August 2026
Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, published the research article “When an F-bomb bonks your funny bone: Humor attenuates the taboo Stroop effect” in the journal Cognition and Emotion, co-authored with Elisabeth Lootus ’25 and colleagues at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and the Army University. Part of this research was conducted in 2023 as Lootus’ Summer Undergraduate Research Project (SURP) award project.
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, served on viola da gamba faculty at the Viols West workshop, organized by the Pacifica Chapter of the Viola da Gamba Society of America (VdGSA) and held at UC Santa Barbara from August 9–15, where he taught classes on 16th-century texted polyphony mapped onto their associated readings in the medieval lectionary, as well as settings of Marian texts by Heinrich Isaac, Josquin des Prez, Cristóbal de Morales, Francisco Guerrero and others.
On August 18 at Cordia at Grand Traverse Commons (Traverse City, Michigan), Bandy performed alongside fellow violists da gamba Eva Lymenstull and Christine Potter a program of works by John Jenkins, Johannes Schenck, Marin Marais, Thomas Morley and Matthew Locke. On August 24, a Bay Area concert by Voices of Music from November 2025 featuring Bandy on Renaissance viola da gamba won a San Francisco Classical Voice Audience Choice Award for Favorite Chamber Performance of 2025-2026.
Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, published a review of Zhenzhen Lu’s book The Vernacular World of Pu Songling: Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China in Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia.
Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, reviewed a July performance of the Santa Fe Opera’s production of George Frideric Handel’s opera Rodelinda in the summer 2026 volume of the Newsletter of the American Handel Society. In the same issue, he reported on the Handel Festival and Conference held in Halle, Germany, in June.
Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, performed an excerpt of Michael Mao’s Black Madrigal at the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater in New York City as a special guest with the Fini Dance Company on August 30.
Gabe Chandler, professor of mathematics and statistics, published “Taking the Easy Road: Boosted Filament Estimation for Overland Route Estimation from Post Office Data” with Elliott Abel ’25 and Alan Zhao ’23 in the September edition of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The article was also featured as the cover art. The motivating example uses the data that forms the foundation of Cameron Blevin’s ’08 award winning book Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West.
Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures, published the paper “Empathy Across Time and Space: Negotiating Hybrid Identities through Reading and Writing about Modern Chinese Stories” in For the Next Generation: Mental Health in Asian American/Pacific Islander Youth, edited by Nancy Liu and published by Wiley.
Steve Comba, associate director/registrar of the museum, was one of several interviewees featured in Tyler Green’s The Art Notes Podcast in their recent episode, “Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles, the Steve Roden Estate.” Comba talks about the decision-making process that led to the generous gift of works from the Roden estate to the Benton Museum of Art as well as opportunities to see Roden’s works in the museum.
KJ Fagan, assistant vice president for strategic innovation, participated as an expert panelist in Inside Higher Ed’s August 12 webcast, “Sustained Disruption Ahead: Higher Ed’s New Financial Reality,” where she discussed structural transformation strategies for higher education, including academic portfolio review, inter-institutional collaboration, alternative revenue strategies, and institutional capacity-building.
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics, gave a talk titled “The Prime-number Theorem as a Theme in a Complex-Analysis Course” at the MAA Paper Session “Looking at Complex Analysis and Geometry through the Lenses of Research, History, and Pedagogy” at MathFEST 2026 in Boston on August 6.
Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, presented results from two NSF-supported projects at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of University Research Administrators in New York City on August 4, “SUNDRI: A national resource on research development in the context of research administration,” with Co-PI Kara Luckey, Seattle University, and “Introducing the Grants Development Ecosystem Inventory (GDEI): A self-assessment tool for identifying assets and opportunities to grow the grant-seeking enterprise,” with Co-PI Sarah Robertson, Bryn Mawr College.
Gerstein served as a remote consultant on sponsored research strategies and metrics to two universities in New Jersey, Fairleigh Dickinson and Kean.
