Frederic Clark, associate professor of classics and English at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, whose research examined how we divide up the flow of human history, died June 8. He was 41. 

Clark’s second book, the forthcoming Dividing Time: The Invention of Historical Periods in Early Modern Europe, focuses on the origins of the “tripartite distinction,” which divided history into three periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity. First advanced in the late Renaissance, it was one of the earliest — and most influential — attempts at organizing history into distinct periods.

A project as vast as history’s entire span was a good fit for Clark, who seemed to possess a near-mystical affinity for books and knowledge.

While conducting research with colleagues into the reading habits of the Puritan Winthrop family, the group visited the Allegany College archives. The librarian was out ill, unfortunately, but that didn’t deter Clark, who with the group navigated the large collection unaided. 

“He could look at the wall of leatherbound books and then pick one up and say: ‘I think there’s something interesting in here,’ and he was right,” says Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University. “Fred was like a ‘book dowser.’ He just had this instinct.”

Scholarly start

Clark was born in Berkeley, Calif., in 1985. His father, Frederic H. Clark, was a hedge fund manager and his mother, Margaret Nolan Clark, a high school English teacher.

Their son was an enthusiastic and curious learner from an early age. The whole family enjoyed browsing bookstores together. While visiting one store, young Clark selected The Federalist Papers. After completing it, he approached his father to suggest that he now read The Anti-Federalist Papers to get a more complete understanding. He was 10 years old.

The family later moved to San Diego, where Clark graduated from The Bishop School as valedictorian. His heart had been set on attending Harvard, so much so that when his Harvard acceptance letter arrived, he immediately gave up his place at Princeton. Since many universities often don’t accept more than one student from each school, he wanted to free up the spot for his classmate who had also applied.

Clark finished a bachelor’s degree in history at Harvard in 2008 and then a master of philosophy degree in medieval history at the University of Cambridge in 2009.

While at Cambridge, he met with Grafton, who invited him to an early morning coffee to discuss graduate school options. Grafton later learned that Clark was famously a late riser and had been barely conscious during their meeting. Nevertheless, Clark made a “great impression immediately,” says Grafton, who became Clark’s PhD advisor at Princeton, where Clark set to work on a thesis that investigated “periodization,” how history is divided into different eras. The studies would later form the basis of Dividing Time. 

Clark also worked as a teacher’s assistant, guiding undergraduates in reading Virgil and Ovid, instructing them in Latin and teaching the history of forgery. Graduate students sometimes chafe at the duties of TA work, says Grafton, but Clark was “as happy a teacher I’ve ever known.”

Princeton also gave Clark a chance to flex his wordplay talents. He enjoyed “pun-offs” with colleagues and attended New York City’s annual Punderdome competition.

The history of history

After completing his PhD in history in 2014, Clark conducted postdoctoral work at Stanford, New York and Rice universities. In 2018, Clark joined USC Dornsife as an assistant professor of classics, receiving tenure in 2023.

In 2020, Clark published his first book, The First Pagan Historian: The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, which examines the History of the Destruction of Troy, a purportedly eyewitness account of the Trojan War written by the pagan priest Dares Phrygius. The account was greatly influential among scholars and writers from the late Roman era through the Renaissance. However, it was later revealed to be a fifth- or sixth-century fabrication.

Clark’s book was an offshoot of his broader research interest into how we divide up history. Fraudulent texts can help historians better understand what defines eras, since frauds are often detected by the presence of something that feels “out of place” for its supposed era. At his passing, Clark was working on a third book, probing the origins of “context.”

“Frederic’s knowledge of early modern historical scholarship was deep and immense. He could jump between countries and languages and across centuries in tracing different complex questions about evidence and chronology,” says Anton Matytsin, associate professor, early modern Europe, at the University of Florida, who met Clark during his postdoctoral work at Stanford.

His impressive book publishing pace did not diminish his steadfast commitment to students, colleagues, family and friends, of whom he had many all over the world.

If an event related to the premodern world was taking place on campus, he could be counted on to attend, and to share a meal with the guests. Although himself a fairly new arrival to USC, he made sure to help new hires get oriented and comfortable in the department.

Thoughtful selflessness was something his colleagues returned to again and again when remembering Clark. “There was an extraordinary generosity to Fred in every aspect of his life,” says Daniel Richter, chair of the Department of Classics and associate professor of classics. “He had this gift of enthusiasm for the ideas of others, which was part of his generosity.” 

When he gave presentations or lectures to students, he stayed after to discuss their interest in studying the classics and looking over books and manuscripts.

Clark’s energy was particularly evident in the classroom, says Lucas Herchenroeder, associate professor (teaching) of classics at USC Dornsife. “He had an infectious enthusiasm for the material, and an ability to convey excitement in ways that really touched students,” Herchenroeder says. “The mundane details of history, the strange and unusual, even the books themselves through which the past is transmitted to us — he had extraordinary talents for bringing all of this to life in the classroom.”

Although a serious and accomplished scholar, Clark possessed a strong sense of humor and a deep humility.  

“He was a natural storyteller and was deeply engaged with the absurdity and humor of the human condition. All of it — his jokes, his curiosity, his intellect — sprung from a place of generosity and sincerity. He was magic; he is irreplaceable,” says Jay Rubenstein, professor of history at USC Dornsife. 

Clark is survived by his parents, sister Catherine, brother-in-law Adriano Giombini, niece Eva Giombini, aunt and uncle Lupe and Patrick Vivier, and cousin Hogan (Nate Robitaille).

Andrew Lakoff, an influential anthropologist whose research explored how science and technology shape the way people understand themselves and societies prepare for an uncertain future, died July 7 from glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. He was 56.

Lakoff was a professor of sociology and anthropology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. His wide-ranging scholarship encompassed psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, public health, pandemics and emergency preparedness. He authored books on psychiatry and emergency preparedness, founded USC Dornsife’s Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life and served as divisional dean for the social sciences from 2017 to 2020.

“Andy’s career was defined not by being in a discipline but in connecting different disciplinary spaces from which he could draw theories, methods, empirical orientations and colleagues,” said Stephen Collier, chair and professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley and Lakoff’s close friend and collaborator for 30 years.

A campus event celebrating the life and work of Lakoff will be held Oct. 5 at 2:30 p.m. All are welcome, and those unable to attend in person can watch remotely.

Examining science and society

Lakoff earned a bachelor’s degree in history, summa cum laude, and a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from UC Berkeley. After a postdoctoral fellowship in medical anthropology at Harvard University, he joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 2002. Seven years later, he came to USC as an associate professor of sociology and communication.

Lakoff came from a family of educators and scholars, including his mother, the late Robin Tolmach Lakoff, and father, George Lakoff, both renowned linguists at UC Berkeley.

“Andy shared with his parents a drive to transform the fields in which he worked, a firm belief in the unique role of the research university in society, and a sense that scholarship should engage with and transform political and social life,” said Daniela Bleichmar, his wife and professor of art history and history at USC Dornsife.

His early scholarship explored the globalization of biomedical psychiatry and the different ways mental illness was understood and treated across cultures. His first book, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, published in 2006, drew on ethnographic research in Buenos Aires to examine tensions between psychoanalytic and biological approaches to mental illness.

Lakoff’s interest in how societies respond to uncertainty also shaped his research on biosecurity and emergency planning, including how governments and other institutions anticipate and prepare for uncertain threats. That work produced Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency in 2017 and The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security, co-authored with Collier, in 2021.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lakoff examined how decades of pandemic planning shaped the United States’ response, culminating in his 2024 book, Planning for the Wrong Pandemic. Rather than simply asking why the response faltered despite years of preparation, he explored how the concepts and techniques developed to prepare for future pandemics helped shape a response poorly suited to the crisis that actually unfolded.

Ideas above hierarchy

Collaboration was central to Lakoff’s approach to scholarship.

“Andy saw dialogue and collaboration as one of the great privileges of an intellectual’s life,” said Bleichmar. “He cared above all about good ideas, whether they came from a beginning graduate student or a senior professor. Rank and prestige meant little to him; it was the ideas that mattered.”

That commitment to collaboration took many forms. In 2011, Lakoff co-founded Limn, an innovative experimental journal, with Collier and Christopher Kelty, a professor at UCLA. The journal brought together scholars from different fields for collaborative examinations of contemporary problems.

Students, in particular, benefited from Lakoff’s generosity as a teacher and mentor. He encouraged young scholars to develop confidence in their own ideas and a distinctive scholarly voice. Melina Sherman, a former graduate student of Lakoff’s who is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, described him as an “intellectual hero” who taught her “how to think.”

“He showed me that I should never accept a problem without approaching it from all angles, reconstructing its history and tracing the mechanisms and techniques through which power quietly becomes ordinary,” Sherman said.

Bringing scholars together

When he was divisional dean for the social sciences, Lakoff worked to strengthen support for faculty research, recruit and retain faculty and increase accountability and transparency among the division’s institutes and centers.

Peter Mancall, Distinguished Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at USC Dornsife, who served as divisional dean for the humanities while Lakoff led the social sciences, described him as a “brilliantly capable administrator.”

“Andy understood rigorous, interdisciplinary research, which gave him the intellectual gravitas to nurture scholarly connections with faculty and students,” said Mancall.

Lakoff also built programs that brought scholars together across disciplines. He established USC Dornsife’s partnership with the Berggruen Institute, which brought visiting fellows to USC to pursue research and engage with faculty and students. The program ultimately supported 32 long-term fellows with $9 million in funding.

In 2020, Lakoff founded the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, which he directed until his death. It brings together faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from fields as diverse as environmental studies, architecture, computer science and cinema to explore problems at the intersection of science, technology, environment and society. Through lectures, seminars, workshops and working groups, the center encourages exchange within and outside USC.

Lakoff’s curiosity about work beyond his own field extended even to committee service. Lakoff served four years on the Dornsife Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure, including two as chair. Bleichmar said it was his favorite service role because it allowed him to read and discuss research from across the College.

Those who worked closely with Lakoff remember both the rigor he brought to scholarship and the generosity he brought to teaching and intellectual life.

“Andy had a rare combination of gifts: the vision to see where fields of study might be heading, the energy to bring people together around an emerging question and the composure to navigate administrative systems with aplomb,” said Peter Redfield, professor of anthropology and history at USC Dornsife, whom Lakoff recruited to USC Dornsife and STPL.

Collier remembered the care Lakoff brought to their three decades of collaboration.

“I appreciated his profound curiosity and meticulous attention to detail,” Collier said. “For Andy, every word mattered. And there was a relentless self-critical questioning: Did we get this right?”

Lakoff is survived by his wife, Daniela Bleichmar, and their daughters, Natalia and Paloma Lakoff.

Long before he became Michigan’s senior senator, Gary Peters had begun a career in higher education.

He taught at several Michigan universities and was working toward a doctorate in political philosophy at Michigan State University, intending to become a professor. Instead, politics took him from local and state office to nearly two decades in Congress.

Soon, Peters will return to higher education.

After completing his Senate term in January, he will hold the Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Endowed Chair in Practical Politics and serve as director of the Center for the Political Future at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He will serve alongside Republican strategist Mike Murphy, who remains co-director. The center is believed to be the only university political center in the country jointly led by a Democrat and a Republican.

Robert Shrum, CPF’s founding director and current holder of the Warschaw Chair, will retire at the end of 2026. A veteran Democratic strategist, he was honored at galas in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., earlier this year that recognized his leadership and tremendous contributions to CPF.

Now in his second Senate term after three terms in the House, Peters has been recognized for his legislative effectiveness. The nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked him the most effective U.S. senator in each of the last three Congresses. He first earned the top ranking while his party was in the minority, something no senator had accomplished in more than 50 years.

Inspiring students to be more politically engaged

Peters says what’s drawing him back to higher education is the opportunity to work with young people and encourage them to become more engaged in public life.

“I look at this as a capstone of my years in public service at the local, state and federal level,” Peters said. “It’s never been more important to bring people together, and there’s no better place to start than working with students and getting them engaged in civic activism.”

Peters worries that too many young people see politics as toxic and want little to do with it. He sees CPF’s work preparing students for political life as especially important, whether they eventually run for office, work in government or simply become more active citizens. “It’s critically important that the next generation take the reins and work to find positive solutions to the tough problems we have,” he said.

For Peters, that means reaching students who might never think of themselves as political. He wants to build on CPF’s success by drawing students from across all academic fields at USC into conversations about how politics and public policy affect their professions and their lives.

