Blog Articles

Backstage: Reaping What She Sews

01-backstage-reaping-what-she-sewsSuzanne Schultz Reed’s classroom is not your typical seminar room. Upon entering, visitors are immediately greeted by a costume rack boasting dozens of hangers and garments in various states of completion. Long project tables dominate the open space, ringed by smaller workstations furnished with bright white sewing machines and strips of fabric. The walls are covered in color sketches of period dresses and men’s breeches; visible in the supply cabinets are buckets of buttons and thread and pincushions. Today is Wednesday and the room is uncharacteristically quiet, humming only with the sound of sewing machines and soft conversation between Schultz Reed and her student worker, Amy Griffin (Scripps ’18). “On Fridays, I have six students working in the shop,” Schultz Reed explains. “It’s very social. Everybody’s chatting, everybody’s doing something, music is on. And—” here she grins wickedly—“I bring brownies on Fridays.”

Schultz Reed has been the Pomona Theatre Department’s costume shop manager for nearly 25 years, producing the costumes for every production the department puts on and teaching sewing to her nine to 16 student workers in the process. She has been sewing for over half a century, since learning from her mother, a sewing teacher, at the age of six. Schultz Reed came to Pomona from a freelance stint at South Coast Repertory, a Costa Mesa–based theatre company, after an accomplished career as a freelancer, a costume shop manager at Mount Holyoke College and a costume shop assistant manager for the Atlanta Ballet.

Although she possesses her own extraordinary design skills and has designed one show for Pomona in the past, Schultz Reed prefers working with her hands to making conceptual decisions about how the costumes should look. “When I went to grad school [at UNC Chapel Hill], I discovered that designing wasn’t what I really liked. What I really liked,” she confesses, “was making the stuff. I liked taking somebody else’s vision and turning it into reality.”

Now Schultz Reed takes the renderings of the department’s guest costume designer, Kimberly Aldinger ’11, and finds ways to bring her ideas to life on the stage. This can mean borrowing from other theatres, renting from costume shops or theatre companies, pulling from the department’s stockroom, or building new costumes from scratch. Gesturing to the sketches that decorate the walls, Schultz Reed explains: “Her renderings are my blueprints.”

Those blueprints reflect the fact that the needs of each production are very different. If a production calls for a costume that looks uncommon or serves a scene-specific purpose, it will most likely need to be handmade. “That dress, the pink one,” Schultz Reed says, gesturing to one of the renderings on the wall, “has three tiers of petals that have to come off during the show. There’s no way we’re going to find that, and no way we’re going to borrow it. So we’re going to have to build it.”

The biggest challenge of Schultz Reed’s job is making sure all the building and borrowing gets done in time. “You have to get it done by opening night,” she stresses. “There’s just no way you can fudge that. Tickets are sold; people are coming.” The dress rehearsals are crucial to this process. Often Schultz Reed will come away from the first dress rehearsal with pages of notes and 24 hours to address as many of them as she can before the next dress rehearsal. “In last year’s production of Urinetown, Amy had a fabulous quick change,” she remembers, smiling at her student. “She had to go from a dress and a wig and heels to a full-body black costume with a mask. In 30 seconds! We had to practice that.” Schultz Reed also worked on redesigning elements of the costumes to make the transition easier, such as replacing a real belt buckle with a magnetic replica. Those kinds of adjustments, from hemming dresses to swapping out collars to the rare overhaul and redesign of entire costumes, ensure that the actors aren’t inhibited from giving a great performance.

And while the actors are working hard onstage, Schultz Reed keeps her students working hard offstage. “I teach the basics to those who come in with nothing, and I try to expand the knowledge of those who come in with a lot of sewing experience,” she says. “You can really see their progress, and it’s a life skill that everybody should have— knowing how to sew. And being creative in here works a different part of your brain than traditional studying does.”

Here Amy chimes in, speaking up from behind her sewing machine: “One of the advantages afforded to you in the costume shop is that you get to produce something that isn’t attached to grades. You’re productive, but you’re not productive in a way that’s stressful. It’s about creating.”

Schultz Reed nods emphatically—to her, this job is about her students as much as it is about her own creativity—and adds: “One of my older students was talking to a newcomer and said, ‘Oh, you’ll love it here! It’s like having a sewing class, but you get paid to do it.’” She laughs. “That’s how I feel. You get paid to sew, to learn and to have fun.”

 

 

Picture This

The Class of 2020 gathers on the steps of Carnegie Hall
The Class of 2020 gathers on the steps of Carnegie Hall.

—photo by Jeff Hing

How to Become the Creativity Guru of the 5Cs

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Fred Leichter likes to tell the story of the 2000 election ballot from Dade County, Florida. “It was so poorly designed,” he says, “that an inordinate number of votes that were meant for Gore went to a third-party candidate instead. And that swung the whole election and the presidency to Bush.”

For years, he kept a copy of that ballot on his wall with a note saying “Design matters.”

Today, as the founding director of the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, Leichter is bringing that message to the students of The Claremont Colleges.

