Archived Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Yuki Arita, associate professor of Japanese, published an article titled “Multiple saying of Japanese negation token iya iya iya as a compliment response” in Journal of Pragmatics. She also presented the paper at the American Association for Applied Linguistics.

Aimee Bahng, associate professor of gender and women’s studies (GWS), was featured in the latest issue of Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience as part of a scholarly roundtable addressing “What’s Racial About Matter?” alongside Mel Y. Chen (University of California, Berkeley), Michelle N. Huang (Northwestern University) and Rachel C. Lee (UCLA). This special issue on Racial Matters of Asian/America was co-edited by two of Bahng’s mentees, Keva X. Bui (Northwestern) and Natalia Duong (UC Davis), both of whom formerly taught at Pomona GWS as visiting instructors.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave the 2026 Jeannette Brown Lectureship at the University of Minnesota. Ball shared his research group’s work and his personal journey. The lectureship honors the legacy of Jeannette Brown, the first Black chemistry graduate student at UMN, highlighting outstanding academic and industrial contributions to the chemical sciences.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, is featured as a viola da gamba soloist in Bear McCreary’s score to all episodes of Season 8 of the STARZ historical drama Outlander, which premiered March 6 on streaming platforms worldwide. On March 27 in Pomona College’s Bridges Hall of Music, Bandy programmed, supplied program notes, made several new editions and arrangements, and played bass viol with his ensemble Artifex Consort in a performance of rarely-heard 17th-century works for viols by Benjamin Hely, Johann Michael Nicolai, Johannes Schenck, Christopher Simpson and others. The performance featured fellow viol players Eva Lymenstull (University of Michigan) and Rebecca Landell (Oberlin Conservatory), baroque harpist Maxine Eilander (USC, The Juilliard School), harpsichordist Ian Pritchard (The Colburn School) and lutenist, baroque guitarist, opera director and 2026 GRAMMY®-winner Stephen Stubbs.

Colin J. Beck, professor of sociology, co-authored an article, “All the Terrorism Fit to Print: A New Dataset on Media Coverage of Militant Groups,” in Critical Studies on Terrorism that publicly releases a dataset of five decades of English-language news coverage on terrorist groups across the world. The dataset is available for download at Harvard Dataverse.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, conducted the Commencement Brass, assembled by trumpeter John Aranda, lecturer in music, and guest organist Juhee Willow Lee in a concert of music for brass and organ in Bridges Hall of Music on March 8. The ensemble included trombonist Phil Keen, lecturer in music, and tuba and euphonium player Stephen Klein, lecturer in music, and the program featured the world premiere of Semiquicentennial Spangles for brass ensemble and organ by composer Tom Flaherty, professor emeritus of music.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, published a book chapter, “Fragmento, pensamiento, silencio: (re)visiones del lenguaje en la poesía española del siglo XXI,” in Nuevas miradas a la poesía española del siglo XXI, edited by Sergio Navarro, Maria Maffei and Marina Bianchi.

Cahill presented a paper, “‘Una sólida trayectoria’: (In)visible Hierarchy in the Circulation of 21st Century Spanish Poetry,” at the 57th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from March 5-8.

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, performed an excerpt of Merce Cunningham’s Interscape (2000) with dance partner Eleanor Hullihan to original music by John King as part of Pasadena Art Night on March 13.

Champi was invited to teach a masterclass in commercial dance at the University of Washington, Seattle, on March 31.

Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of Romances languages and literatures, and Andrew Wilson, director, research computing and digital scholarship and lecturer in computer science and French, co-presented “From Madeleine to Machine Learning: AI Tools in the French Literature Classroom” on March 18, as part of the Honnold Mudd March Library Town Hall Meeting. Along with Mark Allen, professor of art, and Dustin Stokes, she participated in the “Art in the Age of AI” discussion organized by the 5C Artists’ Coalition and the Pomona Student Union on March 25. During the Hahn Grant Showcase in the Frank Blue Room on March 30, she talked about French 184, her spring 2026 class on Proust and AI supported by a Hahn Grant and co-taught with Wilson.

Roberto A. Garza-López, professor of chemistry, and his undergraduate research group presented several accepted works at the ACS Conference in Atlanta. These contributions featured an oral presentation by Liam Kwak ’26 on “The mechanistic insights of µ-opioid receptor allosteric modulation” and three poster presentations: “An in silico characterization of T. thermophilus Polysulfide reductase” by Ian Tam ’27 and Andrew Chung ’28; “An investigation of inhibitors for resistant P. Falciparum” by Noah Baoerjin ’29; and “A study on novel treatments for Duchenne muscular dystrophy” by Benjamin Roh ’29 and Andrew Zheng ’29.

Two of Garza’s students secured prestigious summer research placements for 2026. Tam was accepted into the NSF-funded Catalyzing Careers in Chemistry REU at Emory University, where he will work under the mentorship of Fang Liu. Chung was accepted into the Gateways to the Laboratory Program at Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan Kettering, where he will work under the mentorship of Gretchen Diehl ’94. This premier track for aspiring physician-scientists provides a stipend, clinical shadowing opportunities and the opportunity to present at the Leadership Alliance National Symposium (LANS).

Nicole Desjardins Gowdy, senior director of international and domestic programs, presented “The Case for Doubling Down on Language Learning in Study Abroad” with Mark S. Lenhart (president, CET Academic Programs), Hang Du (Middlebury College) and Allegra O’Donoghue (director, Europe and Middle East Programs, CET Academic Programs) on March 12 at the Forum on Education Abroad Annual Conference in Nashville.

Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, presented the talk “Engaging Undergraduates in Seabird Conservation in a Study Away Course” at the 2026 Pacific Seabird Group Annual Meeting. This talk described the faculty-led study away course that she and Marty Meyer, associate professor of biology, taught in spring 2025, Conservation of Biodiversity in a Changing World. In addition, Karnovsky and Brooke Bailey ’27 were co-authors on a poster presented by Shiori Terretta PZ ’28 and Liliana Costello-Wiginton PZ ’27, “Plastic Ingestion in translocated Black Footed Albatross chicks.”

Benjamin Keim, associate professor of classics, delivered a paper titled “The Political Economies of Honor in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus” on March 27 at the International Xenophon Society’s conference on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus at the Universidad San Sebastián in Santiago, Chile.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, released three episodes of Prof Talk with Nicholas Ball, professor of chemistry. Episodes covered mentorship, conferences and events at Pomona College.

Le’s co-authored articles, “Understanding Global Responses to Terrorism: What Drives Opinions on Terror” and “Demographic Decline as Idiom of Distress: Rethinking Gender (In)Equality in Japan,” were published by Social Science Quarterly and Japan Forum.

Le gave a talk titled “Democratic Challenges at the Local Level” at the Wright Symposium at Texas Christian University. He also gave a lecture titled “Japan’s Politics and Military Ecosystem” for Pacific Air Forces GOPAC program to help onboard incoming military officers to the Asia theatre. Additionally, he served as a moderator on a panel about coral conservation following Chad Cannon’s Music for the Ocean concert at Lyman Hall.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed as a member of the Redfish Piano Trio in four concerts along the southern Oregon coast, bringing classical chamber music to underserved communities. With violinist Fritz Gearhart and cellist Andrew Smith, Lee presented trios by Mélanie Bonis, Frank Martin and Robert Schumann. As part of the Redfish Music Festival winter season, they appeared in Port Orford, North Bend, Brookings and Bandon.

Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, presented “A bias against the present: Recurring sociotechnical oversights in HCI’s cyclical visions of the future” at the Undone Computer Science conference in Luxembourg. Li also gave a talk about their research on artistic support tools at Inria (The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology) in Paris.

Scott Lisbin, Return-to-Pomona Scholar, had one of his books, Principles of Healthcare Financial Management, recognized by The Medical Practice as one of the “14 best medical leadership books in 2026,” ranking third on the list.

Sergio Maldonado, visiting assistant professor of history and Chicana/o Latina/o studies, presented his research paper, “Lessons in Ruin: The Veracruz Earthquake of 1973, Floods, and Disaster Politics,” at the Spring History Colloquia. Maldonado also presented his paper at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies in Las Vegas on March 26.

Maga Miranda, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, gave a talk at Georgia Tech in the School of Literature, Media and Communication titled “Scrolling on #ChambaTok: Latinx Workers and the Politics of Visibility.” She delivered the keynote address at Circuit Breakers, the annual symposium for the Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University. Her talk was titled “Who Gets to be Disruptive? Who Gets to be Modern? On Innovation and the Struggle Over Technological Belonging.” They also delivered a talk “On Scrolling, Memory Work, and Archiving Latinx Digital Cultural Heritage” at Cal State Fullerton for the Coming of Age Soul Research Retreat, a project of the Mellon-funded Latinx Lab for Storytelling and Social Justice.

Miranda is serving on the review committee of the Association of Internet Researchers 2026 annual meeting.

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, participated in the panel “Sonic Identities: Contemporary French Queer & Black Soundtracks and Soundscapes” at the 43rd Annual 20th and 21st Century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium, held at University of Notre-Dame. He presented his paper titled “Résonances queer et musulmanes : la bande-son de La petite dernière comme espace de l’entre-deux” March 27.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, visiting assistant professor of gender & women’s studies, was named as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ+ Poetry for their second full-length poetry collection, Wayward Creatures (2025).

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, chaired the subcommittee of the Governance Reform Taskforce that developed and advanced recommendations establishing Los Angeles County’s first independent Ethics Commission, including a 2026 interim body and proposed charter language for the ballot. Sadhwani also gave a talk at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative along with leading scholars on the impact of redistricting on the 2026 midterm elections.

Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, was awarded the Eileen Southern Fellowship by the Society for American Music, for archival research on sound recordings of African American and maritime music at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

Anthony Shay, professor emeritus of dance, edited and contributed to a new collected volume, Middle Eastern Dance: Histories, Theories, Performances (Palgrave Macmillan). The volume was a result of the first MENACA (Middle East, North African, Central Asia) conference held at Pomona College in 2023.

Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, co-authored a paper, “Adolescent empathy predicts reduced neural responses to social rejection in adulthood,” published in Development and Psychopathology.

Stern was interviewed by The Telegraph to comment on a recent study linking relationship stress to faster biological aging.

David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science, professor of physics, co-authored the research poster “Probing Photodegradated Surfaces of OPV Active Layers using Photothermal AFM-IR Mearsurements” at the MATSUS Conference held in Barcelona, Spain, on March 26. Tanenbaum also served as a judge for the poster session at the conference.

Andrew Wilson, director of research computing, co-authored a paper titled “A New Method for Studying Ancient Cities: Mapping and Estimating Labor and Production with OIKoS” in Urban Science. The paper presents OIKoS, a parametric method for analyzing construction labor at city scale, applied to the ancient Greek city of Olynthos.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, delivered the keynote talk titled “PedAIgogy: Progress and Preauction” for the 2026 CLTAC conference hosted by Stanford University on March 8. He also gave a presentation titled “Model Training for Pragmatics Assessment: The Case of Chinese Formulaic Expressions” for a GenAI colloquium at the 2026 American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference on March 21.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, gave two lectures about her new scholarly book, Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China. She was invited by Duke University’s Asian/Pacific Studies Institute to give a talk, and she also engaged with Duke’s undergraduate and graduate students in special workshops on creativity, identity and minority discourses. Additionally, she gave a book talk at the invitation of the MIT Club of Southern California for the MIT SoCal Author Series.

A roundtable devoted to Zhang’s interdisciplinary book appeared in the annual Association for Asian Studies Conference held in Vancouver, Canada, which is the largest professional organization of Asian studies in the world.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, presented the talk “Musical Passion Theology in Dieterich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri (1680)” on the public Colloquium series at the Newberry Library, held February 18 in Chicago. In addition to chairing a panel on musical craft and expression, Bandy presented a paper titled “‘What are these wounds?’ Fauxbourdon as ‘Sweet’ Mutilation in Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri (1680)” at the annual meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, held February 26–28 at Trinity Christian College (Palos Heights, Illinois).

On February 6, 7 and 8 in San Francisco, Berkeley and Palo Alto (California), Bandy played Baroque double bass with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (dir. Music Director Emeritus Nicholas McGegan) in three performances of the program Baroque Garlands, featuring soprano Nola Richardson, tenor Aaron Sheehan and the Philharmonia Chorale (dir. Valérie Sainte-Agathe) in George Frideric Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s La Guirlande.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, joined his Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble colleagues violinist Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music; flutist Sherrill Herring, general manager, music facilities & Bridges Hall of Music; bassoonist Carolyn Beck, lecturer in music; and cellist Roger Lebow in a Friday Noon Concert of music by Boismortier, Handel and Telemann on February 27 in Lyman Hall.

Alexa Block, associate director of news and strategic content, presented at the AVID Conference 2026, a college-readiness program for high-school students hosted at Pomona College. Through her session titled “Your Digital Footprint, Your Future,” participants learned how to recognize the long-term impact of their social media choices, build a positive and authentic digital identity and navigate common pitfalls.

Amelia Bransky, visiting assistant professor of theatre, served as lead production designer for the premiere event of DTF St. Louis, an HBO Original limited series starring Jason Bateman, David Harbour and Linda Cardellini. Working with her frequent collaborators at Freehold Group, a Los Angeles-based production company, Bransky led a cross-disciplinary team of designers, producers and fabricators through all phases of the event—from concept development and design of the red-carpet experience and post-screening party through final installation and execution.

Tom Flaherty, emeritus professor of music, composed “Choreomania” and premiered it with Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, at the annual Ussachevsky Festival on February 6. Flaherty also composed “Semiquincentennial Spangles” for a Music for Brass and Organ concert.

