Class Acts

New Registrar

September 30, 2021  by Staff Comments Off on New Registrar
Erin Michelle Collins

Erin Michelle Collins

The College’s new registrar, Erin Michelle Collins, started in July and comes to Pomona after serving in the same role at California Institute of the Arts. Prior to CalArts, Collins worked in positions of increasing responsibility within admissions and records at the University of La Verne, Victor Valley College and Barstow Community College.

Collins holds a bachelor’s degree in social psychology from Park University in Missouri and a master’s in psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. She arrives at Pomona a century after Charles Tabor Fitts became Pomona’s first full-time registrar in 1921, at a time when enrollment was just over 700 students and The Claremont Colleges consortium was yet to exist.

Today, Collins says, registrars’ work reaches beyond student and academic records management to include running student information systems and providing data that drives policy and improves student success. Most importantly, “a registrar has to be service-oriented, as retention and student success is directly related to how connected a student feels to their institution,” says Collins, “As the registrar, I can directly impact this connection.”

Wig Awards

September 30, 2021  by Staff Comments Off on Wig Awards

Every year, juniors and seniors nominate professors for the Wig Awards, Pomona College’s highest honor for excellence in teaching, concern for students, and service to the College and community. During an extraordinary year of remote instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic, six faculty members were elected by juniors and seniors and confirmed by a committee of trustees, faculty and students.

The 2021 recipients are:

  • Eleanor Birrell,
    assistant professor of computer science
  • Erica Dobbs,
    assistant professor of politics
  • Phyllis Jackson,
    associate professor of art history
  • Joanne Nucho,
    assistant professor of anthropology
  • Kara Wittman,
    assistant professor of English
  • Yuqing Melanie Wu,
    professor of computer science
Eleanor Birrell

Eleanor Birrell

Erica Dobbs

Erica Dobbs

Phyllis Jackson

Phyllis Jackson

Joanne Nucho

Joanne Nucho

Kara Wittman

Kara Wittman

Yuqing Melanie Wu

Yuqing Melanie Wu

Each of this year’s recipients is a first-time winner, except for Jackson, who was previously honored in 2003, 2010 and 2015.

In Memoriam—William Wirtz

March 23, 2021  by Staff Comments Off on In Memoriam—William Wirtz

William Wirtz

William Wirtz
Emeritus Professor of Zoology and Biology
1937–2020

William Wirtz, emeritus professor of zoology and biology,  died at home on Dec. 24, 2020, after a long illness. He was 83.

Wirtz was born in New Jersey on Aug. 16, 1937. He attended Rutgers University, where he studied ecology under one of the nation’s foremost experts, graduating in 1959. At Cornell University, he did his postdoctoral research on the habits of the Polynesian rat in the leeward Hawaiian Islands. He received his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology in 1968. He joined Pomona College the same year in September, teaching until his retirement in 2003.

As a child, Wirtz enjoyed wandering the woods and taking a boat to the nearby salt marsh to study the wildlife. “I was the kid who brought home mice and snakes. And I never stopped,” he told the Pomona College Magazine in 2003 interview.

At Pomona, Wirtz was responsible for   establishing, maintaining and upgrading Pomona’s animal care facility and program. He was also known for his two 10-foot snakes, a reticulated python and a boa, which on at least two occasions over the years had escaped the classroom. (Both snakes were found shortly after their escapes, and eventually were both rehomed to wildlife centers).

Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Rachel Levin remembers Wirtz as an institution within Pomona’s Biology Department. “He was totally at home in the wilderness and he was a skilled and passionate naturalist,” she says. “He had a way of engaging students and turning them on to natural world … He took many generations of Pomona students on unforgettable  adventures to Pitt Ranch and the Granite Mountains.”

One of those students, Audrey Mayer ’94, now a professor of ecology and environmental policy at Michigan Technological University, credits Wirtz for launching her career. “I knew I liked biology, but I had no idea what to do after in terms of a career. He’s the one who encouraged me to get a Ph.D., which was not on my radar at all. I have a book coming out in March on the gnatcatcher—that was a book that started with him.”

Julie Hagelin ’92, now a senior research scientist for the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says Wirtz was the first person who made her realize she could do field biology. She learned the step-by-step process of handling small mammals on her first day working as his student assistant—a skill she took with her to graduate school. “It was like he opened a door to a secret world of biology: in the bushes and brush, with these little animals that are only active at night.”