Known as “the Hive,” the center was conceived as a place where students could form creative teams, be intellectually daring and work collaboratively to address complex challenges.

Bringing dynamic experience in fields ranging from higher education to technology, Leichter built his career as a design innovator and executive for Fidelity Investments. As senior vice president for design thinking and innovation at the Boston-based firm, he led teams focusing on user needs and experimenting with ways to speed up innovation.

Along with his Fidelity role, Leichter has served as a lecturer at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (commonly known as the d.school), teaching such classes as Designing with Data, Visual Thinking Strategies and Project Joy: Designing Delight into the Workplace. His founding director role at the Hive also includes a faculty appointment as clinical professor of engineering at Harvey Mudd College.

President David Oxtoby said Leichter was chosen for his leadership skills, team-building experience and track record of design innovation. “We are looking to Fred to help spark an environment where students push into new areas, look at problems in fresh ways and seek out surprising solutions.”

The following is a how-to manual in seven parts, tracing Leichter’s path from childhood to the Hive.

1

Grow up a faculty brat at Columbia University. Go to a Waldorf school that emphasizes creativity. Attend Swarthmore, spending a “study abroad” semester at Pomona College. Wish there were such a thing as a computer science major, but since there isn’t, major in math.

2

After graduating, receive two job offers—teaching high school math or becoming a programmer on Wall Street. Choose Wall Street because it cuts “against the grain” of your previous life. Take graduate courses in computer science and spend lots of nights debugging COBOL programs.

3

Meet your future wife, Jennifer, a financial analyst, and when she takes a new job in Boston, abandon Wall Street to join her. Work at a software company until it goes bankrupt, and take away an important lesson: Failure isn’t permanent, and you can learn from it.

4

Get a job at Fidelity Investments and design their first website, with a user interface that is largely unchanged decades later. Learn about human-centered design and begin to think of yourself as a designer at a time when most people think designers are people who sketch clothes.

5

Meet George Kembel and David Kelley, who are launching the d.school at Stanford. When Fidelity sponsors a class at the school, spend time there and bring new ideas back to your firm. Build a state-of-the-art design-thinking lab at Fidelity to focus on innovation from the perspective of unmet human need.

6

Return to the d.school for a full year as a fellow, taking and teaching classes and working on projects for Fidelity. Tell your wife your new dream is to build a creativity program at a small liberal arts college like the one you attended, though the chances of that seem slim.

7

Two years later, learn about the director’s position at the Hive. Though you still love your job at Fidelity, decide that this is the perfect place to pursue your dream. Consult your kids and family and negotiate with the colleges over a great space for the Hive, but ultimately say yes.

New Knowledge

PHYSICS: Professor of Physics David Tanenbaum

Organic Solar

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What was once a rare sight is now becoming more common: solar panels on the roofs of homes across the country. While solar technology has improved and is seeing exponential growth as an industry, Pomona College Professor of Physics David Tanenbaum notes that there are still a few factors limiting production at a mass scale globally. Tanenbaum and his student researchers are working to improve this by focusing on one important factor: the cost of the materials used in producing solar cell panels.

Tanenbaum explains that today’s solar panels, like microchips, are made with silicon, which requires a fairly expensive production process because of factors such as the need for high-temperature processing of high-purity materials. In building solar panels, he says, the difference in cost between silicon and less expensive organic materials is like the cost difference between manufacturing a flat-screen TV and printing ink on paper. Imagine, he says, trying to cover the globe with expensive flat-screen televisions; that’s where solar cell technology is today. Now imagine covering the globe with printed paper and how much cheaper and easier that would be. That’s where he wants to see solar technology go.

To this end, Tanenbaum and his students are making organic solar cells using chemicals like poly(3-hexylthiophene), P3HT for short, or [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester, known as PCBM. They are experimenting with differing materials and processing techniques to make the cells.

“The main thing we want to get out of solar technology is a way to produce electricity. Everyone would benefit from electricity that is carbon neutral, and solar cells require no fuel stock: no gasoline, diesel or nuclear pellets. The sun is out there whether we take advantage of it or not,” he says.

When it comes to solar cell technology, there are three main attributes: efficiency (how good the device is at converting sunlight into energy), production cost (how much it costs to produce cells and panels), and lifetime (how long the device will last).

Current solar technology has good efficiency and a long lifetime, but the challenge still lies in the cost, he says.

“The idea is to bring the cost way down, even if it means the efficiency and lifetime is not so good,” he says. “The efficiency of the solar cell is maybe not perfect, but the reality is there’s not a lot of waste. When you burn diesel fuel or natural gas to make electricity, you produce a lot of waste heat. You’re not wasting anything from the sun, just using a little bit for your advantage. The low cost allows us to displace natural gas, coal, all those things that have issues.

“In the grand scheme of things, we’d like to produce electricity at a low cost and put electricity in isolated places relatively easily. In the U.S. everyone is connected to the electricity grid, but not everyone in the world is. You can’t build a nuclear power plant for a small amount of people, but solar energy can grow with the population.”

Tanenbaum has been working on this particular type of solar cell technology research for about eight years and has had students in the laboratory helping since the beginning.

