Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

Artifact

A Pandemic-Conscious Campus

Gekka infrared thermometersThe object on the right is one of nine Gekka infrared thermometers that have been wall-mounted near the entrance of Pomona College residence halls as part of a project to upgrade campus facilities to provide for the safe return of students, faculty and staff. These IR thermometers are only one small part of a wide-ranging story of added equipment, renovated spaces, upgraded facilities and carefully planned health protocols designed to make the campus a safer place while the novel coronavirus continues to require a high degree of institutional vigilance. Here are a few of the other changes that members of the returning College community will find waiting for them:

1. The creation of an on-site clinic in Rembrandt Hall to oversee health protocols, do COVID-19 testing and carry out contact tracing

2. Optimized heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that will infuse more outside air into the interior of campus buildings

3. The installation of upgraded air filters (from MERV 8 to MERV 11) throughout all campus buildings

4. The installation of 15 automatic door openers and 275 touchless door-opening devices throughout campus to help the community avoid high-touch objects such as doorknobs

5. The addition of 325 soap dispensers in residence hall bathrooms to make it easier for students to wash their hands frequently

6. A daily Pomona Safe email reminding members of the campus community to follow all health protocols, including a required self-check, before coming to campus.

7. The installation of 175 hand-sanitizing stations throughout common areas in all campus buildings to encourage safe behaviors

8. The development of new seating plans for Pomona College classrooms to allow for in-class social distancing during instruction

9. The addition of plexiglass shielding to all front-facing College departments to provide protection for employees whose work requires face-to-face contact with others

10. Specialized COVID-19 cleaning training and supplies provided to all housekeeping staff

Athletic Center Construction

Athletic Center Construction

Construction Begins on New Athletic Center

Althought the pandemic caused a delay of several months, construction of a new athletics, recreation and wellness center finally got under way in February, with completion expected in time for the fall 2022 semester. The rebuilt and expanded facility is designed to replace the Rains Center for Sport and Recreation with an upgraded, up-to-date athletic facility while boosting health and wellness for all members of the Pomona community.

“The need for a revitalized center has been clear for years,” noted President G. Gabrielle Starr in an email to the campus community. “Last spring, however, as the pandemic forced the evacuation of students from campus, we decided to delay the start of construction in the face of the unfolding crisis. Moving forward this semester allows us to complete the most disruptive aspects of construction—demo- lition, grading and assembly of structural steel—at a time when few people will be on our campus. This will reduce the impact of noise, vibration, dust and truck traffic and also will reduce the costs of mitigation steps. When we return to normal operation in the fall, we can proceed with the less disruptive aspects of the work.”

By rebidding the project after the delay, the College was also able to negotiate reduced prices. At the same time, Starr said, the College has benefited from generous gifts that allowed the project to proceed without affecting Pomona’s operating budget. “We are incredibly grateful to Ranney ’60 and Priscilla Draper, Libby Gates MacPhee ’86, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the many other friends of Pomona whose early and generous partnership and support has allowed us to begin construction on this vital facility.”

In addition to supporting more than 450 varsity athletes, the new building will serve more than 900 intramural athletes, 550 club athletes and student physical education classes and accommodate fitness and recreation programming for students, faculty and staff for both colleges.

The new center will include a larger recreational fitness area, with additional space for cardio workouts. Studio space available for fitness classes will be doubled. In addition to a general-use weight room, there will be a dedicated varsity weight room. Locker rooms will be redesigned to provide sufficient space for the groups that use them, with separate facilities for faculty and staff in addition to varsity teams.

The men’s and women’s varsity basketball teams and the women’s varsity volleyball team will continue to play in the facility, with Voelkel Gym remaining largely intact and a new two-court practice and recreational gym added above the fitness area. Plans also include athletic training and equipment storage areas, three new team meeting rooms and individual offices for coaches and administrative staff.

Covid Update

COVID update

Slowly, Cautiously, the Reopening Begins

More than a year after Pomona—like so many colleges across the country—was forced to evacuate and close its campus in the face of the growing pandemic, there is finally a light at the end of the tunnel.