Roberto A. Garza-López, professor of chemistry, and his students had their research featured in Natural Sciences, highlighting a collaboration with Harry Gray (Caltech), with co-authors Liam Kwak ’26, Andrew Chung ’28 and Gabriel Ancajas ’28 and a winning cover design by Ian Tam ’27. This was followed by a feature in the Biophysical Journal, representing a significant collaboration with Malkiat S. Johal, professor of chemistry, and his research group. The publication also features a cover designed by Kwak. The group secured four accepted abstracts for the ACS Conference in Atlanta. These include an oral presentation by Kwak on “The mechanistic insights of µ- opioid receptor allosteric modulation” and three poster presentations: “An in-silico characterization of T. thermophilus Polysulfide reductase” by Tam and Chung; “An investigation of inhibitors for resistant P. Falciparum” by Noah Baoerjin ’29, Tam and Chung; and “A study on novel treatments for Duchenne muscular dystrophy” by Benjamin Roh ’29, Andrew Zheng ’29, Jonathan Cong ’28, Tam and Chung. Notably, the final two poster studies were initiated by Garza-López’s Pomona College for Youth Success (PAYS) students.

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, presented a research talk, “Do C. elegans choose their gut-microbiome?” as part of the University of Southern California Neuroscience Seminar Series. In the seminar, she presented research conducted by Pomona undergraduates in her lab.

Kara Godwin, assistant vice president and chief global officer, played a leading role at the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA) annual conference in Washington, D.C. She co-chaired the strategic services task force and served on the public policy committee. Godwin delivered three presentations: “Building Institutional Agility Through Comprehensive Assessment and Action Frameworks” with Andrew Gordon, CEO of DA Global; “After the Election: Navigating the New U.S. Policy Landscape for Global Higher Education” with vice presidents from ACE and APLU; and “Real Talk about the State of International Education” with Karin Fischer, senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

George L. Gorse, Viola Horton Professor of Art History, presented an opening paper on “An ‘Augustan’ Republic: Genoa and the ‘Golden Age’,” in a session on Genoa during the 16th and 17th centuries at the Renaissance Society of America conference in San Francisco on February 20.

Malkiat S. Johal, professor of chemistry, published the paper “An LSPR-Based Kinetic Framework for Polyelectrolyte Molecular Weight Determination: A Proof-of-Concept Study” in Analytical Chemistry. The paper was co-authored by Ryan Mooney ’27 and Charles Brainin ’27. Johal and Roberto A. Garza-López, professor of chemistry, published the paper “Multivalent binding mechanism of LRP1-fibrinogen interactions revealed by QCM-D and molecular dynamics” in Biophysical Journal. The paper was co-authored by Liam Kwak ’26, Kevin Ye ’27, Ananya Vinay ’27, Gabby Lewis ’26, Alyssa Yao ’26 and Daniel Gao ’25.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, was invited to perform in a concert at Cal State University Northridge, honoring the Cuban-American composer Aurelio de la Vega. She played two pieces from his early career, one with violinist Lorenz Gamma and the other with cellist Kyle Champion.

Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, was invited to Japan to speak at the first Animare Seminar on Creativity Support Tools and to interview artists and directors in the animé industry. They also presented a talk titled “Power, Norms, and Radical Humility: Towards Artistic Support Tools” at the Adobe Human-Computer Interaction seminar.

Christy McCarthy, assistant director, messaging and storytelling, and Katie Kramer, proposal writer, led sessions at the AVID Conference 2026, a college-readiness program for middle- and high-school students. Kramer facilitated a session aimed at helping students understand and build empathy. McCarthy led a session titled “Write Your Story,” which focused on helping students reflect on and better understand their personal narratives for college essays, scholarships and other applications.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, a distinguished honor society established in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and recognize distinctive literary achievement.

Benjamin Rosenberg, visiting assistant professor of neuroscience, published a paper with colleagues from UCLA titled “Does mental health coaching improve efficacy of transcranial magnetic stimulation for major depression? A pilot randomized controlled trial and benchmarking study” in Journal of Affective Disorders. This work provides preliminary evidence that scalable mental health coaching programs may be feasibly integrated into psychiatric clinics and potentially enhance depression treatment outcomes.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, professor and chair of English, appeared in the new PBS documentary “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History.” Sherrard-Johnson discussed Black women’s domestic labor in the Bronx slave market in episode 2.

Patricia A. Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, collaborated on a research paper published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. This study of a diverse sample of preschoolers showed that mothers’ capitalization on their children’s positive experience in a series of games was significantly related to their children’s adaptive physiological regulation. The effect of capitalizing on positive experience was independent of mothers’ supportive responses to children’s negative emotion, suggesting that these two aspects of parenting behavior play different roles in the development of children’s self-regulation.

Samuel Thomas, assistant professor of computer science, and his students presented work at the Southern California Workshop on Systems and Programming Languages at USC. Titles included “CXip List: A CXL-Aware Skip List,” which was co-authored with Steven Kim ’26 (research talk), “The Microservice-ization of gem5” with Connor Wang ’27 (poster) and “Scr Mmy: A Co-Designed Secure and Compressed Memory” with Henry Cannon ’28 (poster).

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, served as a reviewer for AI-related proposals for the UK Metascience Unit and the Education Research Funding Programme at the Ministry of Education, Singapore.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, gave three public lectures on her new monograph, Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China. She gave one lecture at the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies as part of its noon lecture series. She also held a graduate student workshop with the University of Michigan’s Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. She was also invited to give a public lecture on her book at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Finally, Zhang gave a Blue Room Talk at Frank Dining Hall at Pomona College.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, published the research article “Incongruency Sequence Effects Reduce Taboo Interference in Picture Naming” in the journal Cognition and Emotion, co-authored with collaborator Katherine White (Rhodes College).

Abrams presented a talk titled “Healthy Aging vs. Dementia: How Brain Changes Influence Cognition” at Pilgrim Place in Claremont, California.

Anne Bages, professor emerita of physical education, had the new Coach Anne Bages Scoreboard installed at the Pauley Tennis Complex as a tribute to her leadership, her trailblazing work for women in sports, and the vibrant tennis community she helped create.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave a research talk titled “New Tools in Sulfur Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” at the Pacifichem conference in Honolulu.

Ball completed his four-year term as a member of the Beckman Scholars Executive Committee at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. This includes serving as the committee chair in 2025.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, published the chapter “Scordatura as Dispositio: Notation, Rhetorical Figure, and Visual Effect in Heinrich Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (c.1680)” in the volume titled Jesuit Rhetoric across Space and Time: Local and Global Perspectives (Brill Jesuit Studies), edited by Sophie Conte, Cinthia Gannett, John Brereton, Manfred Kraus, Elizabethada Wright and Bartosz Awianowicz.

On January 29, Bandy presented a talk on “Archival Research and Materiality in the Digital Age” in conversation with historians Brian Brege (Syracuse University) and Alcira Dueñas (The Ohio State University) as a keynote speaker at the 2026 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Premodern Studies at the Newberry Library (Chicago).

On January 7, a videorecorded performance of Bandy playing Baroque double bass and featuring GRAMMY®-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan and Bach Collegium San Diego (dir. Ruben Valenzuela) was released as part of Phan’s international media project Bach 52. The full episode, “Theology, Music, and Modern Myths: Who Was J. S. Bach Really?,” contextualizes the performance through a conversation between Phan and musicologist Michael Marissen, author of Bach against Modernity (2023).

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, co-authored a manuscript in Conservation Biology which shows how natural language processing and machine learning can lead to large-scale analyses of how people relate to nature.

Pierre Englebert, H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations and professor of politics, wrote a piano trio entitled “Liberalism’s Last Dance.” Lecturers in music, Gayle Blankenburg (piano) and Cynthia Fogg (violin), as well as Professor Emeritus of Music Tom Flaherty (cello), performed and recorded the trio at Little Bridges Auditorium. Englebert also wrote the score for “The Work is Not Done,” an audio verbatim theater produced as a Spotify podcast by the Nairobi-based Busara Center and built entirely from the exact words of people living through the fallout of the USAID closure on January 24, 2025. The full music composition is titled Requiem for USAID.

Peter Flueckiger, professor of Japanese, published Dazai Shundai: Writings on Political Economy with Cambridge University Press.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor, published the following papers: “A noncommutative generalization of Hunter’s positivity theorem” (with Jurij Volčič) in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society; “Is AX = Y possible with a positive definite A?” (with Roger A. Horn) in the American Mathematical Monthly; “Numerical semigroups from rational matrices III: semigroups of matricial dimension two and a counterexample to the lonely element conjecture” (with Arsh Chhabra) in Communications in Algebra; and “Symmetric tensor powers of graphs” (with Weymar Astaiza, Alexander J. Barrios, Henry Chimal-Dzul, Jazzier Lopez de la Luz, Victor H. Moll, Yunied Puig, and Diego Villamizar) in Scientia Series A. Mathematical Sciences.

Roberto A. Garza-López, professor of chemistry, and his students published the following papers and gave the following presentations. Publications included “Structure-Based Virtual Screening for Small-Molecule Inhibitors of HPV-16 E6” in ChemRxiv with Ian Tam ’27, Andrew Chung ’27 and Liam Kwak ’26 and “Conformational Dynamics and Disorder of HPV-16 E6” in ChemRxiv with Kwak. At the American Chemical Society Conference in San José, California, Garza-López’s students delivered the following presentations: “In-silico Identification of Small-Molecule Inhibitors for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease” (poster by Chung); “In-silico Investigations of Flavonoid Inhibitors of Human Tyrosinase” (poster by Tam) and “Conformational Dynamics and Disorder of HPV-16 E6” (oral presentation by Kwak).

Kara Godwin, assistant vice president and chief global officer, was invited to join the advisory board for the Future Universities Alliance, a network that connects established, emerging and start-up universities worldwide to accelerate innovative initiatives, exchange insight, improve learning quality, and expand access to strengthen the global education ecosystem.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington D.C. from January 4-7. Goins ran an all-day special session for the Simons-Laufer Mathematical Research Institute (SLMath) titled “ADJOINT Mathematics Working Groups” on January 4; gave a keynote address for the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) Special Session on “Supporting Undergraduate Research” on January 5; and ran an all-day special session for the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) titled “50 Years of Math at Howard - Commemorating the First Doctoral Program at an HBCU” on January 7. He also organized his annual informal Black mathematicians dinner where more than 50 African American faculty took over the Yard House in D.C.

Goins recently joined the fundraising advisory board for Game of Genius, a soon-to-be released documentary on the life of statistician David Harold Blackwell, a prodigy from segregated Illinois who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at 22. In 1954, the same year as Brown v. Board of Education, he became the first Black professor in the University of California system. Goins is featured in the teaser trailer for the documentary.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed with violinist Fritz Gearhart at four southern Oregon coast venues (Port Orford, North Bend, Brookings and Bandon) in early January. They presented works of Sergei Prokofiev, Ludwig van Beethoven, Manuel de Falla and Quincy Porter. These concerts were part of the winter season of the Redfish Music Festival.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, is co-author of The Yale School of the Environment: The First 125 Years. His essay, “I Sing the River Electric,” has been posted on LA River X…Remixed and in the Western Water Archives at the Claremont Colleges Library, January 2026. Three students from his Fall 2025 seminar, EA 171: Water in the West, have also published essays on the LA River X site, including Fiona Herbold ’26, Shelby Stanton ’26 and Sascha Weiss ’26 (with more to come).

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Constraining Nuclear Molecular Gas Content with High-resolution CO Imaging of GOALS Galaxies” in the Astrophysical Journal.

Moreno appeared on NPR twice, on an episode titled “A failed galaxy could solve the dark matter mystery” and one on “A galaxy cluster hotter than the surface of the sun is shocking researchers.”

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented the paper titled “Mobilité géographique et éthique minoritaire dans La peau hors du placard, de Jean-Baptiste Phou” at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2026 Convention held in Toronto from January 8-11.

Mary Paster, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, published a discussion on Marie-Louise Popp and Jochen Trommer’s “Phonologically conditioned affix order is stratal” in Radical: A Journal of Phonology.

Adam Pearson, professor of psychological science, co-authored the article “A megastudy of behavioral interventions to catalyze public, political, and financial climate advocacy” in PNAS Nexus with a global team of 34 behavioral scientists, exploring factors that spur bipartisan collective action on climate change in the United States, involving over 31,000 U.S. residents.

John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and professor of politics, had his forthcoming book, American Incest: How White Supremacy Became White Lawlessness, go live on the publisher’s website.

Adolfo J. Rumbos, Joseph N. Fiske Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, published an article co-authored with Leandro Recova (Cal Poly Pomona) in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. The title of the article is “Existence and multiplicity of solutions for a cooperative elliptic system using Morse theory.” Rumbos presented this paper at an American Mathematical Society Special Session on Advances in Nonlinear Partial Differential in the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington D.C. on January 4.

Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, co-authored a paper, “Attachment security to mother is associated with lower trait expressive suppression among girls in middle childhood,” published in Attachment & Human Development.

Stern wrote about her recent book in an article for The Conversation on how psychological science can be applied to navigate difficult relationships.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, professor of English, had her 2024 book Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants Jelly Rot selected for the Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Best Book in Queer Studies, awarded by the GLQ caucus of the Modern Languages Association and the American Studies Association.

Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, moderated a reading and discussion with acclaimed German writer Navid Kermani at the Goethe Institute Los Angeles on January 14.

Von Schwerin-High published her review of Todd C. Kontje’s 2025 book Global Germany Circa 1800: A Revisionist Literary History in The European Legacy.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, published her scholarly monograph, Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China, with the University of Michigan Press on January 12. The book has been widely featured on major scholarly platforms in China Studies and Asian Studies in both the United States and the Chinese-speaking world, including Choice Forthcoming Titles and China Books Review, maintained by Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations. A special “Author-Meets-Critics” roundtable titled “New Methods, New Materials: An Interdisciplinary Conversation on Ethnic Imagination and National Belonging in Contemporary China” will appear at the 2026 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference.

Zhang authored a blog that the University of Michigan Press published on its home page titled “Foreign No More: Writing about China's Ethnic Minorities as an Epistemological Experiment,” reflecting on the nature of scholarly production about China across humanistic disciplines, as well as the cultural and social conditions of writing about ethnic minorities in our global era.

Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, accepted a position as co-section editor of the Cognitive Science of Language section for the journal Language and Linguistics Compass.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, played baroque double bass with Baroque Collegium LA in a period-instrument performance of J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Part I), directed by Mike Raleigh and held December 19 at St. Augustine-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church (Santa Monica, California). On December 22, Bandy played baroque double bass in a period-instrument performance of Handel’s Messiah featuring the Long Beach Camerata Singers and Tesserae Baroque Ensemble, held at Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Church (Long Beach, California) and directed by James K. Bass. On December 24, Bandy played G violone basso continuo in two period-instrument liturgical performances of Marc-Antoine Charpetier’s Messe de Minuit pour Noël (1694), directed by Bruce Neswick at St. James’ in-the-City Episcopal Church (Los Angeles).

Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, gave a talk titled “Xu Xiake (1587-1641) and the Cultural Discourse on Rock Shelters and Caves in Late Imperial China” at Hong Kong Baptist University on December 5 and another titled “Wenxue fanyi yu wenhua yanjiu de hucu gongsheng 文学翻译与文化研究的互促共生” (On the Complementarity of Literary Translation and Cultural Studies) at Beijing Normal–Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai on December 8.

Barr published an article, “Fanyi Xu Xiake youji de tiaozhan yu quwei 翻译〈徐霞客游记〉的挑战与趣味 (The Challenges and Pleasures of Translating Xu Xiake’s Travel Diaries),” in Zhonghua yixue 中华译学 (Chinese Translation Studies).

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, taught a masterclass in commercial dance and performed in choreography by local artists as part of the DOMO Danza Festival in Morelos, Mexico, from December 15-21.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics, gave a talk titled “Positivity aspects of complete homogeneous symmetric polynomials” at The Claremont Colleges Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatorics (ANTC) Seminar on December 2.

Wanda Gibson, assistant dean and deputy director of the Career Development Office, and Kathy Guillén Quispe, assistant director of International Student & Scholar Services, co-presented at the 2025 MPACE (Mountain Pacific Association of Colleges & Employers) Annual Conference in Las Vegas on December 11. Their session, “Raise the Stakes: Igniting Impact through Collaborative International Student Career Development,” showcased Pomona College’s successful cross-campus partnership model for supporting international students’ career development.

George L. Gorse, Viola Horton Professor of Art History, published a review of The Art of the Genoese Colonies of the Black Sea Basin (1261-1475) by Rafal Quirini-Poplawski, Brill, Leiden, 2023 in Renaissance Quarterly.

Jill Grigsby, professor emerita of sociology, presented a lecture on “Population Fears in the 21st Century,” addressing whether population decline is inevitable and how to consider fertility decline, at Mount San Antonio Gardens in Claremont.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the seventh volume of the book series Miradas Desencadenantes: Construyendo conocimientos para la igualdad (Triggering Perspectives: Building Knowledge for Equality) on December 5 at the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC). The book series is published by INTEC’s Gender Studies Center, which was founded in 1987, making it the first of its kind in the Caribbean. Hernández-Medina is also the author of one of the chapters in the volume “El Derecho a una Vida Completa: la lucha del movimiento feminista dominicano (The Right to a Complete Life: The Fight of the Dominican Feminist Movement).”

On December 19, Hernández-Medina was interviewed on the radio show Libertarias on República Radio along with Argentina Gutiérrez to examine the human rights situation in the Dominican Republic in 2025.

Gizem Karaali, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, together with Ahmed Al Fares CGU ’22, published a paper titled “On a ‘grouplike’ family of quasigroups” in Examples and Counterexamples. Karaali also published an article, “Humanistic Mathematics Humanizing Mathematics: Why Now?” in Committee for Women in Mathematics (CWM) Newsletter.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, had his book 日本老いと成熟の平和 positively reviewed by the Chugoku Shimbun on December 19 and selected as one of the top three books to leave an impression in 2025 by the Seikyo Shimbun on December 2.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed for the Helena Modjeska Festival at the Writers Guild, Los Angeles, in early December. She performed Chopin’s “Piano Trio in G Minor” with violinist Tomás Golka and cellist Clement Chow.

Sergio Maldonado, visiting assistant professor of history and Chicana/o Latina/o studies, had his paper, “Lessons in Ruin: The Veracruz Earthquake of 1973, Floods, and Disaster Politics,” accepted for the 73rd annual conference of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies. Maldonado will present his paper in March.

Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, was selected to serve on the board of directors for the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ISSPD). She will represent the North American Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (NASSPD) as the vice president for North America.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published two articles in The Astrophysical Journal. The first article was titled “The shape of FIREbox galaxies and a potential tension with low-mass disks.” The second article, titled “Igniting galaxy formation in the post-reionization universe,” begins with the following text: “It has been 47 years since….”

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, published the article “Advenir queer dans Viendra le temps du feu de Wendy Delorme (Queer futurity in Wendy Delorme’s Viendra le temps du feu)” in the special issue “Penser queer en français: littérature, politique, épistémologie” of the journal Fabula-LhT. He also published the chapter “Podcasting as a queer archival method for an intersectional French culture” in the edited volume Queer Realms of Memory - Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative (Liverpool University Press).

Richard G. Parnell, assistant director, stewardship, successfully defended his dissertation, “The Psychoactive Imagination in Early Modern Literature,” to earn a doctorate in English from Georgia State University. His research project examined how representations of psychoactive substances in 17th-century poetry and epistolary prose both revealed and complicated emerging conceptions of embodiment, cognition and identity in early modern England.

Pamela Prickett, associate professor of sociology, appeared on the podcast “Morbidly Curious Book Club.” Her co-authored book, The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels, was selected as the club’s December pick.

Prickett was selected as a “Best of 2025” for her segment in Pomona College’s week of The Academic Minute. The segment, “America’s Rising Number of Unclaimed Deaths,” re-aired December 29 on NPR stations across the country. Additionally, Prickett was quoted in an LA Public Press article about the annual burial ceremony for LA’s unclaimed dead.

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, professor of English and interim director of College writing, published her article, “Supposing…,” in the Winter 2026 issue of Critical Inquiry. This article offers a panoptic preview of her current book manuscript, Seeing Things Otherwise in Shakespeare and Picasso.

Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, was featured in the episode “Music & Labor” of the early music webseries SalonEra, which premiered December 15.

Amani Starnes, assistant professor of theatre, presented her paper, “The Maya Rudolphication of Kamala Harris: A Performative Cruzo,” at the Performance Studies International Conference in collaboration with the Graduate Arts Program at Universidade Federal do Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil, on December 12.

Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, co-organized and co-chaired several German studies panels and the German studies caucus at the 122nd annual PAMLA conference in San Francisco. She also presented her paper, “Memory, Oblivion, and Palimpsestic Writing in Thomas Mann’s Stories of Jaakob,” on the panel “Thomas Mann at 150.”

Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, was invited by the Vietnam National Academy of Music in Hanoi to give composition masterclasses and present a talk about her music.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, delivered a keynote talk titled “From Pedagogy to PedAIgogy” at the 15th National Convention and Chinese Education Conference in Boston on December 13.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, held a workshop at Pomona College for her national grant, “Resituating Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms,” which was the winner of the inaugural Luce/ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Collaborative Grant in China Studies. Zhang invited key collaborators, including internationally renowned scholars of Chinese ethnic minority literature and renowned historians and artists, to participate. The workshop was widely covered by Chinese and Chinese American media outlets in the Greater LA Area.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, co-authored three poster presentations at the 66th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, held November 20-23 in Denver. These posters, “When an F-bomb hits your funny bone: Humor buffers the taboo Stroop effect,” “A slut-hut is funnier than a slut-tray: Predicting humorous novel taboo compound words” and “The sound of inspiration: The effect of laughter perception on creativity,” were collaborations with colleagues at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Rhodes College and the University of Florida, respectively.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, presented a paper titled “Didactics Beyond Depiction: Ratio, Sensus, and Jesuit Dialectic in Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas (ca. 1680)” at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) on November 8, held in Minneapolis as a joint meeting with the Society for Music Theory. Bandy also organized the panel housing his paper, titled “Sound, Image, and Gesture in Composition and Performance (ca. 1425–1725),” which included colleagues from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.

Bandy played on a newly commissioned Renaissance-model tenor viol in three performances of the program The Voice of the Viol: Petrucci—the first music printer, the 2025–26 season opener of the early music ensemble Voices of Music in Palo Alto, San Francisco and Berkeley (California) on November 7, 8 and 9. The program featured soprano Danielle Reutter-Harrah in works by Josquin des Prez, Heinrich Isaac, Marchetto Cara and others, printed by Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice in the first years of the 16th century on the first moveable-type music printing technology. Bandy played Baroque double bass in Con Gioia Early Music Ensemble’s program “The Feast of St. Cecilia,” directed by Preethi de Silva and presented at Shatto Chapel in Los Angeles on November 22. A preview performance at Pomona College on November 21 was also held on the Friday Noon Concert Series, co-sponsored by Pomona College and Scripps College.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, presented the paper “The Use of Cannons Material in Handel's Op.2 Trio Sonatas” on November 22 at the Handel Institute Conference in London. While there, he also attended a meeting of the editorial board of the Hallische-Haendel-Ausgabe.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper, “Unresolved Feeling(s) in Alfredo Gómez Gil’s Norte, Este, Oeste y Sur (1968),” at the fall meeting of the Southern California Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), held at the College of the Canyons on November 1.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, and Rohan Gowda Thanh Quang ’23 published a novel analysis of over $128 billion in climate tech finance in Environmental Research: Energy, finding that these investments are systematically overlooking the most high-impact solutions, especially nature-based climate solutions.

Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music, published “Intervallic intonation: Applying the Implication-Realization model of musical melody to speech intonation and prosody” in PLOS One. The article is a breakthrough in understanding relationships between speech and music, showing how the Implication-Realization Model, originally proposed as a theory of musical melody, can be used to meaningfully analyze speech intonation in language.

Cramer performed as a baroque violinist with the Con Gioia Early Music Ensemble in Los Angeles on November 22, along with Malachai Bandy, assistant professor of music, and nine other musicians. The concert celebrated the Feast of Saint Cecilia with music by Bach and Handel. Highlights of the program were presented a day earlier at Lyman Hall as a Pomona-Scripps Friday Noon Concert.

As co-chair of the Society for Music Theory’s Work and Family Interest Group, Cramer co-organized a panel on “Music in Children’s Multimedia” at the Joint Annual Conference of SMT and the American Musicological Society in Minneapolis, presented November 8.

David Divita, professor of Romance language & literatures, gave an invited lecture titled “Histoires non-racontées: Ce que j’ai appris de vous” at the Centro de España de la Región de París in Saint-Denis, France.

Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of the Romance Languages & Literatures Department, was a participant in one of the Family Weekend Hen Talks organized by Ken Wolf, professor of classics and John Sutton Miner Professor of History, on November 7. She talked about hands in art history, dreams and AI.

On November 21, Duzer participated at a morning session of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) in San Francisco and presented on her future spring 2026 course on Proust and AI. That same day, she was invited by Pomona Bay alumni to talk at the Quantcast offices (previous Twitter location) on “Reimagining French Literature & Art Through AI.”

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor, published two articles in November. The first, “Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis–GC–MS and supervised machine learning,” was published with colleagues at Carnegie Science in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The second, “The sedimentary geochemistry and paleoenvironments project phase 2 data release: An open data resource for the study of Earth’s environmental history,” was published in Chemical Geology with colleagues from around the world.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, presented three multi-authored papers from two NSF-supported projects with colleagues from Bryn Mawr and Seattle University on November 4 in Costa Mesa, California, at the annual meeting of the Western & Rocky Mountain Regions of the National Council of Research Development Professionals: “Introducing the Grants Development Ecosystem Inventory (GDEI),” “A National Picture of Research Development in the Context of Research Administration (RD/RA) at Colleges and Universities” and “Identifying Strengths and Barriers in Implementing Research Development at PUIs and ERIs.” Gerstein also presented study results with colleagues from Colgate, Smith and Trinity (Connecticut) at the annual meeting of Colleges of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs on November 12: “CLASP 2025 Grants Review: First Look.”

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, visited Carnegie Mellon University from November 5-7. He gave a talk for the Department of Mathematics Colloquium on November 6 titled “Clocks, Parking Garages, and the Solvability of the Quintic: A Friendly Introduction to Monodromy” and a seminar talk for the Pittsburgh Number Theory Day on November 7 titled “Quasi-Critical Points of Toroidal Belyi Maps.”

Goins attended the 2025 Summer Math Camps Consortium Conference in Atlanta from November 15-16. This annual meeting is an opportunity for the leaders of intensive summer math programs to come together to further their collective work. Goins closed out the event with a keynote titled “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Blackboards: An Introspective Look at the Pomona Research in Mathematics Experience.” Goins also attended the 2025 NSBP-NSHP Conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center from November 19-23. This was the annual joint meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists. Goins served as a panelist November 21 for a panel titled “Transitions in Academia.” He, along with Dwight Whittaker, professor of physics and astronomy, met up with Abby Alem ’27, Brian Calderon ’26, David Cortés ’28, Gada Tefer ’26 and Thummim Mekuria ’21.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the paper “The Right to a Complete Life: Lessons from the Dominican Feminist Movement” at the 45th annual conference of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on November 13. Her presentation was part of the panel “Latin American Feminisms Centering Trans-local Dialogue and Praxis from the Global South” along with Solange Simões (Brazil) and Barbara Sutton (Argentina). Hernández-Medina presented the book Embodiment and Representations of Beauty on November 16, also at NWSA, along with co-editor Sharina Maíllo-Pozo and authors Jaleesa Reed and Spencer Ciaralli. She also presented Maíllo-Pozo’s book Bridging Sonic Borders: Popular Music in Contemporary Dominican/Dominicanyork Literature that afternoon at the famous independent bookstore Casa Norberto in Plaza Las Américas.

Gizem Karaali, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, together with colleagues Selçuk Alkan and Mehtap Taştepe, published a book titled Mathematics Beyond the Classroom: A Guide for Expansive Learning in Out-of-School Environments.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published an article with Annalise Chang ’26 and Sebastian Maslow titled “A Historic Win, Familiar Politics: The Paradox of Takaichi’s LDP Leadership” for the Journal of Critical Asian Studies commentary board November 6.