Since its founding in 2018, CPF has built a range of programs that give students opportunities to learn about politics from the people who shape it. The center has brought political leaders and strategists from across the ideological spectrum to USC as fellows, where they lead small study groups and meet one-on-one with students. Students can also pursue internships, scholarships and professional development through CPF’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, while the center’s public events bring together political figures with differing points of view.

CPF’s commitment to civil dialogue was another reason Peters said he was drawn to the center.

“CPF has done a terrific job bringing people with different perspectives together,” he said. “I want to build on Bob Shrum’s accomplishments, and I look forward to working with Mike Murphy to ensure we continue to have a forum where people can discuss tough issues, find common ground and actually accomplish something.”

For Peters, working across political differences isn’t just an aspiration. It has defined his Senate career.

“Gary Peters brings an extraordinary combination of public service, bipartisan leadership and real experience getting things done in Washington,” USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock said. “He has spent his career showing that you can hold strong political convictions and still work productively with people who see the world differently. I’m especially excited about what his leadership will make possible for our students, both in Los Angeles and in Washington.”

Expanding CPF’s reach in D.C.

One of Peters’ biggest ambitions is to expand CPF’s presence in Washington, D.C., with USC’s Capital Campus as a base for courses and programs that bring students closer to the institutions and people shaping national policy.

Los Angeles will remain the center’s home, but Peters will divide his time between L.A. and D.C., teaching courses at both campuses. He wants students in Washington to see policymaking as it happens and interact directly with the people involved in it.

“I’m excited for the opportunity to build out CPF in Washington and to engage students in a meaningful way,” Peters said. He envisions that expansion working in both directions, bringing students closer to policymaking while also bringing USC faculty and their research closer to policymakers.

“I would like to help bridge the gap between academia and practical policymaking in Washington,” he said. “I intend to bring professors doing amazing work in all sorts of fields to D.C., so that they can have a hands-on role in making their ideas become public policy.”

Putting bipartisanship into practice

Peters knows from experience that turning ideas into policy often requires working across party lines.

Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who worked with Peters on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, described him as “a consistent, bipartisan partner who was always willing to work across the aisle and deliver real results for the American people.”

“I know he will carry that same thoughtful, collaborative spirit with him to USC, and I look forward to seeing what this new partnership produces,” Scott said.

During the 117th Congress, Peters authored 19 bipartisan standalone bills that were signed into law, the most by any senator in a single Congress in more than four decades.

“Gary Peters is that rare thing: a principled politician who also knows how to get things done,” said CPF co-director Murphy. “I very much look forward to working with him as we grow the center’s mission to teach and inspire USC students to embrace the idea that civility and reasoned compromise are far from the enemy of politics; they’re essential to turning political disagreement into practical results.”

A return to higher education

Prior to his election to Congress, Peters worked in the private sector for more than 20 years as both a financial advisor and in a variety of management positions with two major financial services firms. He was an assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch before working at UBS/PaineWebber as a vice president. He also taught strategic management and finance at Oakland University and Wayne State University.

After serving as a Lt. Commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve, a city councilman, and a Michigan state senator, he was appointed as the Robert and Marjorie Griffin Endowed Chair in American Government at Central Michigan University.

This time, he will return to higher education with something he couldn’t have brought to those classrooms: firsthand experience inside Congress and an understanding of how federal political institutions work, why they sometimes don’t, and what it takes to turn ideas into policy.

“I’ve learned a lot over the years about what it takes to get things done at all levels of government, and I look forward to sharing my experience with students,” Peters said. “But I expect to learn from them, too. They’re the ones who are going to take the reins next, and I will do whatever I can to help prepare them for the future.”

Annie Dillard is rightly celebrated as a pioneer in creative nonfiction after her death on Sept. 15, 2026, at age 81. But the dazzling, disorienting feel of Dillard’s work might be best understood as the often overlooked influence of poetry on her prose.

Dillard published her first full-length work of creative nonfiction, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, when she was only 28. Winning her the 1975 Pulitzer Prize, this early book set the tone for her later work in creative nonfiction: the essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk, and full-length works Holy the Firm and For the Time Being. They all attend closely to the natural world, with a theologian’s eye and a poet’s idiom.

Dillard’s creative nonfiction about nature owes a debt to the lyrical prose of transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau, whom Dillard cited as a major influence in her work. She was also overt about the central role that fiction played in her thinking in her book of literary criticism, Living by Fiction.

But Dillard’s nonfiction, though undeniably prose, can have “the shape and intensity of a poem,” as her New York Times obituary puts it.

As a writer and writing professor, I think often about how blurred the boundary between poetry and prose really is. Annie Dillard’s work embodies this permeability.

Prose and poetry, in combination

Not all writing is the same. Prose typically features continuous sentences arranged in paragraphs. Poetry tends to be differentiated from prose by a deliberate organization of language that’s not determined by the page itself.

Prose poetry, the lyric essay and other hybrid forms of literature play at the intersection of genre, which usually defines these separate categories of writing. Creative nonfiction likewise aims to accurately convey reality while emphasizing literary style. The literary features of creative nonfiction are often drawn from fiction, with devices such as dialogue, scene and flashback.

But one of the distinctions of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction is how much her prose owes to poetry.

Poetry can be defined in many ways, but it tends to be characterized by honed, heightened language. Poems are often noted for their memorable images, rich sounds and foregrounding of emotion. Dillard’s nonfiction is shot through with images that arrest readers with their beauty or confront readers with their terror – as in her Harper’s essay The Death of a Moth, where the insect is drawn to a candle flame, becomes stuck in the wax and is transformed into a burning wick. In Dillard’s words:

“She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling — only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

It’s no accident that Dillard describes herself as reading the work of French poet Arthur Rimbaud by the light of the moth. She previously wrote that she loved how language sounds in French symbolist poetry, and Rimbaud was known to combine prose with his poetry in a way Dillard herself does.

Writing prose as a poet

In The Writing Life, Dillard describes the process of writing “a favorite, difficult book” — likely Holy the Firm — as akin to writing poetry. She notes that the writing was “so intense and accented, and the world it described was so charged with meaning,” that the idea of going further exhausted her.

To help her write, she read Conrad Aiken’s poetry aloud, describing it as “pure sound unencumbered by sense.” She would read a poetry anthology’s index of first lines because “the parallels sounded strong and suggestive.”

She also describes repeating a single line of Wallace Stevens’ poetry “for hours, like a song” while writing.

Dillard purposefully channeled poetry’s sonic density in her writing process; it comes as no surprise that the heightened register of these poems made its way into her prose.

Inspired by ineffable nature

Dillard’s virtuosic, visionary style isn’t for everyone. Writer Eudora Welty praised Dillard in her review of Tinker Creek, but Welty also admitted “not (knowing) what she’s talking about” at times and that her writing “leaves something to be desired.” That something was what Welty called “straight narrative,” the clarity of “point, direction, and shape” more often demanded of prose than poetry.

The solitude of the narrator in Dillard’s nonfiction and her apparent disengagement with society also was a source of criticism. As critic William Deresiewicz put it, “There is no economy and no society” in Tinker Creek. “We don’t know how Dillard lives, or how she makes a living, or much of anything about her circumstances.” Her mix of cultural disengagement and theological concern smacked to Deresiewicz of “hypocrisy and spiritual snobbery.”

In the contained world of lyric poetry, especially nature poetry, this hermetic perspective would be less of a fault. Her mystical encounters with the divine through the natural world are reminiscent of poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver. The narrow lens of her attention can be viewed as a poetic feature played out at length over her nonfiction essays and books.

Like an expressionist painting, poetry draws attention to how something is being depicted, not just what is being portrayed. Prose can do this, too – creative nonfiction, especially, and Annie Dillard’s writing most of all.

Amy Cannon, Associate 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.

At the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, biologists study life at vastly different scales. Some focus on molecules and cells, others on the brain, human evolution or the organisms that shape marine ecosystems.

To give four longstanding areas of expertise greater visibility in research and graduate education, USC Dornsife has elevated them from sections within Biological Sciences to departments: Human and Evolutionary Biology, Marine and Environmental Biology, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, and Neurobiology.

The new departments join Psychology and Quantitative and Computational Biology in the Life Sciences division, reflecting the breadth of modern life sciences research, from genes and cells to ecosystems and human behavior, including the increasingly important role of computation and data in biology.

“Biology is not a single discipline,” said Ian Ehrenreich, divisional dean for life sciences at USC Dornsife. “What once made sense as four sections within one department no longer reflects how these academic units and their research fields operate today. They have their own questions, methods and ways of doing science, and now our academic structure reflects that.”

Ehrenreich said the new departmental status will also enhance the visibility of each field to prospective graduate students and faculty, collaborators, research funders and peer institutions.

The change does not affect the Biological Sciences undergraduate major, which remains interdepartmental and spans the four new departments. Human and Evolutionary Biology and Neurobiology also offer their own undergraduate majors in human biology and neuroscience, respectively.

“The strength of USC Dornsife’s biological sciences comes from our extraordinary faculty and students,” said Dean James Bullock. “Creating these departments not only gives their research greater visibility, it positions each department for even greater impact in the years ahead.”

Four new departments, four distinct fields

Marine and Environmental Biology
Chair: Naomi Levine

Scholars study organisms, particularly marine life, and the ecosystems they form. Research spans microbial ecology, conservation, organismal biology and biogeochemistry, with particular strength in microbial ecosystems and marine conservation. Its work ranges from the role of microscopic organisms in ocean systems to the effects of environmental change on coral reefs and other marine life.

Molecular and Cellular Biosciences
Chair: Matt Dean

Scholars examine how life works at the molecular and cellular levels, from the interactions that build cells to the processes that shape organisms and biological diversity. Faculty research includes chromosome behavior, genome structure, aging, development, microbial science and RNA, using approaches that draw on genetics, biochemistry, bioinformatics, synthetic biology and advanced microscopy.

Neurobiology
Chair: Judith Hirsch

Scholars study the nervous system from individual neurons and their connections to networks spanning the brain. Faculty investigate learning and memory, neural signaling, sensory processing, behavior, development, disease and repair, often collaborating with researchers in molecular biology, computation, chemistry, physics and engineering.

Human and Evolutionary Biology
Chair: Lorraine Turcotte

Scholars study humans as biological organisms shaped by evolution and natural selection. Faculty examine how physiology, anatomy, development, environment and behavior have shaped the species and how that history can inform human health today, with research spanning appetite and metabolism, biomechanics, human performance, mitochondrial biology and primate behavior.

Although the new departments represent distinct fields, their research often intersects. Genes influence brains and behavior, environmental change affects organisms from the cellular level to entire ecosystems, and evolution shapes biological systems at every scale. The new structure gives each field a clearer identity while supporting cross-departmental collaboration in research and education.

The bright colors glowing from smartphones and television screens rely in part on molecules developed by USC chemist and University Professor Mark Thompson. That work has now earned Thompson recognition as a 2026 Citation Laureate, a distinction previously awarded to dozens of researchers who later received Nobel Prizes.

Clarivate named Thompson, professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, among 22 researchers whose work it considers “of Nobel class.”

He shares the recognition with Chihaya Adachi of Kyushu University and Stephen R. Forrest of the University of Michigan. The three were selected “for pioneering research on phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (PHOLEDs) and thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF), enabling ultrahigh-efficiency organic light-emitting diodes.”

Thompson says the recognition is a career highlight. “It’s a tremendous honor to be included in this group,” he said, while acknowledging the contributions of “many students, postdocs and collaborators over a long period of time. Their work is really what made it possible.”

Clarivate has named Citation Laureates annually since 2002, using publication and citation data from the Web of Science along with expert analysis to identify researchers whose discoveries have had exceptional influence. Nearly 20% of those selected have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize.

Citation Laureates are selected from researchers whose foundational papers rank among the world’s most highly cited. Of the more than 67 million journal articles and conference proceedings indexed by Clarivate since 1970, fewer than 0.02% have been cited more than 2,000 times.

“Mark’s work is a terrific example of fundamental science changing the way people live,” said USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock. “Over three decades at USC, his research has helped move OLED technology from the laboratory into devices used around the world. This recognition reflects the extraordinary and lasting impact of his scholarship.”

Thompson’s research focuses on designing materials that control how light and electricity interact. He helped develop phosphorescent materials that allow OLEDs to convert electrical energy into light much more efficiently. The technology made possible highly efficient red and green pixels now used in digital displays worldwide.

TADF provides another way to produce highly efficient OLEDs. The approach uses specially designed organic molecules to recover energy that would otherwise be lost and convert it into light.

One major challenge remains: creating a highly efficient, durable blue emitter that can match the performance of red and green.