Sabrina Li ’17, a physics major, and Meily Wu Fung ’18, an environmental analysis major, were summer lab researchers through the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP).

Li has been working with Tanenbaum since her first year at Pomona and is planning a senior project that encapsulates what she’s learned in the lab thus far. “I’m looking at organic solar cells. They’re organic instead of silicon, and I’m looking at trying to optimize efficiency and lifetime.” Li experiments with different materials and processing techniques to make the cells.

This was Wu Fung’s first summer doing research at Pomona. She’s working on testing the aging of cells over time, using cells created over the past three years in the lab that are still working today. “At the end of the day, when we’re done making the cells, it’s really gratifying to measure them and see what’s come of it.”

Tanenbaum is on sabbatical for the 2016–17 academic year, continuing his research on solar cell technology at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

 

PSYCHOLOGY: Assistant Professor of Psychology Adam Pearson

Not Your Average Online Quiz

pcm-fall2016text39_page_12_image_0003It’s not your typical online poll—the type you find on BuzzFeed to determine which Hogwarts house you’d be sorted into, or what your Game of Thrones name would be. Assistant Professor of Psychology Adam Pearson, along with Princeton social psychologist Sander van der Linden, have developed a series of online surveys for Time magazine to see what Americans think about issues like climate change, gun safety and genetically modified food and how in touch they are with others’ beliefs on these issues.

The first survey was on how different groups feel about gun ownership. It was to be followed by surveys on issues like climate change, evolution, GMO food consumption, vaccination and gun safety.

At the end of each survey, the reader has a chance to see if he or she has accurately assessed how other people feel about the same subjects. The results, says Pearson, can be very surprising.

“Many seemingly intractable social problems come down to a deceptively simple, but quite powerful truth: Social perceptions matter. As adults, we may like to think that peer pressure is something that only kids are susceptible to—that we come to hold the views that we do through logic and reason—but decades of research in social psychology suggest otherwise,” he says.

“We thought this would be a terrific opportunity to test and expand on a well-known set of social psychological effects with a large and diverse sample of Americans,” says Pearson of the partnership with Time. “We know that one of the best predictors of how you’ll feel about an issue is what you think others think about the issue,” he says. For example, people are more inclined to believe in human-caused climate change when they perceive that there is scientific consensus on the subject, regardless of which political party they align with.

“These meta-perceptions or meta-beliefs—what we think others think—matter,” he adds.

One way this shows itself is what is known as the false consensus effect. “We tend to (and often falsely) assume others hold the same beliefs that we do,” says Pearson. “Another effect is called pluralistic ignorance—a tendency to perceive that my private beliefs don’t align with those around me. Both types of perceptions can influence how we behave. If we want to build consensus on issues that are important to us, we first need to accurately understand others’ views. This is especially true for building consensus on contentious and politicized issues, from gun safety to the foods we consume.”

The findings will be used by Time and shared widely after the surveys are concluded. Pearson and van der Linden also plan to use their findings in their research to broaden our understanding of factors that shape public opinion on these issues.

—Carla Guerrero ‘06

New Pomona Faculty

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Every fall, Pomona College welcomes a special group of people to campus: new professors, visiting professors, lecturers and fellows. This year the College has a group of 36, including, from left to right: Back row: O. Maduka Ogba, Robbins postdoctoral fellow in chemistry; Mark Caspary, post-M.F.A. fellow in theatre and dance; Scott Medling, visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy; Vivek Swaroop Sharma, visiting assistant professor of politics; Peter Andrew Mawhorter, visiting instructor in computer science; second row from back: Robin Melnick, instructor in linguistics and cognitive science; Kimberly Ayers, visiting assistant professor of mathematics; Jill Pace, assistant professor of physical education and women’s basketball coach; Tyler LaPlante, visiting assistant professor of economics; third row from back: Kara Wittman, director of college writing and assistant professor of English; Patricia Blessing, visiting assistant professor of art history; Guadalupe Bacio, assistant professor of psychology and Chicana/o-Latina/o studies; Lei Shao, visiting assistant professor of economics; fourth row from back: Nicole Holliday, Mellon Chau postdoctoral fellow in linguistics and cognitive science; Joanne Nucho, Mellon Chau postdoctoral fellow in anthropology; Carolyn Ratteray , assistant professor of theatre and dance (now tenure-track); Giovanni Ortega, assistant professor of theatre and dance (now tenure-track); and front: Katya Mkrtchyan, visiting instructor in computer science. Not pictured: Nani Agbeli, lecturer in music and director of the West African Music Ensemble; Richard Asante, visiting African scholar in international relations; Martha Bárcenas-Mooradian, lecturer in Romance languages and literatures; Zaylin Cano, lecturer in dance; Brett Hershey, lecturer in theatre and design; Rushaan Kumar, visiting assistant professor of gender and women’s studies; Whitney Mannies, lecturer in politics; Audrey Mayer ’94, lecturer in environmental analysis; Sam Miner ’06, lecturer in mathematics; Claire Nettleton, lecturer in Romance languages and literatures; Alexandria Pivovaroff, lecturer in environmental analysis; Elm Pizarro, lecturer in dance; Meagan Prahl, lecturer in theatre and dance; Andrew Sappey, visiting assistant professor of chemistry; Meghan Sisson, visiting assistant professor of physical education and men’s and women’s swim coach; Corey Sorenson, visiting assistant professor of theatre; Ousmane Traoré, assistant professor of history and Africana studies; and Samira Yamin, lecturer in art.

