend my career learning more about these foods and sharing them back home.”

The Tofu Apprentice

With thoughts of starting a restaurant or food business, he enrolled as a USC Marshall School of Business student. USC’s big-city location and local Chinese community were a major draw — as was the sunshine. 

He eventually switched to an East Asian languages and cultures degree, to focus on his Mandarin skills. At USC Dornsife, he found his fellow students inspiring and open-minded. “My classmates were more curious about the world, more exploratory,” he says. 

While completing his degree, Stiffman embarked on numerous study-abroad programs to China. He studied Fujianese cooking with a Buddhist chef and apprenticed under Luo Zhongda, a fifth-generation tofu master in Guiyang. 

The apprenticeship was physically demanding. Workdays started at 1 a.m., with Stiffman helping to heat vast cauldrons of soy milk over wood fires before it was curdled and then pressed into different forms. It was notably more hands-on than the industrial tofu production in the U.S., which produces the bland cubes most Americans are familiar with. “Working there opened my eyes to how you could make tofu that tastes really, really delicious if you put your heart and soul into it,” he says.

To(fu) boldly go …

After graduation, Stiffman began building a career as tofu’s most devoted hype man. In 2023, he published a cookbook, Broken Cuisine, recounting his experiences living, working and eating in China. He credits writing skills built at USC Dornsife for enabling him to complete the project.

He’s cooked for celebrities, including actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Chinese filmmaker Feng Xiaogang, and lectured at the Culinary Institute of America. In 2024, he launched Soycery, which began as a pop-up selling barbecued tofu skewers and has since pivoted into a venture working to help institutional dining halls offer more tofu varieties. 

His timing is good. Tofu is protein-packed, and protein is “having a moment” in Americans diets these days. However, for Stiffman, his work remains centered in his original concern for the environment as well as animals. “Tofu has three times lower carbon emissions than chicken and 25 times lower emissions than beef,” he says. Plus, it’s a great alternative for those displeased by modern-day animal agriculture.

Tofu might be an unusual focus for a career, but in an era in which technology is upending traditional career paths, pursuing the unexpected might be the best way forward. “The jobs themselves are going to rapidly change. Being able to think critically, figuring out where you can fit in or making your own role, that’s going to be really important,” says Stiffman.

Kyle Ng recalls the spark that ignited his love for languages.

His grandfather was a hardworking immigrant from Hong Kong who, with Ng’s grandmother, opened a flower shop in California’s Bay Area and helped raise Ng and his siblings.

“As he was one of the world’s slowest drivers, we had some of the best conversations together,” recalls NG, a computational linguistics major at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Sadly, his grandfather passed away last summer and won’t be able to see him graduate with a bachelor’s degree this May and, this December, a master’s degree in language sciences. But his grandfather will always remain a loving inspiration for Ng, who cherishes language as a medium for people to connect.

And Ng is all about forming connections.

Take, for example, his role as co-president of USC Kung Fu. For Ng, the student club is about much more than Chinese martial arts. It’s a way of approaching life.

“It’s not just a competitive sports club,” Ng says, “but building a community through the hard work of people.”

Computational linguistics student revels in interdisciplinary opportunities

Ng’s studies in computational linguistics, the scientific and engineering study of human language, have allowed him to further form connections with a community of USC students in the fields of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

The interdisciplinary opportunities at USC Dornsife were one of the main reasons he came here in fall 2022, initially interested in physics and computer science and then in East Asian languages and cultures before settling on his major.

A key turning point was enrolling in a linguistics course, “Human Language as Computation” (LING 385Lg), taught by Professor of Linguistics Khalil Iskarous. The material convinced Ng to pursue a field that combines science and the humanities — and sates his seemingly limitless thirst for knowledge.

“He wouldn’t let an unclear point pass in class, and he wouldn’t let an office hour, an opportunity for inquiry, pass without a brilliant question,” Iskarous says. “Through the hard work of asking, asking, and more asking, Kyle has developed the skill of problem formulation — not just the usual skill of answering and solving.

“Every time I work with Kyle on a problem, I become more hopeful, as I know that the world is about to get a great problem formulator and solver.”

Laura Apisakkul, assistant dean of USC Dornsife admission and student success, saw that promise when Ng was a high school senior and she was interviewing him for a USC scholarship.

“When you talk with Kyle about something he’s interested in,” Apisakkul says, “his enthusiasm is contagious, and you can’t help but be drawn into whatever topic he’s discussing.

“I’ve never met anyone as energetic, optimistic, and curious as Kyle. He loves learning and asking questions to better understand the world around him.”

That enthusiasm and love of learning helped earn Ng a Trustee Scholarship, one of USC’s most prestigious merit awards, covering full tuition for undergraduate students who demonstrate exceptional academic achievement and leadership.

He also received a Gold Family Scholarship, which supports study-abroad opportunities for Trustee Scholars.

He’s been busy.

USC Dornsife senior guides peers as student ambassador

Since starting at USC Dornsife, Ng has served as a student ambassador for the admissions team. He says the volunteer work has satisfied his longtime passion to mentor others — as well as feed them. Ng is known for lugging a rice cooker around campus to share meals with the various circles of students he’s involved with.

“He cares about others around him and is truly interested in hearing their stories, which is why he’s been such a wonderful Dornsife student ambassador,” Apisakkul says.

In high school, Ng participated in FIRST, a global youth robotics community. As part of that, he founded Serendipity, a group dedicated to increasing STEM opportunities for special education students through coding lessons.

“I saw not a class, nor students, nor teachers, but a family,” he says.

After entering USC, Ng participated in the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab, an undergraduate rocketry group for experimental rocket technologies.

“I helped launch two rockets,” he says with a laugh.

Linguistics major dives into AI research

Ng had his first experience with AI research during the SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fund) program, which provides financial support for students conducting faculty-mentored research during the summer.

“I sat in an MRI for three hours for a vocal scan to analyze the movement in my mouth when I spoke,” Ng explains. “The study was part of an experiment to see if such mouth movements could be used in helping to understand how speech LLMs (large language models) work.”

Iskarous and PhD student Haley Hsu mentored Ng during his SURF project. “Not only is Kyle an impressively hardworking student, but he is also a major pillar of the linguistics community at USC,” says Hsu. “His desire to deeply understand and absorb as much information as possible is truly inspirational.”

During the winter break this year, Ng spent three weeks at the Oxford AI Safety Institute pursuing AI Safety, a field dedicated to ensuring AI systems behave as intended, minimizing harmful, dangerous, or uncontrollable outcomes.

Senior’s future a numbers game — and much, much more

Ng says he isn’t sure yet what his post-graduate plans are, but if his achievements to date are any indication, it will almost certainly involve a line of work that goes far beyond the numbers-crunching involved in studying how machines process language.

In an essay he wrote as part of his application to USC Dornsife, Ng reimagines a data-driven world in which people often are defined by numbers (one = the number of winners at the top, a 4.0 GPA, a perfect AP score of 5, etc.).

“I’m redefining the way I count,” Ng wrote, describing the life philosophy he continues to hone today:

“Five. How many more laughs can we share?

“4.0. How many more memories can we make?

“One. A community that is greater than the sum of its numbers.”

New fathers may be losing brain volume, and that could be a good thing.

That was one of the striking findings shared by Darby Saxbe, professor of psychology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences during a recent Dornsife Dialogues event. 

The discussion centered on her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives, which debuts in June. Saxbe’s research shows that men’s brains change after the birth of a child, particularly in areas linked to empathy and social understanding. 

Speaking with USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock, Saxbe described her studies tracking first-time dads from pregnancy through early infancy. Brain scans revealed reductions in each father’s gray matter after their child’s birth. Rather than signaling decline, she said, the changes likely reflect the brain becoming more efficient, like editing a film to focus on the essential story.

Her book builds on that finding to challenge a long-standing assumption that caregiving is something only mothers are naturally wired to do. Instead, Saxbe argues, fatherhood is highly adaptable, especially if fathers are committed to the role. “The more dads wanted to engage in parenting and were invested in it, the more the brain changed,” Saxbe said.

The conversation also explored the emotional realities of new parenthood. More involved fathers reported higher stress, fatigue and even symptoms of depression, emphasizing that deeper engagement can bring both rewards and strain during the transition.

Access to paid paternity leave, Saxbe noted, was linked to lower stress for fathers and reduced depression among mothers, suggesting policy plays a key role in shaping family health.

Saxbe’s book goes beyond neuroscience, examining how fatherhood influences relationships, careers and identity. She frames modern fatherhood as a model of “pro-social masculinity,” centered on caregiving, patience and connection. Her research is part of a larger shift in our understanding of what it means to be a dad, and how much the new role of parent changes men themselves. 

Natalia Molina, Distinguished Professor and Dean’s Professor of American studies and ethnicity at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, joining a class of 223 scholars, artists and scientists selected from nearly 5,000 applicants worldwide.

The fellowship, one of the most prestigious honors in intellectual and creative life, provides recipients with the financial support to pursue independent work “under the freest possible conditions,” a mission the Guggenheim Foundation has maintained since the organization’s founding in 1925. 

It’s not Molina’s first major accolade. In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, an honor often dubbed the “genius grant.”

Her Guggenheim fellowship marks both recognition of a career spent exploring race, citizenship and belonging in the United States and the opportunity to deepen that work through her current book project, Hidden Histories in the Garden. The book reveals the untold stories of laborers who helped to build and maintain the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

“I’m honored to receive the Guggenheim fellowship, which makes it possible to continue telling histories from the perspectives of those whose voices were never meant to be heard,” says Molina.

Drawing on census records, archival fragments, maps, photographs and rare interviews, Molina reconstructs the experiences of Mexican and Japanese workers who cultivated and maintained the estate’s landscapes and European immigrants who served as staff and estate engineers.

She also uncovers the historical context of the era, including the Indigenous communities dispossessed of their land and Chinese immigrants whose labor on the railroads helped to generate the wealth behind Harry Huntington’s empire.

These stories, often absent from official narratives, reveal how cultural institutions are influenced by broader histories of racial hierarchy and exclusion. “This project asks what it means to reframe cultural institutions through the experiences of those once rendered invisible, and what shifts when we center the stories that were silenced,” she says.

Her Guggenheim Fellowship cohort includes fellow USC professors Amy O’Neal of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance and Jennifer West of the USC Roski School of Art and Design. 

Molina joins a number of other USC Dornsife faculty who have received Guggenheim Fellowships, most recently Lisa Pon, professor of art history.

Editor’s Note: Margaret Crable contributed to this article.

High school students will soon take part in a more than 160-year-old tradition in American education: receiving yearbooks at the end of the school year.

In an era of high-speed ephemeral images and social media, some may see high school yearbooks as outdated. But high school and college students have told me that they found it meaningful to look through their yearbooks and inscribe their classmates’ books with personal messages, poems, jokes or simply their signatures.

Many graduates will tuck away their yearbooks — some to be lost forever, but others to be revisited or rediscovered years or decades later.

As a sociologist, I have studied high school yearbooks as time capsules and as a way to understand how youth culture, sports, gender and race relations have changed, or have not changed, over time. Despite their ubiquity, school yearbooks are a largely untapped source for scholarly inquiry.

But as media historian Kate Eichhorn notes, people may probe an old high school yearbook to learn more about a mass murderer or to scrutinize whether someone is fit for public office. Some reporters, for example, dug into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavinaugh’s 1983 high school yearbook while he was going through the confirmation process in 2018. His yearbook included a reference to a female student that some boys, including a young Kavanaugh, might have dated or had a sexual relationship with.

But as Eichhorn notes, some scholars seem to dismiss yearbooks as “cringy” documents created by teenagers, or as documents focused on personal nostalgia, unworthy of examination.

An incomplete picture

Yearbooks are a limited source for accurately understanding history.

In my 2025 study of 120 years of high school yearbooks from Salinas High School in California, where I graduated from in 1970, I found nary a mention of the Great Depression or the Salinas Valley’s violent agricultural labor strikes, which Salinas High alum John Steinbeck wrote about in the 1930s.

Nor did the Salinas High School yearbooks mention the war in Vietnam, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the mass social movements that opposed them.

Some yearbooks from the 2000s showed student clubs that addressed violence, substance abuse and LGBTQ+ issues. But over the years, yearbooks have mostly skipped the pain of high school and focused instead on the pleasure.

They shine a spotlight on sports, cheering and public rituals like all-school rallies and homecoming week. Photos and text blurbs celebrate the accomplishments and humorous antics of the “popular” kids and, at times, the most academically successful students.