After a devastating fall and winter surge, COVID-19 case counts dropped dramatically in Los Angeles County through late February and early March, even as the pace of vaccination accelerated, generating a spirit of optimism in the College community.

County officials agreed in the early spring to first steps toward a limited re-opening of some campus facilities. It began, naturally enough, with outdoor spaces. For students living off campus in reach of Claremont, Pomona made plans to open outdoor facilities for recreational sports activities and physical conditioning. Haldeman Pool, the Pauley Tennis Complex and Strehle Track were set to open for current students, faculty and staff under a reservation system, President G. Gabrielle Starr announced in late February.

Colleges in Los Angeles County were not permitted to bring students back to campus during the spring, and so remote learning continued to be the only show in town. But looking forward, Starr said, Pomona is planning enthusiastically for the full return of students in the fall, with in-person instruction and on-campus living. “The campus is ready,” she said. “We are ready.”

With the county taking a highly restrictive approach to in-person higher education amid much of the pandemic, Pomona has taken the lead in advocating for college students with county officials to work for a responsible return to campus. “The young people who will build our future need to be given greater priority,” said Starr.

By early March, the county was sending positive signals for the return of students to campus for summer programs, and vaccination for higher education workers had begun. Student Health Services received its first small allotment of vaccines in this period, and Pomona faculty and staff were encouraged to seek their shots through the massive county vaccination effort as soon as possible.

As the College reached a turning point in one of the most sweeping crises in its      history, Starr noted the need to stop and mourn for those who lost their lives in the pandemic. “For some of us, the shock of loss is something we are just beginning to feel, and even for those who have been grieving for months now, the pain is still too fresh. In many ways, we are just beginning to absorb what has happened.”

She noted how “so many of our students saw their lives turned upside down. They— and our entire extended Sagehen community—responded with perseverance, ingenuity and grace in the face of the direst world crisis of most of our lifetimes.”

Starr also said she looked forward to the time—not so far away now—when the entire Sagehen family could be back together on campus.

“We are moving full steam ahead for the return of in-person education and on-campus living in the fall,” said Starr, noting that safety protocols would need to be carefully followed. “We will push forward with our mission of providing the most compelling and complete liberal arts education in the world.”

Updates: pomona.edu/coronavirus

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Jennifer Doudna ’85 holds up the gold medallion

Nobel in Gold — While speaking on the phone with her sister, Sarah Doudna, Jennifer Doudna ’85 holds up the gold medallion stamped with the profile of Alfred Nobel that represents the Nobel Prize. The photo was taken on Dec. 8, 2020,following a presentation ceremony in Berkeley, California, during which Doudna officially received her 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Normally, Nobel recipients receive their awards in Stockholm, from the hand of the king of Sweden, but due to the pandemic, all presentations were made locally. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, Pool)

COVID Clinic

COVID Clinic — One of the many changes at Pomona during the pandemic is the creation of an on-campus clinic in Rembrandt Hall focusing on COVID-19 issues. The clinic, managed by Hamilton Health Box, is staffed by two nurses—Stephanie Garcia-Barragan (left), who oversees the new health protocols for people on campus, and her assistant, Sarai Sanchez-Salas (right). (Photo by Jeff Hing)

“In Our Care: Institutional History in Material Form”

At the Museum — Titled “In Our Care: Institutional History in Material Form,” this exhibition is one of the first on display at the new Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. The exhibition was curated by Sam Chan ’22, Noor Tamari ’22 and Kali Tindell-Griffin ’22 as a summer research project under the supervision and partnership of museum director Victoria Sancho Lobis and Claire Nettleton, academic curator. Though the pandemic has made in-person visits to the museum impossible, the staff has been able to offer virtual tours of the show, which will remain in place until July. (Photo by Jeff Hing)

bobcat

bobcatNice Kitty — No, that’s not someone’s pet tabby hiding in the brush near Bridges Auditorium or scampering across the campus green. It’s a bobcat, another example of the local wildlife that has found its way onto the Pomona College campus during the College’s yearlong closure. The photos were taken by a local resident, 12-year-old David Lonardi, who spotted the bobcat while trying out his new camera near campus.

