October 2026
Aimee Bahng, associate professor of gender and women’s studies, published “The Toxic Origins of Toxic Masculinities” in the digital magazine edge effects with collaborators Natalia Duong (UC Davis), Rebecca Hogue (University of Toronto) and Julie Sze (UC Davis). Bahng, who serves as managing editor of the connected volume Toxic Masculinities (under contract with University of Washington Press), presented on this work at ASAP/17 in Madison, Wisconsin (October 15-17) and at the ASA Annual Conference in Chicago (October 22-25).
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, played historical double bass with Bach Collegium San Diego (dir. Ruben Valenzuela) in the opening concerts of their 24th season, featuring music from late 18th-c. Salzburg: Michael Haydn’s Missa pro defuncto Archiepiscopo Sigismundo and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore. The performances took place October 17-18 at All Souls Episcopal Church Point Loma (San Diego) and at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center (La Jolla, California). On October 24 in South Pasadena, California, Bandy programmed and directed a workshop of 16th-c. Marian works by Josquin des Prez, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Ludwig Senfl, Robert Parsons and Loyset Compère for SoCal Viols, the Southern California chapter of the Viola da Gamba Society of America.
Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, gave a talk titled “Xu Xiake’s cave aesthetics” at the Fujian Literary Institute, Fuzhou, China, on October 23, and another titled “The reception of Chinese non-fiction in the U.S.” at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, on October 29.
Robin Brooks, visiting fellow in global policy and governance, was interviewed for an article, “Expert Opinion: The Uneven Impact of Sanctions on Russia’s Oil Trade,” in Brief Eastern Europe on October 12.
Dasha A. Chapman, visiting assistant professor of dance, presented on the panel “Pedagogies of Liberation: the radical praxis of the Robinson Archives” during Archiving Resistance: Activating the Black Radical Tradition, the second annual conference celebrating the Cedric & Elizabeth Robinson Archives at UC Santa Barbara, held October 9-10. Chapman’s presentation focused on the creative ways she facilitated student engagement with the archives in her Black studies and dance/performance studies courses at UCSB. Chapman also presented on the panel “Choreo/geographies of Caribbean Dance Studies: New Books in Dialogue” at the Dance Studies Association annual conference at Cal State Long Beach on October 24, where she previewed her forthcoming book, Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise (University of Michigan Press, January 2027), in conversation with three other authors of recent texts in the growing subfield of Caribbean dance studies.
Chapman’s article, “Folklore’s Ghosts: Haitian Folkloric Dance and the Hauntings of an Entangled History,” received Honorable Mention for the Dance Studies Association’s Gertrude Lippincott Award for best English-language dance studies article published in the previous calendar year. She was recognized with this honor at an awards ceremony at the DSA conference October 23.
Karla Cordova, assistant professor of economics, presented “Local Labor Demand and Achievement Gaps: Evidence from the Great Recession,” a joint work with Jessamyn Schaller (Claremont McKenna College), at the American Society of Hispanic Economists (ASHE) Virtual Seminar Series on October 22.
Jordan Daniels, assistant professor of environmental analysis, published a research article, “Walter Benjamin on Natural History and Place,” in the peer-reviewed journal Environment and Planning: C in a special issue on “Departures: Space in the Frankfurt School,” edited by Margath Walker and Key MacFarlane.
Daniels presented a section of this work, “Walter Benjamin and the Mississippi River,” at the 17th Biennial Conference of the Radical Philosophy Association, held at Pomona College from October 15-17. Daniels and Ellie Anderson, associate professor of philosophy, were the local organizers for the three-day conference, which also featured two undergraduate panels. Also in attendance were Aaron Morgan ’25 and Emilio Esquivel-Márquez ’25. Morgan presented “Extractive Metalepsis: Narrating Dispossession in the Planetary Mine,” a selection of his MA thesis (University of Amsterdam), and won the Iris Marion Young Award for Best Graduate Paper. Esquivel-Márquez, a graduate student at Freie Universität Berlin, presented “Cedric Robinson’s ‘Black Radical Tradition’ and the Idiom of Critical Theory.”
Sofia Dartnell, visiting assistant professor of biology, published the paper “Host Detection by Cuckoo Bumblebees: Choice Experiments Reveal Non-Visual Cues Support Host Detection, but Accuracy Is Low” in the journal Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata.
Kevin Dettmar, W. M. Keck Professor of English, was featured on a panel about punk rock at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in Cheltenham, England, on October 15.
Donna M. Di Grazia, David J. Baldwin Professor of Music, published her book chapter, “Franz Liszt as Conductor, as Interpreter: Perspectives on Sources and Scholarship,” in The Composer-Conductor Figure between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, edited by Roberto Illiano and published by Brepols.
David Divita, professor of Romance languages & literatures, gave the annual Distinguished Alum Lecture in the Department of French at UC Berkeley on October 8. His talk was titled “Wrinkles in time: Inquiries into aging, historicity, and generational meaning.”
