What is the role of creativity in steering the work of dancers, poets, scientists and activists? What follows is a condensed and collated conversation with four Pomona professors from different fields, drawing on themes about the practice and teaching of what it means to create.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies as well as gender and women’s studies, is a feminist academic, public policy expert and activist from the Dominican Republic.

Jane Liu, professor of chemistry professor, is also CEO of BRT Biotechnologies, a small-molecule drug discovery startup she co-founded with fellow Sagehen Greg Copeland ’96.

John Pennington, associate professor of dance, is the artistic director of Pennington Dance Group and ARC (A Room to Create) Pasadena after a career as a performer and teacher with the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, is the author of six collections of poetry, including Onement Won, to be published in September. She is a recipient of a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.

Q: Welcome, all. We’re interested in how you think about creativity. Is it innate? Is it a practice, something that can be summoned?

Pennington: I think this has been a question of the ages. You’ve often heard about “the muses descending” and all of these ways that people are creative, and no one can put their finger on it. Over the years, particularly working in a liberal arts college and through my own investigation and curiosity, I’ve found that creativity lies a lot in neuroscience.

There’s the prefrontal cortex; it’s the executive director. There’s also the “fight or flight” response of the sympathetic nervous system. So there’s a saying that creativity comes in the three B’s—the bed, the bath and the bar. If you look at the bed, the bath and the bar, those are three places that you relax and you feel safe, for the most part. The prefrontal cortex kind of shuts off. The “fight or flight” response is not active, either. A lot of artists have said that they have their most creativity before falling asleep or when they wake up, and that’s when the brain is partly shut down.

Q: That reminds me that Paul McCartney [of the Beatles] has said the melody of “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. Have any of you had ideas or solutions come to you that way?

Liu: I don’t know if I’ve solved the problem in my dream but when you’re sort of dozing, something might come in there. I actually will make sure I get up and go write it down. Maybe that’s the key, [since] I’d like to  sleep … I don’t want to stay up and work it out, but I don’t want to forget it, either!

Q: Jane, many of us think first of the arts when we think about creativity. But what is the role of creativity in the sciences?

Liu: Whenever you’re doing scientific research or trying to progress science forward, you’re never doing the same thing someone else did. It always has to be something new. You need to think: What is the question I even want to ask? That requires creativity. Then, how are you going to approach answering that question or testing your hypothesis? You and I could ask the exact same question but take two completely different approaches based on what inspired us at that time, what our background is, what we read that morning or the conversation we had down the hall. So pulling these different pieces together—and then fitting that into progressing science and doing scientific research—that, to me, is a creative process.

A visualization lab from the Human-Centered Design class

Design as Process for Impact

What is The Hive?

The Hive, more formally known as the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, aims to foster collaboration and innovation for students of the Claremont Colleges.

What does The Hive do?

The Hive is a design and innovation center that hosts courses and activities that are exploratory, collaborative, and experiential, including…

• full-credit courses in Human-Centered Design and Impact Innovation
• workshops and events that introduce alternative ways of engaging with the liberal arts
• makerspaces where students are given access to materials for building, prototyping, sewing, screen printing, woodworking, and music production
• courses from around the 7Cs

Who does The Hive work with?

The Hive offers human-centered design collaborations with a diverse variety of community partners, ranging from The LA Department of Health to LAist Public Radio and StoryHouse Ventures.

Get your organization involved!

Fred Bolarinwa (HMC ’25), Janny Wu (PZ ’25), Michelle Tran ’24, Cece Malone ’24

Q: Esther, what are some of the ways you experience creativity in the social sciences?

Hernández-Medina: The area where I use creativity the most is in my teaching. Especially during the pandemic, I really rethought and retooled all my classes. Pomona’s Information Technology Services and The Claremont Colleges Center for Teaching and Learning had all these workshops, and I took almost all of them. One way is putting together digital books: We use Pressbooks to collect students’ class papers. It makes them feel empowered as authors: “Oh, wait, I am publishing, this is so cool.” Some use the link in their graduate school applications. I also sometimes use the link to their papers in the digital book when I’m writing recommendation letters for them. The students are the ones who come up with the title for the book, the subtitles, the art for the cover. So that’s another way of making them reconnect with their creativity. In some of my classes, the final project is now a podcast about their papers, after learning how to produce and edit podcasts at The Hive.

