Geology Professor Nikki Moore took a team to the “exposed granites” of the White Mountains, nestled in the Sierras.

The sun is setting over the White Mountains an hour west of Nevada as Visiting Assistant Professor of Geology Nikki Moore and Ruth Vesta-June Gale ’25 set up portable chairs some 8,000 feet above sea level.

Grandview Campground—where the two are staying this August weekend—is a certified dark sky location, a haven for stargazers and astronomy groups. From here, once darkness consumes the light, the Milky Way and other collections of stars dot the sky.

As Moore, Pomona visiting assistant professor of geology, and Gale relax after a day of collecting rock samples from ancient dikes, meteors sparkle overhead before darting south and vanishing into the horizon.

While most appear and disappear within seconds, one stays visible long enough for Moore to audibly gasp.

The brightest and longest shooting star she’s ever seen.

“There’s a connection I have with nature where I can have these special moments that stick with me for a lifetime,” she says.

For Gale, a geology and applied math double major, the three-day trip to the Lone Pine area marked her second year doing fieldwork with Moore. She says the chance to visit the White Mountains—one of the lesser-explored ranges in the Sierra Nevada region—for the first time this summer was too good to pass up.

“You think of mountains and [that] they’re big, but it’s something else when you’re hiking on them,” Gale says. “We had some remote dikes we were trying to access, and they weren’t the worst hikes, but you’re off the trail so you don’t realize the magnitude of the mountains until you’re on them. It was satisfying to conquer them, to do science in this massive area.”

Lynn Robinson, Nikki Moore and Ruth Vesta-June Gale ’25 at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains to see Methuselah, confirmed to be the oldest tree in the world (4,856 years and counting…)

Studying Dikes

Moore’s expertise combines her three passions: geology, teaching and nature. From collecting rocks as a child growing up in Nebraska to visiting the Rocky Mountains with friends as a teenager, Moore became equal parts fascinated with how immense mountains are and determined to understand how they came to be.

While an undergrad at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Moore found herself a tutor for friends and peers. “I found that I had an innate sense of joy in sparking an interest for someone else and breaking down something complex to someone else and seeing their eyes light up with understanding and excitement,” she says.

Thanks to a roughly $200,000 National Science Foundation EMpowering BRoader Academic Capacity and Education (EMBRACE) grant, Moore traveled to the eastern Sierra, the White Mountains and the Benton Range this summer to explore dike swarms—the plumbing of magmatic systems found on Earth and other planetary bodies.

Moore’s field, geochemical and geochronological work on the dikes, blends teaching and research. It is a perfect fit for a grant program intended to give undergraduate faculty the time and means to step away from or reduce their teaching load to develop a robust research program.

Dike swarms “are the feeders for volcanic eruptions in a range of geologic settings,” she says, “and thus are the connection between magmas that are generated deep in Earth’s mantle and those that travel through the crust to be erupted at the surface.”

Because swarms exist from the deep geologic past, Moore says, they “can provide important evidence to help reconstruct the magmatic history of these regions.”

According to Moore, understanding the whole volcanic process—from how magmas first form in the “mantle,” then move through the crust and erupt at the surface—is imperative to learning how and why volcanic eruptions happen in different parts of the world.

A rock that’s part of the massive Independence Dike Swarm, which extends more than 370 miles across California.

This summer, she planned three trips to the Sierra Nevada, each accompanied by different Claremont Colleges students. Together, professor and student hiked to dikes Moore targeted and mapped, collecting a compositional range of dike rock samples for lab analysis.

“What I really enjoyed about this experience is how much I could ask Nikki about what’s going on in the field,” Gale says. “I could toss around ideas with her and make sure I understood what’s going on and what the research is trying to prove.”

Studying the chemical composition of the samples they collected this summer will help the team confirm whether the Independence Dike Swarm is 148 million years old, as experts believe, or if the dikes started to emerge even earlier, as preliminary data suggests.

“My study is unique in that the dikes were the conduits through which volcanic eruptions were produced at the surface, during the time the whole Sierra Nevada arc was forming,” Moore says. “Those volcanoes that once existed are now eroded away, and the core of the Sierras are now the exposed granites.”