Le (with Kunihiro Nishimura and Masahiko Haraguchi) was awarded the Social Impact Stipend ($10,000) by the United States-Japan Foundation for his research projected titled “Smart Cities, Policies, and Communities.”

Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, received a $20,000 gift from Adobe supporting their research on developing new software tools for artists.

Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, attended the biannual conference of the International Society for the Study of Personality (ISSPD) in Boston. In the first of three talks, she presented “Patient Feedback to Clinicians in Good Psychiatric Management: Feasibility, Acceptability, and Initial Insights,” a collaborative project with Ueli Kramer (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) and Lois Choi-Kain (McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School). She later delivered a speed data talk, “Limited Training, Lasting Impact: A Critical Examination of Personality Disorder Curriculum and Clinical Exposure in U.S. Doctoral Psychology Programs.” Co-authors include Kellyann Navarre (Monroe Community College), Laura Furtado Fernandes ’25 (Columbia University) and Isabella Lindsay Castelli SC ’26. Finally, she chaired a symposium on “Negative Attitudes about Personality Pathology.”

Two former members of Masland’s research lab, Kate Jones ’24 and Fernandes, as well as one current member, Castelli, also attended and gave presentations. Jones chaired a symposium, “BPD in Their Own Words,” in which she presented her senior thesis project, “‘I Feel Like So Much More of Myself”: Relations Among Appearance Modification, Emptiness, and Identity Disturbance in Borderline Personality Disorder.” The resulting manuscript is currently under review. She also delivered a speed data talk, “Agent of Change: A Proposal for Measuring Sense of Agency Over the Course of BPD Treatment;” participated in a second symposium, “Latent Class Analysis of Impulsivity Reveals Three Distinct Subgroups in Adults with Borderline Personality Disorder and Trauma Psychopathology” and presented a poster, “Mindfulness-Based Neurofeedback to Augment DBT Psychotherapy for Adults with Borderline Personality Disorder (MIND-BPD).” Fernandes delivered a speed data talk based on work that she began during a SURP project and which is currently under review, “Good Enough assessment: A Comparison of Brief Screener and Detailed Interview Assessments of Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms in a Clinical Research Setting.” She also presented a poster based on her senior thesis, “Social Implications of Emotion Dynamics in Borderline Personality Disorder.” Castelli gave a speed data talk based on work she is currently leading in Masland’s lab, “Examining the Impact of Myth and Fact Education on Mental Illness Stigma: Potential Backfire Effects?”

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, chaired the panel “Francophone Postcolonial Remakes” at the 122nd Annual PAMLA Conference in San Francisco on November 20.

Adam Pearson, professor of psychological science, co-authored the article “Public Communication about Science in 68 Countries: Global Evidence on How People Encounter and Engage with Information about Science” in Science Communication with a global team of researchers as part of a consortium studying trust in science and scientists.

Pearson was a delegate to the United Nations Adaptation Futures Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, and was a co-presenter of a talk titled “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: Lay beliefs about life hardship impact judgments of climate vulnerability and resilience” with Xuwen Hua ’23 at the Behavior, Energy, & Climate Change (BECC) Conference in Sacramento, California.

Kathy Guillén Quispe, assistant director of international student & scholar services, held various roles at the 2025 NAFSA Region XII Conference in Pasadena, California. She co-led the “F-1 Student Advising: Intermediate” workshop with colleagues from Chaffey College and Arizona State University. She also served on the conference planning committee leading the special events and local arrangements team. She also co-presented a session, “From Numbers to Narratives: The Dual Role of Data in ISSS Work,” with a colleague from the international student office at the University of Nevada, Reno and with the director of institutional partnerships at Terra Dotta. Additionally, as this year’s NAFSA Region XII Southern District chair, she gave a district update meeting and hosted a networking event. Finally, she received the Service in International Education Award that recognizes an individual’s significant overall contribution to Region XII, NAFSA and international education.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, visiting assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, published an article in Women's Studies Quarterly titled “The Body in Paincraft: Queer, Crip Notes on Hurting.”

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a book chapter titled “The Makings of a Smellscape: Russia’s Case” in Work and Smell: Literature in Comparison, edited by Frank Krause.

Alex Rodriguez, professor of physical education, and the Sagehens coaching staff were honored as the coaching staff of the year after guiding Pomona-Pitzer to an unbeaten 12–0 conference record and earning a league high-tying four First Team All-SCIAC selections. Rodriguez has now been named the SCIAC Men’s Water Polo Coaching Staff of the Year in each of the last two men’s seasons.

Anthony Shay, professor emeritus of dance, hosted the 3rd Middle Eastern, North African, Central Asian, and Southeast Asian (MENACASEA) music and dance conference November 14-16. Pomona College hosted the conference by Zoom in which 142 attendees and 24 presenters from New Zealand and Singapore to California represented a wide range of scholarly interests in dance and music of the vast region.

Lindsay Stadler, interim registrar, presented a session titled “Managing Unapologetically” at the 100th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, held November 10 in Spokane, Washington. She was also selected to serve as the next Audit Committee Vice Chair, with her term beginning November 2026.

Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, had her string quartet Unveiling performed by members of the new music collective Musiqa at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston on November 22.

Kyle Wilson, associate professor of economics, published an article in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics titled “Does Public Competition Crowd Out Private Investment? Evidence from Municipal Provision of Internet Access.”

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, gave a presentation at the 2025 annual conference of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) held in New Orleans. The title of her presentation was “Paradise Recrafted: Intangible Cultural Heritage Law and Ethnic Subjectivity in Contemporary China.” Zhang addressed the relationship between anthropology and literature as she discussed how China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Law, influenced by the UNESCO notions of cultural preservation, made its way into the fictional and non-fictional literary works written by the ethnic minority authors of southwest China.

Yuqing Zhu, assistant professor of neuroscience, had her paper “Task success in trained spiking neural network models coincides with emergence of cross-stimulus-modulated inhibition” accepted for publication in the journal Biological Cybernetics. The study shows how neural network models can solve a simple task using a motif of two neuron types found in biology.

Zhu’s research student, Dashiell Fairborn ’28, presented a poster at the DeepMath Conference titled “Deep Networks Need Sleep—Just Like You.” The work demonstrates how adding sleep-like oscillatory activity can improve learning in neural network models.

Zhu contributed her piece “Celadon, Porcelain” as the cover art for Replica, a poetry collection by Lisa Low published by the University of Wisconsin Press and had additional artwork included in a group exhibition at the Elephant Room Gallery in Chicago.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, served on the faculty at ViolSphere 2, the 26th annual workshop sponsored by the Viola da Gamba Society of Southern Arizona and held October 16–20 at the Biosphere 2 conference center in Oracle, Arizona. Across the workshop, Bandy co-programmed and performed in a faculty recital and taught 11 classes on texted polyphony by Palestrina, Morales, Rupsch, Walther, Lassus and more, in collaboration with faculty from across the U.S., including current and founding members of Parthenia Viol Consort, the Newberry Consort, Sonnambula, Washington Bach Consort, Bach Collegium San Diego, Quicksilver and the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra.

Bandy facilitated and provided coaching for a day-long workshop with viola da gamba master pedagogue Mary Springfels for SoCal Viols, the Southern California chapter of the Viola da Gamba Society of America in Irvine, California, on October 25.

Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, gave a talk on the symbiosis between literary translation and cultural studies at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies on October 16, at Zhejiang University on October 21, at Shanghai Normal University on October 22 and at Sichuan International Studies University on October 28.

Barr’s translations of contemporary Chinese literature are the subject of a new book by Li Furong 刘芙蓉 titled Hanxuejia Bai Yaren Zhongguo dangdai wenxue yingyi yanjiu 汉学家白亚仁中国当代文学英译研究, published by Wuhan University Press.

Gayle Blankenburg, lecturer in music, recorded four new works by composer Richard Cameron-Wolfe at Motor Music in Mechelen, Belgium, on October 12 and 13. In addition, she joined with other musicians from New Zealand, Russia, Ukraine and Japan in presenting chamber music concerts at the Love2Arts Gallery in Antwerp and at a concert sponsored by the Cultural Attaché to the European Union in Brussels.

Mietek Boduszynski, associate professor of politics and international relations, co-authored a new policy report titled “From Protege to Partner: The Way Forward for U.S.-Kosovo Relations” and appeared, alongside his co-author Victor Peskin, former White House Balkans advisor Robin Brooks and former U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo Jeff Hovenier in a virtual launch event for the report organized by the New Lines Institute Western Balkans Center. The report has been widely read in U.S. policy circles and in the Kosovo government. Boduszynski and his student research assistant Holden Tsai ’27 also published a commentary in Pacific Council Magazine titled “Foreign Policy Values in a New Age of Strategic Competition.” Boduszynski also published an op-ed in the USC Center on Public Diplomacy Blog titled “When the Message Undermines the Messenger.”

Boduszynski and Monica Chellam ’04 received a $180,000 grant from The States Forum to implement a study tour in spring 2026 for a select group of opinion makers. The study tour will focus on how Poles built a broad coalition to successfully challenge populist authoritarianism. Boduszynski also conducted fieldwork research in Georgia, North Macedonia and Kosovo, and separately with his SURP summer research assistant Talin Schlachet ’28 in the Philippines and Thailand. Boduszynski and Schlachet met with academics, analysts and activists to explore how great power competition with China is shaping support for human rights in these countries.

Boduszynski joined the OSCE international observer mission to the 2025 Moldovan parliamentary elections as part of the U.S. delegation.

Boduszynski spoke at a USC Center for International Studies event titled “Russia, Ukraine and Central Europe: War, Arms and Politics.”

Shannon Burns, assistant professor of psychological science and neuroscience, co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled “Neural predictors of hidden, persistent psychological states at work.” This work used machine learning to decode subjective feelings of well-being from neural activation.

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, was invited to perform at CO- Show 11 in Los Angeles on October 24 with Waeli Wang, visiting assistant professor of dance at Scripps College. The L.A. Dance Chronicle reviewed the evening, writing, “This pair was absolutely poised…their synchronized breath most magnetic, so parallel and connected. The dancing was stunning….”

Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music, presented a paper titled “Woody’s ‘Land,’ Pete’s ‘Land’: Replaced Refrains and Rhetorical Reframings in an Emblematic American Song” to the Pacific Southwest chapter of the American Musicological Society on October 11.

Kevin Dettmar, W. M. Keck Professor of English and director of the Humanities Studio, was awarded the 2025-26 Faculty Alumni Service Award at the New Faculty Dinner on October 11.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics, published a paper titled “Hunter’s positivity theorem and random vector norms” (with Ángel Chávez and Ludovick Bouthat) in Operator Theory: Advances and Applications.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, presented a collaborative paper with Kara Luckey (Seattle University), “Measuring the scope, scale & quality of grant support ecosystems,” at the Pacific Regional meeting of the National Organization of Research Development Professionals at San Jose State University on October 21. Gerstein, along with Sara Olson, associate professor of biology, and Andrew Schroeder (Claremont McKenna College), participated in a panel at Scripps College on October 24 on “Defunding Discovery: A Conversation on STEM Research Funding Cuts,” organized by Critical Mass, a five-college student organization.

Melissa Givens, associate professor of music, along with Shannon Hesse, piano, presented the recital You Can Tell the World: Spirituals in Concert on the Grace Church Concert Series at Grace Episcopal Church in the Plains (Virginia) on October 12. The recital featured new and traditional settings of African-American spirituals by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Moses Hogan, Shawn Kirchner and others.

Givens coordinated a residency for noted American composer Lori Laitman, who visited Pomona from October 22-25. Laitman spoke to the combined Composition Since 1900 and Music in Dialog classes, met with students over lunch, coached voice students for a recital of her songs October 24 and assisted in the preparation of a concert of her works by the entire voice faculty October 25, joined by some of Pomona’s instrumental colleagues. The residency was in celebration of Laitman’s 70th birthday and included the world premiere of her song “Gift” (2021).

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, helped to organize the “Cox Centennial Celebration of 100 Years of Black PhD Mathematicians” held at Howard University. Elbert Cox became the first Black person in the world to earn a doctorate degree in mathematics when he graduated from Cornell University on September 26, 1925. Goins also gave a talk titled “The Mathematical Contributions of Dr. Elbert Frank Cox,” where Goins presented the details of the results from Cox’s doctoral thesis.

Goins was voted in as president-elect of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). The MAA describes itself as “one of the largest global communities of mathematicians, educators, students, and mathematics enthusiasts, united by a collective love for mathematics.” Goins will serve as president-elect starting in July 2026; then as president for two years starting in July 2027; and as past president starting in July 2029. He has been serving as the MAA Southern California/Nevada section representative since 2019. Goins will be the first African American to serve as MAA president since its founding in 1915.

George L. Gorse, Viola Horton Professor of Art History, delivered a lecture titled “Genoa and the Renaissance: the City as Theatre” at Pepperdine University on October 24.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, was one of the presenters at the inaugural panel of the 5th Dominican Sociological Congress at public university UASD in Santo Domingo on October 20. The panel was titled “Democracy, Citizenship, and Critical Thinking: Challenges and Proposals from Sociology and the Social Sciences” and also included former presidential candidate and journalist Virginia Antares and sociology professor César Pérez.

Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, published “Expanding Norms, Negotiating Bodies: How Artists with Disabilities Perceive and Use Creative Tools” at ACM ASSETS ’25. First author Miriam Brody ’26 presented a conference talk and poster about the work.

William Henry McGuire, academic coordinator, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, completed a master of science in organizational leadership with a concentration in organizational development from the University of La Verne. His research and coursework focused on positive and transformational leadership as catalysts for employee well-being, ethical culture and organizational innovation.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, spoke to students in the political science department at Williams College on “Interpretive Research Methods Political Science” on October 10. On October 20, she delivered an Athenaeum lecture at Claremont McKenna College titled “The Campus and the Capital: Higher Education and Federal Power.”