Retired doctor Sharon Booth ’78 shares the same feeling. “Wirtz’s ecology 101 course awakened my eyes to the natural world and the joy of learning about its complexities.” Booth went on to work for Wirtz, spending at least one summer in the chaparral trapping rodents for population surveys.

Joel Brown ’80, now an emeritus professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago, was also one of Wirtz’s early protégés. “I’d always loved ecology, had always loved nature, but had no idea that extending one’s love for nature could be a career.”

“Bill was a nonstop documentary and encyclopedia who taught us all these techniques, and can you believe it, we were being paid!” Brown became a student worker for Wirtz and learned how to trap small animals, put radio collars on raccoons and coyotes, band red-tailed hawks and noose lizards. “It was completely transformative. I went home and told my folks I finally knew what I wanted to do. I want to be an ecologist. And so, from that day forward, Bill offered me amazing opportunities.”

“He was an outdoors guy, a  classic mud-and-boots ecologist,” says Brown. “Bill Wirtz was one of the foundational mentors in my life; without him, all the other sequences of my life would not have happened.”

Wirtz was a longtime member of the Mt. Baldy Volunteer Fire Department and lived in the mountains with his wife, Helen, for many years. In the 1980s, he studied habits of coyotes who scavenged in the foothills of Claremont and Glendora, even adopting a rescued coyote. He did extensive work on the distribution of rodent populations in the San Dimas Experimental Forest and studied the nesting habits of the endangered California gnatcatcher that lives in endangered coastal sage scrub. These were just some of his many field research interests over the decades.

After retiring from Pomona in 2003, Wirtz and his wife became involved in equine rescue, including rescuing horses during fires, and served on the board of  the Inland Valley Humane Society for  some time. He also became more involved in one of his favorite hobbies: Civil War  reenactments.

Wirtz leaves behind a large legacy of Pomona ecologists and biologists. “There’s  a lot of us around who got that start in our careers working for him,” says Mayer.

Wirtz is survived by his wife, Helen, and a son, William.

A Clue to Blocking the Virus

December 3, 2020  by Staff Comments Off on A Clue to Blocking the Virus

virusUnderstanding how to stop the novel coronavirus from attacking cells and the immune system is a challenge that scientists around the world are facing as they race against the clock to create treatments and vaccines to fight the pandemic. According to new research from Pomona College, Caltech and DePaul University, one key to unlocking that puzzle may have been found in the effect of metal ions on a pair of the novel coronavirus’s proteins—the virus’s main protease, known as 6LU7, and the protein in the virus’s spikes, known as 6VXX.

In an article published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, Pomona College Professor of Chemistry Roberto Garza-López, DePaul University Professor of Chemical Physics John Kozak and Caltech Professor of Chemistry Harry B. Gray have shared their findings in order to contribute to the worldwide effort to end the pandemic. Titled “Structural stability of the SARS-CoV-2 main protease: Can metal ions affect function?” the article was picked by the journal’s editor to be part of a special issue to celebrate the publication’s 50th anniversary.

Using computational techniques employed in Garza-López’s lab and experimental results obtained in Gray’s lab, the team began working in February on the properties of these two pieces of the novel coronavirus. The virus uses its spike protein, 6VXX, to attach itself to human cells. Then, like a pair of molecular scissors, the protease, 6LU7, activates the virus by cutting its large polyproteins into smaller segments that can attack human cells. Both proteins are key to the virus’s ability to replicate.

Through almost daily research via Zoom discussions, computational modeling and experiments, the researchers have discovered that several metals—including certain ions of zinc, copper and cobalt—could inhibit the normal functioning of those two vital pieces of the virus’s protein. Inhibiting either the attachment of the virus or the catalytic action that activates it could prevent the virus from wreaking havoc on individual cells and, ultimately, the immune system.

“The purpose of knowing the mechanism to inhibit the SARS-CoVid-2 virus is to guide the design of COVID-19-specific therapeutics and vaccines suitable for mass immunization,” says Garza-López. “Drug design will focus on the ability to stop the novel coronavirus before it attaches to human cells or reproduces itself. That’s why we believe the contribution of our last two papers and this one that was just accepted will be able to say something about this mechanism.”

The research team had already been studying the family of coronaviruses for a while before the global pandemic caused by the new coronavirus began. Then, in early February, a team of Chinese scientists shared the crystal structure of protein 6LU7 in the Protein Data Bank, an open-access digital data resource available to scientists around the world, with the aim of promoting scientific discovery. One day after 6LU7 was deposited by the Chinese team, Garza-López pulled the data to begin his work.