Sagehens in the Sierra

Pomona College geologists have long used the Sierra Nevada as a proving ground for many core concepts on how magmas form, crystallize and build the crust, says Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology and an authority on the region.

Jade Star Lackey and Nikki Moore

Magmas produce igneous rocks, which can cool and solidify in one of two places: within the crust or erupted at the surface. The magmas that stall, cool and entirely solidify in the crust are plutonic rocks, such as granite.

Spanning some 24,000 square miles, the Sierra has 50 million years’ worth of different granites from all compositions, making it a mecca for geologists and geology students. A room on the first floor of Edmunds Hall is filled with salt-and-pepper granite collected from the Sierra Nevada over the years, each its own piece of Earth history.

“The rocks speak for themselves,” Lackey says, “but then there’s a Sagehen connection in terms of the scholarly research that’s happened on them.”

Art Sylvester ’59, who taught geology for more than 35 years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, cut his teeth navigating the region’s ridges, canyons and terrain as an undergraduate at Pomona. Sylvester, who died in 2023 at age 85, later co-authored Roadside Geology of Southern California, a popular addition to the Roadside Geology series of books published by Mountain Press.

Allen Glazner ’76, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also traversed the Sierra as a student and later, a professional, writing a series of books that includes volumes on Death Valley and Yosemite.

Glazner and Sylvester collaborated on the 1993 tome Geology Underfoot in Southern California.

“All the work they’ve done started by realizing just how much science could be done in the Sierras because of the sheer scale of it,” Lackey says. “It’s also important as an analog for a lot of other great granite terrains that form the Ring of Fire in Japan, Russia and Canada.”

Budding Geologists

At Pomona, Lackey and Moore are part of a Geology Department that draws students from across The Claremont Colleges fascinated by nature and the chance to study science outside the traditional biology and chemistry disciplines.

Little time is wasted getting these inquisitive minds into the field.

There is no substitute for hands-on experience, Lackey says, be it outside or in the lab. As thrilling as collecting dike and granite samples from the Sierra can be for one student, equal thrill can be found by another student in preparing a sample to examine under the microscope for years to come.

“There’s enough breadth of science in geology that it’s really appealing to students,” Lackey says. “It gives you the opportunity to practice all over the world if you want to. So often we go out there looking to answer science questions, but there’s so much we can do in the Sierra that brings the classroom alive.”

He says that students with the time to accompany faculty on multi-day trips are in high demand, and the breathtaking views of the Sierra are a good incentive. Between Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, the scenery is second to none.

“There’s a lot of power in the landscape,” Lackey adds. “The rock falls we see, or the damage that an avalanche has done to trees that are snapped off, and the really big snow years we had a couple years ago—that’s the kind of stuff that’s stunning, and is why this is such a good place for both teaching and research.”

Khadi Diallo ’25 joined Moore for a July trek to Onion Valley. Their days began at 8 a.m. and ended by 3 p.m. due to the extreme heat occurring in the lower elevations of the Owens Valley region. In those seven hours, the two navigated as much of the mountain area as they could in search of rock samples.

“I was in constant awe of the mountains,” Diallo says. “There’s something particular about mountains, too, where you’re looking at them from a distance and feel both very big and very small. You come up to the mountains and realize the sheer magnitude of geology there.”

For Diallo, a geology major and California native, the six-day experience was as fulfilling as she expected. Joining Moore in the field helped Diallo connect the idea of geology mapping with how it’s used in the real world. Some geologists spend their entire careers mapping the Sierra, paving the way for easy sampling.

“It’s a lot of work built on that of other geologists,” Lackey says. “And that’s what makes the Sierra so good. It’s really well mapped. The quadrangles across the Sierra. I used those, and it was the names on those maps that I would then connect back to Pomona people.”

Moore, who used these extensive, pre-existing maps to plan and execute her fieldwork, likes to say she “stands on the shoulders of giants who did so much incredible work before us.”

One With Nature

Moore savors the remoteness of being in the field.