Q: Prageeta, as a poet, how do you draw out creativity in your students?

Sharma: For me, creativity comes from reading and teaching and community and attachment. What is so much fun for me is this class on the theme of diaries and daybooks that I’m teaching now. My late husband was married prior to me, and he left me his first wife’s diary she had kept for many years in the 1990s before she died in 1998. She was a really stunning person and it’s a beautiful diary. He said, “Please write about her if you feel compelled to.” I also have his writings that he left me, notes for me to read after he passed. So in class we started talking about what diaries mean to us, what kind of writing we find there, and what we hope to imagine for ourselves with private writing. I try to bring questions and subjects and work I’m engaged with to my students, to think and work and share interests together. We nurture, I think, a safe classroom that becomes sacred to our writing and to our ideas of ourselves.

Q: You’ve been able to keep writing poetry at such difficult times in your life, publishing the collection Grief Sequence following the death of your first husband, Dale Sherrard, to cancer in 2015. You tragically lost your second husband, Mike Stussy, to cancer in 2023, and your upcoming collection Onement Won includes poems you wrote during his illness. It’s so common for people to try to shut everything out. Did you will yourself to continue writing? Or was it a form of therapy?

Sharma: You know, I feel lucky that Mike was so supportive of my writing poetry. He was always trying to make room for it even as we were in a caregiving situation. But I wanted to document my time with him, too. I see poetry as a record, and that it has a dailiness to it that is sacred.

Q: I’m often surprised at how many young people have suffered losses, a parent or a friend. Does sharing your experience bring out things the students may not have fully expressed before?

Sharma: Yes, students have disclosed to me personal loss, and what I hope to do is just to make them feel supported as best that I can. We think about the tradition of the elegy, the eulogy, the ode. We think about poetic forms as holding so much for them.

John Pennington teaches beginner dance students

Q: Several of you have mentioned the idea of a safe place to create, a safe place for students to be in general. John, tell us your thoughts on that.

Pennington: When I am teaching beginners, I know I have to eliminate the fear of them thinking that I’m going to make them dance. That wall is up immediately because they hear “dance” or “movement” and say, “I’m not a dancer.” But the feedback and what they tell other students is that this class is very safe. I know what that means.

I get at beginners through problem-solving, and part of that is improvisation. One of the first exercises is to walk anywhere in the room and then sometimes I guide them and tell them to change directions. Can you walk at a different level? Can you walk high or low? And already we’re addressing part of the art form, and that is space design, motion design and floor design.

You put limitations on that creativity, or what can get produced within that problem-solving. Because what happens in any art form, when you tell people, “Just go do anything you want,” it is frightening. You need entry points and guardrails, and you need to know where you’re headed. Hopefully that becomes something that’s embodied in the students so that they say, “What if I went up or down, or did a turn here?” We’re trying to put a language to movement and identify some of those movements so that they have a toolbox. During the semester, they get more and more comfortable. They know that I’m not going to ask them to put their leg up over their ears.

Q: I’m hearing again and again about safety, community, collaboration. Esther, you’re the co-founder of a group called Tertulia Feminista Magaly Pineda, a monthly gathering of Dominican feminists and activists, and you’re also involved with the work of Josefina Báez, a Dominican artist in multiple genres who developed a method she calls “performance autology.”

Hernández-Medina: Performance autology is a way to harness your creativity in whichever way you express it. It might be as an artist, but it might be as an intellectual or an activist. The output is different, but you are still creating something.

[Báez] also emphasizes that you are creating a work of art with your life, and that includes taking care of your health and taking care of yourself while doing art. Part of the reason she founded the group was because she was very concerned about the fact that many artists are socialized to believe that they should do art despite themselves. It’s this whole myth about having to be the tortured artist to actually be able to create. And she was like, “No, no, it’s the opposite. You need to take care of yourself, so that your art is sustainable, and so that your life is sustainable.”

Michael O’Malley at Chan Gallery during the closing reception of his exhibition.

O’Malley’s “Headless Object” Exhibit

A Professor of Art at Pomona, Michael O’Malley has focused his work on engaging the aesthetics and conventions that shape the built environment. His winter exhibit at the Chan Gallery reflects his belief in art as agency—that we all create from a position in which we “make choices and exert control over the material world.”