“I visualize the protein, and we go piece by piece and identify different pockets in which we can stop either the attachment of the virus or the catalyzation that is responsible for the polyprotein that will inject the machinery into the cell to replicate and destroy the immune system,” he explains. “Many simulations are performed daily to get the right inhibiting mechanism.”

As COVID-19 swept the world and turned into a global pandemic, Garza-López and Gray took to Zoom to conduct daily research meetings. Garza-López also oversaw 13 student researchers during the summer, including both students at Pomona College and high school students in Pomona’s summer enrichment program, known as PAYS. “Computational research has not slowed down, in spite of spending considerable time at improving my teaching online and having five PAYS students and eight Pomona College undergraduates this summer,” he says, adding that the students have had all the means necessary to continue their work uninterrupted without having to meet in person or put each other at risk.

“The new coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 illness is very unique. It’s very easy to transmit, which makes it more dangerous than the other coronaviruses, especially when it mutates and improves its efficiency,” says Garza-López. “We are interested in how its protein structure behaves and its points of weakness as well as the recent D614G mutation that has increased its efficiency of transmission 10 times.”

Garza-López, Gray and Kozak have a long history of studying proteins, how they interact, how they fold and unfold, how they react with certain metallic elements. Prior to their interest in coronaviruses, the team was working on the folding and unfolding of the proteins azurin and cytochrome C’ and energy transfer in special molecules called dendrimers. The improper unfolding of proteins has been linked to cancers and other diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Together in Cyberspace

December 3, 2020  by Staff Comments Off on Together in Cyberspace

With the College closed for the fall semester and all instruction temporarily online, Pomona faculty have relied on a range of technologies to teach their classes and build community among their students. —Photos by Jeff Hing

Chemistry Professor Jane Liu conducts a Zoom class in Biochemistry from her office in Seaver North.

Chemistry Professor Jane Liu conducts a Zoom class in Biochemistry from her office in Seaver North.

Giovanni Molina Ortega

Theatre Professor Giovanni Molina Ortega accompanies students in his Musical Theatre class from a piano in Seaver Theatre.

German Professor Hans Rindesbacher

German Professor Hans Rindesbacher puts a group of beginning German students through their paces from his office in Mason Hall.

New Knowledge

June 24, 2020  by Staff Comments Off on New Knowledge

Studying Stress During a Pandemic

Studying Stress During a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic—and the personal and financial emergencies that accompany it—are causing heightened levels of stress and anxiety across all demographics. In the U.S. alone, the pandemic has touched the lives of millions, and the economic halt has led to record-high unemployment.

To study the effect these stressful events are having on the people living through them, Professor of Psychological Science Patricia Smiley has received a $164,138 research grant from the National Science Foundation. Her study will explore the changes in stress response in adults and children brought on by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The one-year study titled “The COVID-19 Pandemic and Changes in the Stress Response: Identifying Risk and Resilience in Adults and Children” is a collaboration with Professors Stacey Doan of Claremont McKenna College and Cindy Liu of Harvard Medical School. The researchers will focus on acute and chronic stress, the transmission of stress between caregivers and their children, and risk and resilience factors associated with exacerbating or reducing stress.

The research team will capitalize on an ongoing longitudinal study of stress and adaptation of 150 families with young children in Los Angeles County. “The pandemic will allow us to address fundamental questions about the effects of chronic stress that we would not otherwise be able to answer,” says Smiley. “Uncertainty is something our brains dislike and that’s when we see increased cortisol production, a stress hormone, in our study participants. In our original study, we saw heightened cortisol levels in those participants who are not able to quickly adapt to stressful situations, so in the time of the current pandemic, they may be more susceptible to chronic stressors, showing higher cortisol levels and poorer psychological health.”

Gaze Sharing and Remote Work Collaboration

During the coronavirus pandemic, working remotely has become, in some cases, the only way for many workplaces to continue to function. That has added a new urgency to a line of research that Alexandra Papoutsaki, assistant professor of computer science, was already pursuing before the pandemic began. To continue her work, she recently was awarded a $105,572 National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant, which she will use to study gaze sharing in support of more effective remote work collaboration.

Gaze sharing, in which collaborators can see where each other’s gaze is directed on a shared screen, has been shown to have a positive effect in various visual tasks such as writing and programming.