While extroverted by nature, she finds truly special leaving the beaten path for secluded spaces where mountain ranges dwarf everything in sight.

“Very often I get this feeling of standing on a spot and possibly being one of the few human beings to ever stand there or trod across that particular region,” Moore says. “That’s what gives me this deeper connection with the places I go. It just makes the work more intimate.”

Very often I get this feeling of…being one of the few human beings to ever trod across that particular region. It just makes the work more intimate.”

—Visiting Assistant Professor of Geology Nikki Moore

Lackey, too, appreciates the novel terrain, smells and sights of the Sierra—though the bears have gotten boring, he must admit.

“When you hear a rockslide in the silence of the mountains it is simultaneously terrifying, but also profound,” he says. “We find human artifacts that are really old, way markers in places where nobody else travels.”

After relaxing and volunteering for much of the summer, Diallo says traveling with Moore to the Sierra Nevada “got my mind churning back to geology.”

Khadi Diallo ’25 near a dike sampling site at Onion Valley.

Diallo even plans to incorporate her summer research into her senior thesis.

“As a geology student it’s good to get fieldwork into your repertoire,” she says. “It’s important to get a taste of it to see if it’s something you like—and I do!”

She’s not alone.

“I had a great time—mostly because of the unexploredness of it all,” Gale says. “The trip was a real-world application of all the tools I’ve studied so far in college.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story described the Sierra as spanning “some 24,000 square feet,” instead of 24,000 square miles. The mountain range is much more than half an acre! (Spinal Tap Stonehenge, anyone? Thanks for the tip, Peter Wechsler ’68).

Miller in his backyard in Claremont, where he’s reintroduced Indigenous flora such as coastal sage biota, deergrass and an Engelmann oak.

Today’s view of the San Gabriel Mountains is a bit hazier than it was in 1901.

Indigenous Grounds

2016: If you’re tall enough, and I’m not, you could peer out of the large, north-facing, four-pane window in the Digital Humanities Studio on the third floor of Honnold/Mudd Library and gaze on a striking tableau. In the deep background are the chaparral-cloaked, rough folds of the San Gabriel foothills that rise to Mount Baldy, the range’s visual apex.

Pull your eyes down to the foreground and a different view comes into focus. You’re looking at the Harvey S. Mudd Quadrangle, although few passersby see its fading metal name. They are on their way to somewhere else. Above that, what catches your vision are the towering stone pines and eucalyptuses, then a green sweep of lawn, establishing the x-and-y axis filled with other geometric shapes. Sidewalks radiate out at right angles from the library connecting pedestrians to Dartmouth Avenue on the west. Stately Garrison Theater is to the immediate north, and to the east, McAllister Center, and Scripps and Claremont McKenna colleges. Nothing is out of place. All grows according to plan. This built environment tightly structures the spatial dimensions of how we experience it.

Native buckwheat can be found all across campus.

1901: Fast backward 115 years, a difficult act of imagination that historic photographs can stimulate. Consider a black-and-white photograph shot at the corner of what is now College Avenue and 7th Street, roughly a block south of Honnold. The mountains are vastly more prominent in this more unstructured terrain. The dirt road barely intrudes as your eye is caught first by the snow-capped high country.

The Tongva call this rough ground Torojoatngna, the Place Below Snowy Mountain. It was carpeted with an apparently untrammeled coastal sage ecosystem. In the flatlands, there was buckwheat, sages, ephemeral wildflowers and grasses. The washes and creeks sustained oaks and sycamores. Rock-littered, with not a lot of shade, the landscape was open, capacious. There were even herds of pronghorn antelope. The Tongva and other Indigenous Peoples of Southern California used fire and other tools to manage resources that they wished to extract, including material they invested in their rituals and ceremonies, and that provided food and shelter. Notes biologist Paula M. Schiffman, “By manipulating the mix and abundance of the native plant and animal species present in the ecosystem, the Tongva were able to exert control over the vertical structure of the region’s vegetation and over a diversity of natural processes.”