Magally Miranda, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Chicana/o Latina/o studies, presented a paper at the Urban History Association conference titled “Data Borders at Home: Surveillant Intimacies and Tracking Latina Domestic Labor in Los Angeles.” They were also featured in a roundtable discussion, “Contesting the Territory: Radical Urban Histories of Land and Housing Struggles,” alongside members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.

Miranda was interviewed by the Argentina-based cooperative technology podcast Codigo Libre about her research on the portable benefits app for domestic workers Alia.

For the following year, Miranda will serve on the organizing committee for the annual meeting of the international Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), taking place in Mexico City in October 2026.

Nikki Moore, visiting assistant professor of geology, presented an abstract at the annual Geological Society of America conference titled “New Method for Analyzing Rb-Sr Isotopes in Whole-rock Glasses Using Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry with Chemical Separation Techniques.” This presentation detailed the analytical procedure that she, Kyle McCarty, Oxtoby Lab technician, and Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology, have developed to analyze rubidium and strontium isotopes on the LA-ICP-MS instrument in the Pomona College David W. and Claire B. Oxtoby Environmental Isotope Lab.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published a paper titled “Disks no more: the morphology of low-mass simulated galaxies in FIREbox” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, served on the organizing committee and was a session chair for a memorial symposium in honor of Robert H. Grubbs at the American Chemical Society Western Regional Meeting in San Jose, California, on October 25-28. Grubbs P’93, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and recipient of the 2005 Chemistry Nobel Prize, passed away in 2021.

Alexis Reyes, director of sustainability and energy management, presented at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference in a session titled “The Complex Road to Purchasing High Quality Carbon Offsets.” She shared Pomona College’s process for evaluating and purchasing high-quality carbon offsets while engaging students and faculty in the effort. She was joined by representatives from Calyx Global, Second Nature and the University at Buffalo.

Benjamin Rosenberg, visiting assistant professor of neuroscience, was nominated to receive the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research. Rosenberg also co-authored a paper with colleagues from UCLA titled “A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Two Processes of Exposure Therapy: Inhibitory Retrieval and Habituation” in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of Romance languages and literatures, gave the presentation “Memories of a Hidden child in France during WWII and Courage Women in the Resistance” at Central Park in Rancho Cucamonga, California, on October 20.

Miguel Tinker Salas, professor emeritus of history and Chicana/o Latina/o studies, was interviewed by CBS News on U.S. strikes against alleged drug boats near South America and ABC News ( “3-minute passport to Venezuela”).

Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, had several of her works premiered and performed across the country: a premiere at the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago and performances of four different pieces at James-Madison University, Concordia College and Eastman School of Music, where she was also invited to give a colloquium lecture to the entire Eastman freshmen class.

Ken Wolf, professor of classics and John Sutton Miner Professor of History, is the author of “Eulogius and Islam,” the lead article in the centennial edition of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. The article unpacks the writings of a ninth-century priest living in Muslim Córdoba to appreciate the astounding depth of his knowledge about Islam. It is the culmination of a series of recent projects related to the Andalusi Christian experience, including two book-length translations of the relevant Latin texts, both published by Liverpool University Press (2019 and 2023). The article is the main product if an eight-week stint as the Lester K. Little Resident at the American Academy in Rome in early 2023.

Kevin Wynter, associate professor of media studies, contributed a video interview to the series Office Hours published on Pomona’s YouTube channel.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, did an online workshop on how to use Luduan.ai for a language acquisition research team at the University of Pennsylvania on October 23. On October 24, he did another online workshop on how to use Luduan.ai for teachers from the Appoquinimink School District in Delaware. On October 25, Xiao gave an invited online talk titled “AI 2030: Five-Year Vision for AI-Enhanced Language Education” for the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, began a nine-month residency as a long-term fellow at the Newberry Library (Chicago), having been awarded The Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee Fellowship to support work on his book project handling Dieterich Buxtehude’s 1680 Passion cycle Membra Jesu nostri (BuxWV 75).

On September 14 in South Pasadena, California, Bandy curated, organized and directed a program of 16th- and 17th-c viol consort songs and fantasias by William Byrd, Richard Farrant, Thomas Morley, Thomas Campion, John Jenkins, John Dowland and historical consort-mates Alfonso Ferrabosco II, John Coprario, Thomas Lupo and Orlando Gibbons for Tesserae Baroque. The performance featured soprano Andrea Zomorodian and included Artifex Consort members Ryan Baird (lecturer in music; double bass), Eric Tinkerhess and Leif Woodward, alongside whom Bandy played treble and tenor viols and offered spoken remarks about the program.

Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, published in Asia Major an article titled “A haohan in Yan’an: Xiao Jun Embattled, 1940-1942.”

Amelia Bransky, visiting assistant professor of theatre, was the lead production designer for the world premiere of Producer Jordan Peele’s film Him on September 17 at the historic Chinese Theatre. She led a team of designers, producers, actors and fabricators from conceptualizing the look and design of the premiere’s red-carpet experience through finalizing the scenic installation and event execution. She worked with her frequent collaborators at Freehold Group, a Los Angeles-based production company.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper, “Coming to (Terms with) America: Distant Close Encounters in Paloma Díaz-Mas’s Una ciudad llamada Eugenio (1992),” at the 46th Annual Conference of the Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies, held at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela from September 3-5.

Karla Cordova, visiting assistant professor of economics, presented a paper titled “Immigration Enforcement and Child Maltreatment” at the Hispanic Research Center Scholars Retreat 2025 hosted by The Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University.

Cordova participated in a panel, “Latina Economic Impact,” at the Inland Empire Latina Economic and Policy Summit 2025 alongside Fernando Lozano, Morris B. and Gladys S. Pendleton Professor of Economics.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor and chair of the Department of Geology, published two articles in September. With colleagues from Caltech and Colorado College, he authored the article “Low sinuosity meandering rivers before vascular plants” in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, and with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, he published the article “The oldest diverse jellyfish fauna reinterpreted as sessile polypoid dinomischids (stem-group Ctenophora)” in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics, was appointed to the editorial board of the American Mathematical Monthly. The journal, which was founded in 1894, is the flagship journal of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). This is Garcia’s second five-year term on the editorial board, having previously served on the editorial board from 2017-21.

Gizem Karaali, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published a poem, “The Ruby Cube,” in Math Horizons.

Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, co-authored the book chapter “Sea Ice: A seabird world of its own” along with David Ainley and George Divoky. This book chapter is in Sea Ice: Its Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology and Societal Importance, Fourth Edition, edited by David N. Thomas and published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, was invited to join the editorial board of Chinese Language and Discourse (CLD) for a three-year term beginning January 1, 2026. CLD is an international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing scholarship on Chinese and related languages, with a focus on current topics in Chinese discourse studies.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, was interviewed by Aera, a Japanese weekly magazine, on his book にほん老いと成熟の平和 on September 29. The interview was also carried by Yahoo News and MSN. His book was also positively reviewed by Record China on September 16.

Le presented a paper at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference in Vancouver, Canada, on September 12. The paper was titled “A Typology: Addressing Environmental and Demographic Crises through Smart Cities.”

Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, published “Computational Scaffolding of Composition, Value, and Color for Disciplined Drawing” with Chau Vu ’26, Asya Lyubavina ’26 and Catherine Liu CMC ’26 at ACM UIST 2025. The paper was awarded the Best Paper Award (top 0.6%).

Alexandra Lippman, visiting assistant professor of anthropology, was interviewed by Vanessa Romo for NPR’s All Things Considered on “LA’s booming Gothicumbia scene.” Lippman also performed at the KCRW Summer Block Party at The Music Center’s Gloria Molina Grand Park on September 6.

Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, presented her work, “Limited Training, Lasting Impact: Personality Disorder Curriculum and Clinical Exposure in U.S. Doctoral Programs,” at the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Psychopathology (SRP) on September 27. Isabella Lindsay Castelli SC ’26 presented a poster, “Examining the Impact of Myth and Fact Education on Stigma: Potential Backfire Effects,” based on her work in Masland’s lab. Anjali Karp ’25 presented her senior thesis work, “ADHD and Rejection Sensitivity: The Role of Psychophysiological Reactivity.”

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, was elected president/chair of the American political thought section of the American Political Science Association (ASPA) at its annual meeting. Also at the APSA meeting, McWilliams appeared on four panels: 1) as chair of an author-meets-critics panel on Phillip Yaure’s Seizing Citizenship: Frederick Douglass’s Abolitionist Republicanism, 2) as chair of an author-meets-critics panel on Nicholas Buccola’s One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal, 3) as a critic on an author-meets-critics panel on Keidrick Roy’s American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism, and 4) as chair of a panel on “Leadership, Ancient and Modern.”

On September 16, McWilliams was interviewed by the actress Janine Turner (Friday Night Lights, Northern Exposure) for the Constitutional Chats podcast sponsored by Constituting America. The episode was titled “What Holds Our Republic Together? A Wrap-Up on Checks & Balances.”

On September 17, McWilliams delivered the Constitution Day Lecture at San Diego State University. The title of her lecture was “The Constitution, The Campus, and the Capital.”

Wallace “Marty” Meyer, associate professor of biology and director of the Robert J. Bernard Field Station, published two papers: 1) an invited review paper in Pacific Science titled “Biology and impacts of Pacific Island invasive species. no17. Lissachatina fulica, the giant African snail (Mollusca: Achatinidae; Achatininae),” which synthesizes key information needed to make informed decisions regarding this widespread and impactful species, and 2) a research article in BioInvasions Records titled “Sorting out the stupefying systematics of Succineidae introduced to Hawaii” that resolves taxonomic ambiguities and provides information on the distribution of non-native succineid snails in Hawaii.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, co-led a discussion on “galaxy formation and cosmic rays” at the 2025 Galaxy Formation in Southern California (GALFRESCA) conference, held in San Diego.

Moreno published three research articles: “How invisible stellar halos bias our understanding of ultra-faint galaxies” in the Astrophysical Journal, “Great Balls of FIRE IV. The contribution of massive star clusters to the astrophysical population of merging binary black holes” in Astronomy & Astrophysics, and “Star Formation Rates, Metallicities, and Stellar Masses on kpc-scales in TNG50” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, participated in the conference Contemporary French Civilization, held in North Carolina on September 26-27. He presented his chapter, “Podcasting as a queer archival method for an intersectional French culture,” at the roundtable dedicated to the volume Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative, forthcoming in December 2025 by Liverpool University Press.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art and art history, currently has a very large photo work done in 1981 in the History of Photography exhibition at the Houston Museum of Fine Art.

Alexis Reyes, director of sustainability and energy management, presented as a panelist on a webinar titled “From Hurdles to Highlights: Navigating Carbon Offsets at Small Colleges.” She shared how Pomona College is integrating carbon offsets into the 2030 carbon neutrality goal and was joined by colleagues from Austin College and Oberlin College.

Benjamin Rosenberg, visiting assistant professor of neuroscience, published a paper with colleagues from UCLA titled “Previous Institutionalization is Associated with Elevated Functional Connectivity between the Nucleus Accumbens and Amygdala during Aversive Learning” in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. This work identified a candidate mechanism by which early life adversity changes human brain functioning, as well as evidence that these differences in neurodevelopment may recover throughout adolescence. Rosenberg also co-authored a paper with colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania titled “Brain Changes Associated with Depression Treatment: A Meta-Analysis” in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, E. Wilson Lyon Professor of Humanities and chair of English, published the article “Time Travelers and Truth Tellers: Revisiting Cheryl Wall and Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Harlem Renaissance” in American Literary History.

Chef Martin Draluck of Black Pot Supper Club designed a series of dinners based on poems from Sherrard-Johnson’s Grimoire (Autumn House Press, 2020). A feature describing their collaboration appears in Edible LA.

David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, was interviewed live on Danish National Radio (DR) for the program P4 Afternoon South and Esbjerg on September 9 to discuss “Societal Acceptance of Solar Cells, and the Prospects for New Solar Cell Technologies to Improve the Aesthetics of Solar Energy Harvesting at Scale.”

Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, had three performances of her music this past month: Somewhere over the Clouds by Joel Ferst and Jeanne Hourez at San Angelo University; 2+ by Soundmap Ensemble at Southwestern University; and Four in the Morning by Emeritus Professor of Music Thomas Flaherty, Cindy Fogg and Rachel Vettel Huang at Pomona’s Little Bridges.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, did a visual workshop on AI-supported language teaching for the Chinese teaching team at University of Redlands on September 19.

Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, co-organized and chaired the 2025 Psychonomic Society Collaborative Symposium “We speak many languages! Bridging barriers to bring diversity of language experience into cognitive psychology” in conjunction with the 24th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP) on September 4. The goal of this symposium was to bring together bilingualism researchers from around the globe to present recent research on the importance of diversity (both linguistically and methodologically) in forming coherent theory in the field of bilingual cognition. As part of this symposium, Zirnstein also co-presented a talk with Judith F. Kroll (UC Irvine) titled “What variation in language experience tells us about cognition and the brain.”

Tricia Avant, academic coordinator and gallery manager of art, along with other members of the LA Art Girls, gathered to celebrate fellow LA Art Girl Nancy Buchanan with a collaborative cake cutting and serving performance titled Peace is not a Piece of Cake at The Brick in Los Angeles on August 23. It was part of a day-long program titled “These Creatures: A Celebration of Nancy Buchanan” honoring Buchanan’s pioneering contributions to performance art in Los Angeles. The event was organized by The Brick and the Performance Art Museum.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, published a paper titled “Sulfur fluoride exchange with carbon pronucleophiles” with Joseph Novicki ’26, Matt Teeter ’25 and colleagues at Pfizer. This work demonstrated for the first time that carbon pronucleophiles can broadly be applied in SuFEx. The chemistry was exemplified making aryl alkyl sulfones—an important class of compounds used in drug discovery. This work was funded by the lab’s new NIH grant.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, was featured as a viola da gamba soloist in Bear McCreary’s score to all episodes of Season 1 of the STARZ historical drama Outlander: Blood of My Blood, which premiered August 8 on streaming platforms worldwide.