Studying a person’s gaze is significant because it is a sign of human attention and intention and has a central role in workplace coordination and communication. Through eye tracking, researchers can assess eye movements to determine where a person is looking, what they are looking at and for how long they look at a screen.

Researchers like Papoutsaki have been developing tools to lessen some of the problems encountered in remote collaborations.

Papoutsaki’s two-year study aims to better understand gaze sharing and examine previously overlooked dimensions of remote collaboration. First, she will investigate the effect of the choice of the communication channel—either audio or video-based communication that is used in conjunction to gaze sharing in the screen collaboration process. Second, she will seek to understand how the awareness of someone else’s gaze affects groups of up to six remote collaborators that go beyond the traditionally studied pairs.

Modeling the Next Gravitational Wave Detector

“Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in space and time that Einstein himself thought people would not be able to measure,” Professor of Physics Thomas A. Moore explains. “But now they have been measured, and that promises a lot of interesting astronomy to be done in the future.”

Moore has received a $145,223 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop, test and share a computer application that simulates how future gravitational wave detectors would react to binary star systems. Moore’s three-year project, “Adding Spin to a Gravitational Wave Detector Simulator,” will create undergraduate summer research opportunities beginning in 2021 that expand on his work with Yijun “Ali” Wang ’19, now a graduate student in physics at Caltech. The project was “partly inspired by the interest that a lot of my students have because of the recent detection of gravitational waves,” Moore says, referring to the historic 2015 observation that led to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne.

The 2015 observation of waves created by a collision between two black holes was accomplished through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which consists of two U.S.-based facilities, one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Each facility has two arms that stretch 2½ miles in different directions and use vacuum systems, lasers and mirrors to detect gravitational waves.

Moore, who has taught physics at Pomona since 1987, has been particularly interested in a planned space-based gravitational wave detector known as LISA, for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, and notes that a detector built of satellites would have certain advantages over those on Earth. Computer modeling would allow scientists to evaluate potential designs before undertaking such massive projects.

Developing New Chemical Reac­tions for Drug Discovery

Nitrogen-based sulfur compounds such as sulfonamides, sulfamides and sulfamates are important compounds that have therapeutic applications against cancer, HIV and microbial infections. But existing approaches to making these compounds are limited by the commercial availability of the starting materials and by harsh chemical reactions that prevent late-stage functionality of the compounds.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Nicholas Ball has received a $394,145 research enhancement grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to focus on the development of new chemical reactions that can facilitate drug target discovery using sulfur (VI) fluorides. For this three-year grant, Ball will work with an industry collaborator, Pfizer’s Christopher am Ende, and Chapman University’s Maduka Ogba. This collaboration will expand opportunities for Pomona College students to gain research experiences at Pfizer and in computational chemistry.

Ball’s lab has been working on sulfur-fluoride exchange chemistry, which is a promising new pathway to synthesize sulfur-based compounds by using easy-to-handle starting materials such as inexpensive Lewis acid salts and organic-based catalysts. The successful implementation of the research proposed for this grant will represent a considerable advance over current methods that rely on starting materials that are challenging to synthesize or isolate.

Equally important is the industry research experience that undergraduate students will gain from this research. The work in this proposal will expose them to biomedical research with significant focus on synthesis and medicinal chemistry.

Exploring the History of Environmental Law

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s highly competitive New Directions Fellowships are awarded annually to exceptional faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to acquire systematic training that pushes the edges of their own disciplinary background. One of the recipients this year is Aimee Bahng, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies.

Through this $285,000 grant, Bahng will explore where property law and environmental law overlap or diverge, a path of inquiry which has taken her into legal terrain that is straining her disciplinary training in literary studies and feminist theory.

Working at the interstices of environmental justice, feminist science studies, and Indigenous Pacific and transnational Asian American studies, Bahng proposes to study the history of environmental law around oceanic bodies of water. She plans to analyze how human governance of the environment emerged out of Western liberal humanistic concepts of property. It questions whether the property-based origin of our existing legal framework can be an effective lens through which to legislate the oceanic commons; it will also explore historical determinations of who and what is able to bear rights.

Bahng hopes to spend at least part of her fellowship time pursuing coursework in environmental law at Lewis and Clark Law School, native Hawaiian law at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa, and indigenous law at the University of Victoria in Canada.