“Understanding the science and engineering in these devices allowed us to make OLEDs more efficient and longer lasting, and to do it with materials that are easier to maintain,” Thompson said. “OLEDs are already in products people use every day, but there are still important problems to solve, particularly with blue emitters.”

Thompson joined USC in 1995 after eight years at Princeton University. He also works on organic solar cells, chemical and biological sensors and catalysis. He has authored about 400 papers in peer-reviewed journals and holds more than 250 patents, primarily involving materials used in optoelectronic devices and catalysis.

His previous honors include election to the National Academy of Engineering and as a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the American Chemical Society Award in Chemistry of Materials. USC appointed him a University Professor in 2023.

The American Revolution didn’t simply end with independence, military victory or the Constitution. For generations afterward, Americans continued to see the country as an unfinished political experiment.

That idea was at the center of a recent Dornsife Dialogue featuring historians Peter Mancall and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal in conversation with Dean James Bullock. 

Why it matters: As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, their conversation challenges the familiar story of a revolution completed with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, victory in the Revolutionary War in 1783 or the Constitution in 1787. 

In writing his latest book, The Long Revolution, Perl-Rosenthal found that many Americans thought the revolution was still going on decades, if not a century, after 1776. 

In his words: “They really do think that the American experiment is an experiment,” said Perl-Rosenthal, professor of history, French, Italian and law.. “That is to say, it is a site-specific attempt to figure something out, and you do not know where it’s going to end.”

The evidence: Perl-Rosenthal examined published Fourth of July addresses delivered during the century after independence. Rather than simply celebrating the founding generation, speakers frequently used the occasion to debate the country’s condition and future direction.

Find a transcript of this audio here.

Between the lines: An unfinished revolution also meant figuring out how people with deeply different beliefs could live together. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the separation of church and state offered ways to manage those differences without requiring agreement. 

The question remains: Americans are still working through questions raised by the founding, including who can participate in the republic, how political disagreements should be managed and whether the nation’s institutions can survive profound divisions.

Look further back: If Perl-Rosenthal challenges when the Revolution ended, Mancall challenges when its story begins. His book Contested Continent examines North America from roughly 1000 to 1680, tracing the forces that shaped the U.S. long before the 13 colonies declared independence.

In his words: “You can’t just look at 13 colonies hugging the Atlantic coast and think you understand the American Revolution,” said Mancall, distinguished professor of history and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities.

The bottom line: America’s 250th anniversary marks a founding moment, not a finished story. The questions Americans were wrestling with then, about participation, political disagreement and the durability of democratic institutions, are still with us.

From a mountainside overlooking Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a time traveler turning back the clock 20,000 years would watch a dramatic transformation of the landscape.

The shallow, salty lake below would swell into an immense body of fresh water, at one point reaching nearly 1,000 feet deep and covering more than 10 times the lake’s modern area. Mountain ranges would become islands, and the new shoreline would move far beyond its current boundary.

Travel back 120,000 more years and another giant lake would appear.

A new study led by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and published in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, traces those transformations through sediments buried beneath Great Salt Lake. The scientists reconstructed nearly 240,000 years of lake history and found that the enormous lakes were brief departures from its usual hypersaline (extremely salty) state.

Both giant lakes appear to have followed the same pattern: As the climate warmed and dried, the water receded, salinity rose and salt deposits formed on the lakebed, although the scientists note the timing of the older transition is less precise.

Corresponding author Rachel So, a recent PhD graduate from Earth sciences at USC Dornsife, compares the record to watching a puddle that remains nearly the same size for an hour, briefly swells into a pond and then shrinks again. “If you scaled this up to the size of the present Great Salt Lake, that’s probably what it looked like,” she says. “For most of the past 240,000 years, the lake stayed about the same size but briefly grew 10 times larger on two separate occasions.”

Ancient sediments reveal a lake transformed

Scientists have long known that Lake Bonneville once covered much of western Utah during the last ice age. Its ancient shorelines remain visible across the landscape. But those shorelines provide snapshots, not a continuous account of the lake’s size and salinity change over time.

For that, the researchers turned to a nearly 400-foot sediment core drilled from Great Salt Lake’s bed in 2000. Its layers preserve a record stretching back about 236,000 years.

The team dated the sediment layers by measuring radioactive decay in minerals, which provides a kind of geological clock. The researchers also analyzed molecules left by microorganisms that once lived in the lake. Because the relative abundance of those molecules changes with salinity, they could broadly gauge whether the water was fresh, brackish or extremely salty.

The record shows two major interruptions in the lake’s long hypersaline history. From roughly 30,000 to 16,000 years ago, it expanded to become Lake Bonneville. And Little Valley, an earlier deep lake, existed roughly 140,000 to 135,000 years ago. Shoreline evidence suggests both approached 1,000 feet deep, although Little Valley may have remained somewhat brackish and lasted less than half as long as Bonneville.

“The fact that the core spans two and a half glacial cycles allows us to see two fresh-to-salty transitions,” said senior author Sarah Feakins, professor of Earth sciences at USC Dornsife. “It allows us to compare the two fresh lake events for their duration and freshness, to see how fragile and fleeting these moments are.”

Various records from Nevada, California and Arizona show similar wet-to-dry shifts during the same periods, suggesting that Great Salt Lake was responding to changes felt across the region.

Lessons for a warming West

Feakins says that cooler temperatures slowed evaporation while more frequent storms brought additional water into the basin. Lake Bonneville filled “one storm at a time.”

As temperatures rose, she explained, evaporation increased and storms became less frequent. The lakes dwindled, and their water grew saltier until minerals formed crystals and settled on the lakebed.

Great Salt Lake has no outlet; water leaves mainly through evaporation, making the lake highly sensitive to changes in temperature, precipitation and river flow.

Modern Great Salt Lake also faces pressures its ancient predecessors did not. Human water use, mostly for agriculture, reduces the amount reaching the lake, while human-caused climate change increases evaporation.

“Today we’re warming the climate at an unprecedented rate,” Feakins said. “That warming makes the atmosphere thirstier, increasing the rate of evaporative drying from the soil and lakes across the region.”

She cautioned against treating the ancient changes as evidence that the lake’s decline today is natural.

“People shouldn’t use the defense that ‘climate change happened naturally in the past and so the lake shrank’ to justify shrinking lakes today as normal or a natural phenomenon,” So added.

Knowing when things happened in the past requires radioisotope based dating methods. Dates become less precise in the core’s older layers, with margins of error spanning several thousand years. Dating some ancient salt deposits proved especially difficult. The researchers also tried to reconstruct past temperatures, but the lake’s high salinity made the results unreliable.

Despite those limitations, the sediment core provides a nearly continuous record of a lake responding to major shifts in the West’s water balance and shows how a vast freshwater lake can give way to salt when the climate warms and dries.

About the study

In addition to So and Feakins, study authors include Elliot Jagniecki of the Utah Geological Survey; Tim Lowenstein of Binghamton University; Adam Jost and David McGee of MIT; Christopher Kinsley of the Berkeley Geochronology Center; Kristian Olson of Alfred University; and Jessica Tierney of the University of Arizona.

The research was supported by National Science Foundation grants 2152630, 2218544 and 2218547, USC Women in Science and Engineering, the USC Wrigley Institute Graduate Fellowship, and the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

Moh El-Naggar, Dean’s Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been named director of Carnegie Science’s Biosphere Sciences and Engineering division.

El-Naggar, who holds appointments in physics and astronomy, chemistry, and molecular and cellular biosciences, will join Carnegie Science in October while retaining a faculty affiliation at USC Dornsife. His laboratory will continue its active research on microbial electron transfer and living electronics, and he will continue advising USC graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.

“Moh is an extraordinary scientist whose work has always crossed traditional boundaries, bringing together physics, chemistry and biology to tackle fundamental questions,” said James Bullock, dean of USC Dornsife. “By remaining an important part of the USC Dornsife scientific community as he takes on this ambitious new role with Carnegie Science, he will help bring our already closely connected research communities even closer together.”

El-Naggar’s appointment builds on a longstanding relationship between USC Dornsife and Carnegie Science. In astronomy, the institutions have developed a close research partnership that includes the Carnegie-USC Graduate Fellowship, through which USC doctoral students conduct thesis research alongside Carnegie astronomers in Pasadena, Calif. The fellowship currently includes 12 USC students and could eventually expand to include students in the biological sciences.

In his new role at Carnegie, El-Naggar will lead an interdisciplinary research enterprise spanning areas including developmental biology, ecology and plant science. Researchers in the division investigate fundamental questions about life on Earth, from genomes and ecosystems to the ways living communities interact with planetary systems.

“Carnegie has long empowered scientists to take intellectual risks that drive historic breakthroughs,” El-Naggar said. “I am thrilled to join this storied institution and forge cross-institutional alliances in an era where advancing fundamental biology is essential to tackling our most pressing challenges: the health of our planet and its inhabitants.”

El-Naggar’s research exemplifies the interdisciplinary science he will oversee. One major focus of his lab is “electric bacteria,” microbes that move electrons outside their cells as part of their metabolism, allowing them to effectively “breathe” rocks and minerals in place of oxygen. The work explores how these organisms transfer electrons and how their capabilities might be harnessed by connecting them to metals and semiconductors.

That research helped reveal how the bacteria use microscopic structures known as nanowires to move electrons into their surroundings. The findings could contribute to sustainable technologies such as microbial fuel cells, which capture electrons from bacteria to generate electricity.

More recently, El-Naggar’s group has explored “living electronics,” including the possibility of developing programmable cells that can be integrated with traditional electronics. Such systems could eventually combine the capabilities of living organisms with conventional electronic materials, with potential applications ranging from sustainable energy to environmental sensing.

At USC, El-Naggar has spent two decades building both a research and leadership record. He arrived as a postdoctoral researcher in 2006 and joined the faculty in 2009. He later served as divisional dean for math and physical sciences and as interim dean of USC Dornsife.

His honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the U.S. government’s highest honor for scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers, and recognition by Popular Science as one of its “Brilliant 10” young scientists for his pioneering work on bacterial nanowires.

Stories of Yayoi Kusama’s life often begin after she moved to New York City from Japan in 1958 and found near-overnight success with her abstract infinity net paintings. These evolved into the infinity rooms and polka-dotted pumpkins that became social media phenomena decades later and the focus of her legacy after her death on Aug. 14.

Yet, this timeline misses a crucial first step in how she became one of the art world’s most famous international superstars: A year earlier in 1957, before her move, she journeyed over the Pacific Ocean to show her work in the United States for the first time in a hopeful first step toward her dreams.

As an art historian who specializes in the exchanges between Asian and American modern art, I believe it is important to consider not only her life after she hit it big in the New York art scene, but also how she got there from Japan.

Crossing the ocean

Viewers familiar with Kusama’s flashy polka dots may be surprised to see her bright color schemes in a painting she named “The Pacific Ocean,” which looks more like fire than water. This 1958 painting shares a glimpse into her state of mind looking out an airplane window as she flew from Japan to her first American exhibition the year before.

At the time, she didn’t know that she would finally achieve her goal of making a permanent move the next year. Reflecting back on this uncertain era from her new home in New York City, she painted many works named after the Pacific, the transition space between Japan and the U.S.

The pulsing red patterns are ambiguous. Is it sunrise? Sunset? Or a purely imaginary view? The paint glows with potential energy like a forge where Kusama could remake herself. Before leaving for America, she burned most of her old art, wanting to leave her old self behind.

Crossing the ocean became another transformative step toward an uncertain future. Like the water’s surface, the painting’s swirling waves and currents draw the viewer in without revealing what is underneath its shadowy depths.

Painting infinity

Kusama’s lifelong struggle with her mental health is the most well-known explanation for her quest to paint “infinity,” which she famously called “self-obliteration.” She embraced the stories that fascinated people, including anecdotes about her childhood nightmares and hallucinations that compelled her to paint patterns into the real world so she could exorcise them from her mind.

However, early paintings such as “Pacific Ocean” reveal other sources of inspiration that have been overshadowed by her larger-than-life persona and psychiatric struggles.

An artist’s origin story can turn her into a myth, but “Pacific Ocean” is a window onto a quieter, human moment, before Kusama became a global icon. It reveals how her relationship to the concept of infinity was also shaped by feelings of anxiety and awe in face of the enormous Pacific Ocean and her unclear future.

By repeating patterns that stretch and dance across the painting, Kusama suggests that this rhythm and pattern can go on indefinitely beyond the edges of the canvas. Even though neither the human eye nor a single artwork can contain the vastness of the ocean, the painting can capture a snapshot for a moment.