Compassion on Wheels

Meals on Wheels program

A new Meals on Wheels program, operating since November 2020 out of Pomona’s previously idle dining facilities, was designed with more needs than one in mind. In the midst of the pandemic, furloughed dining and catering staff prepare meals for 180 homebound seniors in the area. The result is mutually beneficial. Senior citizens receive breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, and furloughed staff are able to use their skills on a limited basis and be paid their regular wages.

The program is a partnership between Pomona College, the Hospitality Training Academy and UNITE HERE Local 11, a labor union that represents Pomona’s dining workers.

Staff members cook and package food and prepare the meals for delivery by the Hospitality Training Academy. Jose Martinez Jimenez, general manager of dining services, says a total of 22 furloughed staff members are working the county meal program—16 dining staff and six dining managers.

To ensure their safety during the pandemic, returning dining staff work in tightly controlled “bubbles” of two teams, are regularly tested for COVID-19 and follow strict health and safety guidelines and protocols, according to Robert Robinson, assistant vice president for facilities and campus services.

As of mid-January, more than 20,000 meals had been served. And we’re not talking about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches here. The cyclical menu includes plant-based meals such as mushroom ropa vieja, al pastor tofu with grilled pineapple, miso-glazed buckwheat soba noodles and other Sagehen favorites.

Catering chef Benigno Avina treasures this opportunity to use his talent, and he calls it one of his greatest experiences. “I’m so happy to be working in this program, helping people that really need help in these extraordinary times.”

The Coding Twins

Evelyn and Summer Hasama

Pandemic or not, Evelyn and Summer Hasama ’24 just keep on coding. The first-year twin sisters have already won first place not once but twice this academic year for apps they’ve developed together.

In November they won first place in the virtual 5C Hackathon for their app Event Check, which allows users to go through health and safety checks to gain access to a campus event. Even so, the sisters didn’t expect to win a month later when they presented their new app, called DonateIt, to a panel of judges from Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and Visa for a competition at the conclusion of their CodePath IOS mobile development course. “We honestly thought we had no chance of winning,” says Summer. “We were a team of two, while all the other teams had three or four—we were outnumbered. And we are just freshmen, while some of other students were juniors and seniors.”

DonateIt allows users to donate unwanted items to neighbors who might want them. Explaining their inspiration, the sisters said, “Instead of throwing things in the trash, we wanted to create something that would make use of these things by donating them to individuals within our community.”

Two to Tango

Two to Tango

It takes two to tango, even if they’re a thousand miles apart.

Members of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company have spent the last several months practicing their moves solo, but while physically apart because of the pandemic, the students have continued to practice and compete via a collaboration app called Discord.

“I knew I wanted the team to keep interacting and having some sort of plan, and after talking to the student officers from all 5Cs, they were the ones who said, ‘Discord is where it is at now,’” says Denise Machin, director of the ballroom dance company and assistant director of the Smith Campus Center. “That’s why we started Discord. They were the ones with the insight into what students need, and what they need is a platform to connect.”

To work around the company members’ being in multiple time zones, Zoom meetings are held on different days at various times so that more people have the opportunity to participate. Other colleges in the ballroom scene are hosting online group classes open to other collegiate dancers, and that’s giving “our students a chance to learn from people outside of our organization and build a community,” Machin says. “It’s really nice that the different campuses are supporting each other during this time.”

There were even opportunities to dance in virtual competitions, including the Zoom Ball on Halloween, where participants uploaded videos of their routines to be judged live—a way for them to safely receive feedback on their dancing. “It’s a difficult time, and I’m really impressed by the resilience of our students,” Machin says. “They are going through a lot and managing a lot, and I’m inspired by them. They are just good at this—they are so good at connecting online and coming up with creative ideas.”

Women in Math Award

Elena Kim ’21 has won a national undergraduate mathematics award after being selected as the recipient of the Alice T. Shafer Mathematics

Prize established by the Association for Women in Mathematics. The annual prize is presented to one undergraduate woman for excellence in the field. During her time at Pomona, Kim developed a strong research background and set of skills thanks to two summer research experiences for undergraduates (REU) programs. She did one REU at the University of Michigan-Dearborn the summer after her sophomore year and another, virtually, last summer through Williams College, working for Professor Steven J. Miller, who nominated her for the prize.