Bulletin Board

Welcome New Alumni Association Board Members

47 hearty chirps to Jordan Pedraza ’09 as she steps into her new role as president of the Pomona College Alumni Association. On October 2, to kick off the first meeting of the 2016–17 Alumni Association Board at the Seaver House, Pedraza welcomed four new at-large members to the Board: Mercedes Fitchett ’91, Nina Jacinto ’08, Ginny Kruger ’53 and Don Swan ’15. Pedraza also shared her goal for the board this year—to foster “the three Cs”:

  • Communication—to raise the visibility of the Alumni Board so alumni have an additional channel to be heard, and also to share more updates and opportunities between the board and the community
  • Connection—to enhance alumni connections across a range of affinity groups, regions, identities and generations, as well as increase connections between alumni and students
  • Collaboration—to strengthen the productivity of the board as we work to create opportunities and events through special projects and our working committees

Congratulations, Jordan, and welcome new board members!

The Alumni Board is a group of dedicated volunteers who lead alumni engagement efforts and serve as conduits between the on-campus and off-campus Pomona communities. To see the roster of current board members and learn how to get involved, visit www.pomona.edu/alumni/alumni-association-board.


Calling All Lifelong Learners

Join

ideas@pomona

Ever wish you could go back to class?

The new Ideas@Pomona program curates the best academic content from around campus and the Pomona community to ignite discussion, share ideas and highlight daring research. To take part, join the Ideas@Pomona Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/ideasatpomona. Not a Facebook user? Check the Pomona College YouTube channel for videos and watch your email and this bulletin board for updates on development of a web-based home for Ideas@Pomona content.


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Settle Into Fall with New Pomona Book Club Selections

Fall semester is well under way and it’s time to head back to the library with Pomona! With a national election on the minds of many Sagehens, we’ve asked faculty across campus to recommend books that approach crucial political and cultural topics in insightful ways. Fall and early winter selections include:

October

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

Recommended by Associate Professor of Politics Susan McWilliams

November

Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis

Recommended by Warren Finney Day Professor of History Helena Wall

December/January

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Recommended by Associate Professor of Sociology Colin Beck

To join the Book Club and access exclusive discussion questions, faculty notes and video content, visit www.pomona.edu/bookclub.


Career Connections at Pomona College

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Matt Thompson ’96, Wayne Goldstein ’96, Bill Sewell ’95, Jeremiah Knight ’94, Paulette Barros ’11

Pomona College Career Connections kicked off its year of    programming at Claremont Graduate University’s downtown LA campus on September 27 with a panel of Sagehens discussing careers in advertising, digital media and virtual reality. Panelists included Paulette Barros ’11, Wayne Goldstein ’96, Jeremiah Knight ’94, Bill Sewell ’95 and Matt Thompson ’96. The Pomona College Career Connections program fosters meaningful relationships for Sagehens in their professional lives and provides opportunities for volunteers to help current students as they discover different career paths. To learn more about the Career Connections program and events, visit www.pomona.edu/alumni/careerconnections.

Avery Bedows ’19 demos technology from his virtual reality startup Altar Technologies, Inc.

Avery Bedows ’19 demos technology from his virtual reality startup Altar Technologies, Inc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Give your gift and tell us why you are committed to Pomona at www.pomona.edu/give.

The Other Oxtoby

Claire Oxtoby

pcm-fall2016text39_page_17_image_0001There’s another Oxtoby who has had a Pomona presence for the last 13-plus years. Claire Oxtoby has a view of the College and a college president’s role unique to that of a life partner. But she has been a participant at Pomona, not just an observer.

Eschewing the somewhat archaic title of first lady—too ceremonial, she says—Claire prefers to think of herself as a doer. She is a familiar face in the community, whether meeting with students, talking to staff, attending College events like concerts in Little Bridges or a lunchtime talk in Oldenborg, traveling with the president on Pomona-related trips or auditing a history of photography class.

Claire has felt like part of the fabric of the College, with all the challenges and triumphs woven through what she calls an exciting and dynamic place. Literally living and breathing Pomona 24/7 has meant the occasional awkward moment. Like the student who rang the Oxtobys’ doorbell, shower bucket in hand and towel slung over his shoulder, asking if he could shower at their place, because Wig Hall was flooded, and there was no hot water. Claire invited him in to talk, wielded the power of a president’s wife, and put in a call to facilities.

Sometime back, Claire read an Inside Higher Ed article that talked about how not to be a toxic asset as a college president’s spouse. Laughing, she says she didn’t find the don’ts all that useful, but the dos were. Simple things, she says, like being friendly, approachable and helpful. She has played the role of a bridge builder, she says.