In this case, creating multiple paintings of the Pacific Ocean helped Kusama reflect on experiences larger than any single painting can encapsulate.

Reflecting on a life

Research on Kusama’s early life illuminates her as a complex figure who was constantly searching for ways to make a name for herself.

In 1957, before leaving Japan, she was motivated by hopes and dreams, but also plagued with fears: How would she get a visa? How could she get a job to support herself? Her first trip was disappointing because it ended without either.

In these early years, before she achieved the global success and popular recognition she hoped for, she was just a young girl looking out the window on her first international flight, uncertain of where her future would take her.

Audrey Storm, PhD Candidate in Art History, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

As the 2026 midterm elections enter the final stretch, it’s important to know your rights in case your vote is challenged.

The best way to ensure that your vote is counted is to advocate for yourself. I’m a an attorney and lecturer for the University of Southern California’s undergraduate civil rights advocacy initiative, Agents of Change. Here are several straightforward ways to ensure your vote is counted and two practical remedies for you to consider if your vote remains challenged.

A major part of ensuring that you are able to vote is doing the necessary preparation before you even get to the polling place. Read on to find out how and where to register, where and when you can cast your ballot, and what numbers to call for any information you can’t find online.

Are you registered to vote? Check it out

Before you vote, you need to ensure that you’re registered to vote. You can verify your registration status using this tool. If you can’t use an online tool, then call your local election office or a voter help line like the ones listed in the hotline section below.

If you find you’re not registered, you can use this tool from the National Conference of State Legislatures to find your state’s online registration application. If you need to do this in person, then call your local election office for instructions.

At this point, you may have missed your state’s deadline for voter registration. But it may not be too late to register.

Many states allow same-day registration at the polling site. You can find your state’s same-day voter laws detailed here. Ask the poll worker, at the correct polling location, for a same-day registration form; complete the form and then ask for a “conditional ballot.” A conditional ballot allows election officials to count your vote after verifying your voter eligibility. If you can’t research online, you can call your local election office to find out if you can register on Election Day.

Gather documents to verify your identity

If you live in a state that requires identity verification to vote in person, gather the required documents — which may range from a driver’s license to bank statements with identifying information — before traveling to the correct polling place. You can find your county election office’s contact information here. This webpage includes a table listing each state’s acceptable ID documents and possible exceptions for some people. You may also call your local election office to find out what’s required.

Absentee voters: Locate your state’s identity verification rules here.

Find the correct polling location

You can ensure that you’re headed to the right polling place with this tool. Or call your county election office to find your polling place and its hours of operation; you can look up your county’s election office contact information here.

Once you know your polling place and its hours, you can go there and check in. In most cases, you’ll be handed a ballot, shown where to vote and asked to put your ballot in a machine or a box, and then you can go merrily along your way.

But the moment of check-in is where things might go wrong.

Problems at your polling place

Here are potential vote challenges and ways to overcome them.

Possibility No. 1: Out-of-order polling machines.

If you’re asked to leave because of malfunctioning machines, don’t. Instead, ask for a paper ballot.

Possibility No. 2: You’re in line and officials announce the polls have closed.

If you’re in line at the polling location before it closes, don’t let them turn you away at closing time if you haven’t voted. You have the legal right to vote under those circumstances, so stay in line and wait to cast your ballot.

Possibility No. 3: You’re not on the registered voters list.

If you’re told you can’t vote because your name is not on the voter roster, ask the poll site worker to check again and to check what’s called the list of supplemental voters. If they still can’t find your name, ask the poll worker to verify that you’re at the right location.

Possibility No. 4: Someone claims you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

If your voting eligibility remains challenged after ensuring you’re at the right polling location, ask to cast a provisional ballot, which is available in every state except Idaho and Minnesota. You can find details about your particular state’s provisional ballot rules here.

Track your provisional ballot here.

Call a hotline

If you are not given a provisional ballot, call an election hotline for help. Here are four hotlines, run by members of the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition, that can help you:

English: 866-OUR-VOTE/866-687-8683, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

Spanish: 888-VE-Y-VOTA/888-839-8682, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund

Asian Languages: 888-API-VOTE/888-274-8683, Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote

Arabic: 844-YALLA-US/844-925-5287, Arab American Institute

Report voter intimidation

If someone tries to scare you into voting or not voting for a candidate, stand your ground and demand a ballot from the poll site, call one of the hotlines above to report the intimidation, and file a claim with the FBI later by phone at 800-CALL-FBI — 800-225-5324 — or online at tips.fbi.gov.

File a lawsuit

If you are still blocked from voting, consider legal action — but get advice on your exact situation from one of the hotlines, which have free lawyers on hand. It’s a good idea to write down the names of people who prevented you from voting and to ask people who witnessed the incident for their contact information.

This is an updated version of a story that was originally published on Oct. 28, 2024.

Karen Figueroa-Clewett, Lecturer, Agents of Change program, Department 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.

Over lunch at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island, JD Black found himself talking about reptiles and amphibians with a conservation professional.

Black, who is pursuing a communication major at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism along with a minor in psychology from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, was working as a summer education intern when a team from the Catalina Island Conservancy visited campus. As he spoke with them about the island’s wildlife and their careers, conservation began to look less like an abstract interest and more like a possible future.

“I have always thought conservation was cool, but this experience made me seriously consider it as a career path,” says Black. 

It was the kind of encounter the David H. Meid Visiting Mentor Program was created to foster.

Supported by The Macfarlane Foundation, the program brings leaders in environment and sustainability to the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability’s Catalina Residential College to engage with students participating in the Urban Oceans Maymester.

“The hope is that by bringing creative, driven people together, a simple conversation may turn into an influential event in a student’s life and career,” says Duncan Macfarlane, trustee of the Macfarlane Foundation.

By giving mentors time to interact with students and faculty in informal settings — over a meal or on the dock overlooking the harbor — the program enables connections to develop naturally.

The Meid Visiting Mentor Program originated at Marymount College, where it honored the late David H. Meid, a former trustee and supporter of the college’s mission to transform lives through education.

When Marymount closed in 2022, Macfarlane — with his longstanding interest in the ocean — saw the Wrigley Marine Science Center as a natural new home for the endowment and its original purpose: giving students and faculty opportunities to spend meaningful time with people they might otherwise never meet.

Learning beyond the classroom

Each summer, the Urban Oceans Maymester transforms the Wrigley Marine Science Center into a learning community where students explore environmental challenges from multiple perspectives.

In 2026, more than three dozen students took courses spanning aquatic microbiology, marine biology and biological oceanography, coastal sustainability, and environmental history. 

Alongside their coursework, students participated in activities and conversations connecting what they learned with people putting those ideas into practice. Support from The Macfarlane Foundation allowed the Wrigley Institute to bring more visiting speakers to Catalina Island than ever before, including conservationists, scientists and civic leaders.

Scott Atkinson and Luisa Tam, both senior directors at Conservation International, discussed a conservation approach that works with surfing communities to protect biologically important coastal areas. Afterward, they spoke with students about internships and leadership opportunities through a collaboration between Conservation International and the Wrigley Institute.

For Annika Harusadangkul, who graduated this spring with a BS in environmental studies from USC Dornsife, the conversation offered a glimpse of how she might turn her interest in marine science into action.

“Hearing Scott and Luisa talk about their journeys in the field of conservation has motivated me to pursue marine conservation nonprofit work during my upcoming gap year,” she says.

Other mentors showed students how environmental challenges intersect with economics, policy and community engagement. Paul Armsworth, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, explored how ecological and socioeconomic data can inform conservation decisions. USC Vice President of Civic Engagement and Economic Partnerships Effie Turnbull Sanders drew on her experience with the California Coastal Commission to engage students in questions about environmental justice and coastal decision-making.

The Catalina Island Conservancy team expanded the model further. With support from The Macfarlane Foundation, seven representatives came to campus, giving students opportunities to speak with professionals specializing in Channel Islands ecology, invasive plant management, ornithology and Catalina mammals, among other topics.

“At the core, this is an opportunity to encourage and support the exceptional USC students to explore more, learn more, and create more through their individual and collective efforts,” says Macfarlane. 

“It’s not really giving back,” he added. “It’s investing in the students.”

Every time a virus invades a person, it collides with thousands of years of human history.

A study led by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Howard University suggests that some of the genes involved in the body’s immune response today bear the marks of ancient battles with infectious diseases.

The research also identified rare genetic variants that may help explain why some people developed more severe COVID-19 than others. The findings connect two fields that are rarely studied together: human evolution and infectious disease. By bringing them together, the scientists uncovered clues that may have been missed by studying either field alone.

The study traced the evolutionary history of four immune system genes, which were previously linked to respiratory or inflammatory diseases, across populations around the world. The research team then examined whether changes in those genes were linked to severe COVID-19 in nearly 4,000 people in Italy, using data from the Italian GEN-COVID study.

For Michael Campbell, associate professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife and the study’s senior author, understanding how evolution shaped the immune system over thousands of years offers a new way to think about why people respond differently to disease today.

“SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, may be new, but the immune system it encountered isn’t,” Campbell said. “Our immune genes have been shaped by thousands of generations of encounters with pathogens. Understanding the evolutionary history of immune genes can provide insights into why people respond differently to infectious diseases today.”

How have ancient diseases shaped the human immune system?

To explore that history, the scientists at USC Dornsife and Howard collaborated with colleagues at Yale and Columbia universities to analyze four genes that help regulate the body’s immune response — IL-4, TLR2, CCL2 and SLC11A1. Using genetic data from more than 2,000 people representing populations from Africa, Europe and Asia, they searched for signs that evolution had favored particular versions of these genes over time, leaving lasting marks in the human genome.

The team found evidence that all four genes had been shaped by natural selection, but not in the same way everywhere. Different versions of the genes were more common in different populations, suggesting infectious diseases and other environmental pressures may have shaped human evolution differently around the world.

Some of those gene variants were also found in the DNA of Neanderthals or Denisovans, extinct human relatives that lived tens of thousands of years ago. In some cases, the similarities likely reflect inherited DNA from a shared ancestor. In others, they point to ancient interbreeding between early modern humans and these extinct relatives.

Importantly, Campbell said, these evolutionary changes almost certainly happened long before the coronavirus emerged. “The signals we found weren’t created by COVID-19,” he said. “They reflect much older evolutionary pressures, probably from infectious diseases our ancestors faced over thousands of years.”

Rare gene variants linked to severe COVID-19

The researchers then turned to a different question: Could some of these immune genes also help explain severe COVID-19?

Using genetic and clinical information from nearly 4,000 people in Italy who tested positive for COVID-19, the researchers identified two rare changes in the TLR2 gene. One was found more often in COVID-19 patients who had previously received an organ transplant than in other COVID-19 patients. The second was associated with more severe forms of COVID-19, suggesting it may contribute to differences in how seriously ill some people become.

Unlike the common gene variants shaped by evolution over thousands of years, these TLR2 variants were rare and appear to be much more recent genetic mutations.

Because organ transplant recipients are already known to face a higher risk of severe COVID-19, the finding suggests a TLR2 variant could be one factor influencing that increased risk. The researchers say, however, that more research is needed to determine if that’s the case.

The researchers also caution that the COVID-19 findings overall should be interpreted carefully. The genetic associations will need to be confirmed in larger, independent populations and validated through laboratory studies. They also note the need to include more genetically diverse populations in future studies to better understand disease risk worldwide.

Why evolution still matters today

By identifying immune genes shaped by ancient infectious diseases, such as TLR2, scientists may gain new clues about the biological basis of infectious disease susceptibility.

“The pathogens our ancestors encountered thousands of years ago helped shape the immune system we carry today,” Campbell said. “By tracing that evolutionary history, we can better understand why people respond differently to infectious diseases today and identify biological pathways that may inform new strategies for disease prevention and treatment.”

About the study

In addition to Campbell, study authors include Alessandro Lisi and Marisol Fermin Flores of USC Dornsife; Thomas Heinbockel and Kareem Washington of Howard University; Christopher N. Cross of Howard University and Yale University; and Faith C. Simmonds of Columbia University.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (P30AI117970), the National Science Foundation (IOS-1355034, BCS-2221924, and BCS-2221920), and the National Geographic Society (HJ-116ER-17), as well as fellowships from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program.

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc has built a career that spans music, philanthropy and entrepreneurship. The lessons that shaped his work began long before international hits like “The Man” and “I Need a Dollar.”

Blacc, who graduated with interdisciplinary degrees in linguistics and psychology from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 2001, says the ideas he encountered as a student still influence his creative process. Studying language and consciousness gave him a deeper understanding of how people communicate, and these insights still find their way into his songwriting decades later.