The Front Lines

The Front Lines

The Front Lines

It wasn’t the end, not by a long shot, but it felt like the beginning of the end.

“I was just at home. It was a weeknight, like 8 p.m.,” says Kate Dzurilla ’11, a nurse practitioner at NYU Langone hospital in New York who worked nights on a COVID-19 floor during the surge that brought freezer trucks to the city to serve as overflow morgues. “It just popped up on my phone. ‘You have an appointment to schedule. You’re eligible for the vaccine.’”

Clicking through quickly, Dzurilla scheduled the first available slot on Dec. 15. “And I just kind of started crying,” she says. “I wasn’t sure exactly what the emotion was, whether it was excitement or relief that it was over or, like, a little bit hopeful.”

On the other side of the country in Kirkland, Washington, Dr. David Siew ’98 works as an internal medicine hospitalist at EvergreenHealth Medical Center, where the first known U.S. outbreak of COVID-19 was identified in February 2020 as patients from the nearby Life Care Center skilled nursing facility streamed into the hospital with severe lower respiratory illness. The hospital would later lose an intensive care nurse to COVID-19. “A nurse that had been with us for a really long time and was a bedrock of all of our intensive care unit,” Siew says. “That was really hard, and obviously it highlighted our own vulnerability.”

On Christmas Eve, Siew and other hospital staff received their own first vaccines.

“It was amazing to see the emotion of people,” he says. “It was almost like a party atmosphere at our vaccine clinic because of the amount of relief and elation after living a year in a higher-risk environment, just knowing that the threat was always there, that you could fall critically ill or die from this illness. Obviously, the vaccine is not 100% protective, but to finally have some relief was euphoric, and hopefully we’ll be able to get that for everyone.”

Nurse practitioner Kate Dzurilla ’11 takes a selfie as she receives her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Nurse practitioner Kate Dzurilla ’11 takes a selfie as she receives her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

The first known U.S. case of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was identified on Jan. 20, 2020, in Washington’s Snohomish County in a 35-year-old man who had recently returned from Wuhan, China. “Patient Zero” would recover.

At the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Matt Wise ’01 monitored the reports. With a Ph.D. in epidemiology from UCLA, he has worked for the CDC for more than a dozen years and has risen to chief of the Outbreak Response and Prevention Branch in the division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases, typically focusing on illnesses caused by such pathogens as salmonella, E. coli and listeria.

“The reality is that almost every year, there’s some major public health disaster either at home or abroad,” he says.

Most are contained. This time was different.

The outbreak at the Life Care Center was identified after Dr. Francis Riedo, a former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer and the director for infection control and prevention at the hospital where Siew works, noted an expansion in testing eligibility beyond only those who had travel history or contact with someone who was infected. The hospital selected two seriously ill patients, sent out the tests, and uncovered what would become one of the first significant COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States.

But those illnesses among vulnerable elderly patients weren’t what stopped Wise cold: At about the same time, a 17-year-old high school student from nearby Everett, Washington, tested positive with no history of travel. “The moment that came out, you knew that there was extensive unrecognized community transmission going on,” Wise says. “I think seeing that confirmed everyone’s worst fears that this was being transmitted widely within the U.S. And I think that was the moment where it was just like, ‘OK, we’re not getting out of this. This is here, and it’s happening.’”

Back in New York, the virus hit early and hard.

“I got it right at the beginning, like March 16th. I tested positive,” Dzurilla says. “Thankfully it was mild, but there was so much anxiety, more than anything. Especially at that point, we didn’t really know what all the symptoms would be like. I lost my taste and smell on about Day 5 of being sick and no one had even known that was a symptom at that time. When I got it, we’d barely had any COVID patients. When I came back two weeks later after being sick, the hospital had exploded, and it was all COVID.”