“David has a contract with various expectations, and how the College does as a whole is the metric that he is measured by. But for my job there are no metrics, so it’s really about just fitting in and trying to be helpful or make connections in different places,” Claire says.

Stories she’s heard from students have sometimes led to her connecting them with alumni or a job. She says those personal connections, whether with students, faculty, staff or alumni are among the things she’ll miss most about Pomona.

An early education teacher in Chicago before they came to Claremont, Claire still shares David’s passion for education. It’s something that is positive and forward-looking, she says. Looking back and looking ahead, based on what she’s seen at Pomona, she believes the future is bright.

“It makes you feel good about the world each year when we’re graduating students. They’ve had this experience here, they’ve brought their experiences, they’ve had more, and now they’re going out, and it makes you feel hopeful.”

 

There Ought to Be a Law

There Ought to Be a Law: Going home to care for her parents seemed like a BIG step back for Cristina Garcia ’99, but it proved to be a big step forward for one of California’s most passionate lawmakers.

AP Photos by Rich Pedroncelli

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Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia ’99 watches as votes are posted for and against her bill, AB1561, to repeal the sales tax on tampons and other feminine hygiene products. The bill passed but was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown. —AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

When Cristina Garcia ’99, then a high school math teacher living in Pasadena, was nominated by her siblings to move back to Southeast Los Angeles to care for their ailing parents, she didn’t think twice about taking on her new role as caregiver. Moving back home when her family needed her was an easy decision. Garcia says she’d do it again in a heartbeat.

But resettling less than a mile away from her parents’ home, she suddenly found herself back in the heart of Bell Gardens, the city she thought she had left for good.

When she was growing up, her idea of success had followed the same age-old formula familiar to many: Leave your poor hometown, make something of yourself and never look back. And she had done exactly that. After excelling in high school in the mid-1990s, she had left her hometown, known for its high teen pregnancy rates and polluted air, for the tree-laden and book-filled campus of Pomona College. With a double major in mathematics and politics in hand, Garcia thought she was set for life.

“I taught math for 13 years, and I had a pretty amazing life. I got to teach at the high school level and the college level,” she says.

Now she was right back where she had started.

Today, sitting in her district office that bears her current title, California Assemblymember, she recalls the sense of failure that soon enveloped her upon her return home just a handful of years before.

“We had been taught that success was leaving and never coming back to these communities,” she says. “And so I felt like a failure, in a way, coming back and giving up my comfy life that I had.”

It took a heart-to-heart intervention by her younger sister to help her snap out of it. “She said, ‘You have leadership skills and you have a responsibility,’’’ recalls Garcia. “I was like, you know what, I’m going to start going to council meetings and start asking questions, and eventually that led me to ask more questions.”

Garcia started by attending Bell Gardens’ city council meetings, trying to get information about the city budget and expenses. She hit a lot of roadblocks and found disturbing practices. Next door, in the City of Bell, residents were asking similar questions, trying to figure out why their taxes were so high. They, too, were hitting a brick wall, with no answers and no accountability from their elected officials.

Then in 2010, the Los Angeles Times broke one of the biggest corruption scandals to rock the state in recent memory. At the heart of it was rampant graft and theft of city coffers by a cohort of City of Bell officials. Outraged, Garcia joined with other local activists to form BASTA (Bell Association to Stop the Abuse).

“I saw it as an opportunity for change for the whole Southeast [Los Angeles], since the problems that plague these cities are all very similar. A lot of the dysfunction I saw in Bell Gardens was present in Bell and other surrounding areas,” says Garcia.

Largely thanks to the work of BASTA, six Bell officials were recalled. Eventually, they were brought to trial on corruption charges and are currently serving prison sentences. Through this yearlong process, Garcia’s resolve for change never wavered.

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Assemblymember Cristina Garcia ’99 in conversation with Assemblyman Ian Calderon of Whittier just before the Assembly unanimously approved her bill, AB1673, which bans lobbyists from hosting fundraisers at their homes and offices. —AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

“Failure was never an option, because failure was not an option for my community. I had a sense of responsibility to take our communities back. I thought I’d be there for three weeks, but it was over a year,” she recalls. “Then I was done. I was tired. I thought: I’ve done my part, and my parents are doing better. I can go back to my old comfortable life.”

But by then, that “old comfortable life” was just a mirage.

In 2012 her leadership abilities were called upon again when she was asked to run for State Assembly in the upcoming election. Although she hesitated at first, it was her sense of social responsibility that helped her make the choice.

“We’ve had absent representation for my whole life. I realized I had to sacrifice my comfortable life and become a public figure. I’d been private all my life. I’d been independent all my life. I’d been doing math all my life, so you don’t get to talk to people all the time—and that all changed all of a sudden when I decided I was going to do this.  That sense of responsibility has continued to be my guiding principle.”

Social Responsibility

Garcia’s sense of social responsibility was shaped during her time at Pomona College. She came to campus at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment ran strong in California politics. She protested and organized against Proposition 187, which made undocumented immigrants ineligible for public benefits, and Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in public universities.