 

My exhibit tests out the possibility that, like objects, I am more akin to process: emerging, changing, disappearing. The ‘exhibition’ changes each day. Sometimes a new form is added. Other times a rearranging or a removal. Arrangements of flowers echo this continuum of change as a practice of engagement and witness.”

Q: Jane, what about teaching science students to think creatively and in
a safe environment?

Lane Liu in her laboratory

Liu: I still am figuring that out, because if you’re just saying, “Just do whatever you think of,” that could cause an explosion.

I think one of the challenges in science is you have to be able to understand some fundamental information first or know how to carry out some techniques. So there is a little bit of, “Know these facts; know how to carry out this protocol,” where I don’t think there’s a ton of creativity there. But you need that first stage to then be able to say, “Now just let your mind wander and be open.” Once you have a foundation, you can start thinking about creativity.

Q: I’m reminded that there is creativity in business, too. Besides being a full-time chemistry professor, Jane, you’re the co-founder of an early-stage startup, BRT Biotechnologies, in the area of drug discovery.

Liu: We are making a very specific class of small molecules called macrocycles. We’re trying to make large collections of these macrocycles to then sell to a pharmaceutical company or another biotech company, so that they can then find the next big thing.

Just being able to talk about and share the vision with others is a very creative process. There’s that 30-second elevator pitch and there’s that 20-minute deep dive you might prepare. There’s the website you might put together. There are all of these different audiences. And it’s constantly this creative process of, “How do I talk about what we’re doing in a way that gets other people excited or understanding what I’m feeling and understanding?” No one thing works. It’s a different sort of pitch if I’m talking to someone who has a background in biotech startups, versus someone who’s just excited about the science., versus someone who has no idea about small-molecule drug discovery,  versus someone who really just wants to know about the return on investment.

Q: Let’s close with a question about everyday creativity. There was a recent book by music producer Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, that was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. You don’t end up on the bestseller list for weeks and weeks because only artists are interested. Is that something you all believe—that everyone, not just the artist, is a creative being?

Pennington: I absolutely do. How do we get through the world without creativity? It’s about acknowledging it and giving yourself time to honor it. I don’t think many people who have been on one track their whole life have given themselves time. You know where it happens? It happens in retirement. All the hostels, all the painting classes, because they didn’t have time or they didn’t think they had time. You look at The New York Times bestsellers, there will be a book about creativity almost every year.

I do believe that everyone is creative, and that there are acts you can take every day. It’s about a moment in improvisation, about a different decision. It’s as simple as driving home a different way and seeing something new. It’s going to call upon a new response in the brain and challenge your senses. It’s stopping and allowing room for something else.

Serena Lin ’25

With Uplift Notes, this Sagehen wants to counter isolation for seniors—and maybe even slow the progression of Alzheimer’s.

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Connection? There’s An App For That

How Neuroscience Research Can Inform Intergenerational Conversation

By Lorraine Wu Harry ’97

In an age of pervasive social isolation, Serena Lin ’25 thinks that cultivating connection through conversation is something that’s still very much in the cards.

Her cards are called “Uplift Notes,” and she’s sold more than 200 boxes of them. A neuroscience major, she tested her deck on several hundred people of all ages, with a particular focus on bridging the generational gap between young adults and senior citizens, a group particularly susceptible to isolation and loneliness.

At Pomona, Lin studies Alzheimer’s disease, which has afflicted both her late great-grandfather and her great-aunt. She says that her work has helped her realize that Alzheimer’s treatment is not just about diet and medication, but social engagement.

During her sophomore year, Lin enrolled in a human-centered design course at The Hive, a design center at The Claremont Colleges (see sidebar on page 24). This class, and the mentorship of Hive executive director Fred Leichter, provided the support to create Uplift Notes to help facilitate more social interaction.

To develop the product, Lin consulted with several neuroscience faculty and alumni experts who gave her insights on the complexity of Alzheimer’s, including her thesis advisor and Assistant Professor Jonathan King, Professor Karen Parfitt and Daniel Gibbs ’73, author of A Tattoo on my Brain: A Neurologist’s Personal Battle against Alzheimer’s Disease. Her ongoing testing of the game has included working with Lyn Juckniess ’74 at Pilgrim Place, a retirement community in Claremont. Uplift Notes also has been used at Pomona’s Alumni Weekend and Bridging the Gap, a program Lin participated in that addresses religious and political polarization.