In Los Angeles, Dr. Edgar Chavez ’98 had been monitoring the distant drumbeat of the deadly virus that emerged from Wuhan for months, but Los Angeles County did not record its first death until March 11, a woman who had traveled abroad.

Chavez earned a medical degree at Stanford before turning down a lucrative job offer and returning to the South L.A. neighborhood where he grew up after his family fled war-torn El Salvador. The Universal Community Health Center he opened on E. Washington Boulevard blocks from his childhood home was the first of three clinics he founded to meet the needs of the underserved, largely Spanish-speaking population.

It was a Monday in March, as Chavez recalls, when “I had a patient that came to see me, and he was having a bad cough, just not feeling really well. He had an appointment to come back a week after so that I could evaluate him again. And by Sunday I get a call from a community hospital that he had passed away from respiratory failure. This was a young 60-year-old guy. He had a little bit of diabetes, but not really to the level that I would say, oh, my God, you know, you are at such huge risk of dying from any type of disease. And so that’s when it hit me. You know what? This is going to be really bad.”

Workers exit a large tent set up in front of the emergency room at EvergreenHealth Medical Center, where Dr. David Siew ’98 experienced the first known outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. —AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Workers exit a large tent set up in front of the emergency room at EvergreenHealth Medical Center, where Dr. David Siew ’98 experienced the first known outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. —AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

At the initial U.S. epicenter of the disease, doctors at EvergreenHealth started a website recording their own experiences and responses to the new disease to share with medical colleagues around the U.S., Siew says.

But after the earliest days, when COVID associated with people who had the means to travel—or had interacted with people who traveled—began to fade, it became clear that the battle is against more than the disease itself, says the CDC’s Wise.

“The virus has found the soft underbelly of everything in our society, all of our public health system, our health care system, the inequities, racism—the virus sort of sees all of that,” says Wise. He has now served three COVID deployments from his home—the first last spring focused on identifying areas where transmission was increasing rapidly, the second in the fall working on community interventions such as how to protect people at polling places, and the most recent this winter focused on providing constantly updated vaccination data on the CDC COVID Data Tracker. “When you ask that question about whether I have been touched, well, I am one of the people who have the ability to work remotely and insulate ourseves from contact.”

Working from home “is not a luxury that lots of people have. It’s not a luxury that health care providers have, and it’s not a luxury that lots of people that have to go to a physical job every day have,” Wise says.

The disparities unfolded starkly in the South L.A. communities Chavez’s clinics serve. “A lot of our population historically has gotten poor health care, so they have lots of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease,” he says. “When they get COVID, it’s not a flu, it’s not a cold. It’s actually something that drives them to the hospital. We’re seeing a lot of deaths. In the past year, I’ve probably lost upwards of 15 to 20 patients to COVID—my own patients that I’ve seen over the past 10 years that I’ve been at the clinic.

“The reason that’s happening is because a lot of our community lives in multigenerational households, and so you’ll have the young that have to go out to work. They’re the people that work in restaurants and shops, where they’re the first line to deal with the public. And they’re repeatedly being exposed to COVID. The young may not have issues; they will get over the COVID. But the problem is that they’re taking this COVID back home, and they have grandpas and parents who have these high-risk conditions and end up getting COVID, and then they end up dying. A lot of our patients are undocumented too. They don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I am going to rely on the subsidies that the government gives for me to stay home, from unemployment.’ They don’t have access to that money. It’s a hard situation to see with our patients.”

Frustrated with waiting up to 10 days at one point for results from COVID tests sent out to labs—rendering them clinically useless, he says—Chavez made a decision to go big on testing that provides quick results. “You can tell people, ‘Hey, stay home,’ but if they don’t have a positive result, people are like, ‘Maybe I’m negative.’ They don’t really listen to you.”

With the help of $650,000 from the federal CARES Act, Chavez purchased a mobile van for testing, hired additional staff and ordered 200,000 of Abbott’s ID Now tests that provide a result in less than 15 minutes. The Universal clinics now provide three types of COVID tests—antibody, antigen and the rapid PCR test. In a typical month before the pandemic, the clinics might have had 2,000 patient visits. Now, he says, it’s 4,500 a month, in part because of access to testing.