KJ Fagan, assistant vice president for strategic innovation, was a featured speaker at EdTech Week, held October 14–15 at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. She joined fellow higher education leaders in “Think Tank: Rearchitecting the Integrated Student Experience in the Age of AI,” where she discussed how institutions scale AI solutions and when to pursue partnerships versus in-house development. Fagan also served as a panelist for “The $1M Course – What Should Higher Education Actually Invest In?”, making the case that investment in people, such as advising, mentoring and faculty, is what determines whether technology investments pay off for students.
Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, was elected as a Fellow of the Paleontological Society, in recognition of “far-reaching contributions to the field of paleontology.”
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Mathematics, published a paper titled “Using the Prime Number Theorem in a Complex-Analysis Course: a Practical Implementation” in PRIMUS (Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies).
Garcia gave a keynote address titled “Food for Thought: Eating from the Secret Menu” at the SACNAS (Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science) Annual Conference in Long Beach, California, on October 29.
Roberto A. Garza-López, professor of chemistry, has a student, Ian Tam ’27, who will present research conducted at Emory University with Prof. Fang Liu, titled “Activity-Cliff Explanation-Supervised Graph Neural Networks for Solubility Prediction,” before the Division of Education at the American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Post-baccalaureate researcher Liam Kwak ’26 and Garza-López co-authored a new ChemRxiv preprint, “Mechanistic basis of μ-opioid receptor allosteric modulation from molecular simulations elucidating fundamental target receptor dynamics.” A paper co-authored with Kwak investigating structural dynamics relevant to cervical and throat cancers, “Conformational Dynamics and Disorder of HPV-16 E6,” was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry B, where it earned exceptional peer reviews and was selected for the journal’s front cover.
To support their ongoing computational drug-design projects, Kwak and Garza-López were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS supercomputing grant, securing high-performance computing resources for the year.
Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, cohosted the 29th annual conference of sponsored research staff at liberal arts colleges (CLASP 2026), held October 21-23 on the Pomona, Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna campuses. Sixty conferees from liberal art colleges heard from and talked with representatives of philanthropic foundations, the federal government and CLASP working groups. Gerstein organized and moderated a panel on behavioral and social science funding with the president of the Social Science Research Council in New York, the CEO of Lever for Change in Chicago, and the director of NSF’s Office of Integrative Activities in Washington, D.C.
Peter J. Haproff, associate professor of geology, attended the 38th Himalaya-Karakoram-Tibet (HKT) Workshop in Chengdu, China, where he presented his research titled “Preliminary Field Evidence for Transverse, Strike-Slip Faulting in the Central Himalaya.” The workshop also included a field geology excursion to the Himalaya and southern Tibetan Plateau, including the northern flank of Mt. Everest.
Sherrill Herring, general manager, music facilities & Bridges Hall of Music, was flutist in Daniel Ramon’s Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) voice recital October 30 at Albrecht Auditorium at Claremont Graduate University. The recital featured works by George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach and Claudio Monteverdi and included Mian Tang (harpsichord), Anna Maldonado (cello), Julia Hwuang (soprano), Kimberly Poli (alto) and Elliot Z. Levine (bass-baritone) for collaborative performances.
Louise Ince, assistant professor of neuroscience, was elected vice president of the Society for Light, Rhythms, and Circadian Health. The society brings together researchers and clinicians working on light, circadian rhythms, and their role in health and disease. She will be focusing on the scientific program for their 2027 conference in Aarhus, Denmark, and developing an online curriculum for clinicians interested in circadian health.
Malkiat Johal, professor of chemistry, published the paper “QCM-D Reveals Parallel Adsorption Pathways Governing Amyloid-β Binding to LRP-1” in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. The paper was co-authored by Gabby Lewis ’26, Elysa Tan ’28, Yaejun Myung ’29 and Siliang Fan ’29.
Olivia Anne Lafferty, assistant professor of English, was a panelist for a roundtable on “Improvisations in Filipinx Cultural Studies” on October 22 at the American Studies Association conference in Chicago. The roundtable convened historians, literary critics, performance scholars, and artists to ruminate on the improvisatory acts of critique and expression that surface through Filipinx experiences of queerness, madness, embodiment, movement-building, migration and displacement.
Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, published a peer-reviewed chapter, “Justifiable Toxicity: Perceptions, Shifting Meanings, and Usages of ‘Straight Man Cancer’,” in Toxic Language in East Asia: Linguistic Analysis of Aggression and Conflict, edited by Lucien Brown and Xi Chen and published by Routledge.
Lang co-authored a paper, “Core-Grammatical Innovation in Real Time: Radical and Rapid Constructionalization in Chinese,” published in Cognitive Linguistics.
Joyce Lu, professor of theatre and Asian American studies, led a core training in Playback Theatre and directed a performance-demonstration by LA Playback Theatre Company at the Association of Ethnic Studies Conference at Cal State LA on October 16.
Denise Machin, assistant director of the Smith Campus Center and director of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, presented “Unhousing Authority: Partner Dance and the Gendered Choreographies of Institutional Labor” at the Dance Studies Association annual conference in Long Beach, California, held October 22–25. Her presentation drew on her research and ballroom teaching at Pomona to examine gender, authority and the work of leading and following, arguing that offering students a choice of roles is insufficient without giving them experience practicing both.