Uplift Notes game by Serena Lin ’25

Lin is now working on a version of the toolbox specifically for individuals with neurological challenges such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The 2.0 edition is part of what’s driving her senior thesis on social engagement for Alzheimer’s patients, with a focus on trying to reduce feelings of anxiety and loneliness.

Her ultimate desire is to get the toolbox into the hands of as many Alzheimer’s support groups, hospitals and senior centers as possible. But she also hopes that people of all ages and backgrounds will make use of Uplift Notes as a social engagement tool that’s “good for your well-being, longevity and brain health.”

 

Growing up as a Boston Red Sox fan, Melissa Hooke ’19 never imagined herself celebrating a championship at Yankee Stadium. Yet there she was, cheering as the “Commissioner’s Trophy” was raised into a beautiful October night sky in the Bronx. Hooke, a senior quantitative analyst with the Los Angeles Dodgers, had just become a World Series champion.

Strangely enough, baseball wasn’t even her second favorite sport growing up. Hooke was recruited for basketball but also played soccer at Pomona. “I was looking at small liberal arts schools in New England, then visited Pomona and fell in love with campus,” she says. “Last minute, before early decision deadlines, I applied.”

She played midfield in soccer and guard in basketball, sometimes juggling both seasons. “Especially with our [soccer] team—we made the NCAA tournament a couple of times, so I’d join basketball midseason and have to catch up fast.”

Though an accomplished athlete, Hooke prioritized academics. “For me, it was always school first and then sports as an add-on.”

Like many incoming first years, Hooke wasn’t sure what she wanted to major in at Pomona, but after taking math and psychology courses, she ultimately declared as a math major.

“It was really my junior fall semester when I took a class with Jo Hardin [that] I decided that I really did love math and that there were career paths that attracted me,” she says.

Hooke’s time in the math department also brought her in contact with Associate Professor Gabe Chandler, a former Sagehens baseball coach who built an impressive pipeline to Major League Baseball—not for athletes, but for data analysts. Alongside his colleagues, Chandler has seen a remarkable number of graduates land roles in professional baseball analytics. Though he became Hooke’s thesis advisor, he never pushed her toward the sport.

“I don’t think I ever mentioned working in baseball, other than [sharing that] such career paths exist, as we’ve had a lot of alumni working in that space,” Chandler says.

Hooke and Chandler’s connection extended beyond academics. Athletics took a backseat for Hooke after knee injuries ended her college career, but she joined Chandler’s intramural basketball team, “which made a deep run in the playoffs, with Melissa hitting at least one game-winner,” Chandler recalls.

Academically, Hooke thrived under Chandler’s mentorship, earning Best Paper at the 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Aerospace Conference for her thesis on Bayesian modeling.

A junior-year internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology introduced Hooke to aerospace analytics, leading to a full-time offer before her graduation in 2019. While her foray into aerospace wasn’t necessarily expected, the position fit like a glove.

“I was working on early mission concepts and designs,” Hooke says. “Basically, they’d come up with some crazy idea and say, ‘we want to fly a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere and figure out what the composition is. And we want to fly these four science instruments.’ I would help the team come up with that architecture and estimate the cost based on previously flown historical NASA missions.”

Hooke spent five years at JPL, enjoying the space industry before an opportunity with the Dodgers emerged: A former JPL colleague working for the Dodgers and aware of her sports background sent her a job listing and “wouldn’t let [her] get away with not applying.”

Hooke started with the Dodgers near the end of the 2023 season, just as the team finished with the third-best regular-season record, only to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Heading into 2024, expectations were high.

Among Hooke’s duties as part of the 2023-24 analytics team: crunching the numbers to evaluate effectiveness of pitchers lower in the Dodgers’ depth chart.

“I think this year was a challenging year for the Dodgers, in some ways, with all the expectations. Obviously, the team dealt with a lot of injuries. And as an analytics department, we had experienced a few disappointing seasons leading up to this. So, going into the playoffs, there’s a lot of angst in the office. People are really nervous. A lot of people are too nervous to watch the games.”