A nostalgic rear window

It can be reassuring to dive into nostalgic remembering. It’s common for most people to idealize the past and remember it as better than today.

A Gallup poll from 1939 found that 62% of Americans agreed that people were happier and more content a generation earlier. Since then, national polls consistently show that most people think fondly about the good old days, and usually think 30 or 40 years ago was a better time than the one they are living today.

We can see this penchant for nostalgia in the Salinas High yearbooks of the late 1970s and 1980s. Students in these yearbooks are seen enjoying 1950s-themed dances echoing popular television shows like “Happy Days” that idealized 50s culture.

In analyzing high school yearbooks of the past, I tried to not sidestep nostalgia — probably impossible to do anyway — but to consciously deploy an idea called critical nostalgia. This means acknowledging the pleasures of looking back in time, while remaining attentive to the ways that schools too often worsen, rather than challenge, inequalities among students.

A double focus

Taking on a critical nostalgia lens requires a double focus — first, looking at what high school yearbooks routinely illuminate, like football rallies and cheerleaders. It also means identifying what American writer and activist Tillie Olsen once called “unnatural silences,” like the voices, imagery and activities of marginalized students who have been left outside the frame.

Two examples from the Salinas High School yearbooks illustrate this approach.

Someone looking at Salinas editions from the early 1900s might be surprised to see girls baseball, track and field, volleyball and basketball teams engaged in interscholastic competition.

Yearbook photos show girls wearing school sports uniforms and being treated with respect.

By the early 1930s, girls sports teams disappeared from the yearbooks, absorbed into the Girls’ Athletic Association, a recently formed organization that was based on the idea that competition and vigorous exercise was unhealthy for girls.

For nearly half a century after the creation of the Girls’ Athletic Association, photos of girls playing sports were accompanied by captions that disparaged their athletic abilities.

In the mid-1970s, when competitive girls sports teams were reinstated at Salinas, the yearbooks started to give them more equitable and respectful treatment.

This history shows an uneven picture of social change, as changes in girls sports were driven by the waxing and waning of 20th-century women’s rights movements.

The spring 1941 and 1942 Salinas High School yearbooks, meanwhile, showed scores of Japanese American students — about 14% of the student body at the time — fully integrated into nearly all aspects of student life.

But by the time the yearbook was distributed in the spring of 1942, the Japanese American students had been sent with their families to the Salinas Rodeo Grounds, where they were temporarily housed in converted horse stalls.

They were later transferred for the duration of World War II to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona.

The 1943 yearbook showed zero Japanese American students, nor did the editors of the book mention how or why their classmates had disappeared from campus.

For today’s Salinas students, reading their school’s old yearbooks against the backdrop of this history can help them to explore questions about how the legacy of racial and ethnic removal and detention is echoing in their community and country today.

A starting point for understanding history

It’s not just Salinas High students who might benefit from reading their school’s past yearbooks. I have spoken with a handful of professors who are guiding their students into their university’s archive of yearbooks to explore race and gender relations in their own community.

Students discover that the size, content and organization of school yearbooks have shifted over time. But the books are a rich starting point for a group exploration of how schools create a pleasurable collective identity — for some, at least — while simultaneously shaping and celebrating students’ division and inequalities.

Michael A Messner, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For more than 300 years, Isaac Newton’s simple rule about gravity has held up: The farther apart two objects are, the weaker their pull on each other. It works for apples. It works for planets.

Now, scientists have put that same rule to the test on a scale Newton could never have imagined — across hundreds of millions of light-years, where entire clusters of galaxies drift through space.

A new study published in Physical Review Letters finds that gravity still behaves as expected even at those distances. And that result strengthens the case for something scientists still can’t see directly: dark matter.

“This is really a test of a basic question,” said Kris Pardo, co-author of the study and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “If you look at how galaxy clusters fall toward each other, does it match what our current theory of gravity predicts?”

The answer, according to the study, is yes.

Scientists watch galaxies fall to test gravity

To test gravity on such enormous scales, researchers needed a clever workaround. You can’t exactly drop two galaxy clusters and watch what happens.

Instead, the team measured how large numbers of clusters of galaxies move toward one another over time in a kind of cosmic dance driven by gravity.

They used data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile, which observes faint radiation left over from the Big Bang known as the cosmic microwave background. When galaxy clusters move, they leave tiny imprints in this ancient light.

Despite this phenomenon’s long name — the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect — the idea is simple: Moving galaxy clusters slightly nudge this background radiation in a way that reveals how fast the clusters are traveling.

The researchers combined those velocity measurements with a massive map of galaxy positions. By comparing where clusters are and how they move, the team could estimate how strongly gravity is pulling them together.

“We’re basically asking, given where all this matter is, how fast should things be moving if gravity works the way we think it does?” Pardo said. “And then we check that against what we actually see.”

Newton’s rule holds up on cosmic scales

The researchers found that gravity indeed does appear to weaken with distance almost exactly as Newton predicted.

“We found that galaxy clusters fall toward each other in a way that’s consistent with our standard model of the universe,” Pardo said.

That might sound unsurprising, but testing gravity’s basic rule on such vast scales has been difficult, and some scientists have proposed alternatives.

One idea, known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND, suggests that gravity behaves differently at very large distances. If so, dark matter — the mysterious, invisible substance thought to make up most of the universe’s matter — might not be needed to explain how galaxies move.

The new study puts MOND under pressure on these scales. “We were able to essentially rule out one popular alternative in this analysis,” Pardo said. “This is a particularly clean test because it looks at how things are moving right now, not just how structure formed over time.”

Gravity study makes a case for dark matter

The findings also speak to one of the biggest open questions in physics: What is the universe made of?

If gravity behaves as expected on these vast scales, then the motions of galaxies and galaxy clusters are still best explained by extra mass — mass we can’t see.

“Our results suggest that the standard theory of gravity works really well,” said Patricio Gallardo, a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania and lead author of the study. “If that’s the case, then we do need dark matter to explain the rotations of galaxies and the movements of galaxies within clusters.”

In other words, the study doesn’t detect dark matter directly. But by narrowing the alternatives, it strengthens the argument that something unseen is out there.

Gallardo says he was surprised just how well the basic rule still holds up. “It’s kind of amazing. Newton was thinking about planets in the solar system. And now we’re testing the same rule on galaxy clusters separated by hundreds of millions of light-years — and it still works.”

Why the scale matters — and what’s next

The study, one of the largest-scale direct tests of gravity to date, probes distances far beyond anything previously measured in this way.

That scale matters because scientists want to know whether the laws of physics are truly universal — the same everywhere, from Earth to the farthest reaches of space. So far, the results suggest they are.

The work also opens the door to even more precise tests. Upcoming surveys and telescopes are expected to collect far more data, allowing researchers to push these measurements further.

“With better data, we can start looking for even tiny deviations,” Gallardo said. “If there’s any new physics hiding out there, this is one way we might find it.”

What this test can’t answer yet

The test probes enormous distances, but it doesn’t cover every scale or environment in the universe. Also, the signal the researchers measured is extremely subtle, and the analysis depends on combining data from hundreds of thousands of galaxies. That means the results rely on statistical methods and high quality probes of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background.

“There are some technical limitations, especially when applying this to alternative theories like MOND,” Pardo said. “But overall, this is a pretty clean test.”

Gallardo added that the precision of the measurement, which is still limited by the amount of available data, should improve.

“As we get larger galaxy samples and better observations, we’ll be able to tighten these constraints,” he said.

For now, the takeaway is simple: Across vast distances, gravity still seems to follow the same basic rule first written down in the 1600s — quietly guiding galaxy clusters, just as it guides falling apples.

When Ethan Berg talks about spin, he doesn’t mean rotation in the everyday sense. He’s talking about one of the most fundamental properties of matter — a quantum physics phenomenon that could help power the next generation of computers.

“Quantum mechanical properties of matter like spin … are such versatile tools on the pathway to building the most powerful computers the world has seen,” says Berg, a first-year PhD student in physics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “Understanding these fundamental properties and their interactions is incredibly profound.”

The scale of that challenge requires both focus and opportunity. As the inaugural recipient of the Santec PhD Fellowship in Physics Fund, Berg has the freedom to pursue complex quantum questions during the formative early years of his doctoral training.

New fellowship is a quantum leap for students

The fellowship is part of a $250,000 gift from Santec USA Corporation, spearheaded by USC alumnus Changho Chong, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Santec. The gift establishes the Santec PhD Fellowship in Physics Fund and the Santec Research in Physics Fund, strengthening both graduate education and faculty-led discovery in the USC Dornsife Department of Physics and Astronomy.

For Berg, that support has been transformative.

“The fellowship has allowed me to fully invest myself in my coursework, building a strong foundation in many fields of study,” he says.

Before arriving at USC, Berg completed his bachelor’s degree in physics with a specialization in materials physics at the University of California, San Diego. At USC Dornsife, he is building on that foundation by working with faculty exploring systems such as nitrogen-vacancy centers (an atomic-scale defect found in diamonds) and two-dimensional magnetic materials — research that may one day inform advances in quantum computing.

He plans to focus his doctoral research on spin dynamics, developing more robust measurement techniques and identifying high-efficiency spin-switching systems for quantum technologies.

USC alumnus invests in discovery

With decades of experience in photonics — the engineering of light — Chong has led efforts that bring industry and academic research into closer alignment. Through collaborations with universities across the United States, including several ongoing projects at USC, he has seen firsthand how fundamental research can shape technological breakthroughs.

Chong’s gift was designed to strengthen physics at USC Dornsife by supporting promising graduate students and advancing faculty research at the frontiers of science.

“It’s really difficult for industry to discover talent or core technology,” says Chong, who graduated with a master’s degree from USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 1995 and an MBA from USC Marshall School of Business in 2021. What he values about USC, he explains, is how researchers across different areas work together and connect ideas.

“I am always trying to make connections,” he says. “Connecting dots from different areas is what drives technology development.”

In addition to funding fellowships for outstanding incoming PhD students, half of Chong’s gift establishes the Santec Research in Physics Fund, supporting research led by Moh El-Naggar, Dean’s Professor of Physics and Astronomy and professor of physics and astronomy, chemistry and biological sciences.

Together, the funds reflect a shared commitment to both people and discovery — ensuring that emerging physicists like Berg have the support to pursue ambitious questions, while faculty research continues to push the limits of what is known.

For Berg, that investment means the freedom to explore complex questions about the quantum nature of matter — and the possibility of shaping technologies that have yet to be imagined. His long-term goal is to remain in academia, mentoring future scientists much as he has been supported.

“I want to be able to use the skills I learn during this process to provide opportunities for future students to fully invest in science,” says Berg, “in much the same way this fellowship is supporting me.”

Legendary Democratic speechwriter and political strategist Bob Shrum, director of the Center for the Political Future (CPF) at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, will retire at the end of 2026. 

In advance of his departure, USC Dornsife held two galas, one in Los Angeles and one in Washington, D.C., to toast Shrum’s achievements. Collectively, the events raised nearly $1 million to benefit CPF.

It was a fittingly bicoastal and bipartisan series of fêtes for a man whose career was first forged in D.C. political campaigns before he headed to USC to advance civil approaches to politics.

In both cities, politicians, strategists, fellow speechwriters and alumni gathered to reflect on a long career that, while always fiercely in support of the Democratic Party, was also marked by good faith friendships with political rivals.

“Shrum knew that opponents were not enemies, and that we needed everybody at the table of democracy if we were going to honor the Constitution and the values that we all share,” said John Kerry, former senator and secretary of state whose 2004 presidential bid was aided by Shrum, at the D.C. event. Shrum’s aptitude for alliance-building was evidenced by the fact that nearly all the speakers at his Los Angeles gala were Republicans.

It was Shrum who recruited Mike Murphy, a long-time Republican strategist and Shrum’s frequent opponent on the campaign trail, to become co-director of CPF.

Under their leadership, CPF has become a hub of bipartisan political discussion and education, unusual for college campuses these days. Events and conferences host politicians and intellectuals who advance a wide range of ideas. The CPF Fellows program brings in diverse politicians and thinkers, where students get to learn from those with hands-on experience in the political trenches.

Such efforts are training the next generation of policy makers in the art of cross-aisle persuasion and alliance-building. Already, students who have benefited from CPF’s approach are bringing this ethos into their careers in politics, education and more. Will Erens, who graduated from USC Dornsife in 2025 with a degree in political economy, is now pursuing his law degree at Georgetown University.