Wig Awards 2020

June 24, 2020  by Staff Comments Off on Wig Awards 2020
From top: Aimee Bahng, Tom Le, Jane Liu, Jorge Moreno, Gilda Ochoa and Alexandra Papoutsaki

From top: Aimee Bahng, Tom Le, Jane Liu, Jorge Moreno, Gilda Ochoa and Alexandra Papoutsaki

Six professors have been selected to receive the 2020 Wig Distinguished Professor Award for excellence in teaching. The award is the highest honor bestowed on Pomona College faculty, recognizing exceptional teaching, concern for students and service to the College and community. Here’s a list of this year’s recipients, along with anonymously written nomination comments from their students:

Aimee Bahng
Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies

“Professor Bahng is one of the most intellectually generous people I have ever met. Her courses are fascinating, excellent discussions that I feel have contributed to my growth as a person. She masters the difficult dance of encouraging rigorous intellectual work while recognizing the strangeness of academia as an elite space (particularly in the context of Gender and Women’s Studies).”

Tom Le
Assistant Professor of Politics

“I met Professor Le my sophomore year in an upper division international relations class. At first, I was intimidated by his candor and overwhelming expertise on the subject of East Asian politics. However, in the span of a few weeks, I realized how lucky I was to have the chance to take one of his classes. Professor Le has always pushed me to be better, work harder and care more. His leadership style is inspiring, and Pomona is lucky to have him as faculty. Thank you, Professor Le, for always encouraging me to be a better scholar, student and friend.”

Jane Liu
Associate Professor of Chemistry

“It’s amazing how a professor can make such a big difference in your academic experience, even if you only see them once a week for lab. Professor Liu is not only extremely knowledgeable and a talented scientist, but she is also one of the kindest human beings I have ever met.”

Jorge Moreno
Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

“Professor Moreno has completely reimagined the possibilities of the STEM classroom. His teaching style and commitment to students—particularly students that have been historically excluded from STEM spaces—makes him one of the most beloved professors at Pomona. In his short time at the College, Professor Moreno has made an impactful impression on students from all disciplines. He is truly an advocate for his students.”

Gilda Ochoa
Professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies

“Gilda Ochoa is the most deserving faculty member for this award because she is always available for students regardless of their major or background. Gilda Ochoa is the person to ask you how you are feeling rather than how you are doing. She will listen to you and make you feel heard and cared for. Her research advances social justice by centering underrepresented voices.”

Alexandra Papoutsaki
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

“I was not the best computer science student and was never going to end up going very far in it, but Professor Papoutsaki still worked hard to make sure I understood things. Some people who are as evidently smart as she is in a given field aren’t able to make things accessible to those who don’t share their knowledge, but she can. I think it shows not just her talent for teaching, but what a genuinely great person she is.”

New Director of Athletics Joins Sagehen Team

June 24, 2020  by Staff Comments Off on New Director of Athletics Joins Sagehen Team
Miriam Merrill

Miriam Merrill

Innovative and accomplished athletics administrator Miriam Merrill will lead Pomona-Pitzer Athletics into its next era after being selected as director of athletics following a national search.

Merrill, previously the associate director of athletics at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, also served as interim director of Hamilton’s NCAA Division III program for four months in 2019. She starts at Pomona-Pitzer on July 1, and also will be professor and chair of the Department of Physical Education at Pomona College, overseeing the joint athletic department’s activity classes, faculty/staff fitness and wellness program, intramural/club sport and recreation programs and academic offerings.

“Miriam is a collaborative and inspiring leader, and I’m confident she has both the vision and the experience to help take Pomona-Pitzer athletics to the next level,” said Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr.

Merrill brings broad experience in athletics and academia to Claremont. She earned a Ph.D. in the psychology of human movement at Temple University in 2019, and previously has served as an athletics director at Richard J. Daley College, a Chicago community college, and as head coach of women’s track and field at Robert Morris University in Chicago. As an athlete, she was an NCAA Division I All-American in track and field for the University of Cincinnati in 2001 and was inducted into the university’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 2012.

Baseball by the Numbers

March 4, 2020  by Robyn Norwood Comments Off on Baseball by the Numbers

Rapsodo device provides pitching data that includes velocity, spin rate and vertical and horizontal breakGATHERED ON THE pitcher’s mound during class, Pomona College students feed balls into a pitching machine, then quickly glance down at an iPad.

On the ground between them and home plate is a boxlike device called a Rapsodo, a $4,000 radar-based system that provides data not only on pitch velocity, but also spin rate, spin axis, horizontal and vertical break, 3D trajectory and a strike zone analysis.