Research opportunities he found at USC also left a lasting impression. Working alongside a neuroscience researcher introduced Blacc to the scientific process, sparking an appreciation for evidence-based thinking that extends beyond music into his work as an investor and biotech entrepreneur.

Today, Blacc also uses his platform to champion social good, an effort he says was partly inspired by the civic engagement he saw modeled by USC professors and programs.

His latest album, Stand Together, pairs each of its 12 songs with a nonprofit organization and has taken him to national television, including performances on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Good Morning America. The project reflects his longstanding belief that music can serve to tell the stories of people working to help their communities.

What makes the cells of the muscles contract? — Samarth, age 13, India

Muscles are amazing. They’re what let you strum a guitar, kick a soccer ball and high-five your friends. When you decide to move, your brain tells your muscles what to do, and they spring into action. But what is actually happening inside your muscles to make that happen?

To answer that question, you first need to understand how your muscles are put together.

What muscles are made of

Every muscle in your body is an organ, and just like every other organ, muscles are made of cells. Muscle cells, called muscle fibers, are shaped a little differently than most other cells. Muscle fibers are long and ropelike. They can stretch and shorten, kind of like a bungee cord.

Each muscle contains a bunch of these fibers all lined up together, side by side, like a bag of dry spaghetti noodles. Some muscles are made of hundreds of thousands of fibers.

The muscles that you use to move your body are called skeletal muscles because they move your bones. Each muscle is attached to bones by tendons. When a muscle shortens, it tugs on the tendon, which pulls on the bone, allowing you to move.

Microscopic rope pulls

Your cells are filled with molecular machines made out of proteins. They help your cells do their jobs.

Actin and myosin are two proteins that are super important for muscle fibers. Actin is like a microscopic rope, and myosin is like a microscopic hand. When millions of tiny myosin hands grab onto actin ropes and pull at the same time, the muscle fiber gets shorter. Scientists say the muscle is contracting.

Notice that the tiny hands can only pull on the ropes. They never push. That is why muscles can only pull.

See for yourself. Go ahead and bend your elbow. That muscle on the inside of your upper arm is called your biceps. When it gets shorter, it pulls to bend your arm. Now straighten your arm out. That muscle on the back of your arm is called your triceps, and it is pulling to straighten your arm. No pushing necessary.

Sending the message to move

That’s how muscles create movement, but those tiny myosin hands aren’t pulling all the time. What tells them when to pull? The answer is your brain.

Your brain and muscles communicate using electricity. When you decide to move, your brain generates an electrical signal it sends to your muscles. To reach your muscles, the signal travels down your spinal cord, then along nerves that connect to your muscle fibers.

These signals travel at speeds of over 200 miles per hour. They reach the muscles so quickly that movement feels almost immediate. Luckily, for common movements like walking or writing, the brain sends these signals automatically so you don’t need to think about them.

When an electrical signal reaches the muscle fibers, it tells tiny sacs full of calcium to open. When calcium is stuck in these sacs, the myosin hands cannot get ahold of the actin ropes. But when the calcium is released, it acts like a key and unblocks the actin ropes so the myosin hands can grab on.

Scientists call this calcium storage system the sarcoplasmic reticulum.

Once calcium lets the myosin hands grab the actin ropes, they still need energy to pull. That energy comes from a special cellular fuel called ATP. ATP is the main source of energy for all of the cells in your body. Your body uses the food you eat to make ATP, and ATP helps power your proteins so that cells can do their jobs.

Putting it all together

So, what makes muscles contract? It takes an entire team of electricity, calcium, ATP and proteins all working together.

First, your brain sends an electrical signal to your muscle fibers. This causes calcium to be released in those fibers. Calcium lets myosin proteins grab onto actin proteins. ATP provides the energy for myosin to pull. When millions of tiny pulls happen at the same time, your muscle shortens and creates movement.

Next time you wave to a friend or scroll to another Curious Kids article, you’ll know that thousands of muscle fibers and millions of microscopic proteins are working together to make it happen.

Kiki Crawford, Lecturer of Biological Sciences, 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 French writer Marcel Proust famously recalled his childhood from the taste of a Madeline cookie, his stomach may have done some of the work.  

We generally associate our memories almost exclusively with the brain, which we imagine both forms and stores them. New research led by Scott Kanoski, professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has found that our gut may also play an important role in helping us to remember experiences, especially those revolving around food.  

The study, published in Nature Communications, focused on the vagus nerve, a major communication highway that connects the digestive system to the brain. Scientists have long known that the vagus nerve helps regulate digestion, hunger and feelings of fullness. Now, researchers have uncovered evidence that signals traveling from the gut through the vagus nerve can also help to form memories.

Memorable munchies

The researchers found that when rats consumed nutritious foods, neurons communicating to  the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for learning and memory, released higher levels of a chemical called acetylcholine. This neurotransmitter supports memory formation and helps the brain encode new experiences.  

The response depends on signals traveling from the gut via the vagus nerve. When the researchers interrupted vagus nerve communication, the increase in acetylcholine disappeared. These rats also performed worse on memory tests that required them to remember where they had recently found food.

The scientists also discovered that the brain’s memory system seems to respond primarily to a food’s nutrients, not just its pleasing taste. Rats who ate sugar or fat showed strong memory-related brain activity. Those given sweet-tasting but low-calorie or non-caloric liquids did not show the same response. This suggests that the brain reacts to the actual nutritional value of food, rather than just its flavor.

“We think the mechanism likely evolved to help animals remember vital information about food sources,” says study first author Logan Lauer, a PhD student in Kanoski’s lab. Recalling where certain plants sprout first in the spring can help hungry animals find important nutrients. Signals from the gut tell the brain, “This meal provided valuable nutrients, so remember where and how you got it.”

Brain-boosting research

Although high-fat and high-sugar foods sparked strong memory responses, the study also found that chronic exposure to these items worsened memory formation over time. 

Rats that consumed this type of diet early in life showed weaker communication between the gut and the hippocampus later on. Even after returning to a healthier diet, these animals had reduced memory-related brain responses and poorer performance on food-location memory tasks. 

The findings could have important implications for human health. Scientists already know that obesity, poor diet and metabolic disorders such as diabetes are associated with cognitive decline. This new research suggests one reason why: Constant exposure to junk foods may disrupt or disturb the connection between our gut and our brain.  

Their work could also shed new light on neurodegenerative diseases. 

“The disruption of acetylcholine signaling in the hippocampus is one of the earliest neurochemical changes in Alzheimer’s disease,” says Kanoski. “By revealing that this system is boosted by gut signaling from the vagus nerve, novel therapeutic targets could leverage this information to explore vagus nerve-based approaches, such as vagus nerve stimulation.”

The discovery also raises the possibility of new treatments to strengthen communication between the gut and the brain. Therapies that stimulate the vagus nerve or improve gut health could potentially help protect memory and cognitive function. 

While much more research is needed to determine whether the same mechanisms operate in humans, the findings add to a growing body of evidence that the gut and brain are deeply connected.

About the study

In addition to Kanoski and Lauer, study authors include Anna Hayes, Andrea Suarez, Alexander Bashaw, Molly Klug, Alicia Kao, Robert Cheng, Jessica Rea, Keshav Subramanian, Anna Nourbash, Kristen Donohue, and Lindsey Schier of USC Dornsife; Kevin Myers of Bucknell University; and Léa Décarie-Spain of Université de Montréal.

This work was supported by National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases grants DK104897, DK123423, F31AG092136; Postdoctoral Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institute on Aging grant F32AG077932; Quebec Research Funds postdoctoral fellowship  315201; and an Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship to Promote Diversity.

Mexico is one of the United States’ most important partners and one of its most misunderstood.

The two countries share more than a border. They are bound together by trade, migration, supply chains, family ties, security concerns and a complicated political history. Now, that relationship is being tested by rising tensions over tariffs, the future of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), fentanyl, cartel violence, migration and Mexican sovereignty.

Pamela Starr, professor of the practice of political science and international relations at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has spent decades studying Mexican politics, Mexican foreign policy and U.S.-Mexico relations. Her new book, The Making of Mexico: Revolution, Reform, and Transformation, examines the historical experiences and “unwritten rules of behavior” that continue to shape how Mexico responds to today’s challenges.

In this Q&A, Starr explains what Americans often misunderstand about Mexico, how President Claudia Sheinbaum is navigating pressure from Washington, and why the future of U.S.-Mexico relations matters for American workers, consumers and national security.

When Americans think about Mexico today, problems at the border are likely top of mind. What do you wish more people understood about how deeply connected our two countries are?

Most Americans know about the headline issues of drugs and migration. Some know the U.S. runs a trade deficit with Mexico, and many imagine that this means the U.S. is exporting jobs to Mexico. But that is an incomplete view of a relationship that is very complicated and, on balance, highly beneficial to the United States.

For example, Mexico is our number one trading partner. It exports fruits and vegetables and minerals to the U.S., but it also exports autos and autoparts, medical devices, and computers. It imports more U.S. corn than any other country in the world, but also imports large quantities of pork, natural gas, gasoline and autoparts.

But we don’t merely trade with Mexico. We produce things together, trading inputs as we jointly produce stuff. For example, 74% of Mexican manufactured exports contain U.S. content. Further, it’s estimated that an “American” car crosses the U.S.-Mexico border eight times during its manufacture.

These deeply integrated supply chains reinforce our global competitiveness by keeping the cost of production lower than it would otherwise be. This helps the U.S. compete with China, generate investment, growth and job creation, and keep consumer prices down. And that’s just the economic relationship.

The Trump administration is pushing changes to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade deal that replaced NAFTA. Why should Americans who don’t follow trade policy care about what happens next?

Americans should care because changes to USMCA could affect their jobs, wages and the prices they pay for everyday goods. The agreement makes possible the cross-border production process that helps keep the U.S. economy internationally competitive and consumer prices low. Its rules governing trade and investment give companies the confidence to invest across borders while maintaining quality and controlling costs.

The U.S. does not appear to want to leave the agreement but rather to establish new rules designed to dramatically increase U.S. content in cars and other products and reduce Chinese inputs in North American supply chains. Companies may struggle to adapt, especially if the changes are substantial and must be implemented quickly. In the best case, they adapt. In the worst case, production is disrupted and costs rise, making U.S. companies less competitive with China and leading to job cuts, lower wages and higher consumer prices.

The decision to continue negotiating rather than renew USMCA under its current term has added to the uncertainty. Although the agreement remains in force, companies cannot be sure what future trade rules will look like. As a result, many are delaying investment in Mexico. And rather than shifting that investment to the U.S., as the Trump administration hopes, some may look to countries that may ultimately not be as reliable a partner.

Sheinbaum has had to respond to U.S. pressure on tariffs, migration and security while also defending Mexican sovereignty. How would you describe her strategy so far?

President Sheinbaum refers to her strategy for dealing with President Trump during the first year and a half of her presidency as “cool headedness.” She largely avoided responding in kind to Trump’s rhetorical provocations, built a working relationship through a series of phone calls that helped defuse potential conflicts, and responded to key U.S. demands for deeper cooperation on migration and security policy.

That strategy shifted, however, after the U.S. indicted several Mexican officials, including the sitting governor of Sinaloa, and demanded their arrest and extradition. For Sheinbaum, this crossed a line. She responded by invoking a long-standing Mexican strategy for dealing with excessive U.S. pressure: appealing to Mexican nationalism.

She argued that far-right forces in the U.S. were attempting to influence Mexican politics and use criminal indictments to shape who governs the country — the latest in a long history of foreign violations of Mexican sovereignty. Even so, she stopped short of accusing Trump directly, suggesting that she has modified, rather than abandoned, her strategy of “cool headedness.”

You have described U.S.-Mexico relations as shaped by an informal “autonomy within limits” accord, in which Mexico has had room to chart its own path as long as it did not cross certain U.S. red lines. Is that longstanding bargain beginning to break down?

The U.S.-Mexico relationship is in uncharted territory. For roughly a century, U.S. presidents largely followed two informal rules in dealing with Mexico: Disagreements were handled privately, and Mexico was given broad policy autonomy as long as it aligned with the United States when U.S. national security was at stake.

Historically, U.S. national security threats were understood as coming from foreign adversaries, such as the Axis powers during World War II or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the late 20th century, Washington increasingly pressed Mexico to cooperate on migration and drug trafficking, but those issues were not treated as national security threats that sharply constrained Mexican policy autonomy. Trump changed that.