“As a relative conservative at a university, my views were often in the minority [at USC]. The communication skills I collected from the fellows enhanced my ability to articulate and persuade colleagues,” said Erens. “As Shrum’s vision foresaw, not only am I more knowledgeable about the political system, but I’m more aware of the spirit of American democracy.”

CPF Managing Director Kamy Akhavan highlighted the lasting impact Shrum has had since joining USC Dornsife in 2014. 

“He’s been called the ‘poet of American politics’ and one of the great campaigners in U.S. history,” Akhavan said. “He brought those top shelf talents to USC along with his incredible teaching and civil discourse skills. His impact at USC will be felt far beyond his tenure.”

Michelle Barton, an environmental leader whose work has shaped biodiversity, water conservation, and urban sustainability efforts throughout California, especially in Los Angeles, has joined USC Dornsife Public Exchange as director of its Climate & Sustainability Practice.

Barton brings more than a decade of experience in city and state government, including leadership roles with Los Angeles World Airports, LA Sanitation & Environment, and Caltrans.

Why it matters: Public Exchange, based at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, works to pair experts in academia with public, private, and nonprofit partners to solve pressing societal issues. As Los Angeles faces growing climate pressures, Barton’s experience will help strengthen efforts to advance practical solutions.

In her new role, Barton will lead the next phase of Public Exchange’s climate strategy. That includes:

• Co-leading ShadeLA with UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation, a cross-sector effort to expand shade infrastructure and reduce extreme heat risk across L.A. County.
• Overseeing Public Exchange’s L.A. River initiative and building on recent work with the 100 Acre Partnership to support Taylor Yard’s revitalization. Public Exchange also plans to expand scientific monitoring along the river ahead of a study of plant life in the river ecosystem.

In previous roles, Barton helped lead or support projects that:

• Restored 50 acres at the LAX Dunes
• Secured $5 million to plant 8,000 trees and remove more than two acres of concrete in heavily impacted communities
• Deliver 750,000 gallons of recycled water per day to LAX
• Replace 95,000 square feet of turf at LAX with drought-tolerant landscaping

Barton also served as the City of Los Angeles’ first biodiversity program manager, helping advance the LA Biodiversity Index Baseline Report, LA Biodiversity Guidelines, and the city’s healthy soils strategy.

Her work has included collaboration with a wide range of public agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Federal Aviation Administration, and California Coastal Commission. Earlier in her career at Caltrans, she supported environmental planning tied to the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.

Barton succeeds Monica Dean, who left Public Exchange in January to become director of the Ocean and Climate Diplomacy Initiative at Oceans5. Dean established Public Exchange’s Climate & Sustainability Practice and helped position it as a partner to public agencies and community leaders across the region.

Editor’s Note: Trenise Ferreira and Jim Key contributed to this story.

With U.S. bombs raining down on Iran and Tehran’s leaders responding by hitting targets across the Persian Gulf and restricting transit through the Strait of Hormuz, it is fair to suggest that the present moment represents a low in relations between the two countries.

But the bad blood isn’t new: The U.S. and Iran have been in conflict for decades — at least since the U.S. helped overthrow a democracy-minded prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, in August 1953. The U.S. then supported the long, repressive reign of the Shah of Iran, whose security services brutalized Iranian citizens for decades.

The two countries have been particularly hostile to each other since Iranian students took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, resulting in economic sanctions and the severing of formal diplomatic relations between the nations.

Since 1984, the U.S. State Department has listed Iran as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” alleging the Iranian government provides terrorists with training, money and weapons.

Some of the major events in U.S.-Iran relations highlight the differences between the nations’ views, but others arguably presented real opportunities for reconciliation.

1953: US overthrows Mossadegh

In 1951, the Iranian Parliament chose a new prime minister, Mossadegh, who then led lawmakers to vote in favor of taking over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, expelling the company’s British owners and saying they wanted to turn oil profits into investments in the Iranian people. The U.S. feared disruption in the global oil supply and worried about Iran falling prey to Soviet influence. The British feared the loss of cheap Iranian oil.

President Dwight Eisenhower decided it was best for the U.S. and the U.K. to get rid of Mossadegh. Operation Ajax, a joint CIA-British operation, convinced the Shah of Iran, the country’s monarch, to dismiss Mossadegh and drive him from office by force. Mossadegh was replaced by a much more Western-friendly prime minister, handpicked by the CIA.

1979: Revolutionaries oust the shah, take hostages

After more than 25 years of relative stability in U.S.-Iran relations, the Iranian public had grown unhappy with the social and economic conditions that developed under the dictatorial rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Pahlavi enriched himself and used American aid to fund the military while many Iranians lived in poverty. Dissent was often violently quashed by SAVAK, the shah’s security service. In January 1979, the shah left Iran, ostensibly to seek cancer treatment. Two weeks later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Iraq and led a drive to abolish the monarchy and proclaim an Islamic government.

In October 1979, President Jimmy Carter agreed to allow the shah to come to the U.S. to seek advanced medical treatment. Outraged Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, taking 52 Americans hostage. That convinced Carter to sever U.S. diplomatic relations with Iran on April 7, 1980.

Two weeks later, the U.S. military launched a mission to rescue the hostages, but it failed, with aircraft crashes killing eight U.S. servicemembers.

The shah died in Egypt in July 1980, but the hostages weren’t released until Jan. 20, 1981, after 444 days of captivity.

1980-1988: US tacitly sides with Iraq

In September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, an escalation of the two countries’ regional rivalry and religious differences: Iraq was governed by Sunni Muslims but had a Shia Muslim majority population; Iran was led and populated mostly by Shiites.

The U.S. was concerned that the conflict would limit the flow of Middle Eastern oil and wanted to ensure the conflict didn’t affect its close ally, Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. supported Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his fight against the anti-American Iranian regime. As a result, the U.S. mostly turned a blind eye toward Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran.

U.S. officials moderated their usual opposition to those illegal and inhumane weapons because the U.S. State Department did not “wish to play into Iran’s hands by fueling its propaganda against Iraq.” In 1988, the war ended in a stalemate. More than 500,000 military and 100,000 civilians died.

1981-1986: US secretly sells weapons to Iran

The U.S. imposed an arms embargo after Iran was designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984. That left the Iranian military, in the middle of its war with Iraq, desperate for weapons and aircraft and vehicle parts to keep fighting.

The Reagan administration decided that the embargo would likely push Iran to seek support from the Soviet Union, the U.S.’s Cold War rival. Rather than formally end the embargo, U.S. officials agreed to secretly sell weapons to Iran starting in 1981.

The last shipment, of anti-tank missiles, was in October 1986. In November 1986, a Lebanese magazine exposed the deal. That revelation sparked the Iran-Contra scandal in the U.S., with Reagan’s officials found to have collected money from Iran for the weapons and illegally sent those funds to anti-socialist rebels — the Contras — in Nicaragua.

1988: US Navy shoots down Iran Air flight 655

On the morning of July 8, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser patrolling in the international waters of the Persian Gulf, entered Iranian territorial waters while in a skirmish with Iranian gunboats.

Either during or just after that exchange of gunfire, the Vincennes crew mistook a passing civilian Airbus passenger jet for an Iranian F-14 fighter. They shot it down, killing all 290 people aboard.

The U.S. called it a “tragic and regrettable accident,” but Iran believed the plane’s downing was intentional. In 1996, the U.S. agreed to pay US$131.8 million in compensation to Iran.

1997-1998: The US seeks contact

In August 1997, a moderate reformer, Mohammad Khatami, won Iran’s presidential election.

U.S. President Bill Clinton sensed an opportunity. He sent a message to Tehran through the Swiss ambassador there, proposing direct government-to-government talks.

Shortly thereafter, in early January 1998, Khatami gave an interview to CNN in which he expressed “respect for the great American people,” denounced terrorism and recommended an “exchange of professors, writers, scholars, artists, journalists and tourists” between the United States and Iran.

However, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei didn’t agree, so not much came of the mutual overtures as Clinton’s time in office came to an end.

In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush characterized Iran, Iraq and North Korea as constituting an “Axis of Evil” supporting terrorism and pursuing weapons of mass destruction, straining relations even further.

2002: Iran’s nuclear program raises alarm

In August 2002, an exiled rebel group announced that Iran had been secretly working on nuclear weapons at two installations that had not previously been publicly revealed.

That was a violation of the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which Iran had signed, requiring countries to disclose their nuclear-related facilities to international inspectors.

One of those formerly secret locations, Natanz, housed centrifuges for enriching uranium, which could be used in civilian nuclear reactors or enriched further for weapons.

Starting in roughly 2005, U.S. and Israeli government cyberattackers together reportedly targeted the Natanz centrifuges with a custom-made piece of malicious software that became known as Stuxnet.

That effort, which slowed down Iran’s nuclear program was one of many U.S. and international attempts — mostly unsuccessful — to curtail Iran’s progress toward building a nuclear bomb.

2003: Iran writes to Bush administration

In May 2003, senior Iranian officials quietly contacted the State Department through the Swiss embassy in Iran, seeking “a dialogue ‘in mutual respect,’” addressing four big issues: nuclear weapons, terrorism, Palestinian resistance and stability in Iraq.

Hardliners in the Bush administration weren’t interested in any major reconciliation, though Secretary of State Colin Powell favored dialogue and other officials had met with Iran about al-Qaida.

When Iranian hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran in 2005, the opportunity died. The following year, Ahmadinejad made his own overture to Washington in an 18-page letter to President Bush. The letter was widely dismissed; a senior State Department official told me in profane terms that it amounted to nothing.

2015: Iran nuclear deal signed

After a decade of unsuccessful attempts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Obama administration undertook a direct diplomatic approach beginning in 2013.

Two years of secret, direct negotiations initially bilaterally between the U.S. and Iran and later with other nuclear powers culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, often called the Iran nuclear deal.

Iran, the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom signed the deal in 2015. It severely limited Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium and mandated that international inspectors monitor and enforce Iran’s compliance with the agreement.

In return, Iran was granted relief from international and U.S. economic sanctions. Though the inspectors regularly certified that Iran was abiding by the agreement’s terms, President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in May 2018.

2020: US drones kill Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani

On Jan. 3, 2020, an American drone fired a missile that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force. Analysts considered Soleimani the second most powerful man in Iran, after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

At the time, the Trump administration asserted that Soleimani was directing an imminent attack against U.S. assets in the region, but officials have not provided clear evidence to support that claim.

Iran responded by launching ballistic missiles that hit two American bases in Iraq.

2023: The Oct. 7 attacks on Israel

Hamas’ brazen attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, provoked a fearsome militarized response from Israel that continues today and served to severely weaken Iran’s proxies in the region, especially Hamas — the perpetrator of the attacks — and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

2025: Trump 2.0 and Iran

Trump initially saw an opportunity to forge a new nuclear deal with Iran and to pursue other business deals with Tehran. Once inaugurated for his second term, Trump appointed Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor who is the president’s friend, to serve as special envoy for the Middle East and to lead negotiations.

Negotiations for a nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran began in April, but the countries did not reach a deal. They were planning a new round of talks when Israel struck Iran with a series of airstrikes on June 13, forcing the White House to reconsider is position.

On June 22, in the early morning hours, the U.S. chose to act decisively in an attempt to cripple Iran’s nuclear capacity, bombing three nuclear sites and causing what Pentagon officials called “severe damage.”

The war lasted 12 days, during which Trump declared that Iranian nuclear sites had been “totally obliterated” — a claim denied by Tehran.

2026: Simmering conflict turns into hot war

In early 2026, successive rounds of indirect talks took place between Iran and representatives from the U.S. administration. They followed major unrest in Iran during which Trump told protesters that “help is on its way.”

Then, on Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran in an operation the U.S. called “Epic Fury.” In the initial wave of airstrikes, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior members of the Islamic Republic were killed. Tehran responded by hitting targets across the Gulf, turning the conflict into a wider, regional affair.

This is an updated version of a story originally published on June 17, 2025.

Jeffrey Fields, Professor of the Practice of Political Science and International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Before Dexter Holland sold more than 45 million records as frontman of The Offspring, he was a student at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences in 1988, a master’s degree in molecular biology in 1990 and a PhD in molecular biology in 2017.

Now, he’s returning to his alma mater to deliver the commencement address at both USC Dornsife ceremonies on May 15 at USC’s Alumni Park on the University Park Campus, speaking to about 2,000 graduates.

“Dexter Holland earned his PhD in molecular biology and also fronts one of the defining bands of the last 30 years,” said USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock. “That combination isn’t a contradiction. It exemplifies how the liberal arts develop the intellectual range to go deep in a field as well as the confidence to build something entirely your own outside of it. I’m thrilled he’s returning to make that case in person.”