Hooke’s Dodgers job is about removing emotions from decision-making in areas
such as player evaluation, game strategy and team management. She primarily works on pitcher evaluation.

“Math has pushed the game of baseball forward. As we get more data, we’re able to uncover more about why certain players are good,” she explains. “For pitching mechanics, we track pitcher movement, and teams can use that data to extract information about delivery mechanics—when a delivery leads to better outcomes, worse outcomes or even injury. That’s how we’re helping teams move forward.”

While analytics can clash with instinct and tradition, Hooke sees growing acceptance of its role.

“At the Dodgers, the coaches [and] executives really buy into it,” she says. “We have a culture of accepting it, and that trickles down to the players.”

That buy-in led to another successful regular season as the Dodgers finished with the best record in the MLB. But injuries left their pitching staff short-handed in the postseason. Part of Hooke’s job was to identify pitchers in the lower ranks who could contribute to a World Series-winning team.

Melissa Hooke ’19 at Dodgers–Yankees game in New York.

The Dodgers made it to the World Series, and Hooke found herself on a team-chartered plane heading to New York. After falling behind 5-0 in Game 5, she recalled the team’s resolve.

“I think we kind of just said ‘well, we’ll get it done in L.A.’ And then, as the fifth inning progressed and we started coming back, we said ‘let’s just finish this off.’”

The Dodgers did finish it off, winning 7-6, and Hooke became a World Series champion.

“It was a bit of relief, but also just pent-up from the last few years,” she says. “Having a disappointing postseason ending before, everyone expected us to [disappoint again]. It was a celebration. It was different being in New York, but I’m glad that we were because it just tied together that magical experience.”

After college Desiree (Golen) Wicht ’08 created a bestselling Tetris app, launched a pop-up restaurant startup, scrubbed the decks of John Kerry’s $100 million yacht and then quit the landlocked life entirely in 2014 when, within three months of meeting her partner Jordan Wicht, she decided to travel the globe in a 50-year-old, 30-foot sailboat—having never before hoisted a single jib.

Over the last decade the Wichts have cataloged the trials and tribulations of boat life through weekly YouTube videos as “Project Atticus,” with roughly 300,000 subscribers following their adventures doing everything from spearing hogfish in Belize, to fleeing Turkish warships, to spending the pandemic off-grid in Panama, to giving birth to their daughter Isabella on the island of Malta.

“We went on this adventure because we wanted the freedom to be able to go anywhere from the comfort of our economical, sustainable, floating home,” Desiree says. “As the tiny-home mantra goes, ‘the world gets a lot bigger when you’re living small.’”

Desiree (Golen) Wicht ’08 and her husband Jordan Wicht spent more than half of the last decade on their 30-foot sailboat Atticus, braving hurricanes, Turkish warships and even pirates.

Along the way, Desiree transformed from a 20-something who’d never touched a screwdriver, to a seasoned seafarer bartering her boat-repair skills for groceries. She and Jordan had to wear an array of hats ranging from carpentry to amateur meteorology, all while dealing with unusual professional hazards like running out of water and evading Honduran pirates. (The team bootstrapped the 10-year project via merchandise sales, video sponsors, several side hustles and thousands of annual donations from followers on YouTube and Patreon.)

“We operated on the adage that, in 20 years, we’d likely be more disappointed by the things that we didn’t do than by the things we did,” says Desiree.

Desiree (Golen) Wicht ’08 on bow of Atticus sailboat

As of this fall, the Wichts have returned to solid ground—a decision brought about by the imminent birth of their second daughter Scarlett in January of 2025. After a few months exploring different areas of Appalachia, the couple decided to settle in Bryson City, North Carolina, nestled in the Smoky Mountains—and they continue to film and release weekly videos as they build a mountain homestead DIY-style. While Desiree has no regrets about their time on the water, she says that she’s very happy to be back on dry land for this next chapter of life.

“I always thought of myself as a traveler who needed to see and experience the world to feel fulfilled,” she says.“But what surprised me the most about our travels is that after a while I started to really understand how special my own home, my own family, and my own country is to me. Now I’m excited to make roots, without feeling like I’m missing out on what’s ‘out there’ anymore.”