From August 3–9, Bandy 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 Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he taught classes handling articulation in texted polyphony, fauxbourdon in 15th-c. works by Guillaume Dufay, 16th-c. music theory and musica ficta practice.

On August 15, Bandy programmed, contracted, directed Artifex Consort, and played tenor viol in a staged public reading of Like as the Hart, a new play by Oliver Mayer, directed by Alberto Barboza, co-sponsored by the USC Collaborations in History, Art, Religion, and Music (CHARM) working group and presented at the A-Frame Theater at the Wende Museum’s Glorya Kaufman Community Center in Culver City, California. The historical and musical framing of the play, which explores the young J. S. Bach’s legendary 1705 trip—over 250 miles each way on foot—to meet composer-organist Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637–1707), is largely based on Bandy’s written research handling Buxtehude’s life and esoteric compositional practices.

Colin J. Beck, professor of sociology, was an invited panelist for “When Revolutions Turn Authoritarian: Pathways from Democratic Ideals to Autocratic Rule,” hosted by the Democratic Erosion Consortium and the Chicago Center on Democracy on August 22.

Eleanor Birrell, associate professor of computer science, published a paper titled “User Understandings of Technical Terms in App Privacy Labels” in the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security. This work was coauthored with students Ishika Keswani ’26, Kerick Walker ’25, Adrian Clement ’26, Eusila Kitur ’25, Nannapas Wonghirundacha ’25, Ryan Aubrey ’25 and Vivien Song ’25.

Shannon Burns, assistant professor of psychological science and neuroscience, published a paper along with Laura Furtado Fernandes ’25, Ezra Ford ’25 and Jacob Zimmerman ’23 titled “Loneliness is associated with unstable and distorted emotion transition predictions” in the journal Communications Psychology. This work reveals differences in social cognitive processes in people who are chronically lonely.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, led two sessions at the 67th annual meeting of the National Council of University Research Administrators in Washington, DC (August 11-12): one to present early results and encourage participation in SUNDRI, a national survey of research development activities at colleges and universities, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant; and a second to discuss strategic planning of research infrastructure at primarily undergraduate institutions, a recurrent theme in activities funded by two other NSF grants that focus on diversifying and broadening the base of participation in academic research.

Melissa Givens, associate professor of music, was a featured soloist in Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepherd with Pasadena Pro Musica under the baton of Scott Lehmkuhl, lecturer in voice. The concert took place at First United Methodist Church Pasadena. She also participated in a pre-show interview with KUSC’s Jennifer Miller about her nine-year history with the work, from its conception to the present.

Givens wrote the program notes for the latest CD release by Conspirare and Artistic Director Craig Hella Johnson: advena: liturgies for a broken world, which consists of four works by noted Houston composer Mark Buller on text by renowned writers Leah Lax and Euan Tait. The CD is distributed by Divine Art recordings and is available on all platforms.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the paper “The Anti-Gender and Anti-LGTBQ Right-wing Backlash in the Dominican Republic” on August 8 in Chicago. The paper was part of a panel on right-wing movements at the mini conference “The Many Impacts of Social Movements,” organized by the section on collective behavior and social movements as a pre-conference to the American Sociological Association annual congress.

Gizem Karaali, professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, together with Lew Ludwig of Denison University, organized and facilitated a two-day minicourse, “Navigating the AI Landscape: Practical and Ethical Integration in Mathematics Education,” at MathFest, the annual meeting of the Mathematical Association of America, this year held in Sacramento, California, from August 6-9. Karaali also facilitated a session, “Crafting an AI-Savvy Syllabus for Your Fall Courses,” as part of the Teaching Math with Gen AI Biweekly Virtual Discussions on August 19.

Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology, was awarded a grant of $86,902 from the National Science Foundation for a two-year study titled “Depth-dependent decarbonation in a continental arc, Sierra Nevada, California.” The study is a collaboration with Assistant Professor Emily Stewart at Florida State University.

Lackey saw publication of the study “Plutonic Piercing Points as Recorders of Continental Transform Fault Evolution: Chronologic Insights From the Transpressive Southern San Andreas Fault” in the journal Tectonics with collaborators from Brown University and University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Lackey gave a talk titled “Oxygen Isotope Tracing of Rapid Burial & Remelting of Upper Arc Rocks in Continental Batholiths: The Many Implications” at the meeting of the Geological Society of Australia and the University of Adelaide (South Australia).

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, gave a talk on Japanese demographics and security at Kyoto University on August 2.

Le’s translated book, 日本老いと成熟の平和, was positively reviewed by Chūō Kōron, the oldest continuously published magazine in Japan, on August 22. The book was also positively reviewed by Japanese newspapers Komei Shinbun on August 18 and Asahi Shinbun on August 30.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, was a guest artist at the Garth Newel Music Center 2025 Summer Festival where the two concerts were livestreamed and made available on YouTube. She played two-piano works of Darius Milhaud, Gabriella Smith, Maurice Ravel and Florent Schmitt and eight-hand arrangements of works by Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt. The August 17 concert was reviewed in EarRelevant, Atlanta’s online source for classical and post-classical music journalism. After the concert, she and Brian Hsu were interviewed for an article on the website that celebrates the music of Florent Schmitt.

Jonathan Lethem, Roy E. Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing, is publishing his 20th book of fiction, A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, taught at Civic Spirit’s New York City Summer Institute for Educators, which explored the theme of “America at 250: Reaffirming Our Compact and Civic Mission.”

Also in August, Perspectives on Politics published an article by McWilliams titled “A Tale of Two Liberalisms: Desegregating American Political Thought.”

Sara Olson, associate professor of biology, gave a talk on “Probing the structural motifs of proteins that polymerize the vitelline layer of the C. elegans egg coat” at the Gordon Research Conference on Fertilization and Activation of Development, held at the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Student co-authors included Thanos Syntrivanis ’25, Ysabella Alcaraz ’22, Katiannah Moise ’18, Angie Wang ’23, Essi Logan ’24, Eli Taub ’25, Elelta Sisay ’23, Dolores Fritzsche ’22, Norani Abilo ’20, Vicki Cao ’27, Juliette Des Rosiers SCR ’26 and Mohamad Alkhatib ’24.

Olson presented a poster titled “Characterization of a new uterine eggshell layer in the nematode C. elegans” at the 25th International Worm Meeting, held at UC Davis. Student co-authors included Mohamad Alkhatib ’24 and Melissa Seecharan ’24, with helpful data contributions by seven additional students funded by this summer’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program.

John Pennington, associate professor and chair of dance, gave a lecture and demonstration on American Modern Dance at Oxford’s St. Hilda’s College. As a guest artist, he also set a work for the Yorke Dance Project in London at the Royal Opera House and taught technique and repertory at the Rambert School of Ballet.

Lori Quick, academic coordinator of music, made her Folk Music Center debut on the guitar, performing music by Brandi Carlile. She has been studying guitar for the past year in the studio of Mike Kreivis, furthering her artistic work as a vocalist and songwriter.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, visiting assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, published their second full-length poetry collection titled Wayward Creatures (published by Host Publications). They read at Basket Books in Houston, celebrated the book launch hosted by the press at Alienated Majesty in Austin, Texas, and participated in a public conversation titled “Generative Joy, Kin-Making, and Collective Thinking,” hosted by Letras Latinas.

rhodes participated in the Society for the Study of Affect Summer School held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from August 6-8.

Adolfo J. Rumbos, Joseph N. Fiske Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, published an article co-authored with Emer Lopera (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) and Leandro Recôva (Cal Poly Pomona) in Results in Applied Mathematics. The title of the article is “Multiplicity results for non-local operators of elliptic type.”

Jennifer Schulz, lecturer in dance, presented a workshop titled “Building Connection and Ensemble in the Actor’s Studio” at the 13th International Alexander Technique Congress: The Embodied Mind In Action in Dublin.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, had her poem “Irresistible Contentment” appear in The Atlantic online August 24.

Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, published a paper, “Environmental Moral Cognition in Children and Adults,” in the Journal of Cognition and Development’s special issue on climate change and child development.

Stern’s book, Beyond Difficult, was reviewed in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, contributed a review essay of the collected volume Herder on Empathy and Sympathy / Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders (edited by Eva Pirimäe, Liina Lukas and Johannes Schmidt and published by Brill) to a special European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms issue dedicated to the works of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803).

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, conducted an online workshop for students at the University of Virginia on AI-supported language learning August 29.

Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, co-authored a poster with collaborator Natsuki Atagi (Cal State Fullerton) titled “Heritage language vs. dominant language: When bilinguals excel in unexpected ways,” presented at the 47th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in San Francisco on August 31.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave research talks at the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Graduate Research Symposium at San Diego State University (July 17-19) and the Organic Reactions and Processes Gordon Conference at Bryant University (July 20-25).

Ball published a paper titled “Flash Communication: Sulfonyl Fluoride Activation via S–F and C–S Bond Cleavage by a Ni(0) Bis-Bidentate N-Heterocyclic Carbene Complex” with S. Chantal Stieber (Cal Poly Pomona). This work, focused on Ni-activation of sulfonyl fluorides to form novel Ni-sulfur dioxide complexes, gives evidence of how sulfonyl fluorides can be activated for Ni-catalyzed reactions and was funded by the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award.

Ball was awarded an NIH R15 area grant for $428,004. This three-year grant enables the Ball group to continue training students in new avenues for sulfur fluoride exchange (SuFEx). The grant also involves a subaward for O. Maduka Ogba (Harvey Mudd College), who will lead efforts in the mechanistic computational experiments. Additionally, Christopher am Ende (Pfizer) is a collaborator serving as a mentor for students to conduct related work at Pfizer for the summer. This grant will support undergraduate researcher stipends, student attendance at conferences, and two postbaccalaureate scholars.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, performed as a viola da gamba soloist in the Oregon Bach Festival’s production of J. S. Bach’s Markus Passion, a new musical reconstruction co-produced by Concert Theatre Works and starring actor Joseph Marcell. Performances took place July 11–13 in Eugene, Oregon, Portland and Seattle.

On July 16 in Downtown Los Angeles, Bandy served as musical director for Tesserae Baroque’s viola da gamba sextet in Secret Byrd, an internationally acclaimed touring production of a secret Catholic mass from 1590s Britain, conceived and directed by Bill Barclay and featuring The Gesualdo Six from the U.K.

On July 19 and 20 at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (Birmingham, U.K.), Bandy chaired a session on German instrumental music and presented the paper “Instruments of ‘Torture’: Viols, Mutilation, and Transfiguration in the German Baroque Passion” at the 21st Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music. On July 22–25 at the University of Copenhagen, Bandy organized and chaired two panels at the 25th Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. Bandy presented the paper “Quid sunt plagae istae? Harmonizing Pathos and Pleasure in Membra Jesu nostri (1680).” The coordinated Musica Poetica panels cumulatively spanned 750 years of rhetoric in musical composition and performance and were formed and presented in collaboration with colleagues from the USC Thornton School of Music and Donna Di Grazia and Alfred Cramer from the Pomona College Department of Music.

Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, published a review of Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature, edited by Wai-yee Li, in Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, presented the paper “‘Odes & Songs on St Cecilia's Day and Other Occasions’: The Secular Vocal Music of William Croft Reconsidered” at the 21st Biennial International Conference of Baroque Music hosted by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in Birmingham, England, from July 16-20.

Eleanor Birrell, associate professor of computer science, published a paper titled “Evaluating a Data Fiduciary Standard for Privacy: Developer and End-user Perspectives” in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. This work, coauthored with Michele Tang ’24, Liam Bayer ’27 and Leo Torres ’26, was presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July.

Ralph Bolton ’61, emeritus professor of anthropology, had the address he gave upon receiving The Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology published by the journal Human Organization. A digital Open Access version of the article is available online; the print version is scheduled for later in 2025. The title of the article is “Applied Anthropology: A Way of Life, a Call to Action.”

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, co-authored a paper developing open-source machine learning pipelines to monitor human-biodiversity interactions globally. The manuscript was just accepted at Conservation Biology and was the product of a collaboration between Chang, Conservation Science Partners, On the Edge Conservation and Oxford University.

Toni Cook, visiting assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, published a paper, “The canar-yi in the coal mine: The loss of yi in Zulu reduplication,” in the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics.

Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music, spoke on “Woody’s ‘Land,’ Pete’s ‘Land’: Rhetorical Reframings of an Emblematic American Song” at the Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric in Copenhagen, Denmark, on July 24. This presentation was part of a pair of panels organized by Malachai Bandy which also featured a presentation by Donna M. Di Grazia. Cramer gave a presentation on a related topic at Pilgrim Place in Claremont: “Signs, Formulas, and Meanings in ‘This Land Is Your Land’ by Woody Guthrie and Others.”

Donna M. Di Grazia, David J. Baldwin Professor of Music, presented her paper “The Power of Silence in Nineteenth-Century Music” on July 24 at the Twenty-Fifth Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric held in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Di Grazia and the 30-member Pomona College Glee Club traveled to Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and New York City, giving four full-length concerts. They also took part in two choral exchanges with high school students at Oak Park/River Forest High School in Oak Park and at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art & Performing Arts in Manhattan. Earlier in the month, they gave a 20-minute performance at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of Romance languages and literatures, published the article “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, ou la disparition de l’herbe verte” in The Balzac Review / Revue Balzac, focusing on ecology (Écologies/Ecologie).

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics, had a book chapter “Upper level mathematics and statistics courses shared across campuses,” (with J. Hu and S.J. Miller) reprinted in the second edition of Teaching and Learning Mathematics Online (edited by J.P. Howard II and J.F. Beyers and published by Chapman and Hall).

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, visited the Undergraduate Program (MSRI-UP) at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California. The 2025 program was a six-week summer research experience led by Omayra Ortega ’21, where 18 students focused on “Quantitative Justice.” Goins gave a talk July 3 titled “A Survey of Diophantine Equations.”