This Indigenous landscape was more rapidly and enduringly modified when Spanish and later Mexican settler-colonists ran vast herds of cattle, sheep and goat in California’s inland valleys. In 1817, Rancho San Rafael in the present-day San Gabriel Valley—a mere 20 miles to Claremont’s west—had nearly 2,000 cattle and hundreds of horses. Multiply those numbers across the region and it is little wonder these herbivores, in Schiffman’s words, quickly became the “dominant organisms” that allowed them to “govern the region’s ecological processes.” Converting coastal sage into grassland, as happened in what is now Pomona Valley, was a reflection of their dominance.

Both the Indigenous and Spanish/Mexican settler-colonist managed landscapes in turn were buried beginning with the post-Civil War Americanization of the region. The late 19th- century arrival of the railroad, and the land speculation and town-building schemes that followed, produced hardened roadbeds, gridded streetscapes, and a series of Victorian buildings that constituted Pomona’s early campus. Since then, The Claremont Colleges have constructed an environment that signals its distance from that earlier time and place. A plaque bolted in Pomona’s Smith Campus Center cheers the ecological conversion that began in the late 1880s: “the clearing away of underbrush, and the planting of roses and other flowers about the building, with an oval lawn in front … forced back the jackrabbits and rattlesnakes.”

The towering oaks that adorn”the Wash,” thirty acres of native landscape on campus.

2021: What would it take to reimagine the traces of that earlier biome? How might we peel back what the bulldozer flattened, shovel dug in, and the rake groomed? How might we re-see what we have rendered invisible? To make the past, present?”

Start with a trowel. It was the initial symbol of the student-led Ralph Cornell Society devoted to re-engaging with native plants. In the early 2010s, the organization collaborated with the college Grounds Department to plant sage, deer grass, baccharis, and buckwheat in place of grass, a re-indigenizing that dovetailed with campus water-reduction commitments. The department also reintroduced the endemic Engelmann oak, which had been logged out of the region a century earlier.

Often on my morning walks I’ll swing through campus to pay my respects to some of the more than 30 trees that add to the biodiverse canopy, flourishing in their native soil.”

These are small steps, to be sure, but they matter. Ethnobotanist and Tongva elder, the late Barbara Drake, made that case explicitly through her establishment of the Tongva Living History Garden, which has been an inspiration to many students and faculty.

This was among the influences that led my wife and me to transform our quarter-acre suburban lot one mile west of campus. When we purchased the home in 2009, we ripped up the St. Augustine lawn, and with the help of landscapers began to reintroduce coastal sage biota. Initially we planted bunches of deer grass as an evocative play on the now-departed sod; in the back, an Engelmann oak. While lizards loved the cover the grass provided, few other species did. So, as a second draft, we thinned out the long-stemmed grass, and planted different varieties of ceanothus, bitterbush, and buckwheat, and a Channel Island poppy and cherry. Clematis and morning glory are inching up the wooden fence that frames the backyard, and even a prickly pear refugee has taken root. Someone had tossed a pad over the weathered fence, and I troweled it into place. It has now stretched up and out, catching the sun’s rays.

On a recent afternoon, as I picked my way through the aromatic spring growth, jackrabbits and lizards scattered. An Anna’s hummingbird, like a sewing machine, darted around a blue-flowered Cleveland sage, and resting on a leaf while a pair of monarchs twirled into the air above, a mourning cloak. Chattering bushtits picked their way through oak and paperbark.

Home.

This second piece by Professor Miller spotlights Pomona’s two LEED Platinum dorms, first unveiled in 2011. The College has continued to make key strides in sustainability, with goals by 2030 to reach carbon neutrality and reduce its energy emissions 50 percent. Since 2014 Pomona has reduced its water use 45 percent, diverted waste at a rate of 52 percent.

Code Green

What do buildings mean? How do their volume, mass, and detail convey their subject and significance? How do their materials signal what we should see and think about their form and function? Should these structures stand for something?

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) believes so. Since its founding in 1993, the nonprofit has been a relentless promoter of the idea that a building’s design should be as sustainable as possible, and that sustainability is a key index of its value and meaning. In 2000 USGBC created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, an incentive-based metric that has become a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for architects and developers.