From USC lab to punk stardom

Growing up in Garden Grove, Calif., Bryan Holland planned to be a physician. His affinity for academics earned him the nickname “Poindexter,” which later influenced his stage name.

After graduating as his high school valedictorian in 1984, he enrolled at USC Dornsife. That same year, he and friends formed the punk garage band Manic Subsidal, despite not yet knowing how to play instruments.

As Holland continued his studies, the group evolved and changed its name to The Offspring. In 1994, while working on his PhD, the band broke through with the album Smash. The refrain “keep ’em separated” from the hit song “Come Out and Play,” was inspired by Holland’s experience cooling Erlenmeyer flasks of hot liquid in a USC lab.

The Offspring went on to become one of the best-selling punk rock bands of all time, releasing 11 studio albums and numerous chart-topping songs including “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” and “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid.” Holland will be speaking at commencement between tour dates for the band’s latest album, Supercharged.

Holland’s other ventures include the successful hot sauce company Gringo Bandito and regularly competing on the Ironman circuit.

In 2004, Holland completed a solo flight around the world in his Cessna Citation, dodging a volcano eruption in Iceland and a swarm of locusts in Egypt. And in 2017, he returned to the USC Dornsife campus to finish the PhD his music career had interrupted. His thesis focused on microRNA in HIV genomes and was published in the journal PLOS One.

About USC Dornsife’s 2026 commencement ceremonies

The deadline for students to register for the USC Dornsife commencement ceremonies is April 6.

More information about the USC Dornsife commencement ceremonies can be found at dornsife.usc.edu/commencement/.

Editor’s Note: Susan Bell contributed to this story.

Matthew Pratt began his university studies eyeing a career in medicine. But an undergraduate stint in an organic chemistry lab changed that plan, setting him on a course that has since earned him a place among Nobel laureates, astronauts, inventors and innovators. The professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has been named a 2025 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Pratt arrived at the University of Arizona in 1995 to study math and biochemistry, with medical school as his long-term academic goal. That changed when the young undergraduate stepped into Professor Robin Polt’s organic chemistry lab.

“I was hooked by the logic of chemical transformations and the ability to make molecules with my own hands,” Pratt says. “That ability to forge molecules with precision, from drug-like compounds to full proteins, and using them to answer questions in biology is what gets me excited about what my lab is doing now.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and mathematics and studying glycosylation reactions — the bonding of carbohydrate molecules to proteins — under Polt’s guidance, he moved on to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in chemistry in 2004 with future Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi. Pratt then completed an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rockefeller University in Professor Tom Muir’s lab before joining USC Dornsife’s Department of Chemistry in 2009.

Now in his 16th year at the College, Pratt studies the molecular and physiological effects of chemical alterations of proteins while mentoring a new generation of postdocs and PhD students, perhaps some destined for prestigious scientific honors of their own.

“Helping students and postdocs mature as scientists, promoting them, and getting to watch them go off and do amazing things is my favorite part of this job,” Pratt says.

“AAAS Fellows have a responsibility to be examples of strong science and mentorship,” he adds. “I’ve strived to do both of these things throughout my career, but the visibility of the honor makes it all the more important.”

Pratt says becoming a fellow also provides an important opportunity to contribute to the broader scientific community. “Our profession faces challenges from a murky grant-funding landscape to reduced trust in science and scientific leaders. Our community needs to come together to address those issues, and I’m excited to be a part of that effort.”

Use of ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models, or LLMs — what most people call “AI” — has surged since ChatGPT debuted publicly in 2022. Hundreds of millions of people now use these tools weekly, according to recent estimates.

Users might assume these tools are just helping them organize their thoughts, but recent research suggests they may be doing something more subtle and more powerful — influencing how we all think, speak and even understand the world.

In a recent opinion piece, researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, investigated how artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT could be nudging people toward similar ways of communicating and reasoning — a process researchers call “cultural homogenization.”

“AI isn’t just reflecting culture anymore,” said lead author Yalda Daryani, a PhD student in social psychology at USC Dornsife. “It’s actively shaping it. It’s deciding what sounds polite, what sounds clear, even what counts as a good answer.”

So the researchers set out to understand how large language models like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini might influence human culture on a global scale, and how policies could address the broader effects these LLMs might have.

A pattern emerges with AI use

The researchers — under the guidance of Morteza Dehghani, professor of psychology and computer science at USC Dornsife and head of the Morality and Language Lab — reviewed a wide range of recent studies across psychology, computer science and linguistics to understand how LLMs perform across different cultures and how people respond when using AI in real-world tasks such as writing or decision-making.

They found a consistent pattern: AI systems tend to reflect and reinforce a narrow slice of human experience.

A central finding of the research is that these systems often align with what the researchers describe as “WHELM” perspectives — Western, high-income, educated, liberal and male. In other words, they reflect the values and communication styles most common in English-language online data.

“When you ask AI for advice, you’re not getting a neutral answer,” Daryani said. “You’re getting the perspective of a very specific group of people, even if it doesn’t say that explicitly.”

This pattern appears in how AI handles moral questions. The research showed that AI systems tend to favor values such as individual freedom and fairness, while placing less emphasis on ideas like tradition, authority and community, which are more central in many non-Western cultures.

AI’s impact extends to subtle social interactions

The influence goes beyond values. It also affects how people communicate.

“When millions of people use AI to draft messages, those differences start to disappear,” Daryani said. “Over time, we may all start sounding very alike.”

Even when users ask questions in other languages, the models often return examples tied to American or European culture — such as U.S. holidays or English-language films — while offering less detailed or more stereotypical descriptions of non-Western traditions.

Dehghani says this pattern creates a kind of feedback loop. “The more we rely on these systems, the more their outputs become part of our shared knowledge, and then that same material gets used to train the next generation of AI. So the cycle reinforces itself.”

That loop, the researchers warn, could gradually narrow the range of ideas, traditions and communication styles that people are exposed to and pass on over time.

Why does that matter? Because cultural diversity isn’t just about language or customs, the researchers say. It shapes how people think, solve problems and make decisions. A wide range of perspectives can lead to better solutions and more creative ideas. If that diversity shrinks, the researchers argue, society could lose important ways of understanding the world.

How to build a better AI

Of note, the team does not suggest that AI is inherently harmful. LLMs can make writing easier, improve access to information and help people communicate more clearly. The concern, the researchers say, is what happens when a small number of systems begin to influence billions of interactions every day.

“Once the system is trained on a narrow set of data, it’s very hard to undo that,” Daryani said.

To address the issue, the team outlines a three-part approach based on their study findings, beginning with the data used to train models. Most AI systems learn from English-language content drawn heavily from Western sources. The researchers say developers should include more material from different languages, regions and cultural traditions to capture cultural knowledge that might otherwise be systematically underrepresented.

During later training stages aimed at refining and evaluating LLMs, the researchers suggest incorporating culturally diverse examples as well as consulting experts such as psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and policymakers working in collaboration with diverse cultural communities to ensure responses reflect different social norms and values.

They then recommend changing how the training results are judged. Tech companies do employ workers from a variety of countries during this step,but  those workers are trained to apply standardized Western evaluation criteria. Instead, reviewers should evaluate answers based on multiple standards.

Taken together, these changes could help AI systems recognize that there is no one “correct” way to communicate or reason, preserving a broader range of human perspectives as the technology continues to evolve.

For Daryani, the stakes are clear: “Languages, traditions, ways of thinking — once they disappear, we can’t get them back. The question isn’t whether this is difficult to fix. It’s whether we can afford not to.”

About the study

Zhivar Sourati, a PhD student at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, was a co-author of the report, published in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

The compulsion started soon after my marriage.

Long before e-books and audiobooks, I furtively read paperbacks whose covers of bosomy maidens and bare-chested men would have outed my obsession. Then, on a family car trip, my husband told my young stepdaughters why I liked sitting alone in the back seat.

“Diane is reading bodice rippers,” he said, citing the old-fashioned name for sexually explicit romance novels. Back then, they were my guilty pleasure.

More than 30 years later, I remain a fan of romance novels, but it’s no longer a craving I feel compelled to hide. In fact, I value the window it opens to my research interests in pop culture, religion and gender.

I’m not alone. Romantic fiction makes up almost 25% of books sold in the U.S., and the genre earned US$1.44 billion globally in 2022-23. The Bible may be the bestselling book of all time, but annual sales of romance novels even outpace the Scriptures.

Written by women, for women

Among scholars, there’s a range of opinions on the genre’s enduring popularity.

Some describe romantic fiction as the literary equivalent of Marx’s “opium of the masses.” They argue that these books are perennial bestsellers because they offer escapism and the promise of “happily ever after” — a quick sugar high to distract from the struggles of everyday life.

Other scholars cite the genre’s pedigree. Though they’re canonized as literary classics, 19th-century novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights can also be read as romances — stories written by women and centered on women’s emotional lives, courtship and desires. In a world circumscribed by the era’s narrow gender roles, these books featured clever, often headstrong women who exercised some agency over their love lives and their fates.

In my view, this explains their popularity: 19th-century readers may have found vicarious pleasure in Jane Eyre’s journey from timid governess to independent heiress and happy wife. Likewise, Catherine Earnshaw’s decision to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton, thus abandoning the penniless Heathcliff, may have struck the female fans of Wuthering Heights as an understandable choice.

Nineteenth-century women had limited pastimes. Books that reflected on their own circumstances, albeit with more intrigue and drama, were catnip. But as readership grew, male authors wanted to cash in on the expanding market.

As men penned their own novels, their perspectives dominated, pushing women’s fiction to the side. Changing social mores also made the once popular “woman’s novel” seem dated.

The romance genre was revived in the 20th century when authors added more oomph to their plots and edgier characters. Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 classic, Rebecca, breathed new life into gothic romances — love stories set in dreary, desolate places, intermingled with horror and suspense. And Georgette Heyer revitalized historical romance with smoldering stories such as The Grand Sophy, set in England’s Regency period (1811–1820).

Bodice rippers debuted in the 1970s. The name came, in part, from the covers, which often depicted a woman in a half-torn dress being embraced by a buff male. A racier take on the romance genre, they were often set in early 19th-century England and ended in happily-ever-afters. But the characters were sexually active in ways that would have shocked and scandalized Jane Austen’s heroines.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’ The Flame and The Flower (1972) is widely credited with launching the modern bodice ripper: The first romance novel published in paperback, it became a huge bestseller, despite its graphic rape scenes.

These novels, which debuted in the midst of the sexual revolution, were more explicit than their precursors, and heroines enjoyed more agency in their life choices. That said, the sex was male-driven and often implied that a “throbbing member” could send the heroine into paroxysms of ecstasy.

Lovestruck mafiosos and bull breeders

The digital revolution further transformed romance novels.

Self-publishing, digital publishing and BookTok brought new and younger readers into the mix. Anyone could become a romance novelist, leading to an array of new characters, plots and sexual adventures.

A genre that once mainly featured straight, British aristocrats now embraced Black, Latino and Asian protagonists. There were wanton witches, voracious werewolves and vampire lotharios. Some stories explored alien pairings and lovestruck mafiosos, while in others, LGBTQ characters and professional athletes took center stage. Readers drawn to bawdier fare could dive into erotic fiction, with plotlines featuring women mating with bulls, reverse harems — one woman with several men — and women consorting with multi-limbed aliens.

Many of these innovations have something in common. Rather than sticking to the male-driven plotlines of 20th-century bodice rippers, most contemporary romance writers focus on the female orgasm. Men are far less likely to rush penetration because, before seeking their release, they want their partners to experience multiple climaxes.

But contemporary female characters are not just sexually satisfied. They also enjoy successful careers and close female friends. True to real life, some are plus size or have disabilities. Others were burned in past encounters. They need suitors to scale their emotional walls before blowing their minds in the bedroom.

Women in control

Put together, the genre has undergone a 180-degree turn from the books I hid in the 1990s.

Today’s romantic fiction is less about horny couplings and happy endings and more about exploring emotional connections and power dynamics. Stories also play out the impact of race, class, gender and sexuality on relationships.

Consider the bestselling book and breakout hit HBO series Heated Rivalry, which explores the complicated romance between two gay hockey players. It’s beloved by straight and gay female fans for depicting a blossoming relationship characterized by emotional vulnerability rather than toxic masculinity. And it reveals a trend previously underreported: Women like watching gay men enjoying sex.

While the Heated Rivalry phenomenon is intriguing, readership also has skyrocketed for romantasy.