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the paper “Los Grupos Antiderechos: The Expansion of the Far Right in the Dominican Republic” at the V International Sociological Forum convened by the International Sociological Association in Rabat, Morocco, on July 9. Hernández-Medina also organized and chaired the panel “What Can We Learn from Latin American Feminist Movements” on July 11 and chaired the panel “Authoritarian Politics, Feminist Struggles and Democratic Futures in the MENA Region” on July 9.

Malkiat Johal, professor of chemistry, published the paper “A Hydrophobic Goldilocks Zone for Cyclodextrin-Lipid-Membrane Interactions: Implications of Drug Hydrophobicity on Kinetics of Cholesterol Removal from Lipid Membranes” in Langmuir. The article was co-authored by Ethan M. Fong ’25, J. Sebastian D. Kinzie ’26, Aaron Christopherson ’26, Jacob K. Al-Hussieni ’22, Kevin Ye ’27, Ananya Vinay ’27 and Ryan Mooney ’27.

Johal was recently featured in a blog post by Nicoya Lifesciences Inc. titled “Exploring Molecular Interactions with OpenSPR: A Perspective from the Johal Lab.” The article highlights Johal’s research on protein-ligand binding and his lab’s innovative use of OpenSPR technology to study molecular interactions relevant to disease.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, co-authored and published the article “Beyond smell: rethinking the figurative force of olfactory language” in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory on July 15. Drawing on corpus linguistic techniques, this article shows that English olfactory metaphorical constructions are more productive than previously assumed, mapping smell perception onto abstract domains, particularly those related to socioemotions and morality. Lang also published an invited book review of Chinese Sociolinguistics: Language and Identity in Greater China by Chunsheng Yang in Chinese Language and Discourse on July 28.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, gave a talk for his book launch event of 日本老いと成熟の平和 at the University of Tokyo on July 1. On July 8, he gave a talk on Japanese security policy at Meiji Gakuin University. On July 15, he gave a book talk for the Asia Pacific Initiative roundtable at the International House of Japan. On July 17, he gave a book talk at Temple University (Zoom). On July 23, he gave a book talk at Hiroshima City University. On July 24, he gave a talk on demographics and Japanese security at the Machinaka Community Center in Sasebo as part of the YCAPS Community Conversations Series. On July 30, he gave a book talk at the National Institute of Defense Studies in Tokyo.

On July 25, Le joined the Nobel Peace Prize Selection Committee for a dinner honoring Hidankyo, the 2024 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

On July 29, Le and Olivia Lee ’28 (Summer Undergraduate Research Program participant) published a peer-reviewed article with East Asia Forum titled “Japan-South Korea relations under Lee’s pragmatic leadership.”

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed as a faculty member at the Redfish Music Festival in late July. Lee and her colleagues presented piano quartets of Beethoven and Fauré in Crescent City, California, and two venues in Oregon (Port Orford and North Bend). She also coached chamber music groups (of undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate students) at the Redfish Music Festival.

Stephen Marks, Elden Smith Professor of Economics and associate dean of the College, was interviewed by the BBC World Service radio network and later in the day by BBC News television network July 15 on the topic of President Trump’s announced trade deal with Indonesia.

Richard Mawhorter, professor of physics, had an active research summer with two Summer Undergraduate Research Program students. They visited related labs at Caltech and JPL in preparation for a three-week visit to The University of the Basque Country near Bilbao in Spain. Being in Europe also provided opportunities to visit labs in Valladolid, Paris, and Groningen, Netherlands. Research talks on the ytterbium oxide molecule YbO were given in Bilbao and earlier at the annual APS DAMOP meeting in Portland, Oregon.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, won the award for writing the best paper presented in American Political Thought at The American Political Science Association’s 2024 Annual Meeting. The award committee called McWilliams’s paper, titled “A Tale of Two Liberalisms: Desegregating American Political Thought,” “not just clever and compelling but important and interesting to a wide group of scholars,” adding to disciplinary conversations in “founding scholarship, religion and politics, and especially black political thought.” McWilliams will formally receive the award at a ceremony at this year’s APSA meeting in September.

Hans J. Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a review essay on two volumes of critical essays on the Swiss 19th-century writer Gottfried Keller, “Kellers Welten; Kellers Wissen,” in Monatshefte.

Joti Rockwell, associate professor of music, published the article “Theorizing Musical Motion, Moving with the Steel Guitar” in Journal of Music Theory.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of Russian, presented a paper titled “When I Was a Girl, I Was a Boy: Queer Adolescence in Mikita Franko’s Fiction” at the 27th Biennial International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) Congress: “Borders, Migration, and Liminality in Children’s Literature,” held in Salamanca, Spain.

Penny Sinanoglou, associate professor of history, was selected as a reviews editor for the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the American Historical Association.

Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, published a paper, “Relational roots of retributive vs. restorative justice: Attachment insecurity predicts harsher responses to crime,” in Attachment & Human Development.

Stern gave a talk on “Resilience in African American children and families” for the Applied Mind and Health Lab at Claremont McKenna College.

Stern spoke about her new book, Beyond Difficult, in an interview with Theravive and on recent episodes of The Power of Women Podcast and Speak Honest.

Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, completed a month-long residency at Yaddo this past June and July in Saratoga Springs, New York. She also attended a premiere of her new piece written for the GRAMMY-nominated JACK Quartet at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Heather Williams, professor of politics, and Joanna L. Dyl, visiting assistant professor of environmental analysis, published a co-authored chapter, “SONGS of the Southland: The Nuclear-Water Nexus in Southern California” in the edited collection The Nuclear-Water Nexus, edited by Per Högselius and Siegried Evens and published by The MIT Press.

Keri Wilson, assistant professor of biology, co-authored the research article “Early-life vocalizations and adult auditory brainstem responses in California mice (Peromyscus californicus)” in the journal Physiology and Behavior. The study details the dynamic interplay between offspring vocalizations and parental hearing in a mammal in which both parents care for young. This research was part of a larger project funded by NSF.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, gave a pre-concert lecture and served as master of ceremonies for a concert of Lieder and instrumental chamber music by Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven and Karl Goldmark (U.S. premiere) June 1 for Le Salon De Musiques, a chamber music series in La Jolla, California, directed by Francois Chouchan.

On June 6 in Santa Monica, California, Bandy played baroque double bass with Baroque Collegium LA in their debut performance of cantatas and motets by J. S. Bach, directed by Mike Raleigh. On June 7, Bandy participated in the event Artists in Harmony and History, held at the Drucker Institute on the campus of Claremont Graduate University, in conjunction with the current exhibit Sound Formations: Artist, Musician, Instrument Maker at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art. In the event, Bandy and duo partner Eva Lymenstull programmed, introduced and performed Renaissance works by Christopher Simpson, Tobias Hume, Orlande de Lassus and Diego Ortiz on bass and tenor viols recently built by Warren Shingleton of Shingleton Viols in Upland, California.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, presented the paper “‘Some Overtures to be plaied before the first lesson’: Old and New Candidates” on June 10 at the conference held in conjunction with the annual Handel Festival in Halle, Germany. While there, he also participated in the meetings of the editorial board of the Hallische-Haendel-Ausgabe, of which he is a member, and the Vorstand of the Georg-Friedrich-Haendel Gesellschaft, which he serves as a vice president.

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, was selected as a 2025 Art Omi: Dance Residency Fellow from an international pool of applicants. Champi was also awarded a Professional Development Network grant by The Claremont College Faculty Development Associate Deans, taking the lead to improve disciplinary cohesion between the Pomona and Scripps Dance Departments.

Kevin Dettmar, W.M. Keck Professor of English and director of the Humanities Studio, concluded his Chronicle of Higher Education monthly advice column, “Ask the Chair,” after a three-year run. In the fall of 2026, the Johns Hopkins University Press will publish the columns in substantially revised form, along with Dettmar’s other recent occasional writing on faculty leadership, as The Department Chair’s Handbook: Practical Advice for Faculty Leaders.

Cécile Evers, assistant professor of anthropology, gave a paper titled “A seventh function? Marseille: Muslim and Arabophone city” at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology conference, held at the University of Chicago.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, was awarded a research grant (as sole PI) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The $285,236 grant, titled “RUI: New Frontiers in Operators, Functions, and Matrices,” runs from 2025-2028 and is his sixth NSF research grant at Pomona College.

Garcia published a paper titled “Numerical semigroups from rational matrices II: matricial dimension does not exceed multiplicity” (with Arsh Chhabra ’12, Christopher O’Neill) in the Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society.

Garcia was appointed by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) to chair the selection committee for the Dolciani Prize for Excellence in Research. He was the inaugural winner of the prize in 2019.

Roberto A. Garza-López, professor of physical and computational chemistry, published a paper, “Copper(II) Inhibition of the SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease,” in Natural Sciences. The paper was in collaboration with Harry B. Gray, founding director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech, Robbins Lecturer 2005 in the Chemistry Department at Pomona College and host of Garza’s sabbatical. Three Pomona students are co-authors of this publication: Liam Kwak ’26, Andrew Chung ’28 and Gabriel Lee Ancajas ’28, and the research made the cover of the journal.

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, presented “Identification of a new odorant that is detected by the AWC^OFF neuron in Caenorhabditis elegans” at the 25th International Worm Meeting, held at University of California Davis. Student co-authors were Vaughn Brown ’25, Ella Bradley ’26, Sokhna Lo ’25 and Tymmaa Asaed ’25.

Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete ’17, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in linguistics and cognitive science, presented his research project titled “Place-dependent stop salience among Spanish-English bilinguals: Evidence from Code-switching” at the 6th Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE 2025) linguistics conference hosted by the University of the Balearic Islands in Mallorca, Spain.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, co-organized and co-moderated the panel “The Scholar as Insurgent: From Crisis to Future Thinking in Dominican Studies” at the Global Dominicanidades II conference in San Francisco. Hernández-Medina and Warren Day Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College April Mayes led the organizing team for the event, which took place as a pre-conference workshop for the 2025 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) annual congress and was co-sponsored by Pomona’s Latin American Studies Program. Additionally, Hernández-Medina co-organized and co-moderated the activities of the LASA Haiti-Dominican Republic section at LASA’s annual congress in her role as section co-chair alongside Sharina Maíllo-Pozo (University of Georgia). Events included the panel “Poner el cuerpo in Hispaniola and Beyond: Chapeo, Afro-Latina Womanhood, Tourism, and Medicine” and the section’s business meeting and joint reception with the Puerto Rico section.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published 日本 老いと成熟の平和, the Japanese translation with new foreword of his book Japan’s Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century with Misuzu Shobo Press on June 16.

Le did an interview for ABC Australia on Japan’s declining birthrate.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, is the editor of and a contributor to Our Forests, Our Future (Society of American Foresters, 2025), an anthology marking the society’s 125th anniversary. He delivered a June 9 webinar on the book that the Forest History Society hosted. In related work, he spoke on “The Legacy of Public Lands” on Our Public Lands.

Miller continued to address the January 2025 firestorms, including appearing in “After the inferno: Can Los Angeles rise from the ashes?” ITV-News (UK); talks at “Major Repairs,” a conference hosted by the LA Forum for Architecture and Design; “Why History Matters: LA Wildfires, past, present, future,” at UCLA Fowler Museum; and on June 18, was featured in “LA is Built to Burn – What Can We Do About It?” on the Los Angeles Times: Rebuilding LA podcast.

Miller contributed two chapters to The Seeds of Texas: An Interactive Exploration of Bexar County History, a digital project probing the 12,000-year history of San Antonio, Texas. His chapters included “Historic Overview, 1865-1918” and “San Antonio: Embracing the Twentieth Century.”

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented the paper titled “Retours géographiques et littéraires dans Le bastion des larmes d’Abdellah Taïa” at the annual colloquium of the Conseil International d’Études Francophones (CIÉF), held in Cape Town, South Africa, from June 8-13.

Zhiru Ng, professor of religious studies, presented at the Food in Chinese Religion workshop at the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies and School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University on May 31 and June 1.

Adam Pearson, professor and chair of psychological science, published the article “Extreme weather event attribution predicts climate policy support across the world” in Nature Climate Change—part of an interdisciplinary global collaboration of climate researchers and social and behavioral scientists in 68 countries, including faculty from Harvey Mudd College: Sarah Kavassalis (Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment) and Katherine Breeden (computer science). Pearson also co-authored “Psychology and the ethics of climate change” with Susan Clayton in the Handbook of Ethics and Social Psychology.

Pearson gave an invited talk at the Claremont Graduate University psychology speaker series titled “Social psychological dimensions of climate injustice: Public perceptions and social reality.”

Alexander Rodriguez, men’s and women’s water polo coach, served as an assistant coach for the USA Men’s 20U national team at the 2024 FINA Men’s Junior World Championships in Zagreb, Croatia. This tournament marked the first time in USA Water Polo history that a men’s junior or youth team advanced to the final of a world championship.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of Russian, presented a paper titled “Culture Three and Children’s War Literature of Resistance in Contemporary Russia” at the workshop “Surrounded by Conflict: Children’s War Literature in the Making” at Aarhus University’s Institute for Advanced Studies from June 12-13. She served as a formal discussant of the panel “Transborder Circulations, Translations, and Responses to War” at the same workshop. Rudova also gave a lecture titled “No Longer Erased: Diverse Characters in Contemporary Russian YA Literature” at the Institute of German Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin on June 16.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, had her poem “Passion of the Void” appear in The Atlantic online June 22.

Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, is a co-author on two publications with Jessica Borelli and colleagues, “Maternal emotion regulation and parenting: A physiological perspective” in Developmental Psychobiology and “Adult attachment as a predictor of savoring quality in mothers of toddlers: Results from a 4-week randomized trial” in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. These publications report that mothers’ physiological regulation predicts sensitive parenting and their childhood attachment narratives predict child-centered reflections during a relational savoring intervention.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published an opinion piece, “No, large reasoning models do not reason” (MindMatters, June 13).

Smith was invited back to SciFoo, an annual invitation-only interdisciplinary scientific unconference at the GooglePlex. Smith was also invited to speak at the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2026.