The Trump administration expanded the range of U.S. red lines to include migration and drug trafficking, arguing that both threaten national security and require Mexico to meet U.S. demands. It has also raised the possibility of unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico and publicly pushed for joint military or police operations against cartels — both deeply sensitive issues for Mexico.

Mexico has rarely had to draw such explicit red lines with the U.S., and it cannot be sure how Washington will respond. For Mexico, the most important aspect of autonomy is limiting foreign influence in its domestic politics. That is why cooperation on issues such as containing the screwworm may be acceptable, while demands to arrest and extradite elected officials may not be.

Mexico has also approved a constitutional change allowing election results to be annulled if foreign interference is proven. Supporters say it protects Mexican sovereignty; critics warn it could be used to overturn unfavorable results. What could it mean for Mexican democracy and U.S.-Mexico relations?

This constitutional change is intended to curb support from internationally connected far-right groups for Mexico’s conservative opposition, which the Sheinbaum administration sees as a potential threat to its political survival and its ability to advance a leftist agenda. Citing alleged outside influence in recent right-wing electoral victories across Latin America, the administration argues that foreign — particularly U.S. — involvement in Mexican politics violates national sovereignty and that election results should be subject to challenge when such interference is proven.

Sheinbaum’s opponents, however, are concerned that the legislation is written so vaguely that it could be abused. Because it allows an election to be annulled if foreign interference is demonstrated, they fear government forces could invoke the provision broadly to overturn unfavorable results and preserve the governing party’s hold on power. The resulting uncertainty about whether future elections will be free and fair is significant.

Your new book explores the “unwritten rules of behavior” that shape Mexico’s politics, economy and foreign policy. Which of these rules are most important for Americans to understand?

“Autonomy within limits” is the most important unwritten rule shaping Mexican foreign policy. But Mexico’s domestic development has also been shaped by a historically rooted tolerance for corruption, the bending of laws and government favoritism in the economy. These patterns have hindered its fight against organized crime and its efforts to build a more dynamic national economy. Because the U.S. has had a different historical experience, some Americans have limited sympathy for the resulting policy challenges and see Mexico primarily as a source of problems rather than opportunity.

These unwritten rules are certainly not unique to Mexico; every country’s behavior is shaped by its history. Government in the U.S. was once deeply corrupt, for example, but the country largely succeeded in changing that accepted pattern of behavior, despite some recent backsliding. In Mexico, the powerful influence of the Catholic Church in politics and the economy was accepted as normal for centuries before being sharply curtailed in the early 20th century.

History is not destiny, but unwritten rules can be formidable obstacles to change because they define what societies consider normal and can be especially difficult for outsiders to recognize or understand.

Research conducted at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has been recognized with the 2026 Fields Medal, widely regarded as one of mathematics’ highest honors.

Yu Deng, who served on the USC Dornsife faculty from 2018 to 2024 and is now a professor at the University of Chicago, received the award for his contributions to partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation, advances in wave kinetic equations and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics.

“Yu Deng pursued some of the deepest questions in mathematical physics during his time as an assistant professor at USC. His striking talents combined extraordinary creativity and remarkable mathematical rigor,” said Susan Friedlander, director of USC Dornsife’s Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences. “I’m delighted he was awarded one of the 2026 Fields Medals, which is the highest international honor for a mathematician under 40.”

Awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union, the Fields Medal recognizes exceptional mathematical achievement.

Yu Deng’s research addressed a fundamental question that had challenged mathematicians for more than a century: How does the seemingly random motion of countless microscopic particles give rise to the orderly behavior of gases and fluids observed in everyday life?

His work helped explain how macroscopic behavior emerges from microscopic dynamics, providing rigorous mathematical foundations for phenomena that had challenged mathematicians and physicists for decades.

According to the International Mathematical Union, Yu Deng’s work “has substantially expanded the scope of rigorous analysis in nonlinear dynamics and has had a deep impact on the study of dispersive equations and mathematical physics.”

In early July 2026, the Trump administration quietly tapped Matthew Wielicki to lead the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The move places a podcaster known for downplaying the threats of climate change — and importantly, someone who has not been meaningfully involved in research on climate change or its impacts – at the top of one of the country’s most important scientific enterprises, one mandated by federal law.

Under the law, the Global Change Research Program — USGCRP for short — is required to prepare and submit a National Climate Assessment to the president and Congress at least every four years. Its purpose is to help the country’s businesses, communities and governments at all levels make better decisions about how to respond to the growing risks posed by climate change.

The National Climate Assessments have done two things exceedingly well since the first report was released in 2000: They have told hard truths about the risks that climate change poses to the United States, and they have made clear that, if left unchecked, those risks are going to get much worse.

But despite the best intentions and science, the assessments have largely failed to fulfill a critical aspect of their mandate: They haven’t provided decision-makers with a clear accounting of the range of national and local options for adapting to or mitigating climate risks. They have also remained largely silent on which adaptation or mitigation strategies are most appropriate in different places and under different climate scenarios. And they have said next to nothing about how to make decisions in the face of the risks — and inevitable uncertainties — posed by climate change.

This is why I have argued that the National Climate Assessment, and other climate reports like it, are broken and in urgent need of repair. I come to this conclusion from my experience as an interdisciplinary climate and decision scientist, as a member of the team that reviewed the Fourth National Climate Assessment beginning in 2017 and as chair of a National Academies working group charged with figuring out how climate reports like the National Climate Assessment could better support decision-makers in business and government.

Fixing a broken National Climate Assessment is the job of the person in charge of the USGCRP. But the fix it needs isn’t pretending that climate change isn’t happening — the evidence is everywhere in extreme downpours, deadly heat waves and severe droughts. The real fix is to expand the focus of the National Climate Assessment from just reporting the causes and consequences of climate risks to providing better advice about how to manage them.

Why sharing solutions also matters

To be fair, scientists who develop assessments like this focus on the evidence; they tend to avoid recommending particular courses of action because doing so would require making explicit value judgments that extend beyond the scientific evidence. This is a level of restraint that many people have come to expect from the scientific community.

But as the risks posed by climate change have become more acute, this omission has limited the National Climate Assessment’s usefulness for leaders in business and government who might want — or need — to use it.

Imagine learning from your doctor that you have been diagnosed with a serious illness, only to be ushered out of the office before hearing about either your treatment options or what other patients have done, and how they have fared, under similar circumstances. That’s largely the story of the National Climate Assessment. It does a terrific job of enumerating risks, but a poor job of helping people decide how — and, in some cases, even if — they should manage them.

The National Climate Assessment under Trump

Appointing Wielicki, a former geochemistry instructor and climate science critic, to lead the USGCRP and oversee the National Climate Assessment won’t address the report’s shortcomings. In fact, I expect it will make them worse.

Given the administration’s history, it’s not a stretch to imagine a USGCRP under Wielicki’s leadership soft-pedaling climate risks or, worse, amplifying the debunked “climate change is a hoax” narrative advanced by the Trump White House. Why? Because it’s already happening.

The administration dismantled the USGCRP in 2025. Then it commissioned a group of climate skeptics to write their own government report dismissing the risks of climate change, part of an effort to buttress the administration’s moves to rescind a decades-old federal finding that climate change endangers public health and welfare. A court later determined that the report was illegally produced.

At the same time, the world’s 10 hottest years on record have all happened since 2015, and Americans across the country are experiencing climate change in worsening storms, riskier floods and fires, extreme heat and drought. Leaders are looking for ways to alleviate those risks. Indeed, the long-term success of their businesses demands that they do so.

What decision-makers in business and government across the country really need isn’t deflection or denial. They need information about the costs, benefits and uncertainties associated with different climate risk-management options that they can act on.

They also need a clearer picture of the trade-offs associated with acting now, delaying action or, in some cases, choosing to do nothing.

Over time, an improved National Climate Assessment would build a searchable library of practical and relatable case studies of climate risk-management decisions. They would describe, among thousands of examples, why and how New York City used scenario planning to prepare for sea-level rise and more intense storms; why Flagstaff, Arizona, turned to a ballot initiative to address flood and wildfire risks; how places from Burlington, Vermont, to Georgetown, Texas, fared after transitioning their electricity grids exclusively to renewables; and why governments in South Florida have continued to avoid policies that would limit development or pursue managed retreat from vulnerable areas despite swelling political and scientific consensus about the long-term risks.

Cases like these are what would form the backbone of a more effective National Climate Assessment.

Providing candid, useful examples to follow

One key to making these case studies useful is to be candid about the strengths and weaknesses of competing options for managing risk, including maintaining the status quo.

Another is to provide guidance on how the lessons from each case can be adapted to different places and different kinds of risks.

An important third key is to keep these cases updated over time so users of the National Climate Assessment can learn from the outcomes of others’ decisions.

All three are well within the grasp of the USGCRP if it is operating under knowledgeable and experienced leadership.

And this brings us back to the analogy of the doctor and the patient. Some patients will opt for treatment, while others will choose to ignore their diagnosis. It’s the same story for how organizations and governments respond, or not, to climate change.

Only by developing a better understanding of how and why specific decisions to act on climate were made, and then what happened next, can those charged with managing future climate risks be better prepared to confront decisions about climate action when it’s their turn to make them.

Joe Árvai, Dana and David Dornsife Chair, Wrigley Institute Director and Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences and Environmental Studies, 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 slang term for cash money is “dead presidents.” But now the very much alive President Donald Trump could appear on U.S. coins and banknotes, too.

Ever since Trump returned to power in 2025, his administration has put the president’s face and name on all sorts of things, from federal buildings to national park passes. Putting him on the almighty dollar would be the crowning achievement of these efforts. After all, the value of physical U.S. currency in circulation today stands at over US$2.46 trillion, an all-time high.

If a sitting president’s portraits start appearing on U.S. currency, what would this change say about American political culture?

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said he doesn’t “think that there’s anything untoward” about the idea, while Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley has said, “President Trump’s self-celebrating maneuvers are authoritarian actions worthy of dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.”

As a professor of international relations who has studied the global evolution of currency iconography for over 20 years, I take a worldwide perspective on this debate. The data that I have amassed shows that such a choice by the U.S. would be out of step with nearly every other currency in the world.

All about the Benjamins — or the Donalds?

The Trump administration has been incredibly active on the currency front.

In January 2026, Trump’s handpicked commissioners of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a federal agency that advises on design and aesthetics, recommended designs for a circulating $1 coin featuring Trump’s head. The commission later also recommended a different portrayal of Trump for a 24-karat gold commemorative coin that it suggested making “as large as possible.” These coins were supposed to be ready for July 4, but production delays at the U.S. Mint have pushed the release date back.

The administration is also preparing Trump-branded banknotes. In March 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced a historic first: From now on, the president’s signature will be on newly printed paper dollars.

In April, the Treasury Department abruptly reassigned the director of its Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Patricia Solimene, after she had refused to advance a $250 bill with Trump’s face on it, according to The Washington Post.

“The buck stopped here,” Solimene wrote in a goodbye email to colleagues. But after her reassignment, the buck started again. In May, Bessent publicly displayed a $250 bill design featuring Trump – even while acknowledging that the new bills cannot be printed until Congress changes the 160-year-old law against depicting living persons on U.S. paper currency.

The Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act, a measure to amend the law, is awaiting further congressional action in the House Committee on Financial Services. Treasury claims it already has the legal authority to mint its Trump coins.

Examining the world’s coins

Putting the sitting president’s face on coins would be a dramatic departure from U.S. tradition. The only previous such instance in the country’s history was a 1926 commemorative half-dollar showing then-President Calvin Coolidge alongside George Washington.

But what about other countries in the contemporary world? How normal is it for their sitting leaders to appear on their coins?

Using the most recent edition of Coin & Mint News’ Directory of Circulating Coins — a standard reference for coin professionals working at national mints and central banks — I counted the images of sitting state leaders on the circulating coins of the world as of 2024. (Note: This data has not yet gone through rigorous peer review.)

Analyzing nearly 1,000 coins from 165 independent countries, I counted only 22 countries — about 13% of the total — whose circulating coins feature their sitting head of state. This number includes coins depicting heads of state who were in office when the coin was originally issued, whether or not they were still there in 2024.

Almost all the sitting heads of state who appear on the circulating coins that I analyzed are hereditary monarchs.

If a country is a hereditary monarchy — whether its political system is democratic, like the United Kingdom, or authoritarian, like Brunei — there is a high chance that its reigning king or queen is on its circulating coins. This is the case for about 62% of the monarchies in my database, or 21 out of 34.