“I was very aware of the opportunities and privileges that I had and how different I was from most of my peers back home who didn’t get to go to college or who did get to go to college but didn’t get to have the same opportunities I had at Pomona—personal attention, study abroad, or when I didn’t have money for books, being able to receive a grant for books,” says Garcia.

“It came with a sense of social responsibility. There were a lot of social justice discussions on campus when I was there. I was there as Prop. 187 had passed and Prop. 209 was going on, and Pomona College allowed those discussions to happen.”

That sense of social responsibility continued to guide Garcia well into her career as a teacher, and in her decision to run for the state Assembly.

In 2012, defeating a longtime incumbent, Garcia was elected to represent the 58th Assembly District, which includes the cities of Artesia, Bellflower, Bell Gardens, Cerritos, Commerce, Downey, Montebello, Norwalk and Pico Rivera. She was reelected in 2014 and is up for reelection again this November.

Garcia came into office with the stated goal of making politics more transparent and rebuilding the public’s trust in government, and in 2014, she introduced a wide-ranging package of ethics and transparency measures. Five of these passed and Gov. Jerry Brown signed them into law.

Garcia is proud of that accomplishment, but she’s not sitting back and relaxing. She likes to keep busy.

In her four years in office, Garcia has focused on three areas dear to her heart: good government and reform, environmental justice, and elevating and expanding the role of women in society and government. She chairs the Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review, and she is the vice chair of the Legislative Women’s Caucus.

“I decided that to be legislator, I was going to legislate to empower other women and change that. There’s a lot of work and not enough women, so I want to share the wealth with other women,” she says.

Among her most recent and lauded efforts is the so-called “Tampon Tax,” a bill that would repeal the sales tax on pads, tampons and other menstrual items. Although Gov. Jerry Brown recently vetoed the bill, Garcia is not giving up.

“I am known as ‘Ms. Maxi.’ I am the ‘Tampon Lady’ everywhere I go. ‘Ms. Flo.’ And it’s fine; I take on the jokes because I get to expand on women’s health care. It’s not something to be ashamed of or to see as something that is dirty,” says Garcia with a smile. “It’s exciting to talk to young women. It’s exciting to see it become a national discussion. It’s exciting to see women’s health in a different way, and it’s exciting because it affects our day-to-day life.”

Recently, Garcia also introduced legislation to revise an outdated definition of rape—an issue brought to light after a judge sentenced former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to six months after he was convicted on three felony counts of sexual assault. Garcia was moved to action after reading the open letter penned by the unnamed survivor in the case.

“Part of getting rid of our rape culture is talking about it, but it’s also about how we define it. … If we’re going to end rape culture, we have to call rape what it is—it’s rape.”

Investing in Government

Although she’s faced a lot of setbacks, Garcia remains undaunted. Picking up lessons from her past, it seems like failure is no longer part of her equation.

When asked what advice she would give a younger Cristina or college students of today, she says simply, “Don’t do it all.”

Another tough lesson learned.

Garcia says she did indeed try to “do it all” as a Pomona student, a habit that she carried over in her first years in the legislature.

“For a while I tried 20 different clubs [in college], but it’s better to find one or two that you’re passionate about and be really good at it,” she says. “This year I’ve pared it down to the basics, things I   really care about. So I only have seven bills that I’m working on. They’re a lot of work, but really hands-on and I’m really passionate about them, and I’m much happier about the work that I’m doing.”

Her advice to students: “Find something you’re passionate about and get engaged in it and figure out how you’re going to be engaged. Take on leadership roles like president or secretary.”

And Garcia is helping her constituents of all ages become agents of change. Her annual “There Ought to Be a Law” contest gives residents a chance to submit proposals to improve their community.

Last year, a local fifth grade class invited Garcia to their classroom for a special presentation on the nearly 1.5 million people of Mexican descent who were deported by executive order in the 1930s. “The students felt that history was repeating itself, so they did presentations; they wrote poems and books. They became activists and lobbyists,” she says.

Garcia encouraged the students to enter her contest and they won. Last October, they saw their proposal signed into law by Gov. Brown.

This year, all new public school history textbooks will include information about the Mexican Repatriation Act of the 1930s.

“I’m an idealist at heart,” she says. “I’m an idealist in the belief of the social contract, that in order to have a government that works for us, we have to invest in it.”

That’s a tall order, but Garcia is game. Sitting in her district office, Garcia says, “There are times when I joke: Can I retire now?”

Not for a while, it seems.

How to Build a Fountain of Youth (Piece by Piece)

How to Build a Fountain of Youth (Piece by Piece): When Osman Kibar ’92 set out to create a cure for a range of degenerative diseases, he knew there would be skeptics.

Photos by K.C. Alfred

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Osman Kibar ’92 has grown accustomed to skeptics. They don’t seem to bother him.

Kibar is the founder and CEO of Samumed, a small San Diego biotech company with new drugs in clinical trials seeking to cure arthritic knees, hair loss, scarring of the lungs, degenerative disc disease and four types of gastrointestinal cancers. Even Alzheimer’s is on the longer-term list of about a dozen targeted diseases.