Romantasy features unconventional women navigating make-believe worlds populated by magic, faeries and dragons. Some heroines are timid, others are brazen, but they share a drive to succeed on their terms.

The genre took off in 2015 with Sarah Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses, the saga of a beautiful but impoverished teen who finds herself in the faerie court. Eleven years and two series later, Maas’ books have sold more than 75 million copies. Each novel is kinkier than the last, and they’ve even inspired some readers to spice up things in their own bedrooms.

The success of these new romance subgenres reflects a striking societal shift: Women are no longer shy about being on top. As writers and readers increasingly see powerful women in C-suites and boardrooms, they expect similar strength in the bedroom.

Although what women want has not changed over time, our ability to achieve it has. That’s why the popularity of books by, for and about women is as fervent today as when Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine in Pride and Prejudice, fell for Mr. Darcy. But Lizzie Bennet lived in a world where she could do only so much, hemmed in like her real-life counterparts.

Thankfully, women today enjoy more power, agency and pleasure. And thankfully, too, we have a lot more books by, for and about women as we contemplate what lies ahead.

Diane Winston, Professor and Knight Center Chair in Media and Religion, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In February 2023, a little more than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Vanderbilt University sent an email to its student body in the wake of a fatal campus shooting at Michigan State.

“The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other,” the email read in part. In tiny type at the bottom of the message, a disclaimer appeared: “paraphrased from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”

Students immediately objected.

“There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” one senior wrote.

A Vanderbilt apology email quickly followed. The university launched a professionalism and ethics investigation. One associate dean couched the misstep as a result of learning pains tied to the adoption of new technology.

Chatbots have spawned a host of ethical questions about writing assistance for teachers, students and authors.

But similar debates about ghostwriting have been taking place for over a century, revealing a persistent discomfort with the idea that the words we read might not belong to the person whose name is attached to them.

Outsourcing authorship

Ghostwriting, a paid arrangement in which one person writes under another’s name, has existed for over a century.

The term seems to have first appeared in the English language in a 1908 newspaper article, which I encountered while researching my forthcoming book, Ghostwriting: A Secret History, from God to A.I. The story appeared in the Daily Star in Lincoln, Nebraska, and describes an anonymous writer who earned US$5,000 to help a high-society woman write a book.

Today, ghostwriting usually involves collaborations between professional writers and celebrities or professionals who otherwise wouldn’t have the time, skill or connections to write a book.

On publication of the manuscript, the ghostwriter is typically named, albeit obliquely — perhaps identified as a friend or consultant in the acknowledgments section. In some instances, the ghostwriter’s name appears alongside the credited author’s on the cover. Either way, the client assumes ownership of the ghostwriter’s work.

An ethical gray area

And yet when I type “the practice of one person writing in another person’s name” into Google, the search engine doesn’t spit out “ghostwriting.”

My first hit is “pseudonym” or “alias.” “Plagiarism,” “libel” and “slander” aren’t far behind. A 1953 article titled “Ghost Writing and History” that appeared in The American Scholar also points out that in the mid-20th century, “forgery” — falsely imitating another’s work with the intent to deceive — and “ghostwriting” could be used interchangeably by scholars.

In other words, even when consensual and compensated, ghostwriting has some relatives that are ethically suspect. And maybe that’s why many clients obscure the fact that they’ve used a ghostwriter, and why responses to ghostwritten works often reflect uneasiness with the practice.

“You should be ashamed,” read one social media post, written in response to Millie Bobby Brown’s 2023 debut novel, which she co-wrote with a ghostwriter. “[The ghostwriter’s] name should be on the cover. She was the one who actually wrote the book.”

The discomfort goes both ways: “I feel so guilty and ashamed whenever I use a ghostwriter now because I feel people will think I’m lying,” an anonymous poster on Reddit admitted.

Both the criticism and self-flagellation imply that the act of claiming another person’s words can render these words deceitful, even if the words have been paid for and the content is true.

Ghostwriting agencies rush to defuse these worries. Ghostwriting has been around forever, the Association of Ghostwriters reassures its clients. Ghostwriting is consensual and collaborative — not lazy, deceptive or a form of “selling out,” an author who’d recently used ghostwriting services explained.

And yet, in the last chapter of her ghostwritten book, Whoopi Goldberg acknowledges some misgivings about using a ghostwriter.

“I meant to try (to write the book myself),” Goldberg writes. “And when it turned out I couldn’t quite pull it off … I looked for help.”

Goldberg frames the assistance of ghostwriting as something she deserved after overcoming obstacles as a Black woman. But Goldberg also has financial resources available that others looking for writing assistance usually don’t. High-end ghostwriters collect in the mid-six figures for their services; Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, supposedly scored a $1 million advance.

Cue chatbots. Generative AI promises to be the ghostwriter for the masses, so much so that ghostwriter Josh Lisec explained to me how, in the future, ghostwriting will need to be marketed as a boutique service for elites if it is to survive.

Naming names

Whether you’re paying for a ghostwriter or using a free chatbot, “assistance” or “collaboration” on intellectual and artistic work is not automatically unethical.

Editors have long made a career out of helping authors shape their writing. Visual artists have long employed studio assistants. Television shows only get written collaboratively in writers’ rooms.

And yet, accepting assistance on intellectual or artistic work can raise legitimate questions, particularly with regards to how that assistance is acknowledged and how much assistance can be accepted while still calling a project “ours.”

In the late 19th century, for example, one sculptor went to court to rebut a claim that his assistant — whom the press referred to as a “ghost” — had completed sculptures for which the sculptor took credit. The judge announced that an artist could accept, with integrity, a certain amount of mechanical assistance. But he added that there was a threshold when artistic assistance became “dishonest.” The judge made the accused sculptor craft a bust in real time to prove his skill.

Similarly, most educators find it more ethical when their students turn to ChatGPT for editing assistance but much less so when they use it to generate a document from scratch.

Many universities now allow AI as a tool but require users to verify its accuracy and disclose its use.

Yet even verified, A.I.-generated text, if claimed solely as an individual’s work, can pose policy violations at my institution, the University of Southern California: “You should never attempt to present … content created by others, including generative AI, as your own.”

The same policies that govern appropriate A.I. use also come up in ghostwriting contracts. The ghostwriter signs a “warranty of originality” that promises the author that the ghostwriter has — via platforms such as iThenticate — fact-checked and plagiarism-checked their work.

When inaccuracies do crop up, ghostwriters often take the fall.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blamed her ghostwriter for indicating in her memoir that she had met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Physician David Agus, who teaches at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, held his ghostwriter responsible for the many instances of plagiarism that were identified in his popular science books.

Ghostwriters willingly provide assistance and accept responsibility for the originality of what they write. Scholars have permission to use generative AI, provided they properly cite its use.

And yet when Vanderbilt administrators advertised that their email had been written with the assistance of ChatGPT, students and faculty pushed back.

University policies and book contracts may offer veils of legitimacy and shields from legal liability. But in the end, readers still seem to want the words they’re reading to come from the mind of the person whose name is on the byline.

Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Education, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Three weeks into the U.S. war with Iran, it seems increasingly evident that President Donald Trump and his administration miscalculated how Iran would respond to attacks.

Besides appearing unprepared by the escalation of war, the president has offered contradictory statements on the U.S. rationale for bombing Iran, including that Iranian missiles could “soon” rain down on American cities.

The administration’s inconsistent rationale for waging war was laid bare on March 18, 2026, when Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and declined to say whether her agency had made an estimate of if and when Iran would threaten the U.S. mainland.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” Gabbard said.

The statement was especially odd given that the briefing’s subject was the U.S. intelligence community’s latest global threat assessment. It’s clear to me that neither Gabbard nor other members of the intelligence community were part of Trump’s decision-making about going to war.

Besides serving as chair of the National Intelligence Council in the Barack Obama administration, I was a staff member of the National Security Council in the Jimmy Carter administration. I know that this apparent lack of a coordinated policy on Iran is a far cry from the war preparation and planning done during previous presidential administrations.

National Security Council

Typically, the National Security Council, which consists of the Cabinet secretaries of the national security agencies, does its work through its committees, including the Deputies Committee, which is made up of the top deputies in those departments. The Deputies Committee reviews plans and assesses options, usually presenting a recommendation to the principals, including the president.

In that sense, the National Security Council is seen within an administration as the honest broker, especially in balancing the roles of the two main foreign affairs departments: the State Department and the Defense Department.

To be sure, different administrations have used the National Security Council in different ways.

President Dwight Eisenhower created the modern National Security Council. His was an elaborate structure, with groups for both assessing options and overseeing implementation. It reflected his wartime experience, with careful staffing from a general staff whose responsibilities ranged from operations and logistics to intelligence and plans.

Other administrations have favored less formal arrangements. John F. Kennedy, for instance, kept discussions with the National Security Council secret during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But all the National Security Council stakeholders were represented, and Kennedy reached out to consult outside expertise on the Soviet Union.

Lyndon Johnson made Tuesday lunches his forum for debating decisions about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Beginning with just his secretaries of state and defense, the lunches became a National Security Council meeting but in less formal circumstances. The CIA director, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the press secretary were later added to the group.

In other administrations at war, including the George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations in Iraq, the Deputies Committees would meet daily to assess progress and review options for what came next.

In the Obama administration, the National Intelligence Council I chaired supplied the intelligence support to the Deputies Committee. We provided a steady stream of intelligence assessments across various subjects. Those included pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring in the 2010s to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

The intelligence assessments provided the information – about where wars stood and what may come next — used for discussion among the deputies. They were discussions informed by experts on the Deputies Committee and from staff on the National Security Council who specialized in the region or military affairs.

This was nowhere better illustrated than in negotiating the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The deal required bringing together experts on Iran and regional dynamics in the Middle East with experts on nuclear fuel cycles and the making of nuclear weapons.

Hardly seen

The Trump administration cut the National Security Council staff in half in May 2025, to around 150. The plan was to streamline and restructure national intelligence under Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Since White Houses always want to pretend they are cheaper than they are, most staff with the National Security Council are seconded — or loaned for free — from one of the agencies. The process saves the White House money. But it also provides it with invaluable in-house expertise and exposes those seconded officials to presidential policymaking.

A friend and colleague who served as under secretary of defense quipped that every time he saw a State Department counterpart coming to a Deputies Committee meeting, he knew what was coming in substance: a request for a military solution to a geopolitical problem.

His stock answer: “Yes, we can do that, but it’ll require 100,000 soldiers and cost US$10 billion.” That answer was his quip, but the Deputies Committee provided a forum for arguing about the merits of the case.

The Trump administration in January 2025 outlined the National Security Council structure in familiar terms. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and director of national intelligence, both a regular presence in debates in previous administrations, were made situational rather than regular members. They would attend as needed, not automatically.

But the National Security Council has hardly been seen since, unlike Trump’s Cabinet, which gathers occasionally at meetings that often begin with Cabinet members lavishing praise on the president.

Brian Kilmeade of Fox News Radio asked Trump on March 13, 2026, about that inner circle.

“In your Cabinet with the vice president, secretary of state, what is it like, what are the dynamics when you have a big decision like Iran or Venezuela?” Kilmeade asked. “Are people speaking up and speaking their minds?”

Trump’s answer spoke volumes.

“They do,” the president said. “I let them speak their mind, and they do. And we have some differences, but they, they never end up being much. I convince them all to, let’s do it my way.”

Perhaps this casual approach to national security from the Trump administration should not surprise Americans after “Signalgate” — when administration officials in 2025 used the messaging app Signal rather than secure government modes to discuss U.S. military strikes on Yemen and inadvertently included a journalist in the communications.

But when lives are at stake, not to mention Americans’ pocketbooks and the global economy, I think the nation deserves better. Conducting a war requires a hard-headed process for assessing progress and evaluating next steps. In other administrations, the National Security Council would have provided that.

Gregory F. Treverton, Professor Emeritus of the Practice in International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Older Americans are willing to travel far for medical care — sometimes much farther than policymakers and experts assume, according to researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Why it matters: As hospitals close in some areas, practices consolidate and telehealth expands, older adults may tolerate long trips for care — but not equally. The study suggests socioeconomic status affects willingness to travel.

What’s new: A study published recently in JAMA Network Open finds that many Americans age 65 and older are willing to travel more than an hour for routine or specialized medical care.

What happened: Researchers at the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) surveyed a nationally representative group of older adults.

• Questions centered on how long respondents currently travel for care and how much farther they would be willing to go before deciding to delay or skip an appointment.