LEED serves as a way to keep score—the more points a structure earns toward certification, the more lustrous the medal bestowed. While there’s nothing wrong with securing Silver or Gold, Platinum is the ultimate benchmark, a shining example of how the construction industry might help make the world a more habitable place.

Or not. LEED’s many critics are wary of the system’s low bar for certification, arguing that it asks too little of its applicants, offering instead a grade-inflated set of outcomes that undercuts their value. Critics are also skeptical about LEED’s failure to require postconstruction assessment of how certified buildings function: are they as good as advertised? As efficient? As low impact? An even greater lack in the rating is an analysis of how people interact with these certified buildings in real-time. All that glitters is not gold. Or platinum.

Yet the debate is healthy, especially if it compels producers and consumers to ask sharper questions about the built landscape we inhabit, about why it looks, feels and operates as it does. I contributed a small bit to this larger discussion when I spoke at the dedication of Pomona’s two new dormitories in 2011, shortly after they achieved the highest level of LEED certification. They earned it, too; they’re not fool’s gold.

The college takes a lot of pride in these buildings and has posted online an extensive list of their more remarkable attributes. I want to point out one that speaks to my inner wonk—stormwater control. Hardly as sexy as the array of solar panels, lacking the cachet of the green roof and garden, and not nearly as cool as the energy efficiencies that are built into the halls’ every design element, the stormwater system is arguably more revolutionary.

To understand why, imagine a single raindrop hurtling down during one of Southern California’s furious late-winter storms. The moment it hits the ground, according to those who have engineered the Los Angeles basin since the late19th-century, it should be captured as quickly as possible behind a dam or in a ditch or culvert, then swiftly channeled into the concrete-lined Santa Ana, San Gabriel or Los Angeles rivers before being flushed ignominiously into the sea.

The construction of Pomona’s LEED Platinum dorms kicked off a decade of sustainability-minded initiatives.

This complex system, designed to prevent flooding, has wreaked havoc with riparian ecosystems, destroying the once-robust regional runs of steelhead trout. It also has severely limited the capacity of nature to replenish local groundwater supplies—and we have compensated for this loss by expropriating snowmelt from as far away as the northern Rockies.

Pomona’s new dorms embody a smarter, locally framed approach. Any precipitation that falls within, or flows through, their catchment area will be retained onsite, and filtered down to a large underground detention basin in the alluvial wash that runs along the campus’ eastern edge. There it will slowly percolate into the aquifer, recharging the Pomona Valley’s groundwater. In so doing, these dorms benefit and befit their environment.

Yet will they be as integrative as human habitats? How will generations of students occupy them and make them their own? How will they respond to these buildings that teach sustainability every time they flick a light switch, open a window, or flush a toilet, but that also require their active participation to ensure its realization?

Pomona has asserted that sustainability is integral to its modern mission. One mark of its commitment has been the establishment of a Sustainability Integration Office—the middle word is of prime importance—that inculcates sustainable concepts into new construction and the rehabilitation of older facilities and infuses them into the college’s curricular goals and extracurricular activities.

The community must measure the steps it has taken to fulfill its convictions. That includes using intellectual tools and analytical methodologies to evaluate the very buildings in which so many abide and work. However limited, this rigorous self-examination is not just an academic exercise. Whatever the results, the evaluations will help us calibrate the human capacity to sustain ourselves on this planet of swelling population and finite resources.

Such calibrations may be especially impactful at the local level. How apt, then, that my students’ probing analyses of sustainability as fact and fancy—like the munificence of the donor families that made these two dormitories possible—is fully consistent with Pomona’s century-old charge to graduates: “They only are loyal to this college who, departing, bear their added riches in trust for mankind.”

With these dorms and other campus sustainability efforts the College has reframed that sense of individual social obligation, acknowledging that as an institution it too has a responsibility to redeem its pledge.