Elizabeth Glater, associate professor and co-chair of neuroscience, presented the poster “Modeling a Rare Human Genetic Disease in Caenorhabditis elegans,” at the UC Irvine Center for Neural Circuit Mapping: Neural Circuits in Health and Disease Conference in Irvine, California. Co-authors included Roland Scott ’22, Tymmaa Asaed ’25, Vaughn Brown ’25, Jeremy Callaway ’24, Taryn Kaneko ’24, Kira Augustin ’26 and Enock Kipkogei ’27, as well as collaborator Wardiya Afshar-Saber, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, was awarded an Alternative Fields Medal. Created by Mason Porter and Evelyn Sander in 2022, the Alternative Fields Medals are awarded every four years in four different categories which complement what is recognized by the original Fields Medals prize awarded to two, three or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). The Alternative Fields Medals are designed to recognize the many important types of contributions to mathematics; Goins was recognized for “Excellence in Leadership in the Mathematics Community.” Goins’ AFM Trophy, the Clebsch Diagonal Cubic Surface, coincidentally has been his area of research since graduate school.
Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, was interviewed on the Dominican TV show Portada Digital on August 3 about the definition and importance of social movements from a sociological perspective.
On August 9, Hernández-Medina participated in a gathering of Dominican sociologists while attending the annual conference of the American Sociological Association. As Hernández-Medina explained in her biweekly column, the meeting highlighted the growing diversity and presence of Dominican scholars in U.S. academia.
Alexis Jimenez, visitor services associate at the Benton Museum of Art, is a co-author of the recently accepted perspective “Considering MicroRNAs as Measures of Extrinsic Domains of Risk in the Context of Underlying Genetic Characteristics: Type 2 Diabetes as an Exemplar,” forthcoming in Frontiers in Genetics: Genetics of Common and Rare Diseases. The article examines the role of microRNAs in understanding environmental and genetic contributions to type 2 diabetes risk.
Malkiat Johal, professor of chemistry, published the paper “A Solvent-Assisted Supported Bilayer QCM-D Platform for Resolving Composition- and Structure-Dependent Antimicrobial Peptide-Membrane Interactions” in Langmuir. The paper was co-authored by Sebastian Kinzie ’26, Elysa Tan ’28, Sherly Yang ’28, Rahul R. Niranjan ’26 and Ethan M. Fong ’25.
Gizem Karaali, professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, gave a talk August 6, together with Feryal Alayont of Grand Valley State University, titled “A Framework for AI Literacy to Support Effective Teaching and Learning” during the MAA Contributed Paper Session on Innovation, Evidence, and Applications of AI in Teaching and Learning Mathematics, at MathFEST 2026 (the annual summer meeting of the Mathematical Association of America held in Boston).
Talya Klein, visiting assistant professor of theatre, acted in Buttercup Pudding Pie, a short film written and directed by Keith Powell. The film had its world premiere at the 2026 American Black Film Festival, and its L.A. premiere at the Night Temple Film Festival, where it won the award for best short film.
Klein accepted an offer of representation from literary agent Juliana McBride at Fine Print Literary Management, who will be submitting her debut novel for publication starting in fall 2026.
Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology, published the paper “Evidence for organic and igneous carbon sources of the Mesoproterozoic Adirondack Highlands graphite district, New York” in the Geological Society of America Bulletin. The study unlocked the origins of graphite mined by the Dixon Company whose Ticonderoga pencil helped generations of students to learn.
Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, played a 4-hand piece by David Lang, 2-piano works by John Adams and Leonard Bernstein, and 8-hand arrangements of symphonic works by Tchaikovsky and Liszt at the Garth Newel Music Center 2026 Summer Festival, where she is a regular guest artist.
Sergio Maldonado, visiting assistant professor of history and Chicana/o–Latina/o studies, had his article “Lessons in Ruin: The Veracruz Earthquake of 1973, Floods, and Disaster Politics” accepted for publication in the Journal of Disaster Studies, which recently received an honorable mention for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ 2025 Best New Journal Award. The article examines the overlapping earthquake and flood disasters that struck Mexico in 1973 and explores how these crises exposed broader tensions surrounding disaster response, governance and politics.
Stephen Marks, Elden Smith Professor of Economics, was interviewed on BBC’s World Business Report on August 14 about state enterprise and corruption in Indonesia following the Independence Day speech by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto.
Sara Masland, associate professor and chair of psychological science, published an article in PLOS One with collaborators at Harvard Medical School and Albert Einstein Medical Center. The paper presents findings from a randomized controlled trial of a novel, accessible intervention for borderline personality disorder.
Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, presented “Intersecting Engagements: Gifford Pinchot, Beatrix Farrand, and the American Landscape” to the Beatrix Farrand Society on Mount Desert Island, Maine, on August 3.
Miller published “‘That Splendid Man from California’: Jerry Voorhis, the Mavericks of Texas, and Their Corresponding Politics,” in the new issue of Southern California Quarterly; the new editor of the journal is Jonathan van Harmelen ’17.
Zhiru Ng, professor of religious studies, published Sutra on the Past Vows of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva, an English translation with an extended introduction of Taishō 410, BDK Tripiṭaka Series.
Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, Hiwot Endeshaw ’25 and Jaylyn Gonzalez ’25 published “Multicolor 3D Printed Orbital Models across the Chemistry Curriculum,” a chapter appearing in the American Chemical Society Symposium Series volume 3D Printing for Chemical Education: Tools for Active Learning. In collaboration with researchers at San José State University, O’Leary published “PyQuiverHS: A Web Tool for Calculating Isotope Effects” in a special issue of the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry highlighting work done at primarily undergraduate institutions. The paper describes a free online resource for predicting isotope effects using widely available computational chemistry methods.
Michael O’Malley, professor of art, built a barn/studio in western Massachusetts, which will serve as a site for future studio, exhibition and farm-related activities within the larger work ArtLandProjects.
Mary Paster, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, led a grant-writing workshop for the College of Liberal Arts Proposal Development Program at Oregon State University on August 5.
Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a review of Andrew Hammond’s Modern European Borders in Fiction: The Divided Continent (Bloomsbury, 2025) in the journal The European Legacy.
Cris Robu, visiting assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, published « Entretien avec Diane Obomsawin (Obom) – Un papillon que le vent emporte d’un endroit à un autre, d’un médium à un autre. » In Transcr(é)ation.
Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, has a forthcoming publication, “Dyadic and bidirectional associations between physiological reactivity and maternal overcontrol” in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Smiley is a co-author with Jennifer A. Somers ’12 at Auburn University and Jessica Borelli at UC Irvine.
Amani Starnes, assistant professor of theatre, served as a mentor for artistic interns and as dramaturg for playwright Harrison David Rivers’ August 1 staged reading of his play Except That It Is God, all as part of Ojai Playwrights Conference’s New Works Festival.
Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychology, led a paper titled “Adult attachment predicts parental empathy: Evidence across four samples of parents of children from preschool through middle childhood,” published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The work examines psychological barriers to parental empathy across four studies with more than 300 parents of children spanning ages 3-10 years.
Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, was one of nine recipients of the 2026 Barlow Endowment Commissions from a pool of 201 applicants and will develop a new, 12-minute work for Brightwork Newmusic in the upcoming year.
Margaret Waller, professor emerita of French, published Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion (Columbia University Press).
I Nyoman Wenten, lecturer in music, received the Dharma Kusuma award, presented by the Governor of Bali. It is the Balinese government’s highest honor for artistic and cultural achievement. He was nominated by the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia in Los Angeles, in recognition of his dedication to preserving and performing the Indonesian arts, including his work with Nanik Wenten, lecturer in dance, directing the Pomona College gamelan ensemble.
Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, co-authored “A Descriptive Catalogue of Chinese Ancient Books” in The Claremont Colleges Library with Xiuying Zhou, head of the Asian library, Zhiqiang Zhi and Xizhen Huang. The catalogue documents a total of 1,054 ancient Chinese texts held by The Claremont Colleges Library system, including a 10th-century handwritten copy of the Golden Light Sutra and a copy of the Aṅgulimālīya Sūtra printed in 1090 AD, as well as 11 Chinese books printed in Japan, 12 in Korea and one in Singapore. This project lasted eight years and represents a collective endeavor of scholars from The Claremont Colleges and scholars from Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Virginia, Rice University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Peking University and National Library of China.
Yuqing Zhu, assistant professor of neuroscience, gave a talk titled “The Eye and the Algorithm: How Humans and AI See the World” on August 13 as part of the Lectures on Tap event series to a general audience of Angelenos. She will give further public-facing talks on AI and vision through this series in the fall.