Results: On average, respondents would tolerate about an hour or more of travel time, particularly for specialty care.

• For primary care visits, they would travel 68 minutes.
• For a diagnostic test, such as an MRI, 113 minutes.
• For a specialist visit, 128 minutes.

What they’re saying: “This shows older adults place a high value on access to care,” said Soeren Mattke, professor (research) of economics, director of the Brain Health Observatory at CESR and study senior author. “They are often willing to travel significant distances before delaying or forgoing care.”

Yes, but: The averages mask important differences.

• Older adults in poorer health, those living in large metropolitan areas and those who had previously struggled with transportation were less willing to travel long durations.
• In contrast, those with higher incomes, more education and reliable access to a car reported greater willingness to spend more time traveling.

Study first author Jeremy Burke, senior economist at CESR, said those gaps matter for health equity.

• “If someone is already dealing with health challenges or transportation barriers, even modest increases in travel time can become a real obstacle,” Burke said. “Those are the patients most at risk of delaying care.”

The big picture: Health systems are consolidating, with some services moving into regional hubs rather than neighborhood clinics. Policymakers often debate how far is “too far” for patients to travel, especially for older adults.

• This study suggests that distance alone isn’t the full story. The type of visit, transportation options and personal resources all shape decisions.

The findings also have implications for telehealth.

• Virtual visits can reduce travel burdens, but they may not fully replace in-person care, especially for diagnostic tests or specialist consultations that require equipment or physical exams.
• “Telehealth is an important tool, but it’s not a cure-all,” Mattke said. “We still need to think carefully about where services are located and how patients physically get there.”

What else? Transportation policy plays a role, too. Programs that offer ride services, improved public transit or partnerships with community organizations could make a meaningful difference for vulnerable seniors.

Between the lines: Older adults living in big cities were less willing to travel long durations.

• This might boil down to traffic, parking and other travel complexities, which make even short drives feel burdensome.
• But rural residents, who often already travel long distances for care, appeared more accepting of extended trips.

Bottom line: Many older Americans are willing to travel surprisingly long distances for medical care — but willingness depends on health, resources and access to transportation.

• As care delivery models evolve, understanding those differences may help health systems and policymakers design services that better match patients’ needs and circumstances.

About the study

The findings are based on data from the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative internet panel administered by CESR. For this study, researchers surveyed a representative sample of 2,650 adults age 65 or older between April 23 and June 8, 2025, about their willingness to travel for primary care, specialty care and one-time diagnostic appointments.

In addition to Mattke and Burke, authors on the study include USC Dornsife researchers Tabasa Ozawa, Ying Liu and Wei Ye, all from the USC Brain Health Observatory based at USC Dornsife.

The study was funded by National Institute on Aging grants 1R01AG083189 and 1U01AG077280.

Editor’s Note: Darrin S. Joy contributed to this article.

A recent Dornsife Dialogues conversation hosted by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences explored two big questions: How does life begin — and where else in the universe it might it exist?

The conversation, led by USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock, included alumna Laurie Barge, a senior research scientist in astrobiology at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Karen Lloyd, Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and professor of Earth sciences.

Both are conducting research that’s changing our understanding of what makes for habitable conditions. Life, they argue, may not require sunlight or even abundant energy, only the right chemical conditions. 

Lloyd focuses on life deep beneath Earth’s surface. Using modern DNA sequencing tools, she and her team have discovered entirely new branches of microbial life. 

These “novel phyla” are thriving in extreme environments, from highly alkaline deep-sea mud volcanoes to ancient Siberian permafrost frozen for 120,000 years. Some microbes appear to survive on energy levels far below what scientists once thought possible. Her new book, Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, covers this journey of discovery. 

In her lab, Barge is recreating hydrothermal vents, mineral “chimneys” similar to those on the ocean floor, to test how early chemical reactions could have generated energy and organic molecules on Earth — and possibly on worlds like Mars or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. She’s exploring whether life’s building blocks can form without biology and what measurable “biosignatures” future space missions should seek when they look for life on other planets. 

For Barge, who completed her PhD in 2009 at USC Dornsife, these emerging discoveries give her a sense of optimism. “It makes me feel less alone. We’re less alone than we even thought we were here on our own planet,” she says. “Spending all my time thinking about it really gives me a lot of hope, and I see a lot of possibilities and interesting questions.” 

The 2025 Eaton fire’s smoke did more than darken the sky: It generated a carbon monoxide and particulate matter surge that far exceeded Los Angeles County’s average daily human-caused emissions, according to a new study led by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Why it matters: The findings show how a major urban wildfire can quickly become a regional air-quality crisis, sending harmful smoke across L.A. and raising concerns about respiratory, psychological and other health effects that Keck School of Medicine of USC researchers are now studying.

What they found: Researchers estimated the Eaton fire produced carbon monoxide at rates more than 20 times higher than L.A. County’s average daily human-caused emissions.

• “People could see the smoke, but they couldn’t see the scale of the pollution it was carrying,” said William Berelson, professor of Earth sciences, environmental studies and spatial sciences at USC Dornsife and a co-author of the study. “This one fire was producing carbon monoxide on a scale that exceeded the entire county’s usual daily emissions from human activity.”

Zoom in: Burning homes and other structures accounted for a larger share of the fire’s carbon emissions than trees and shrubs did, helping explain why the Eaton fire created such a large regional impact.

How they did it: Researchers combined satellite imagery, computer-aided modeling of the smoke plumes and on-the-ground air measurements to estimate what burned and track how smoke moved across the region in near real time.

• The air data included readings from the Carbon Census network of sensors deployed around Los Angeles by Berelson’s team.

By the numbers: The team estimated the Eaton fire released about 153 million kilograms of carbon (337 million pounds).

• Smoke reached downtown L.A. within hours of the fire’s start, then moved west, reaching coastal areas several hours later.
• At some monitoring sites, levels of harmful fine-particle pollution known as PM2.5 exceeded the EPA’s 24-hour health standard for one to three days.

The big picture: The January 2025 Los Angeles fires affected the region in different ways, but the Eaton fire stands out because its smoke moved directly into central and western Los Angeles, exposing communities far from the burn area.

• By contrast, early emissions from the Palisades fire were carried offshore by winds.

What it means: The study suggests urban wildfires should be understood not only as disasters of flame and loss, but also as citywide air-quality emergencies with climate and public-health consequences.

• The findings could help scientists and policymakers better estimate the full costs of urban fires, including emissions and air-quality impacts that spread across an entire metro area.

About the study

In addition to Berelson, study authors include Pietro Vannucci and Wenye Wang of USC Dornsife and Jooil Kim and Timothy Lueker of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.

The research was supported by USC through a President’s Sustainability Award and a USC Dornsife Public Exchange Grant.

What do an Olympic Gold Medalist, a paleontologist and a cookbook author all have in common?

They’re all graduates of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and part of the inaugural USC Dornsife 10 to Watch list, which spotlights outstanding recent alumni whose accomplishments reflect the value and versatility of a USC Dornsife education. 

“The liberal arts are an incredible vehicle for success. They teach you how to think critically, communicate powerfully, and adapt quickly in a changing world,” says USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock. “That’s why so many USC Dornsife alumni are thriving and leading today.”

All Credit to Troy

Although their career fields vary widely, all 10 to Watch honorees say that USC Dornsife was an important launchpad.

Yasmeen Serhan ’16 graduated with a degree in international relations and is a digital features editor at Reuters, overseeing recurring series on global news and culture, sports and AI. She credits USC Dornsife with helping her acquire the skills necessary for a career covering foreign relations.

“In addition to majoring in international relations, I minored in French and took classes studying Arabic and journalism,” she says. “What I appreciate most about my USC education is how multifaceted it was.”

For Kaitlin Mogentale ’15, a unit on U.S. agriculture in her “Intro to Environmental Studies (ENST 100)” class not only changed what she ate but also inspired the focus of her later career. “I went from being a Midwestern, meat-and-potatoes eater to a full-fledged vegan by the end of freshman year. The class sparked a deeper reflection on how our personal choices align with our values,” she says.

Shortly after graduating with her degree in environmental studies, she launched Pulp Pantry, one of the first businesses to turn food scraps into snacks,  and nabbed an investment from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. She’s since launched another snack business, Trashy, along with Scrapi, which connects those with excess food to those who can put it to use. Mogentale is also the head of business development at Divert, which works to prevent food waste.

Other 10 to Watch honorees cite the personal connections established at USC as being pivotal to their success.

During his senior year majoring in economics at USC Dornsife, Owen Han ’20 started a pop-up supper club for his friends. After graduation, his roommate and USC Marshall School of Business alumnus Hwoo Lee ’19 encouraged him to parlay his enthusiasm for food into a career. “Honestly, if it weren’t for Lee, whom I met at USC, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now,” says Han.

Han now has millions of followers across his social media platforms, cooks with celebrity chefs  like Gordon Ramsey and recently published a cookbook, Stacked.

Nominate a Trojan to 10 to Watch

The annual USC Dornsife 10  to Watch list recognizes outstanding undergraduate and graduate alumni of the College from the past decade. Nominations for the 2027 list are now open. For current students who hope to one day make the list, this year’s 10 to Watch have a little advice.

“The Trojan Family is very real, so make the most of it! And read your school paper,” says Serhan.

“Take advantage of all USC has to offer. Go to campus events and meet people. The genuine bond you create with fellow Trojans sticks with you well beyond your college years,” says Tommy Brooksbank ’18, a news producer at ABC News who earned a political science degree at USC Dornsife and a degree in broadcast and digital journalism from USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

“Find a good support network, whether it be friends, peers, or professors. USC has no shortage of incredible people. And explore Los Angeles! Tap into your interests that L.A. undoubtedly serves in some way. It’s an incredible city,” says assistant professor at Rutgers University Kiersten Formoso ’23, who earned her PhD in geological sciences.

Artificial intelligence chatbots are standardizing how people speak, write and think. If this homogenization continues unchecked, it risks reducing humanity’s collective wisdom and ability to adapt, argue USC computer scientists and psychologists in an opinion paper published March 11 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

The researchers — led by Morteza Dehghani, professor of psychology and computer science at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences — say that AI developers should incorporate more real-world diversity into large language model (LLM) training sets, not only to help preserve human cognitive diversity, but also to improve chatbots’ reasoning abilities.

“Individuals differ in how they write, reason and view the world,” says study first author Zhivar Sourati, a PhD student at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “When these differences are mediated by the same LLMs, their distinct linguistic style, perspective, and reasoning strategies become homogenized, producing standardized expressions and thoughts across users.”

Large language models dampen individuality

Within groups and societies, cognitive diversity bolsters creativity and problem-solving, say the researchers. However, cognitive diversity is shrinking worldwide as billions of people are using the same handful of AI chatbots for an increasing number of tasks, they add. When people use chatbots to help them polish their writing, for example, the writing ends up losing its stylistic individuality, and people feel less creative ownership over what they produce.

“The concern is not just that LLMs shape how people write or speak, but that they subtly redefine what counts as credible speech, correct perspective, or even good reasoning,” says Sourati, a member of Dehghani’s Morality and Language Lab.

The team points to multiple studies showing that LLM outputs are less varied than human-generated writing and that LLM outputs tend to reflect the language, values and reasoning styles of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies.

“Because LLMs are trained to capture and reproduce statistical regularities in their training data, which often overrepresent dominant languages and ideologies, their outputs often mirror a narrow and skewed slice of human experience,” says Sourati.

Though studies show that individuals often generate more ideas with more details when they use LLMs, groups of people produce fewer and less creative ideas when they use LLMs than when they simply combine their collective powers, note the researchers.

“Even if people are not the firsthand users of LLMs, LLMs are still going to affect them indirectly,” says Sourati. “If a lot of people around me are thinking and speaking in a certain way, and I do things differently, I would feel a pressure to align with them because it would seem like a more credible or socially acceptable way of expressing my ideas.”

LLMs can reduce the variety of reasoning styles

Beyond language, studies have shown that after interacting with biased LLMs, people’s opinions become more like the LLM that they used.

LLMs also favor linear modes of reasoning such as “chain-of-thought reasoning,” which requires models to show step-by-step reasoning. This emphasis reduces the use of intuitive or abstract reasoning styles, which are sometimes more efficient than linear reasoning, the researchers say.

They also note that LLMs can alter people’s expectations, which can subtly change the direction of a person’s work.

“Rather than actively steering generation, users often defer to model-suggested continuations, selecting options that seem ‘good enough’ instead of crafting their own, which gradually shifts agency from the user to the model,” says Sourati.