Drone photo of Norway’s Mardalsfossen Waterfall

Where many tourists seek out spots via Instagram, Collier scans through the satellite images on Google Earth to find destinations farther afield—which is how he landed at Norway’s Mardalsfossen Waterfall. For this particular shot he flew his drone past a cliff face to get a view of the fjord from a perspective that he could never have gotten from the ground.

Gullfoss Falls, Iceland

Gulfoos Falls by Iceland’s Hvítá River

Shooting in a deep canyon by Iceland’s Hvítá River, Collier had to contend with heavy waterfall mist and 100-mph wind gusts. Every time he snapped a picture he would turn the camera away from the wind, clean the mist off the lens, put the lens cap on, turn the camera back around, compose the image blind, take off the lens cap and immediately take a shot—all while holding down the tripod with his other hand in the Sisyphean hope of somehow keeping it stable.

Vatnajökull Glacier, Iceland

Vatnajökull Glacier, Iceland

Despite having only spent a few weeks there, Collier puts Iceland at the very top of his list of locations with absolutely jaw-dropping scenery. “There is no place quite like it,” he says. “It’s like something out of a fairy tale.” To get to this ice cave, Collier took a bumpy ride to the base of Vatnajökull Glacier on an all-terrain vehicle with off-road tires that were six feet tall. His girlfriend posed to provide scale for what he described as a “truly otherworldly backdrop.”

Beauty in Your Backyard

Although Collier takes most of his photos far away from big cities, he says that he’s “always on the lookout for magical light that can make any scene come to life.” So when he saw these clouds bursting with color outside his old home in the suburbs of Denver, he quickly set up his camera and tripod in the driveway. After shooting photos for more than three decades, he says he has learned to always be ready to capture moments of beauty. “Sometimes you can find the extraordinary in the ordinary.”

Northern Lights, in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2012

Collier’s first time shooting northern lights, in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2012 (above), almost swore him off the aurora experience entirely. He waited in vain for five hours in -10°F weather without seeing anything, and was about to leave when he suddenly saw a flicker of green light in the sky. It gradually expanded, appearing like “a dancing apparition in the heavens.” Since then he’s visited multiple countries throughout the world photographing the phenomenon, including the Snowy Range in Wyoming (below).

Wyoming Snowy Range Northern Lights

Four Fun Facts About the Northern Lights

• They power communications. In 1859 a 2-hour telegraph conversation between Boston, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine, was made possible without any battery power—there was enough electric current generated in the telegraph wires due to an aurora borealis happening.
• They may actually make an audible sound. While hard to notice in all but the quietest of settings, Finnish researchers found that the faint sound of “whistles, cracks and hisses” tended to coincide with a temperature inversion—cold air trapped under a lid of warm air. They attribute the sounds to the release of static charge, linked to changes in atmospheric electricity caused by the aurora’s disturbance to Earth’s magnetic field.
• They once nearly caused an international conflict. In 1995 a Norwegian research rocket sent to observe the aurora borealis passed through Russian air space, provoking the Russian military to briefly elevate their forces to high alert.
• Yes, there are “southern lights,” also known as “aurora australis.” The areas where they can be seen are generally less populous than the northern variety, but include parts of Tasmania, New Zealand and rural Australia.

Getting More Pacific

Lava flowing from the Big Island of Hawaii into the Pacific Ocean in 2016

When lava began flowing from the Big Island of Hawaii into the Pacific Ocean (above) in 2016, Collier quickly booked a plane ticket there. The park service had closed the road near the lava, so visitors had to walk four miles to see it. But Collier got crafty, renting an e-bike that got him there in 15 minutes, where he had “a rain-drenched evening marveling at the incredible scene.”

Tapuaetai—one of 22 islands in the Aitutaki Lagoon of the Cook Islands, in Polynesia.

Tapuaetai (above) is one of 22 islands in the Aitutaki Lagoon of the Cook Islands, in Polynesia. It has no full-time residents and just a single house with no electricity or running water and, according to Collier, “far too many mosquitoes.” He rented this house for one night, fulfilling his dream of living—ever so briefly—on a desert island. “When the stars came out at night it was a sight to behold,” he says. “I had to remind myself that I was there to take photographs, and not just sit in reverie.”

