What comes to mind when you see the word fusion? For me, it’s the wild and crazy food mashups of the ’90s and early aughts, when “global cooking” took off and menus began mixing and matching Asian and Western flavors with gusto—and decidedly mixed results. Pasta biryani anyone?
For folks on the STEM side of things, fusion probably means something else entirely—that would be nuclear fusion, the clean energy source that mimics the sun and could one day power our electric grids with nearly limitless power.
Whatever type of fusion—architectural fusion? fashion fusion?—resonates most closely for you, the underlying concept is similar: Combining elements creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts and the synergy of their interaction generates something new and unexpected.
In this issue of PCM, we delve into several facets of fusion. Yes, we’ll talk about food, and how chefs are moving on from fusion to a more personal kind of hyperlocalism that honors both geography and tradition. And we’ll meet Alex Zylstra ’09, who, with Bay Area startup Pacific Fusion, is making huge strides in bringing nuclear fusion online.
We’ll also explore a different sort of fusion here on campus, where integrated fields of study—philosophy, politics and economics or environmental analysis, for example—have developed in recent years to address the critical issues of our time. Increasingly, our students are also creating their own multidisciplinary courses of study by pursuing double majors. “Economics gives me the technical tool kit,” says Aditya Bhargava ’26, “while international relations sharpens my understanding of the political and regional contexts in which policy actually operates.”
In our final feature you’ll meet Kaitlyn Casimo ’13, a Seattle-based science communicator who draws on her experiences at Pomona as a neuroscience major passionately involved in theatre. Both science and theatre, says Casimo, are ways of exploring and understanding our relationship with the world.
So please, embrace the complexity, feel the synergy and enjoy this issue of PCM, my first as editor-in-chief.
—Judy Hill
editor-in-chief