Samumed’s goals are stunningly ambitious: What Kibar and his team are trying to do is repair or regenerate human tissues through drugs that target the complex system known as the Wnt pathway, which is a key process in regulating cell development, cell proliferation and tissue regeneration.

The potential is so mind-boggling that despite being at least two years from an all-important Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the first of many drugs in its pipeline, Samumed already has raised $220 million in funding and is completing another round of $100 million that values the company at an astonishing $12 billion, making it the most valuable biotech startup in the world.

That eye-popping valuation and the boldness of Samumed’s venture landed Kibar, 45, on the cover of Forbes magazine in May, the featured figure on a list of 30 Global Game Changers that included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Though Samumed—named for the Zen term “samu,” for meditation at work or in action—doesn’t have a product to sell yet, the confidence of Kibar, his team and key investors has soared on the early results in human trials of the hair loss and osteoarthritis drugs, which appear to show Samumed’s drugs may safely regrow hair and even cartilage.

The potential of the osteoarthritis drug alone is tantalizing to Finian Tan, chairman of Vickers Venture Partners, an international venture capital company that owns about 3.5% of Samumed and is bullish enough to be seeking to take 30% of the current round of funding.

“It doesn’t matter who cures osteoarthritis. Whoever cures it has the potential to be the largest company in the world,” says Tan, basing his calculations in part on the fact that there are some 27 million osteoarthritis sufferers in the U.S alone.

And Samumed is going after far more than fixing worn-out knees with injections instead of surgery. The firm is developing drugs that target a wide swath of diseases, many of them related to aging.

pcm-fall2016text39_page_22_image_0054“After all is said and done, if we have just one approval, then we have failed miserably,” Kibar says. “We call our platform a fountain of youth, but piece by piece.”

Born in Turkey, Kibar came to the U.S. in 1988 after graduating from Istanbul’s elite Robert College high school, which selects only those who score in the top 0.01% of Turkish students on a national standardized test. With a perfect 800 on the math section of the SAT and a 1987 European math championship in his pocket, Kibar had options when it came to college. But he bypassed more internationally famous East Coast schools for Pomona College in part for a climate more similar to that of his hometown of Izmir on the Aegean coast, and in part for the opportunity to attend Pomona on a 3-2 program that allowed him to earn a B.A. in mathematical economics at Pomona in three years, winning the Lorne D. Cook Memorial Award in economics his final year, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Caltech two years later.

Kibar went on to earn a Ph.D. in engineering at UC San Diego and worked with his graduate school advisor, Sadik C. Esener, to found Genoptix, an oncology diagnostics firm that went public in 2007 and was acquired by Novartis for $470 million in 2011. Kibar also was a cofounder of e-tenna, a wireless antenna company whose assets were acquired by Titan and Intel. In addition, he had a stint in New York as a vice president on Pequot Capital’s venture capital and private equity team.

Samumed, founded in 2008, grew out of a company named Wintherix after legal disputes with Pfizer. It was built initially on the research of a small group of scientists including John Hood, one of Samumed’s scientific cofounders, who recently left to start a company of his own called Impact Biosciences. Hood’s track record is impressive: He created a cancer drug that led to his former company TargeGen being sold for over half a billion dollars.

Kibar’s intellect and energy are unquestioned. Consider that on the side, he is working through the course outline he found online for a Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton, just for enjoyment. And once, on a lark, he entered an event on the World Series of Poker circuit and won. Betting against him, it would seem, is at your peril. But with goals so lofty, he does have his doubters.

The Forbes magazine cover led to an interview on CNBC that can best be described as skeptical, tossing around words like “too many red flags” and a comparison to Theranos, the medical diagnostic testing startup that went from a $9 billion valuation to being targeted by federal investigators and losing its partnership deal with Walgreens.

It’s a cautionary tale, but Kibar and industry experts say Samumed is no Theranos. As Kibar says with his typical disarming laugh, “First of all, you know the Taylor Swift song, ‘Haters Gonna Hate’?”

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“Every big pharma, every small biotech, every academic center—they have been working on the Wnt pathway, trying to come up with a drug that can modulate the pathway in a safe manner,” Kibar says. “It’s been more than 30 years, and every single one has failed so far. So when we come out and say we did it, there is natural skepticism. Without seeing the data, the so-called experts’ reaction in a fair manner is, ‘Yeah, yeah, everybody has tried it.  What makes these guys so special that they will have cracked the code?’ So our response to that is: Just look at the data.”

For starters, the company already has been issued dozens of patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, has five programs in clinical trials and has begun sharing data with the medical community that shows the hair loss and osteo­arthritis drugs appear to be safe and effective in small human trials.

“I don’t think Theranos is a very good analogy for this company,” says Derek Lowe, who holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and works in the pharmaceutical industry while writing the widely read drug discovery blog In the Pipeline, which appears on a site maintained by the journal Science. “You can look at the patents and see the types of molecules [Samumed is] working with,” Lowe says. “This is not one of those where ‘we’re going to change the world but you can’t see anything’ companies like Theranos.”

Kibar shrugs off any comparisons to Theranos and its headline-grabbing fall from grace.