Beyond the Landscape

Sea stacks on the West coast of the South Island of New Zealand

Sometimes camera effects can be your friend. While driving along the rugged west coast of the South Island of New Zealand, Collier spotted some impressive sea stacks (above) in the water. The lighting wasn’t ideal with such an overcast sky, so he used a light-blocking “neutral-density filter” that allowed him to capture long 30-second exposures that blurred the waves and gave the scene a distinctly dreamy effect.

Drone photo of the geological formations at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah

Collier was perusing Google Earth one day when he discovered a curiosity in nearby Utah: the Mars Desert Research Station (above), where scientists spend weeks-long shifts simulating Martian environments, down to the detail of wearing spacesuits and air supply packs. Collier captured the 30-acre space by flying a drone in a grid-like pattern, stitching together more than 200 photos to create the final image. “The beautiful, lifeless landscape really did resemble Mars in such an uncanny and surreal way,” he says.

Hollywood Sign Hike

Two days after first-years move into their residence halls in August, they embark on Orientation Adventure (OA) trips. Launched in 1995, the program aims to help new students get acquainted with each other and their SoCal surroundings. For three days, students experience wilderness, cultural and entertainment options in L.A. and beyond, from bouldering in Palm Springs, to hiking the Sequoias, to camping in San Bernardino National Forest. As Outdoor Education Center Manager Connor Bigenho put it, “it’s the first-year students’ first chance to make some friends, and make some memories.”

 A sample of feedback from this year’s OA-ers:

At other schools, orientation is just another thing you do on campus; here you get to actually know your classmates by going on an adventure together.”

OA-ers at Camp Arbolado, a wilderness retreat in Angelus Oaks.

It was so great to be able to soak in nature with a bunch of new people.”

Bonelli Bluffs in San Dimas

You can really be present with others when you’re in a different environment like this.”

Visit Frank Dining Hall for brunch, and most days you will find Teo Ibarra on the back patio, bantering with students while serving up made-to-order omelets. Ibarra has worked at Pomona for 12 years and is considered by many to be a Pomona mainstay. It’s hard to tell if students love Ibarra or his omelets more, but it’s safe to say that both have reached legendary status.

1. Work at Pomona in the ’90s as a dishwasher on the weekends while doing construction during the week.
2. Take a full-time position with Sodexo (the food services company at Pomona at the time), who pays for you to attend the Culinary Institute of America in New York. “I couldn’t say no to that,” says Ibarra. “I’d have to be out of my mind.” Become a manager with Sodexo at other universities across the country and eventually at Disneyland.
3. Apply to work as a cook at Pomona again, seeking a shorter commute and better work-life balance. Cook in Oldenborg Dining Hall for seven years.
4. Ask to take over making omelets when the current omelet chef retires.
5. Pour love into your cooking. Ibarra preps at least 20 fresh ingredients for the omelets each day, chopping vegetables and cooking meats to perfection beforehand.
6. Talk to students while making omelets. Get to know them by name and ask about their interests. “The students motivate me the most,” he says.
7. Remember people’s orders. Many students are regulars at the omelet bar, getting the same order every day. “I know what they want, what they like and how they want it.”
8. Gain perspective on life through a major health issue. Ibarra experienced a brain aneurysm during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I really thought I was going to go. They opened my head,” says Ibarra. “Ever since, I see life totally different. And if I can help someone, I can. I go the extra mile. I would do it even if they don’t appreciate it. We’re all humans. We all sleep, breathe, die, so why not be the best you can be?”
9. Let students reciprocate the care you show them. Ibarra experienced an outpouring of support from students and alumni while in the hospital. A GoFundMe organized on his behalf raised close to $26,000. “I’ve been blessed,” he says.
10. Make something you can’t eat yourself. Ibarra, ironically, is allergic to eggs. “I get hives all over my body.”

Schwarzman Scholar

New environments have always fascinated Lydia Haile ’22, a Coloradan and first-generation college student whose curiosity led her to Pomona and now is taking her across the globe.