The researchers say that AI developers should intentionally incorporate diversity in language, perspectives and reasoning into their models. They emphasize that this diversity should be grounded in the diversity that exists within humans globally, rather than introducing random variation.

“If LLMs had more diverse ways of approaching ideas and problems, they would better support the collective intelligence and problem-solving capabilities of our societies,” said Sourati. “We need to diversify the AI models themselves while also adjusting how we interact with them, especially given their widespread use across tasks and contexts, to protect the cognitive diversity and ideation potential of future generations.”

About the study

USC Viterbi PhD student Alireza Ziabari also contributed to the research, which was supported by funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

As a space scientist, every time I go outside with my family, I tell my children to look up at the sky. The front door of our home looks southeast, and on winter nights the constellation Orion hangs majestically just above the horizon as soon as it grows dark enough to see stars.

One summer night, my son came running in and exclaimed, “Dad, Orion’s not there!” It was time for his first real astronomy lesson.

We went outside and I asked him to find the Big Dipper, the easily identifiable pattern of stars that make up a portion of the constellation Ursa Major. I reminded him that we could always see the Big Dipper no matter what time of the year it was.

So, why is it that Orion is not always visible in the night sky, and certainly not in the same location month after month, while the Big Dipper always is? The answer is intimately tied to a few concepts: how astronomers measure the length of a day, the motion of the Earth around the Sun during a year, and the cadence with which stars rise and set night after night.

Sidereal time

If you look eastward at the same hour for two nights in a row, you’ll find that the stars seem to be in the same place. But they’re not, and this movement becomes apparent if you continue observing at the same hour for a week or more. A combination of the Earth’s daily rotation on its axis and its yearly orbit around the Sun cause them to appear to move across the sky.

Earth spins on its axis, which runs from the South Pole through the center of the Earth to the North Pole, once a day. Astronomers measure a day in two different ways: They measure a solar day, 24 hours long, with the position of the Sun from high noon to high noon. They measure a sidereal day with respect to distant stars that are fixed in the sky. A sidereal day is 23 hours and 56 minutes long.

The constellation Orion — and every star in the night sky — will appear in exactly the same place every 23 hours and 56 minutes. Because of this slight offset, stars will appear to rise four minutes earlier every 24 hours on successive nights. Over the course of a month, a star that was close to the eastern horizon at 10 p.m. will now be much higher in the sky, having risen two hours earlier.

So while the constellation Orion appears close to the horizon at sunset in late December, it is nearly overhead in February and March.

You can use an interactive star chart to see this phenomenon. Do you want to find Orion in August in North America? Just wake up at 4:30 a.m. and look eastward.

Unlike Orion, the Big Dipper is always visible at night in most of the Northern Hemisphere. This is because of how Earth’s daily rotation is projected onto the stars.

Circumpolar stars

Astronomers use a common set of reference points to project Earth’s north and south poles, and the equator, onto the celestial sphere, an imaginary sphere encompassing the sky.

The idea of the celestial sphere evolved in ancient times from the notion that the Earth was the unmoving center of the universe. The projection of Earth’s equator delineates the celestial equator, and the poles project onto the north and south celestial poles.

The motion of stars near the celestial poles differs from how Orion and other constellations behave. Presently, the north celestial pole is very close to the star Polaris, also known as the North Star. Stars close to Polaris never rise or set. They appear to circle counterclockwise around that star as the Earth spins on its rotation axis once a day.

The number of these circumpolar stars increases as you move toward the North Pole. There are no circumpolar stars at the equator. Every star and constellation rises in the east and sets in the west because Earth rotates west to east on its axis.

If you are standing at the North Pole, every northern constellation is circumpolar, circling the North Star and never rising or setting. The pattern is similar in the Southern Hemisphere, with the southern constellations circling clockwise around the south celestial pole.

Earth’s precession

Millennia ago, people charted the path of the Sun through the constellations of the zodiac, which birthed the practice of astrology.

What does it mean for the Sun to be in Sagittarius, for example? It means that to see the constellation Sagittarius, you have to be looking toward the Sun. That would make it daytime, when the stars are not visible. Wait for nightfall, and you can see Gemini high in the sky. Six months later, the Sun is in Gemini, and Sagittarius is visible in the night sky. This pattern repeats year after year, as the Earth orbits the Sun. Your zodiac signs depend on which constellation the Sun was in when you were born.

There is one other change in the night sky that occurs on time scales much longer than a human lifetime. Because of the gravitational influence of the Sun, and to a lesser extent Jupiter, on Earth’s daily rotation, Earth’s spin axis precesses, or moves in a circle, like a toy top spun on a table.

Because of this motion, which also subtly changes Earth’s orbit in space, Polaris will no longer be the North Star a thousand years from now. Wait 12,000 years, and the bright star Vega will be closest to the north celestial pole, more than 50 degrees across the night sky from its present location near Polaris.

Another consequence of this motion, sometimes referred to as the precession of the equinoxes, is that today the constellations of the zodiac no longer align with the traditional dates associated with them.

For example, when horoscopes and astrological signs were originally devised, the Sun was in the constellation Sagittarius from Nov. 22 to Dec. 21. However, because of precession over thousands of years, the Sun now crosses this constellation from Dec. 18 to Jan. 19. It spends the early part of December in Ophiuchus, which is not part of the traditional 12 constellations of the zodiac.

These changes in the night sky take weeks, months or even hundreds of years to be visible. If you’re not that patient, you can fly to the opposite hemisphere to see Orion upside down and the night sky turning in the opposite direction above.

Vahe Peroomian, Professor (Teaching) of Physics and Astronomy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When the bombing of Iran began on Feb. 28, 2026, the Trump administration had not informed the American people exactly what it was prepared to achieve.

Was the attack intended to degrade Iran’s nuclear program? Trump had declared that “obliterated” after last June’s bombing.

Was it to slow Iran’s ballistic missile program? U.S. intelligence assesses that Iran is years away from any ballistic missile that could strike the United States.

Was it to show support for Iran’s opposition, as Trump’s earlier “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” posts on Truth Social suggested? A bombing campaign that was bound to kill innocent Iranians, including 175 people at a girls elementary school near a military base, seemed an odd form of support.

I am a scholar and former practitioner of intelligence and national security policy in the White House. I believe there are lessons in effecting political change in Iran that can be taken, ironically, from the very U.S.- and British-led clandestine campaign in the mid-20th century that set Iran on the road to the intense anti-Western and anti-American sentiment that has characterized its government policy for decades.

How does this end?

President Trump has said he wants regime change in Iran but has articulated no strategy for achieving that end.

Strategy is the connection between means and ends. For waging a war, it means asking whether the military means available match the desired military outcome. In trying to effect political change, it means asking whether the instruments employed will produce the desired change.

As journalist Fareed Zakaria put it, “‘Bomb and hope’ is not a strategy.”

Looking at the last U.S. effort at regime change in Iran — the CIA’s 1953 covert program to oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and strengthen Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule — offers insight into what might have been … and what still might be this time around in Iran.

Mossadegh had moved to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — effectively, British oil interests. Britain responded with an an oil embargo and a severe economic squeeze on Iran.

Western powers feared that prolonged Iranian instability could open the door to Soviet influence in the oil-rich country — a central Cold War concern.

By early 1953 the U.S. government, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, authorized the CIA to prepare a covert plan to remove Mossadegh and restore effective power to the shah, who at the time held a more ceremonial role. British intelligence had been pushing a similar agenda, and the two services collaborated on both the strategy and its implementation.

The operational details, especially those declassified in recent decades, paint a striking picture of a carefully planned clandestine political intervention that was successful, rather than a simple military invasion.

A far cry from ‘bomb and hope’

The British-American budget for the joint plan was modest by military standards. It was aimed at propaganda and influence operations, and it sought to shape public perception and political support.

It was composed of three elements. First it funded newspapers and printed propaganda designed to discredit Mossadegh, portraying him as corrupt or sympathetic to communism. The propaganda also promoted fears of instability and communist infiltration.

Second, according to declassified histories, agents staged “false flag” incidents — attacks attributed to communists, for example — to stoke fear and backlash against Mossadegh among religious and conservative groups.

Third, the coup planners attempted to engage influential clerical leaders and organizations to amplify anti-Mossadegh sentiment.

Shaping the crowds on Tehran’s streets proved critical to the operation. The CIA organized demonstrators to pose as pro-shah protesters, including paying individuals to chant slogans and confront Mossadegh supporters.

These orchestrated demonstrations climaxed on Aug. 19, 1953, when pro-shah forces and sympathetic leaders in the Iranian military – with CIA financial and logistical backing – seized key points of the country, confronted Mossadegh loyalists and helped topple his government. Estimates suggest around 200 to 300 people were killed in the chaotic fighting in Tehran.

What might have been, and what might be

The Mossadegh coup occurred in a less transparent world. However — and regardless of how you feel about it — the coup suggests the value of having a strategy to accomplish political change and, beyond Israel, bringing allies along if possible.

So far, Trump has called for the Iranian military and the Revolutionary Guard to lay down their arms. But the Trump administration has provided no guidance on how to do so, or to whom to do so.

Surely, the administration should be able to devise a plan for potential political change in Iran. It has insight from the years it has spent negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. Recent events suggest the extent of Israeli, if not American, penetration of Iran.

In 2018, for instance, Israel’s Mossad national intelligence agency broke into an Iranian facility and stole archives on Iran’s nuclear activities, 55,000 pages and another 55,000 files stored on CDs.

In June 2025, Israel conducted covert drone operations deep inside Iran, in concert with airstrikes on Iranian missile and military infrastructure. Mossad reportedly established an undercover drone network and launched explosive drones to neutralize air defenses and missile launchers before the main attack.

The successful targeting of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his close associates in the latest round of airstrikes suggests the extent of likely Israeli monitoring of Iranian communications by Mossad and the CIA.

Crises tend to put pressure on governments to open communications channels, and the take from any successful eavesdropping might be passed to opposition groups to help them organize and avoid capture.

If Israel can smuggle explosive drones into Iran, it should be able to make the satellite internet provider Starlink and its kin available to enable the opposition to better — and more safely — organize.

It is late in the day to emulate the Mossadegh coup with information operations, and it is probably more difficult in an era of ubiquitous social media, not newspapers. But it’s not too late to try.

I believe those brave opposition elements in Iran, who have been killed by their government and bombed by the United States and Israel, deserve no less.

Gregory F. Treverton, Professor Emeritus of the Practice of International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Three rounds of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran failed to persuade President Donald Trump that a solution to the two country’s nuclear impasse lay in diplomacy, rather than military action. A perceived lack of progress in the last of those indirect negotiations on Feb. 26, was enough to prompt Trump to green-light a massive onslaught of missiles that has degraded Iran’s offensive capabilities and killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several members of Iran’s senior military leadership.

In response, Tehran has launched strikes across the Middle East, targeting Israel as well as Gulf states that host U.S. airbases. At least three Americans have been killed.

While the scale of the U.S., Israeli and Iranian strikes has taken some observers by surprise, the failure of the talks that led to them was all too predictable.

For diplomacy to be successful, both sides need to agree on the issues subject to negotiation and also believe that peaceful resolution is more valuable than military engagement. This clearly was not the case in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks of 2025 and 2026.

As someone who has researched nonproliferation and U.S. national security for two decades and was involved in State Department nuclear diplomacy, I know that even under more favorable conditions, negotiations often fail. And the chances for success in the Iran-U.S. talks were always slim. In fact, publicly stated red lines by both sides were incompatible with each other — meaning negotiations were always likely to fail.

Iran wanted the talks confined only to guarantees about the civilian purpose of its nuclear program, not its missile program, support of regional proxy groups or human rights abuses. Essentially it wanted a return to 2015’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which halted Iran’s development of nuclear technology and stockpiling of nuclear material in exchange for lifting multiple international economic sanctions placed on Iran.

Meanwhile, Trump insisted on limits to Iran’s ballistic missiles and the cutting of Tehran’s support for regional militias. These were not included in the 2015 agreement, with parties ultimately deciding that a nuclear deal was better than the alternative of no deal at all.

False hope

Nevertheless, there had been a slim chance for a breakthrough of late.

While the positions of both the U.S. and Iranian governments had ossified since May 8, 2018 — the date when the first Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal — there had been some recent movement by Iran, according to former U.S. diplomats involved in negotiations during the Obama and Biden administrations.