Luis Edward Tenorio, visiting instructor of sociology, published a paper that is available online first in Social Forces: “How Public Benefits Make Citizens in Mixed Status Families: Self-Efficacy, Institutional Engagement, and Concerted Citizenship Cultivation.” Tenorio’s “Work After Lawful Status: Formerly Undocumented Immigrants’ Gendered Relational Legal Consciousness and Workplace Claims-Making” received paper awards from the American Sociological Association’s Labor & Labor Movement Section and the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section, while “Disclosure and the Evolving Legal Consciousness of Sexual and Gender Minority Central American Unaccompanied Minors” received a paper award from the American Sociological Association’s Children and Youth Section.

Andrew Wilson, director of research computing, coauthored a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports titled “Visualising solar-passive design of courtyard houses and the rhythms of life in Classical Olynthos, Greece.” The paper uses 3D computer modeling of architectural and environmental features to explore how house design affects domestic rhythms in courtyard houses.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, gave a talk titled “Chinese Food Along the Pacific Rim” to alumni in Orange County, California, on June 28.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, played G violone with Tesserae Baroque in their 2024-2025 season finale. The program, titled Pathopoeia: Music of 17th Century Vienna, was curated and guest-directed by Andrew McIntosh, with the performance held at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, California, on May 18.

On May 31, Bandy presented the paper “The Tortoise and The Herr: Dismemberment and Transfiguration in German Baroque Passion Meditations” at the spring meeting of the American Musicological Society Pacific Southwest Chapter, held at the University of San Diego. Bandy also adjudicated the Ingolf Dahl Award, the chapter’s graduate-student paper competition.

Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, gave presentations on “The challenges and pleasures of translating Xu Xiake’s travel diaries” at Shanghai Jiao Tong University on May 8; “Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People in historical context” at the Symposium on Civilizational Exchange and Cultural Communication at Shaanxi Normal University on May 17; and “Travel Accounts and Cultural Heritage: thoughts on translating Xu Xiake and Chen Yizhong” at the Symposium on the Translation and Dissemination of Shaanxi’s Intangible Cultural Heritage at Weinan Normal University on May 19.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, contributed the article “William Croft’s References to Henry Purcell’s Settings of the Funeral Sentences” to the volume “Und alle Sphären klingen”: Musikgeschichtliche Entdeckungen und Reflexionen, a Festschrift published in honor of the 65th birthday of Wolfgang Hirschmann of the Martin Luther University of Halle and Wittenberg, Germany.

Beeks conducted two performances by the Pomona College Band of Adventure in the Air, a commissioned work by composer Mark Winges, featuring soprano saxophone soloist Kenneth Foerch, lecturer in saxophone at Pomona College.

Ralph Bolton ’61, professor emeritus of anthropology, published a chapter, “‘AIDS and the Social Imaginary’ Thirty Years Later: A Controversial Early Skirmish in the De-Colonizing of Anthropology,” in the book Invisible Contrarian: Stephen O. Murray as (Inter)disciplinary Historian, edited by Regna Darnell and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and published by University of Nebraska Press.

Bolton published an article, “Expanding Educational Opportunities for Rural Youth in Peru: The Scholarship Program of the Chijnaya Foundation and the Asociación Pro-DIA,” in Practicing Anthropology, a journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology, co-authored with a Peruvian colleague, Jhuver Aguirre, and Ann Stromberg ’64. He also published an article titled “Sueños Qollas: Una Muestra de Textos del Altiplano” (“Qolla Dreams: A Sample of Texts from the Altiplano”) in the Revista Peruana de Antropología. The article includes commentaries by three Peruvian anthropology colleagues, Armando Medina, Carolina Espinoza and Javier Ávila.

Shannon Burns, assistant professor of psychological science and neuroscience, authored a paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science about analytic methods for studying social interaction titled “Interdependent Minds: Quantifying the Dynamics of Successful Social Interactions.”

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented two papers, “Moving Memories in Lázaro Santana’s Recordatorio USA (1971)” at the spring meeting of the Southern California Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), held at Pasadena City College, and “Fragmento, pensamiento, silencio: (re)visiones del lenguaje en la poesía española del siglo XXI” at the Seminario Internacional Nuevas miradas sobre la poesía española actual, hosted online by the Universidad de Granada and Università degli Studi di Bergamo from May 29-30.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, was selected to participate as a reviewer for the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship for the artificial intelligence cohort.

Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures, published “Beyond the Borders: Lu Xun, ‘Professor Fujino,’ and the Possibilities for World Literature,” co-authored with Shu Akiyoshi, in Linguistic Science.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, gave a talk titled “Gay Gen X: Aging and Community among Queer Men in Midlife” at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology conference at the University of Chicago.

Joanna L. Dyl, visiting assistant professor of environmental analysis, presented her paper “Coastal Waters and Moving Sand: Science, Engineering, and Agency in the Development of California’s Beaches” at the international conference A Water’s History of the United States hosted by the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg, The Netherlands. The conference also saw the launch of the Blue History Network.

KJ Fagan, executive director of strategic innovation, gave a talk titled “Assist, Build, Buy, Lend, Empower: A Survey of Workforce Housing Solutions” at the annual Conference on Academic Workforce Housing on May 2. The presentation reviewed best practices among institutions with faculty and staff housing programs and engaged participants in a discussion about the future of workforce housing.

Fagan was elected to the board of directors of the American Council on Education (ACE) Women’s Network of Southern California, which provides strategic leadership, oversight and guidance to advance the organization’s mission of empowering women in higher education. She will serve a two-year term beginning July 2025.

Jennifer Friedlander, Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies, published “An Ethics of Shame: Love, Media Pleasures, and Monsters” in Death and Love: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Julie Reshe and Todd McGowan and published by Routledge.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published a paper titled “The Linear Targeting Problem” with Kyle Bierly ’23 and Roger A. Horn in Linear Algebra and Applications.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, attended the American Mathematical Society (AMS) 2025 Spring Western Sectional Meeting held at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. On May 4, Goins gave a presentation titled “Adinkras as Origami?” in the AMS Special Session “Number Theory at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions.’’

Goins spent several days at York College / CUNY in Jamaica, New York, as a distinguished visitor. He interacted with students, faculty and staff at the Converge 2025 conference, a meeting which celebrated three years of the Queens Experiences in Discrete Mathematics (QED), REU and S-STEM Program at the community college. On May 8, Goins gave a presentation titled “A Dream Deferred: 50 Years of Blacks in Mathematics,” and on May 9, Goins gave the keynote address with a presentation titled “An Introduction to Dessins d’Enfants: The Intersection of Graph Theory, Group Theory, and Differential Geometry.”

Goins attended his final meeting of the MAA Board of Directors from May 19-20 in Washington, DC. For the past year, he has served as the Past Chair of the MAA Congress. He will continue as a representative of the MAA Congress, serving as representative for the Southern California/Nevada Section through June 2026.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, together with three colleagues, organized and facilitated a four-day virtual workshop titled “Who’s Afraid of Generative AI? Promises and Challenges of AI for the Mathematics Classroom” as part of the Mathematical Association of America’s annual Open Math Summer Professional Development workshop series. The workshop ran May 12-16 and introduced 26 mathematics faculty from across the United States to the topic.

Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, published the paper “A decade of diving: responses of Cassin’s auklets to variable foraging conditions in the California Current System” in the journal Frontiers in Bird Science with co-authors Andre Cavalcanti, professor of biology, and Jo Hardin, professor of mathematics and statistics, as well as Zachary W. Brown ’07, Eleanor Caves ’11, Clare M. Flynn ’19, Gail Gallaher ’17, Nicole McDuffie ’15 and Kristina McOmber ’12. Other co-authors are Pete Warzybok, Russell W. Bradley, Meredith L. Elliott, Benjamin T. Saenz and Jaime Jahncke. This paper summarizes how a small planktivorous seabird that breeds on the Farallon islands off San Francisco responded to changes in food availability over 10 breeding seasons.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, and Ernesto Gutierrez Topete, postdoctoral fellow in linguistics and cognitive science, co-presented a talk titled “Utilizing AI-Powered Tools as Supplementary Resources for L2 Chinese Learners” at the interdisciplinary workshop PedAIgogy: Teaching Chinese Language, Literature, and Culture in the Age of AI. The event was hosted by the Asian Languages and Literatures Department at Pomona College for Southern California instructors May 3.

Lang received the inaugural Shou-hsin Teng Pedagogical Innovation Prize (2024-2025) at the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA (CLTA-USA) Annual Conference in New York City on May 10. The award recognizes her “outstanding contribution to the field” and “her inspiring innovation in Chinese language teaching.” At the conference, she also delivered a talk titled “AI-Supported Pronunciation Learning for L2 Chinese Beginners.”

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, gave a series of invited lectures in May. He gave a talk titled “Japan’s Contemporary Economy and Security Dilemmas” at UC Irvine (Zoom) on May 20 and a talk titled “Japan’s Strategic Culture as a Global Actor” for a symposium on Japan at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey (Zoom), also on May 20. He gave two in-person lectures for the LEAP-ACE program at the Yokota Air Base in Fussa City, Japan, on May 28. The Language Enabled Airmen Postured for Agile Combat Employment program is designed to train interpreters to help strengthen the U.S.-Japan alliance.

Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, published “Reimagining misuse as creative practice: impressions and implications of usage norms on digital artists” to the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), in collaboration with undergraduate authors from UC Berkeley.

Li was interviewed by PAGE magazine on their views on generative AI and art.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, edited and wrote the introduction to a collection of essays titled “The Idea of Fraternity in America at 50: A Symposium” that appeared in The Political Science Reviewer.

McWilliams gave a lecture titled “The Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education” to the University Club of Claremont.

Thomas A. Moore, Ruben C. and Eleanor Winslow Professor of Mathematics and Natural Science, gave a talk titled “The Exuberant Universe: Re-thinking Creation in a Scientific Age” to the Process Explorations group supported by the Cobb Institute at the Center for Process Studies on May 27. This talk discussed the scientific evidence regarding whether the universe is “fine-tuned” for complexity and some of the philosophical implications of that evidence, including possible links to process philosophy.

Kathy Guillén Quispe, assistant director of international student & scholar services, co-presented a poster at the 2025 NAFSA Annual Conference & Expo at San Diego Convention Center on May 28. The poster “Size Doesn't Matter: Orientation Programming Does!” compares Rutgers University and Pomona College to demonstrate how synchronous J-1 orientations are more beneficial to J-1 exchange visitors for understanding their responsibilities while also establishing personal connections not found in asynchronous presentations.

Nicolette Rohr, visiting assistant professor of history, presented at the Inland Empire People’s History Conference at California State University, San Bernardino on May 3. This conference “seeks to bridge university research and community activism to explore the art, culture, and histories of Inland Southern California.” Rohr’s presentation explored histories of the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s in Claremont, San Bernardino and Riverside.

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, professor of English, received the 2025 Isabel MacCaffrey Award from the International Spenser Society for her essay, “The Contingency of Form in Renaissance Poetics,” published in PMLA in 2023.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages, professor of Russian, gave a talk titled “On the Rainbow Spectrum: Queer Characters in Contemporary Russian Children’s and Young Adult Literature” in the UC San Diego Department of Literature on May 15.

Rudova published a book review of Moscow Conceptualism, 1975-1985. Words, Deeds, Legacies by Mary A. Nicholas in The Russian Review.

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, received a formal recognition by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for her leadership on the California Citizens Redistricting Commission and the County’s historic Measure G to transform county governance.

Sadhwani published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on May 30 launching the beginning of the Measure G Taskforce, which she will serve on.

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave the presentation “My Hidden Childhood in WWII Occupied France” in Seaver Auditorium on May 3 for Alumni Weekend.

Shahriar Shahriari, William Polk Russell Professor of Mathematics, published a paper (coauthored with Gabriel Currier ’16), “3-cluster-free families of subspaces,” in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.

On May 3, Shahriari gave an invited talk, “EKR-type problems for Vector Spaces and Graphs,” at the American Mathematical Society’s Western Sectional Meeting at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Shahriari was selected as an associate editor for The American Mathematical Monthly, the flagship journal of the Mathematical Association of America.

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, wrote an article, “Dancing the Other: The Aman Folk Ensemble and Avaz International Dance Theatre,” in Dance Research, Summer 2025.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published three opinion pieces: “Yes, Large Language Models May Soon be Smarter than Humans” (MindMatters, May 9); “What is AI really giving back to tech investors? Here’s the hard truth” (MarketWatch, May 14); and “LLMs are bad at good things, good at bad things” (MindMatters, May 28).

Smith signed a contract with Elsevier for the third edition of his popular textbook Essential Statistics, Regression, and Econometrics.

Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, was quoted in The New York Times article “25 questions to bring you closer to your mom” for Mother’s Day.

Stern served as a moderator and planning committee member for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) workshop “Unraveling the neurobiology of empathy and compassion: Implications for treatments for brain disorders and human well-being.”

Stern gave a research talk, “Depressive symptoms across three generations: The role of father mental health and marital satisfaction,” at the Society for Research in Child Development biennial conference in Minneapolis.

Stern’s forthcoming book Beyond difficult: An attachment-based guide to dealing with challenging people is available for pre-order.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, and Cecilia Wade ’25 gave a presentation titled “AI in Second Language Learning: A Review” at the 2025 Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) conference May 9. He was also invited to join a panel discussion at the AI 2030 reception, along with three other panelists including the executive director of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). On May 22, he delivered an invited talk titled “AI Empowerment for Chinese Schools: From Vision to Action” for the Chinese School Association in the United States. On May 30, he gave a presentation titled “Training AI for Pragmatics Assessment: A Preliminary Study on Chinese Routines” at the 2025 Conference of the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO). Luduan.ai, the AI-powered adaptive learning platform he co-founded, won first place in the LaunchPad startup competition at CALICO. Established in 1983, CALICO is a leading international research organization dedicated to the field of computer-assisted language learning.

On May 10, Xiao was selected as co-chair of the 2026 CLTA conference and appointed as one of five members of the CLTA executive committee.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, delivered the keynote address at this year’s Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony in Lyman Hall on May 16. His presentation was titled “Fear, Passion and Fiction on a Kauai Farm.”