Haile is pursuing a master’s degree in global affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, thanks to the one-year scholarship. At Tsinghua she will attend lectures, travel and deepen her understanding of the world’s second-most populous country.

“I’m excited to immerse myself in an environment I would not find myself in otherwise,” Haile says. “I’m at a stage in life where I can just pack up and move, simply for the sake of learning.”

A neuroscience major, Haile was chosen as one of 150 scholars from 4,200 applicants. After graduation, she became an operations specialist at the Obesity Medicine Association and helped launch the nonprofit Global Medical Relief for Tigray (GMRT) to address health care needs in Tigray, Ethiopia, raising funds for medical supplies for a hospital affected by the 2020 conflict.

Being of Tigrayan descent herself, Haile views her involvement with GMRT as an opportunity “to utilize my skills to enact long-lasting change.”

As a Schwarzman Scholar, Haile hopes to leverage her diverse background to develop interdisciplinary solutions spanning global affairs, medicine, technology and language.

“This opportunity is invaluable,” she says, “There’s so much I have yet to experience, and by gaining a broader perspective, I simply can’t lose.”

Find out more at pomona.edu/news/2024/06/24-schwarzman-scholar-lydia-haile-22-embraces-opportunity-live-and-learn-abroad.

Udall Scholar

For someone entering her junior year, Arianna Lawrence ’26 has already built an impressive resume. She interned with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), the New York City Commission on Human Rights and the San Francisco Environmental Department. She is an EcoRep in Pomona’s sustainability office and a student manager of ReCoop, helping students recover and reuse clothing, furniture and other items. And now, she’s been recognized for her sustained involvement and potential for environmental leadership by being named one of 55 Udall Scholars for 2024, earning a $7,000 scholarship.

“I’ve always been interested in environmentalism, in how inequities can manifest in physical spaces,” says Lawrence. “I’m from Brooklyn. Nobody [there] has backyards. Nobody has green spaces.” What Lawrence did have in her New York community, though, was a high school where she could pursue a major. She chose Law and Society, with an interest in environmental organizing.

Lawrence remembers being inspired by the 2019 New York City Climate Strike, where tens of thousands marched for climate action. The next summer, as a rising high school senior, she interned with the Natural Resources Defense Council and joined a youth coalition for the United Nations Environmental Program, focusing on youth involvement in environmental policymaking.

At Pomona Lawrence majors in public policy analysis with an emphasis on environmental issues, aiming for a career in urban planning, zoning law or environmental litigation. “It’s exciting to figure out my niche in environmentalism and policy,” she says.

Find out more at pomona.edu/news/2024/05/29-udall-scholarship-recognizes-pomona-student-environmental-involvement.

Goldwater Scholar

Daniel Gao ’25, a molecular biology major, was awarded the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship, established by Congress in 1986 for students in science, engineering and mathematics. This year 437 Scholars were selected out of a pool of over 5,000 students.

Since his sophomore year Gao has conducted research in the lab of chemistry professor Malkiat Johal, using surface-chemistry tools to look at “receptor-ligand interactions” that are involved in blood clotting. They are also probing the physiological significance of the interactions beyond the chemistry.

Gao’s interest in blood clotting began at a young age when his grandfather experienced a stroke. “That was the sort of alarm,” he says. “It’s a very niche type of work, but it’s been a big passion of mine.”

Gao sought out Johal because he was interested in the convergence of the biology of blood clotting with Johal’s background in surface chemistry. “Having the different perspectives brings a lot to the table in terms of the interdisciplinary aspect of our research,” says Gao.

Along with conducting research this summer, Gao applied to M.D.-Ph.D. programs with the goal of beginning a program in fall 2025.

The future physician hopes to create new tools for diseases, particularly in the realm of blood clotting. “A big part of being an M.D.-Ph.D. is [to] translate basic science into clinical tools,” says Gao. “That’s something I want to do: being proficient in both, and having both perspectives.”

Find out more at pomona.edu/news/2024/06/06-daniel-gao-25-named-2024-goldwater-scholar.