With U.S. military building up in the region, Iran appeared more willing to negotiate within the nuclear arena than before. There were plausible solutions to the issue of Iran’s enrichment of uranium capabilities, including maintaining a minimum domestic capacity to develop medical isotopes and a removal of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium necessary to build a nuclear bomb.

There was less openness on other points of contention. Notably, there was no movement on ballistic missiles, which had always been a red line. On the eve of the round of discussions held in Geneva on Feb. 17, Trump stated: “I think they want to make a deal.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, noted progress over the “guiding principles” of the talks.

But a lot of this optimism appeared to have dissipated by the time the two sides held another round of talks on Feb. 26. While mediator Oman’s negotiators continued to talk of progress, the U.S. side was noticeably silent. Reporting since has suggested that Trump was displeased with the way the talks had gone, setting the stage for the Feb. 28 attack.

Military brinkmanship

The threat of military action was, of course, a continued backdrop to the talks.

The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group was deployed near Iranian waters in January as a signal of support to the Iranian protesters. The USS Gerald R Ford carrier group joined the buildup before the last round of talks.

Trump warned Iran that “if they don’t make a deal, the consequences are very steep.”

The thinking may have been that Iran, weakened by both the June 2025 U.S.-Israeli strikes and diminished capabilities of Tehran proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, was playing a weak hand in the talks.

Yet Iran also signaled a willingness to engage in military action. In the run-up to the last round of talks, Iran held military exercises and closed the Strait of Hormuz for a live-fire drill. Leaders in Tehran also declared that they would not restrain its response to another attack. The world is seeing that now, with a response that has seen Iran launch missiles across the Middle East and at rival Gulf nations.

Optimism has fallen before

Trump isn’t the first president to fail to secure a nuclear deal, although he is the first to respond to that failure with military action.

The Biden administration publicly pledged to strengthen and renew the Obama-era nuclear deal in 2021. However, Iran had significantly increased its nuclear technical capability during the years that had passed since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action collapsed. That increased the difficulty — just to return to the previous deal would have required Iran to give up the new technical capability it had achieved for no new benefits.

That window closed in 2022 after Iran removed all of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s surveillance and monitoring under the deal and started enriching uranium to near-weapons levels and stockpiling sufficient amounts for several nuclear weapons. The IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, maintains only normal safeguards that Iran had agreed to before the plan of action.

Optimism also existed for a short time in spring 2025 during five rounds of indirect talks that preceded the United States bombing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in June as part of a broader Israeli attack.

A more unstable Middle East

When I worked in multilateral nuclear diplomacy for the U.S. State Department, we saw talks fail in 2009 regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, after six years of on-and-off progress. The consequence of that failure is a more unstable East Asia and renewed interest by South Korea in developing nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the same dynamic appears to be playing out in the Middle East.

Military strikes have already killed more than 200 in Iran and across the region. A wider war in the Middle East is a possibility, and should the Iranian regime survive, it may commit to developing nuclear weapons given that the lack of them proved no deterrent to U.S. and Israeli military action.

Talks do not necessarily need an end point — in the shape of a deal — for them to have purpose. Under situations of increased military brinkmanship, talks could have helped the U.S. and Iran step back from the edge, build trust and perhaps develop better political relations — even if an actual deal remained out of reach.

Instead, Trump opted to go a different route.

This article includes sections originally published by The Conversation U.S. on Feb. 17, 2026.

Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, Professor of International Relations, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto; USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bad Bunny likes to remind the world where he and his music come from.

In “EoO,” a song from his 2025 album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” he raps, “‘Tás escuchando música de Puerto Rico” (“You’re listening to music from Puerto Rico”). Similarly, in the album’s second track, “VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR,” he announces that both he and reggaeton were born in Puerto Rico: “Aquí nací yo y el reggaetón, pa’ que sepa’.”

Puerto Rican artists like Bad Bunny certainly helped popularize the genre. But they didn’t create it.

In my own research of Latin America, I’ve explored how reggaeton comes from the small Central American nation of Panama, where the sound emerged from a swirl of sonic influences that included Spanish conquistadors, Caribbean immigrants and American colonizers.

English and Spanish collide

Understanding reggaeton requires understanding the intermingling of cultures and languages that Panama experienced over a relatively short period of time.

After Panama gained its independence from Spain in 1821, it became part of Gran Colombia, which, at its peak, included modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama.

Throughout the 19th century, Panama experienced population growth and mass industrialization, and waves of Afro Caribbean immigrants arrived in northern Panama in search of economic opportunities. Since they came from former British colonies, many of them spoke English. Meanwhile, the many Afro Panamanians already living in the country, whose descendants had been trafficked as slaves, spoke Spanish.

These linguistic distinctions resulted in two primary groups of Black people in Panama: Spanish-speaking Afro Panamanians and English-speaking West Indians. They worked alongside one another on construction projects, such as the trans-Isthmus railroad, in the mid-19th century. But with their different languages, colonial histories and cultures, they didn’t always get along.

In 1903, Panama separated from Gran Colombia, becoming the independent nation we know today. The U.S. had supported Panama’s independence for strategic reasons: It wanted to build and control the Panama Canal to secure influence over maritime trade and military movement in the Western Hemisphere. While Gran Colombia had rebuffed earlier U.S. overtures, leaders of the newly independent Panama were more receptive to American interests.

Jim Crow is imported to the Canal Zone

Police brutality, exploitation and intra-racial and interracial tensions also served as scaffolding for reggaeton.

During the canal’s construction, the U.S. operated and controlled the Panama Canal Zone, a 553 square-mile (1,432 square-kilometer) parcel of land encompassing the canal. Up to 60,000 people lived there while the canal was being built, with residents segregated by race into “gold roll” and “silver roll” workers. Gold roll workers were usually white. Silver roll workers were Black, and they were tasked with the most dangerous jobs.

The Canal Zone’s white residents were far more likely to have access to health services and have proper sanitation; Afro Panamanian and immigrant workers from Barbados, the Antilles, Jamaica and other Caribbean countries were much more likely to be exposed to — and die from — malaria.

West Indians and Afro Panamanians also experienced police brutality. Black women, in particular, were harassed by white police officers, who often accused them of sex work.

While both West Indians and Afro Panamanians were subjected to segregation and police brutality, the Americans running the Canal Zone tended to treat the English-speaking West Indians better. Meanwhile, children born and raised in the Canal Zone were only taught English in schools, which Afro Panamanians resented.

These tensions led to the rise of “panameñismo,” a movement that sought to preserve and promote Spanish language and culture in Panama. This movement culminated in the passing of restrictive immigration laws targeted at West Indians and stripping second-generation West Indians of their citizenship.

Despite these anti-West Indian policies, many Jamaican, Barbadian and Antillean immigrants who had already built a life in Panama remained in the country even after the canal was completed in 1914.

Reggae with a Spanish twist

In the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaicans introduced three subgenres of reggae — mento, ska and dancehall — to Panama.

The lyrics were in English and Jamaican Patois, an English-based creole language. But it didn’t take long for an offshoot of reggae, “reggae en español,” to emerge. By the end of the 1970s, reggae en español had become popular in Panama and had spread throughout Latin America. Similarly, the nascent genre of hip-hop was gaining steam in the U.S. and eventually made its way to Panama, where an American presence had remained since the completion of the canal. It wasn’t until 1979 that the Canal Zone was abolished, and Panama did not have ownership over the canal until 2000.

It was out of this diverse mix of musical and linguistic influences that reggaeton was born, a genre that features the looping drum pattern — called “dembow riddim” — of Jamaican dancehall, the tropical vibe of reggae and a mixture of rapping and singing. Like reggae and hip-hop, reggaeton lyrics often emphasize Black solidarity and speak out against racial oppression and police violence.

The Panamanian artist Renato is credited with releasing the first reggaeton song, titled, “El D.E.N.I.,” in 1985.

The D.E.N.I. — an acronym for the Departamento Nacional de Investigaciones, or National Department of Investigations — was a tool of repression for Panama’s military dictatorship under Omar Torrijos in the 1970s and later under Manuel Noriega in the 1980s. The secret police force became entangled in drug trafficking and political corruption.

In ‘El D.E.N.I.,’ Renato denounces police brutality and racism.

In the song, Renato assumes the role of a racist police officer, the kind he encountered after relocating from the Canal Zone to Rio Abajo, an impoverished neighborhood in Panama City:

Con mi cara albina, te puedo golpear …

(With my albino face, I can hit you …)

Te voy a enseñar

(I am going to teach you)

Que a la justicia no se puede burlar

(That you cannot make fun of the justice system)

After its release, the track became a protest anthem against Panama’s military government.

While Renato’s popularity was growing in Panama, early Panamanian reggaeton artists and producers like El General were collaborating with Jamaican and American artists in New York City, where the underground dancehall and “hip-hop en español” scene thrived.

Even though El General primarily produced music, one of his tracks, “No Mas Guerra,” channeled the fighting spirit of original reggaeton, calling for Latin American communities to come together to end violence and wars.

A sanitized version of reggaeton goes mainstream

Despite not being responsible for its creation, Puerto Rico is where the genre went mainstream — largely thanks to the popular Puerto Rican artist Daddy Yankee.

Daddy Yankee’s music spread, in part, thanks to American brands like Kellogg’s and Reebok, whose ads featuring his songs were broadcast to American audiences. Few of his tracks contained the social justice themes that characterized early reggaeton.

Meanwhile, Tego Calderon, a Black Puerto Rican reggaeton artist, struggled to find a buyer for his 2003 debut album, “El Abayarde,” after being told he was too ugly for a musical career — a remark rooted in the anti-Blackness that’s pervasive in Puerto Rico.

Calderon’s experience in the industry and as a Black Puerto Rican dictated how he viewed the genre and created his music. Like Calderon, Renato and other Black reggaeton artists have spoken out against racism in reggaeton.

Bringing reggaeton back to its roots

Though he may have the genre’s history slightly wrong, Bad Bunny’s own tracks return to reggaeton’s social justice roots.

Performed during the Super Bowl halftime show by Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny’s “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” describes the history of U.S. colonialism in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, pointing out how local communities have been forced out by gentrifiers:

Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa

(They want to take the river and the beach away from me)

Quieren al barrio mío y que tus hijos se vayan

(They want my neighborhood and for your kids to leave)

And while the early-2000s reggaeton popularized by Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderon and Don Omar contained elements of misogyny and homophobia, Bad Bunny’s tracks “Yo Perreo Sola” and “YO VISTO ASÍ” build on feminist reggaeton anthems like Ivy Queen’s “Yo Quiero Bailar.”

Reggaeton was born out of a call for freedom, equality and justice. So I find it fitting that Bad Bunny is creating music that speaks to all types of people from all over the world.

Brendan Frizzell, PhD Student in Sociology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Vahe Peroomian winces slightly as he eases himself, with the help of two assistants, from a sitting position to lying full-length on a bed of long, sharp nails. Students in the room observe quietly as another plank of nails is placed onto his chest with their points down. As an assistant sets a cinderblock on top of it all, the students stir nervously, but Peroomian reassures them. “It’s just a bit more pressure,” he says.

Then the assistant reaches for a hammer, and the students erupt with excitement, cell phones recording.

The assistant moves into position near Peroomian and raises the hammer, taking aim. Then he strikes, shattering half of the cinder block, and the students let out a surprised exclamation: “Oooooo!” The tone suggests more than a little concern at their instructor’s well-being.

But they need not worry; Peroomian, professor (teaching) of physics and astronomy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is fine.

His assistants clear the pieces of concrete, remove the top plank and help him stand, and he lets out a small “Whoo, all right!” The students applaud and cheer, clearly impressed — and likely a little relieved.

The demonstration is old hat for Peroomian; he’s performed the feat — and others — for more than two decades, including the 11 years he’s taught at USC Dornsife.

It’s part of his course “Fundamentals of Physics I: Mechanics and Thermodynamics” (PHYS 151) course, designed for students majoring in the physical sciences or engineering. The nail-bed demonstration aims to teach students about pressure and inertia.

By spreading his weight over many nails in the lower plank, no single nail will experience enough pressure to penetrate his back. And as the hammer strikes the cinder block, the block’s inertia absorbs the force of the hammer, keeping it from pushing the top plank of nails into his chest.

“I didn’t feel the concrete block,” he says. “I mean, it was heavy. It was sitting on top of me. But the additional impact of breaking it didn’t get through.”

The spectacle is intended to be entertaining and memorable, and for good reason: It drives the lesson home.

“I try to turn it into something tangible that the students can apply, and solidify their understanding of what’s going on,” Peroomian says. “Even if they only remember one demonstration that I did, that might help them if they’re struggling with the material.”