On the other hand, if a country is not a hereditary monarchy, its sitting head of state is almost certainly not on its circulating coins. This is the case for 99% of the nonmonarchy countries in my database, or 130 out of 131.

The lone exception is Samoa, a parliamentary democracy whose circulating coins all feature the country’s head of state as of 2011, the coins’ original year of issuance. However, even Samoa is hardly an exception, as its political culture has many of the trappings of a monarchy: Its head of state is called “His Highness,” and he is traditionally chosen from among the country’s four paramount chieftains.

Examining the world’s banknotes

A similar story emerges from my data on banknotes.

Using Bank Note Museum – a free online catalog crowdsourced from a network of banknote collectors – and supplementing that data with information from Greysheet publications’ paywalled catalog The Banknote Book, I created a database of all the circulating banknotes in the world that were newly designed and issued between 2019 and 2024.

According to my data, 84 independent countries issued 340 new regular circulating banknotes during the chosen time frame. Yet only 13 of those countries — about 15% — issued new banknotes depicting their sitting head of state. All but one of the 13 countries that did so are hereditary monarchies.

The lone exception to the rule is Botswana, a democratic republic that has traditionally featured the sitting president’s portrait on its 10 pula banknote denomination. However, Duma Boko, Botswana’s president since late 2024, is still waiting for his 10 pula note.

US currency: Fit for a king?

Today, almost every country that isn’t a hereditary monarchy is declining to issue currency that features its sitting head of state. Since the U.S. isn’t a hereditary monarchy, putting Trump’s face on U.S. currency while he is still in office would be highly abnormal.

The nationwide “No Kings” protest movement has mobilized millions of Americans to march the streets in opposition to what they perceive as Trump’s monarchical ambitions. The global patterns of currency iconography suggest that they might have a point.

University of Southern California undergraduate student Anyi Tan contributed to this research.

Jacques Hymans, Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; University of Southern California

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

The end of World War II is often remembered as the beginning of a more peaceful and tolerant era in the United States. But Steve Ross, a historian at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, documents a darker reality: Antisemitism and racism increased after the war, and the number of organized hate groups more than doubled between 1940 and 1946.

In his latest book, The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross tells the story of the ordinary Americans who decided to fight back. Working through clandestine networks, these civilian operatives infiltrated Nazi and white supremacist organizations, gathered intelligence and helped thwart plots to bomb churches and synagogues.

Among them was Emmanuel Trujillo, who rose to become a leading figure in the postwar American Nazi movement while secretly communicating with antifascist organizations and tracking extremist leaders in the U.S. and abroad.

Ross, Distinguished Professor and Dean’s Professor of History and Myron and Marian Casden Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life at USC Dornsife, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his previous book, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America. Researching his latest book, he says, gave him the opportunity to write his own spy story — “only unlike the fiction I read, this stuff is true.”

In this video interview with USC Dornsife News, Ross discusses the operatives who put themselves in danger, the attacks they prevented and what their courage can teach us today about resisting hate and defending democracy.

The USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences earned five prestigious awards for marketing and communications work that spans digital campaigns, videos, magazine publication and journalism.

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) awarded USC Dornsife two golds and one silver in its 2026 Circle of Excellence Awards, an international competition recognizing outstanding work in educational advancement. This year’s competition drew nearly 4,200 entries from more than 600 institutions in 33 countries.

Separately, the Los Angeles Press Club awarded first place to USC Dornsife Magazine: The Life Issue and to a USC Dornsife News profile by Darrin Joy, senior director of strategic and scientific communication, at its 68th Southern California Journalism Awards.

“What makes these honors especially meaningful is the range of work they recognize: strategic marketing, inventive video and first-rate journalism,” said Jim Key, senior associate dean for communication and marketing. “Each award reflects the talent and collaboration of people who thrive on finding creative, compelling ways to connect audiences with USC Dornsife.”

Summer enrollment campaign earns CASE gold

The Just One GE campaign earned gold in the CASE category for marketing initiatives at institutions with more than 25 staff members.

Created through a partnership between USC Dornsife’s Office of Communication and Office of Creative Content, the campaign employed digital ads, emails, video and social media to encourage undergraduates to take one general education course during the summer. It paired a student-friendly message — “One class. Less stress. Summer vibes.” — with a website that made it easier to explore courses by GE requirement and format.

Summer enrollment increased 36.5% year over year, exceeding the campaign’s 25% goal, while course cancellations fell 29%.

CASE judges called it “a smart, highly targeted enrollment initiative” that paired a simple concept with strong execution. They also praised its efficient use of resources, focused messaging and thoughtful audience segmentation.

Professors reacting to student reviews takes video gold

CASE also awarded gold to “Professors Surprised with Students’ Reviews,” produced by Multimedia News Director Katie Kim Scott, videographer Mike Glier, and Christelle Snow, audience engagement editor.

Inspired by the format of celebrities reading mean tweets, the short featured USC Dornsife professors’ candid reactions to anonymous student evaluations. Their unscripted responses highlighted the impact of excellent teaching while giving students and alumni a personal look at faculty members across disciplines.

Screened during USC Dornsife’s 2025 commencement ceremony, the video reached more than 25,000 graduates, family members, friends, faculty and guests. It also generated more than 70,000 Instagram views and reached 40,000 accounts. CASE judges called the concept compelling and impactful for current and prospective students.

Online magazine receives CASE silver

The online editions of USC Dornsife Magazine’s “Life” and “Family” issues received silver in the CASE online magazine category.

Led by editor in chief Susan Bell, creative director Letty Avila and associate editor Margaret Crable, with visual design by graphic designer Rhiannon Montelius, the magazine’s online editions go beyond reproducing print articles by adapting stories for digital reading and extending them through multimedia and public programming.

Magazine website visits increased 71% from 2024 to 2025. CASE judges praised the publication’s engaging long-form journalism and animation.

Magazine and alumni profile win first place for journalism

At the Southern California Journalism Awards, the Los Angeles Press Club named the “Life” issue of USC Dornsife Magazine as the top in-house or corporate publication.

Judges called it “a beautifully ambitious and thought-provoking collection” that explores the complexity and wonder of life through rich storytelling and interdisciplinary insight.

Joy received first place for personality profile writing in the film and television category for “Actor earns philosophy PhD on his way to major movie and television roles.” The compelling story profiles USC Dornsife alumnus Luka Jones, who completed a doctorate in philosophy while building a successful film and television career.

Judges praised the piece as “great writing” that was “well thought out, and expertly written,” noting the strength of its connection between Jones’ university experience and acting career.

“Turn off that TV, it’ll rot your brain!” has been a household refrain for decades. While “rot” might be too strong a term, researchers are finding that the overall sentiment could have some merit.

A study published recently in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association revealed that those who reported watching TV “very often” in midlife later exhibited reduced volume in areas of the brain associated with memory, smaller frontal and occipital lobes, and areas of damage in the brain’s white matter that are associated with aging, stroke risk, cognitive decline and dementia. 

“For years we’ve focused on how much people sit. Our findings suggest we should also pay attention to what they’re doing while they’re sitting,” says David Raichlen, professor of biological sciences and anthropology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and a senior author of the study.

Raichlen’s group has long studied the association between dementia risk and physical activity, including comparing leisure and work activities. 

The findings weren’t just due to TV viewing’s sedentary nature. The study found that other types of sedentary activities did not have the same associations, indicating that what one does while sitting may matter much more than previously thought.

Watching changes

The researchers analyzed data from about 1,700 adults, average age 53, who enrolled in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study between 1987 and 1989. ARIC is a long-running study of the U.S. population designed to investigate cardiovascular and brain health. 

Participants were asked how frequently, on a scale ranging from “never/seldom” to “very often,” they watched television during their leisure time and how much of their workday they spent sitting.

More than two decades later, participants underwent brain MRI. Compared with people who reported “never” or “seldom” watching TV, those who watched TV “very often” showed widespread structural differences across the brain.

The researchers found smaller volumes in areas associated with early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and more white matter hyperintensity volumes, an indicator of cerebral small blood vessel disease associated with cognitive decline and dementia. These participants also had smaller occipital and frontal lobes, regions associated with visual processing and executive functioning.

Differences persisted even when the researchers controlled for factors such as physical activity, diabetes, body mass index, smoking, and alcohol use.

Of note, the researchers relied on self-reported data for TV consumption, which can be less precise than timed tracking. Study participants also did not undergo a baseline MRI. Future research could begin with a baseline MRI to more concretely demonstrate changes over time.

Not all sitting is made the same

Strikingly, the sedentary element of TV watching didn’t appear to be the main driver for these changes.

Those who reported high amounts of sitting at work actually had larger frontal and occipital lobes, as well as reduced white matter hyperintensity volumes, indicating better brain health than among those who sit to watch TV. This could be due to the intellectually stimulating nature of many sit-down jobs, say the study authors. 

Men appeared to be particularly vulnerable to these changes. When the MRI scans were separated by sex, researchers found that most of the changes to the brain, both from TV watching and occupational sitting, were seen in men.

Such findings indicate there is still more research to be done on this complex topic. However, a different approach to health guidance around sedentary activities may emerge. Rather than just directing their patients to move more, for example, physicians might recommend they reduce television time and add cognitively engaging activities for when they do sit.  

“We frequently encourage the public not to spend too much time sitting down, but experts may want to expand that recommendation to encompass the activities done while sitting, since those seems to have distinct impacts on brain health,” says study corresponding author Natan Feter, postdoctoral scholar in the Human and Evolutionary Biology program at USC Dornsife. 

About this study

In addition to Raichlen and Feter, study authors include Anamika Nanda, Mark Lai, Rand Wilcox and Sarah Hourihan of USC Dornsife; Daniel Aslan of Harvard University; Jayne Feter of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; M. Katherine Sayre of University of California Santa Barbara; Pradyumna Bharadwaj, Madeline Ally, Hyun Son, Yann Klimentidis, Amit Arora and Gene Alexander of the University of Arizona; Silvio Maltagliati of USC Dornsife and Université Bretagne Sud.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants P30AG072980, P30AG019610, R56AG067200, R01AG064587, and R01AG072445 and funding from the state of Arizona, the Arizona Department of Health Services and the McKnight Brain Research Foundation. 

There are few greater feelings than the sense of heartfelt gratitude to another human being who has done you a solid. Sincere thanks and reciprocation are part of the glue that binds us in human relationships.

But sometimes you’re just not feeling it. You know that you have benefited from what someone has done for you, but you don’t really feel grateful to them for doing it. Most teenagers go through this period with their parents. Maybe you take your partner or colleague for granted.

For me, 14 years ago, it was my mother-in-law. She had upended her life to move from South Dakota to California to live with my wife and me to assist with childcare after our daughter was born; no other source of childcare fit with our demanding work schedules and my commute. She made a huge sacrifice that transformed our lives, but there were moments when I really struggled to feel grateful.

Since that time, I’ve come to devote much of my research as a philosopher to studying how the way that we interpret each other as people shapes our relationships. That work has helped me to understand why I struggled to be grateful — and taught me a little bit about how to do better.

Personal gratitude

I’ve found that the hardest part of feeling grateful to someone is the “to” part. It is one thing to be impersonally grateful that something happened and another thing to be personally grateful to someone for doing it. These are not the same.

Both forms of gratitude require seeing something as a benefit. And they both require a humble recognition of how easily things could have been otherwise. When the rain ends a drought, an atheist can feel grateful that the tomatoes will survive. But the atheist isn’t grateful “to” anyone for the rain.

Personal gratitude requires more than impersonal gratitude. It is an example of what the philosopher Peter Strawson calls a “participant” attitude: an attitude that we have toward people, but not toward things. And a large theme in my work is that participant attitudes such as gratitude involve giving someone credit for what the attitude responds to.

But which benefits we give people credit for is complicated. As philosophers such as Tony Manela have argued, actions motivated primarily by money, self-interest or insecurity don’t merit personal gratitude, even when they benefit you. Actions motivated by love, generosity or concern, on the other hand — or other “pro-social” motives — do.

Sometimes people fail to feel gratitude because they take someone for granted, not noticing how easily they could have done otherwise. This wasn’t my problem with my mother-in-law. It was obvious that she didn’t have to move across the country to live with us.

But it was hard to avoid noticing that she had always wanted to live in California. Sometimes it is hard to feel grateful because of how we interpret someone’s motives. They could have done otherwise, but we don’t think their action was really “about us.”

Bad motives are easy to find

Sometimes ungenerous motives can help people to be generous. Your child’s kindergarten teacher isn’t a volunteer. They may be a naturally generous person — but still, they probably wouldn’t be working with your child on spelling, arithmetic and handling adversity if they weren’t getting a paycheck.