The Rapsodo device provides pitching data that includes velocity, spin rate and vertical and horizontal break.

Welcome to PE 086: Baseball Analytics, a new course taught by Frank Pericolosi, a professor of physical education and coach of the Pomona-Pitzer baseball team.

The class formalizes what has emerged as a notable career path for Pomona alumni: More than a dozen graduates or current students have put backgrounds in mathematics and computer science to work for Major League Baseball teams analyzing the game-changing explosion of data in baseball.

They’re following a trail blazed by Guy Stevens ’13, a former Sagehens pitcher and math major who has risen to senior director of research and development/strategy for the Kansas City Royals. He was on staff for a World Series championship in 2015, less than three years after working with Math Professor Gabe Chandler to publish a statistical analysis of minor league data.

“Talking to Guy [Stevens] over the years, I ask, ‘What do we need to be doing on campus to make these kids better candidates for these internships and for these jobs?’” Pericolosi says. “He gave some suggestions in terms of, ‘They need to be doing creative, innovative projects on their own.’ The driving force for getting this technology on campus was initially to help our kids who want to go into analytics. Also, we’re in a heavy-data era of baseball even more so than before, and it’s going to give us good data to evaluate our players as well.”

Five of the 15 students in the class play baseball for the Sagehens. One of them, catcher and math major Jack Hanley ’20, worked for the Oakland Athletics two summers ago and spent last summer as an associate in quantitative analysis with the New York Yankees. This October, he watched his former colleagues advance to the American League Championship Series.

“It’s definitely very rewarding to know that whatever small role I played this summer in making the team better, it paid dividends,” says Hanley, whose description of his research for the Yankees is vague. That’s because he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect what amount to industry secrets.

Not all the alumni putting data analysis to work for major league teams are former baseball players. Jake Coleman ’13 played Ultimate Frisbee at Pomona but completed a Ph.D. in statistics at Duke University in May and joined the Los Angeles Dodgers in August as a senior quantitative analyst. Nor are they all men: Christina Williamson ’17, a former water polo player and swimmer who majored in math, was featured by The Athletic as one of 35 people under 35 shaping the game of baseball for her work with the Yankees using biomechanical data to aid player development and reduce injuries.

Pomona, Stevens is confident, is gaining a reputation in the game.

“If you think about how small the sport is, with only 30 teams, and how well-connected it is, there’s a pretty good chance if you’re in baseball, you know someone who knows someone who went to Pomona,” he says. “A lot of these jobs in baseball, it’s the same set of skills that translate anywhere: If you’re working with data, it’s curiosity and creativity and thinking outside the box. And Pomona trains you for that 100%, whether it’s baseball or finance or whatever else.”

Baseball analytics once was based on information available in a box score, but has evolved rapidly in the era since it was popularized by the 2003 book Moneyball and the movie that followed. It is now decidedly high-tech, requiring expensive equipment that Pericolosi was able to purchase for the course through Pomona’s Hahn Teaching with Technology Grants. He’s in the process of acquiring a second Rapsodo that gathers hitting data, measuring such things such as exit velocity—the speed of the ball off the bat—launch angle, 3D ball flight and expected landing location. Blast Motion swing sensors that attach to the knob of a bat are yet another tool in an array of devices that are used in training to aid the development of players and to help shape strategies.

Though some of the students in the class chose the course as an intriguing elective—Noah Sasaki ’20 thinks it could help him in a planned sports media career—those who play baseball are earnestly using the data to improve their skills and approaches. Analyzing spin data has helped catcher Jake Lialios ’20 and pitchers Luka Green ’20 and Simon Heck ’22 determine a particular pitcher on the staff should throw higher in the strike zone because the spin rate makes his fastball appear higher than it is. Green suggests data also could be used to recognize injuries.

“If your slider spin rate gets cut in half, your elbow probably hurts—and sometimes people don’t tell anyone,” he says.

Hanley plans to use bat sensor data to study swing paths in a senior thesis supervised by Chandler, the math professor and former assistant baseball coach whose mentorship helped launch Stevens’ career. After Stevens showed Chandler a trove of minor league data he was struggling to shape into a project, the pair joined forces and published an article in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports in 2012. That, plus an introduction from Chandler to an East Coast statistics professor who also worked with the New York Mets, helped Stevens break into Major League Baseball.