Along with testing, Chavez transitioned many clinic visits to telephone or virtual with a simplified system called Doxy.me that allows people to simply click on a text for a video call rather than going through a portal or requiring a computer and Wi-Fi. That allowed both patients and his health care providers to limit contact.

With the arrival of the vaccine, Chavez pivoted again, quickly ordering vaccines and spending close to $10,000 on a used ultra-low-temperature freezer to store them.

Beyond L.A. County, Dr. Michael Sequeira ’73 faces some of the same demographic challenges and more in his role as San Bernardino County’s new public health officer—a job he started on Nov. 23, shortly before the devastating post-holiday surge.

The county is home to transportation and shipping hubs, farm workers, a large Indigenous population that includes the San Manuel and Morongo tribes and many Pacific Islanders, whose large and close-knit families have been hit hard by the virus.

As hospitals began to fill, Sequeira, a former emergency room doctor, stepped back in to assist in the emergency room for a bit, even though at 69 his age put him in a vulnerable group.

“Most of the hospitals in the region were bursting at the seams,” he says. “We were helping bring in State and National Guard to help our different hospitals. We were basically having to put ICU beds in gift shops and hospital cafeterias and lobbies.”

Since then, he has shifted his work to the immense logistical task of distributing vaccines in a county that covers more than 20,000 square miles and reaches to the Arizona and Nevada borders, making it the largest in the Lower 48 states.

Instead of creating vaccination mega-sites, as L.A. County did, San Bernardino adopted a hub-and-spoke system to reach a more dispersed population. Another challenge is overcoming vaccine hesitancy in the community. “I just had a feeling that was going to be a problem with this vaccine,” Sequeira says, recalling how about half of his nurses in years past had resisted flu vaccines. “From the start, I was trying to stay ahead because if we only had 50% of the people who are eligible taking the vaccine, we’d never reach herd immunity.”

To counter uncertainty stemming from concerns about the speed of the vaccine’s approval, the mRNA technology, politicization of the pandemic or other issues, San Bernardino embarked on a campaign of education and reassurance using social media, community town halls and spokespeople including Black doctors, Spanish-speaking doctors and tribal doctors.

There are also worries about variants, with the U.K. variant appearing in a small pocket of Big Bear Lake. “We had to jump all over that, and we’ve contained it,” Sequira says.

Matt Wise ’01

Matt Wise ’01 in his office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.—Photo by Dustin Chambers

By late February, as the U.S. marked the solemn toll of more than 500,000 dead, hints of hope emerged as cases declined rapidly—a suggestion, some said, that the U.S. had begun to achieve partial herd immunity. Many of those closest to the crisis are more cautious, saying it could be only a lull, cautioning against overreaction.

“I think everyone is eager for a return to some kind of normalcy,” says the CDC’s Wise. “I just think we have to be really careful that our eagerness to try and have some of that normalcy come back—to be able to see our grandparents and our friends and all that—doesn’t lead us to underestimate the virus. There are variants out there.

“I would say I’m optimistic for sure, but I think that we have to temper that optimism with some realism that having a vaccine is an incredibly important tool, maybe the most important tool, but it’s not the only one. And it’s necessary but probably not sufficient to get us over the line. We still have to do all the other stuff too.

“I think it’s really hard to predict what society is going to look like when this all ends. And frankly, I think even the notion of this ending, it’s hard to know what that even means. You know, we will probably have some amount of COVID-19 with us always now.”

Winning Inspiration

A bright idea from Christine Cannon ’23 may help light up the world in these dark days. It also won her a $25,000 award for tuition costs from the organizers of the Reimagine Challenge, sponsored by Schmidt Futures. The molecular biology major was one of 20 college and university students from around the world selected for their innovative solutions to the problems of building back from COVID-19 and sparking global movements for change. Cannon’s bright idea took the form of a virtual hub called WeCan, designed to keep users connected to a range of social justice movements. On the app, individuals will be able to receive updates and action items from the movements they care about in one centralized feed and create group message communities with friends and family where, together, they can share and track their action plans.