Sara Masland, associate professor and chair of psychological science, published a book chapter with co-author Laura Furtado Fernandes ’25. The chapter “Personality Dysfunction, Stigma, and Diverse Identities” appears in Personality Functioning and Personality Pathology: Integrating Theory, Assessment, and Treatment (Guilford Press).
Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published three peer-reviewed manuscripts: “Enhanced Multiphase Circumgalactic Medium and Gas Cycling in Galaxy Mergers” (The Astrophysical Journal); “From protogalaxy through thick and thin: Why did the Milky Way evolve in three kinematic phases?” (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) and “Tracing Radial Structures of Molecular Gas and Gas-phase Metallicity Across the Galaxy Merger Sequence with KILOGAS” (The Astrophysical Journal).
On October 8, Moreno delivered a lecture titled “The devil is in the extremes: from starless HI-rich halos to dark matter deficient galaxies” at a colloquium at Yale University.
Moreno is the recipient of the 2026 Outstanding University/College Mentor Prize, presented on October 31 by the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).
Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o studies, presented on her forthcoming book In the Shadows of Los Angeles: Black and Chicana/o Suburban Activism at the Annual Association for Ethnic Studies Conference. She also co-facilitated a panel based on her co-edited special issue of Ethnic Studies Pedagogies on “Re-Rooting Intersectional Ethnic Studies.”
On October 22, Ochoa co-organized a community forum with ¡Juntos Podemos!/Together We Can! on the upcoming school board elections in the La Puente, California, area.
Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, published “An Investigations-Based Undergraduate Computational Chemistry Course” in a special issue of the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry highlighting work done at primarily undergraduate institutions. The paper provides an overview and open access to materials developed for Chemistry 164: Computational Chemistry, a course that fully integrates Pomona’s high-performance computing cluster, Sagehen, into a series of research-level guided investigations of chemical structure and reactivity. Originating during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chemistry 164 has been supported since that time with technical assistance from Andrew Wilson, director, research computing and digital scholarship, lecturer in computer science, and Viet Pham, system administrator, high performance computing, whose contributions are acknowledged in the publication.
Edward (Eddie) Pickett III, assistant vice president and director of admissions, received the John B. Muir Excellence in Media Award, which honors a National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) member who has consistently made significant media-related contributions to the college admissions counseling field. Pickett’s award recognizes his contributions as the host of the College Admissions Decoded podcast for the past five years. During this time, the podcast reached the top spot for educational podcasts on Apple. He was presented the award at the NACAC National Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, held October 8-10.
Carolyn Ratteray, associate professor of theatre, is performing in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House at Antaeus Theatre this fall.
Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages, professor of German and Russian, published a review of Eliot Borenstein’s book The Politics of Fantasy: Magic, Children’s Literature, and Fandom in Putin’s Russia (U of Wisconsin Press, 2025) in Slavic Review.
Christina Sandman, lecturer in neuroscience, and Benjamin Rosenberg, visiting assistant professor of neuroscience, published the paper “The role of positive linguistic sentiment in extinction learning through exposure therapy” in the journal Behavior Research and Therapy.
Anthony Shay, professor emeritus of dance, served as one of the organizers for the Symposium: Music, Dance and Spirituality in Muslim Contexts in London at the Aga Khan Centre sponsored by MENACASEA (Middle Eastern, North African, Central Asian, and South East Asian Dance and Music) and the Ismaili Islamic Studies Institution in London, October 27-30. He presented a paper, “Staging Spirituality, Innocent Sexualities and Glorious Histories: Choreographic Strategies of State Folk Dance Ensembles to Create Idealized National Identities.”
Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, gave an invited talk titled “Empathy Across Generations,” as part of the T. Denny Sanford Institute of Empathy and Compassion Research Speaker Series at UC San Diego.
Stern co-authored a paper, “Increasing supportive responses to a peer’s distress following a loss: The role of attachment orientations, security priming, and previous experience with loss,” published in the journal Death Studies. The study examines the effects of a brief experimental intervention to increase supportive responses to grief.
Samuel Thomas, assistant professor of computer science, published a research article, “Cordelia: A Huffmanized Merkle Tree for Secure Memory,” at The International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT) where the work was presented in Chicago. The paper is a joint work with Gal Sela (EPFL), Tali Moreshet (Boston University), Maurice Herlihy (Brown University) and R. Iris Bahar (Colorado School of Mines).
Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, served as a peer reviewer for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature published by Oxford University Press. She also served as a peer reviewer for ASIA Network Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts. In addition, Zhang published her review of Princeton historian Janet Chen’s book, The Sounds of Mandarin, in the October issue of the The PRC History Review.
Michael Zlatin, assistant professor of computer science, was selected to receive a Best Paper Award at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. The award recognizes the paper “Approximation Algorithms for Matroid-Intersection Coloring with Applications to Rota’s Basis Conjecture” and is co-authored with Stephen Arndt, Benjamin Moseley, Kirk Pruhs and Chaitanya Swamy.