It’s still appropriate to be grateful to them. Their financial incentive to show up for work enables their generosity, rather than competing with it.

Elementary school teachers are not alone. After all, people’s decisions are often driven by many factors: some that merit gratitude and others that don’t. So if you go looking for selfish motives, you are bound to find some.

Take your partner, for example. They do something that benefits you: buying you flowers, filling your tank with gas or finally taking their turn to wash the dishes. They are partly motivated by generosity, love or communal spirit. But, as in any close relationship, sometimes they may be hoping to get something out of it: reciprocation, maybe, or getting you off their back.

It matters which of these you interpret as their “true” motive: Seeing it one way opens you up to gratitude, while the other precludes it.

What are ‘true’ motives?

The distinction between someone’s “true” motive and the other motives that enable it looks like the distinction between causes and enabling conditions. For example, when you drop a wine glass, the fragility of the glass enables the drop to cause the break, but it isn’t itself a cause of the break — the drop is.

In the case of the falling glass, there’s a clear, objective answer to what caused the break and what merely enabled it. But I believe that relating to people is deeply different than understanding physical things.

The key question in whether to be grateful to someone isn’t about which motives count as “causes.” It is about which cause we need to bring into focus in order to see the other person more clearly for who they are.

See it their way

In other words, it’s at least partly a matter of perspective. If someone does you a favor, but you know they’re hoping for something in return, you can see that as their “true” motive. But you don’t have to see it that way. Instead, you could see that motive as the condition they need for their generosity to thrive.

Shifting perspectives isn’t easy. When you’re doubting someone’s motives, their lack of generosity can feel obvious. But it helps to remember that people tend to believe they’re acting generously. If you want to respond with gratitude, try seeing them as they see themselves.

What if that doesn’t work?

Well, the next best thing to being grateful to someone is being grateful for them. Starting there is a good way to remind yourself of why you value this relationship in the first place. And it can be enough to simply say “Thanks” and mean it.

Mark Schroeder, Professor of Philosophy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

Why is Venus the hottest planet, whereas Mercury is closer to the Sun? — Sejal M., age 7, Bangalore, India

When the solar system had just formed, 4.5 billion years ago, Venus was probably a tropical paradise. Oceans of water likely covered its surface, and puffy clouds dotted its skies. At that time, Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, was undoubtedly the hottest planet in the solar system.

But then the Sun grew brighter, and a series of events known as a runaway greenhouse effect caused Venus’s surface temperature to soar well past Mercury’s. To be sure, as the closest planet to the Sun, parts of Mercury are still extremely hot. Its surface temperature on its sunlit side is around 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead.

I’m a space scientist with a passion for teaching physics and astronomy. I’ve seen Venus shine brightly in the western sky just after sunset, and, on rare occasions, seen Mercury briefly appear as an “evening star.”

What is the greenhouse effect?

Venus isn’t the only planet that has experienced a greenhouse effect. Today, the same phenomenon keeps Earth’s surface habitable.

Warm objects emit electromagnetic radiation, or light, because their atoms and molecules are constantly vibrating. Earth’s surface is warmed by the Sun and gives off infrared light, which is invisible to your eyes. Humans and animals also glow in infrared, and most of the energy released by a campfire is infrared radiation. The hotter an object is, the more infrared radiation it emits.

On a planet without an atmosphere, such as Mercury, this energy escapes directly into space. As a result, there is an enormous difference in temperature between Mercury’s blistering hot sunlit side and its night side, where temperatures can drop to minus 290 degrees F (minus 180 degrees C).

On Earth, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including molecules of carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor, absorb and trap some of this infrared radiation, acting like a blanket around the planet and keeping the surface warm.

Earth’s average surface temperature is about 59 F (15 C). Without greenhouse gases, the temperature would be closer to 0 F (minus 18 C), and Earth would resemble a giant snowball. We definitely need a moderate greenhouse effect to make our planet habitable.

Diverging fates

But how could Venus, a planet that is nearly the same size as Earth and that was once made up of the same things, end up so different from our home world? There are several clues to why Venus is such a hot, unpleasant planet today.

Scientists agree that because of their similar sizes and proximity to the Sun, Earth and Venus likely started out with comparable amounts of water and carbon dioxide. On Earth, most of the carbon dioxide is dissolved in the oceans or locked away in rocks, such as limestone. Venus may once have stored carbon dioxide in a similar way.

Scientific models of stars indicate that the Sun has grown about 40% brighter since the early history of the solar system. Four billion years ago, it emitted only about 70% of the energy it does today.

Scientists disagree about whether Venus ever had long-lived oceans. But evidence suggests the planet possessed lots of water early in its history. As the Sun’s brightness increased, more and more water would have evaporated into the atmosphere. Without surface water to absorb and store carbon dioxide, nearly all of this greenhouse gas accumulated in the atmosphere.

This process, in turn, would have caused even more evaporation and even more warming, a feedback loop known as a runaway greenhouse effect. Today, carbon dioxide makes up about 96% of Venus’ atmosphere, and its surface temperature is a nearly constant 867 F (464 C) day or night. Venus is now stuck in this state, and its atmosphere and surface temperature will remain like this for a very long time.

Imagine how thick Earth’s atmosphere would be if all the oceans evaporated and all the carbon dioxide dissolved in them were released into the air. Something very much like this happened on Venus.

As a result, the atmospheric pressure at Venus’ surface is more than 90 times greater than Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level. To experience such a high pressure on Earth, you would have to dive to a depth of about 3,000 feet (940 meters). That much pressure is like having five elephants standing on your shoulders!

A runaway greenhouse effect on Earth?

You may have heard scientists warn that Earth could experience some of the same processes affecting Venus if human-caused climate change continues unchecked. Global temperatures are rising as people burn coal, oil and natural gas for industrial activities and transportation, releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time. As more and more accumulates there, it traps more heat, raising the temperature on the planet’s surface.

Another major greenhouse gas is methane. As Earth warms, an important source of methane is thawing permafrost, the permanently frozen ground found mostly in the Arctic. When the icy ground thaws, it exposes organic matter that had been frozen for thousands of years, including ancient plants, mosses, and even the remains of woolly mammoths and other large animals.

Bacteria can then decompose that matter, and as they do, they release methane into the atmosphere.

As Earth warms, more permafrost melts, releasing even more methane and creating a vicious cycle. Earth may never reach the extreme temperatures found on Venus today. However, our planet could become a much less comfortable place as temperatures rise.

However, Earth’s surface temperature will never reach anywhere near that of Venus in our lifetime, and Venus will remain the hottest planet in the solar system — despite being farther from the Sun than Mercury.

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

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Most Americans understand that their avocado toast and Super Bowl guacamole depend on a green fruit imported from Mexico. But few realize that Mexico is the United States’ top trading partner, both as the largest source of U.S. imports and the largest market for its exports.

Mexico supplies everything from fruits and vegetables to computers, medical equipment and electrical machinery — not to mention vehicles and auto parts. Mexico is also the top consumer of U.S. exports, ranging from corn, pork and dairy products to natural gas, to auto parts.

Given these ties, the stakes will be high on July 1, 2026, when U.S., Mexican and Canadian trade negotiators begin a required trilateral review of the 2020 trade deal underpinning this relationship. But a de facto stalemate is likely, resulting in uncertainty that will dampen growth in all three member countries.

Meanwhile, consumers will have to keep paying the tab for imports affected by Trump’s tariffs, including global tariffs announced in April 2025, as well as specific levies on autos and products made with steel and aluminum. According to the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, the U.S. inflation rate in March 2026 would have been 0.8 percentage point lower year on year without these tariffs.

As a scholar of U.S.-Mexico relations, I argue this outcome reflects President Donald Trump’s desire to reduce U.S. trade deficits, bring manufacturing back to the U.S. and retain coercive power over his neighbors. But all it will likely do is yield a poorly defined process of annual reviews of the longer-standing agreement — signed by Trump during his first term.

The logic of trade integration

The 2020 pact, known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, has been a linchpin for U.S. global competitiveness, especially for the trade relationship with Mexico. With some modifications, it succeeded the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mexico doesn’t export just agricultural goods and products assembled with factors of production imported from the U.S. It supplies such inputs to the U.S. production process as well. This bilateral trade supports key cross-border supply chains for regional manufacturing.

This is most striking in the automotive industry. A telling measure is that a typical “U.S.” vehicle crosses the U.S.-Mexico border up to eight times during the manufacturing process. The U.S. and Mexico don’t just trade finished products; they produce things together, as Mexico scholar Chris Wilson has put it.

These deeply integrated supply chains lower the cost of production, which in turn helps the U.S. compete with China, generate investment, spur job creation — and keep consumer prices down. Recognizing this, the Trump administration agreed to exempt all exports that comply with the terms of the 2020 trade pact from the global tariffs announced in April 2025. This exemption now applies to 85% of Mexican exports, according to Mexico Economy Secretary Marcelo Ebrard.

Annual reviews are likely outcome

Under the terms of the 2020 pact, the three countries have to review the deal after six years. Potential outcomes of the 2026 negotiation round range from renewing the deal in full for 16 more years, ending it altogether or agreeing to undergo a series of annual reviews that could extend it through 2036.

Given the three countries’ supply-chain integration, preserving predictability in trade and investment through a successful review should be a slam-dunk case. But that outcome looks unlikely for three reasons.

First is Trump’s abhorrence of trade deficits, stemming from his belief that they’re caused by U.S. production and jobs moving overseas due to unfair trade practices. While this argument applies to U.S.-China trade to a certain degree, it does not to Mexico. For example, 30% of Mexican-manufactured exports to the U.S. include U.S. content, a share that rises to 40% for vehicles. The effect of these integrated supply chains is to create jobs rather than replace them.

What Trump also overlooks is that Washington’s success in pressuring manufacturers to move production out of China and into low-cost producers — including Mexico — has helped widen the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico, a “problem” of Washington’s making. In fact, a 2026 Federal Reserve study found that 53% of the increase in Mexico’s trade deficit with the U.S. over the past five years resulted from U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports.

Despite such clear findings, the Trump administration remains fixated on reducing the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico, making a successful review even less likely.

The reshoring illusion

Second, Trump is wedded to the idea of “reshoring,” or bringing production back to the U.S. But that position runs against the trade deal’s logic of “nearshoring,” or bringing production back to North America. That was the principle also embedded in NAFTA.

This reshoring obsession drove Washington’s refusal to exempt Mexican steel and aluminum exports from the 50% tariff that the administration imposed in mid-2025 and provide only a partial exemption on a 25% tariff on autos and auto parts. It’s also behind Trump’s demand to add a high minimum U.S. content requirement in autos.

Taken together, the levies and demands by Trump will likely stymie a successful review of the pact that replaced NAFTA.

Coercion through chaos

Finally, Trump and his team believe that advancing Washington’s interests depends on wielding U.S. power to coerce other countries. This includes using tariffs not merely to redirect international trade but to pressure allies and adversaries alike to meet U.S. demands.

Mexico and Canada were the first two targets of this coercive tool in February 2025, when Trump slapped tariffs on all Mexican and Canadian exports to force their leaders to cooperate on migration and drug policies.

Although the goods that fell under the 2020 trade pact were quickly declared exempt and the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled that the legal foundation for those levies was unconstitutional, Trump’s desire to exploit the coercive power of tariffs persists. He has no incentive to ink a trade agreement that limits his power to impose tariffs at will.

He restated this indifference in June 2026, when he asserted that he wasn’t “looking to renew” the pact because he believes the U.S. would do better without it.

“We don’t need anything that Canada has,” he added. “We don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have. They have to treat us better.”

Implications of annual reviews

Mexico needs investors to have the certainty provided by a successful review.

But without knowing the future rules of the road, investors are sitting on the sidelines, which is weakening the country’s growth strategy tied to nearshoring. As a result, Mexico has focused on preserving the 2020 agreement — even if this means a more ad hoc cycle of annual reviews — because it still guarantees a lower tariff rate compared with what other countries face with Trump in the White House.

Indeed, in a private conversation, a Mexican official told me that keeping this lower rate is a core objective in Mexico’s trade talks with the United States.

Although not ideal, this outcome would protect the North American supply chains that drive growth in a country where exports account for 37% of its GDP.

But for Americans, an unsuccessful review followed by ongoing talks without resolution has few upsides. Instead, it’s likely to weaken the U.S. competitive advantage relative to China — all while Trump’s trade policy leaves them grappling with higher prices on products such as cars and trucks and with no uptick in job creation.

Pamela K. Starr, 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.