“At that point, people at Pomona realized this is something that one can do,” Chandler says. “I don’t know if people were thinking this before they decided to enroll here, but all of a sudden we went from having almost no math major baseball players to having two or three a year.”

Hanley, who communicated with Stevens even before arriving at Pomona, would love to follow the same sort of path. For his thesis, he is building on research he began with the A’s to study swing mechanics through functional data analysis, a statistical method Chandler calls “cutting-edge stuff.”

“What I’m really interested in is the function of position or acceleration over time—not just to reduce the entire function down to one point, but to use the entire function in data analysis,” Hanley says. “Generally, the project is to look at these swings and see how much information we can really glean. Let’s not limit ourselves in terms of format or data structure. Let’s see what we can really do with this stuff.”

After graduation, Hanley hopes to land a position with a baseball team, but he notes that more and more baseball analytics researchers have graduate school training and he might also go that route after a couple of years. Peter Xenopoulos ’18, who has worked for the Philadelphia Phillies as a quantitative analyst associate, is now a Ph.D. student in computer science at NYU, and Mike Dairyko ’13 earned a Ph.D. in applied math at Iowa State and works as a data scientist for the Milwaukee Brewers, though he is on the business side. “I do think this is something where Pomona is getting a reputation,” Hanley says. “It’s really a great breeding ground, a great incubator for baseball analytics in college.”

Pomona’s Baseball Analysts

The following is a list of recent Pomona alumni who have worked for MLB teams in roles related to data and analytics:

Drew Hedman ’09
Run Production Coordinator
Arizona Diamondbacks

Guy Stevens ’13
Senior Director, Research & Development/Strategy
Kansas City Royals

Jake Coleman ’13
Senior Quantitative Analyst
Los Angeles Dodgers

Mike Dairyko ’13
Senior Manager, Data Science, Business Analytics
Milwaukee Brewers

Jake Bruml ’15
Pro Scouting Intern
Boston Red Sox

Kevin Brice ’16
Quantitative Analysis Assistant
Los Angeles Angels

Simon Rosenbaum ’16
Assistant, Baseball Development
Tampa Bay Rays

Dylan Quantz ’16
Player Development Assistant
Atlanta Braves

Christina Williamson ’17
Research Analyst, Performance Science
New York Yankees

Peter Xenopolous ’18
Former Quantitative Analyst Associate
Philadelphia Phillies

Bryce Rogan ’18
Quantitative Analysis Assistant
Los Angeles Angels

Andrew Brown ’19
Apprentice, Baseball Analytics
Texas Rangers

Jack Hanley ’20
Former Summer Associate
New York Yankees

Nolan McCafferty ’20
Former Quantitative Analyst Intern
Baltimore Orioles

Outsmarting the Market

March 4, 2020  by Patricia Vest Comments Off on Outsmarting the Market

Stocks with clever ticker symbols CASH. BABY. BOOM. Stocks with clever ticker symbols such as these continue to outperform the market as a whole, a new study has confirmed.

The study’s authors, Professor of Economics Gary Smith, along with recent Pomona graduates Naomi Baer ’19 and Erica Barry ’19 studied the performance of a portfolio of 82 stocks and found that companies with clever tickers outperformed the market from 2006 to 2018.

This new study is a follow up to a 2009 study in which Professor Smith and his co-authors Alex Head ’05 and Julia Wilson ’05 found that a portfolio of stocks with clever ticker symbols beat the market by a substantial margin during the years 1984–2005. Smith and his co-authors re-examined the 2009 study’s surprising conclusion by updating the analysis for the subsequent years 2006 through 2018. They pursued the new study to demonstrate the resiliency of this phenomenon with respect to both the original clever-ticker stocks and a more recent set of clever-ticker NASDAQ stocks, a phenomenon that strongly contradicts the efficient market hypothesis.

The authors replicated the earlier methodology with a new list, focusing on NASDAQ stocks, which historically use four-digit ticker symbols, in contrast to the NYSE and AMEX, which use three or fewer characters. Examples include PZZA for a pizza company, BDAY for online party supply retailer and BOOM for an explosives company, among others.

“For example, WOOF, the ticker for VCA Antech, which operates a network of animal hospitals and diagnostic laboratories, is a lot more amusing and memorable than something boring like VCAA or VCAN,” says Smith.

A possible explanation to this stock overperformance is that memory involves the acquisition, storage, retention and retrieval of information and the understanding of human memory suggests that clever tickers may heighten investors’ recall of companies, according to Smith and his co-authors.