“They’re in diagnostics and they never shared their data, so their whole approach was: ‘Trust us, we got this,’” he says. “Being in the therapeutic field, we’re coming up with drugs; we don’t have that luxury. We cannot say, ‘Trust us, we got it.’ First and foremost, we have the FDA. The FDA is not going to take our word for it.”

The FDA is the gatekeeper, and though less than 10% of proposed new drugs ultimately earn FDA approval, the likelihood increases with each step forward in the lengthy process. The next step for Samumed’s most advanced projects, the hair loss and osteoarthritis drugs, is large Phase III studies with thousands of participants. Some 64% of drugs that begin Phase III studies are submitted for FDA approval and 90% of those are successful, according to a study cited by the independent site fdareview.org.

To begin building support in the medical community, last November at the annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology, Samumed presented clinical data  w from its Phase I trial of 61 patients for a new drug that seeks to regrow knee cartilage to treat osteoarthritis.  Animal studies already had shown that injections of Samumed’s compound caused stem cells to regenerate cartilage in rats. The Phase I study focused on demonstrating that the drug is safe in humans, but MRIs and X-rays also suggested a single dose showed what the company called “statistically significant improved joint space width” in the knees of patients who received it. A Phase II study of 445 patients is under way and expected to be complete next spring.

Samumed followed those announcements with a presentation of Phase I data from its trial to treat baldness at the World Congress for Hair Research, and in March presented data from its completed Phase II hair-growth trial to the American Academy of Dermatology. That study of 310 participants showed that hair count in a one-square-centimeter area of one group of subjects’ scalps increased by 7.7 hairs (6.9%) and by 10.1 hairs (9.6%) in another, though the largest increase was in the group that received the lower of two doses. The control group lost hair.

Tan, the venture capitalist known for making an early bet on Baidu, the Chinese answer to Google, sticks to his assertion that Samumed, if successful, could be bigger than Apple.

“I think the potential is unbelievable. With the Wnt pathway, when it eventually is totally controllable, the sky is the limit because it is involved in cell birth, cell growth and cell death,” Tan says. “The key is nobody has been able to successfully manipulate the Wnt pathway safely and effectively. Samumed appears to be doing it in human trials.”

So far, the trials are small, preliminary studies, both Samumed and industry observers note. Since the groundbreaking discovery of Wnt signaling in the early 1980s, no other attempts to modulate it have succeeded, and tinkering with a system that regulates cell development clearly involves risk. In an article titled “Can We Safely Target the Wnt Pathway?” in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, a publication of the journal Nature, Michael Kahn, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine who holds a joint appointment in pharmacy, likened the Wnt pathway to a “sword of Damocles.” Put most simply, targeting the Wnt pathway might cure cancer, but could also cause it.

“It is a death or glory target,” says Lowe, the industry blogger.

That, of course, lends itself to discussion of the high-stakes gamble reflected in the company’s $12 billion valuation. Investors include many with close ties to Kibar, and he says remaining privately held allows Samumed to proceed without shareholder pressure for quick results and requirements for public disclosure in what is by definition a long-haul endeavor. Inter IKEA Group, the retail giant’s private venture firm, has placed the largest bet among Samumed’s mostly anonymous outside investors. The operative phrase is “caveat emptor.”

“Anybody who is investing in an early-stage biopharma company has to be ready for it not to work out, because most of these don’t,” Lowe says. “The hope is just like if you’re developing some great new app: The hope is this is going to turn out to be something big.”

It’s a boom-or-bust world. Kibar and his team know that but remain confident.

“From a technical perspective, we don’t lose any sleep anymore, because we have demonstrated safety and efficacy and disease modification in enough programs that we believe we have already validated the broader platform,” Kibar says. “In terms of funding, we’re also in a fortunate position in that we have all the money we need to bring these programs all the way to approvals. With our first approval, the company will become cash-flow positive. And we have enough cash in the bank to get us to multiple approvals, so that gives us additional diversification.”

The management team still on board after Hood’s departure is solid, united by decades-old friendship: Three of Kibar’s top executives also went to the elite Robert College high school. But he rejects any suggestion that he has simply surrounded himself with high school chums, saying instead that they have all reached such heights in their careers that the only reason a startup could have lured them is because of their confidence in him and his project.

The chief financial officer, Cevdet Samikoglu, cofounded a hedge fund, Greywolf Capital Management, after becoming a director and portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs following Harvard Business School. The chief legal officer, Arman Oruc, earned a master’s in economics from the University of Cambridge and a law degree at UC Berkeley before becoming a partner in Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, where he represented clients like MasterCard, Ericsson, LG and Novartis. And the chief medical officer, Yusuf Yazici, is an internationally known rheumatologist who has maintained his role as an assistant professor at NYU, where he is director of the Seligman Center for Advanced Therapeutics, which conducts all clinical trials in rheumatology for the NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases.

They are on a journey together along a path that still holds suspense.

“These are all long-term projects, taking a molecule from discovery to animal studies to clinical and then commercialization. You’re talking a minimum 10 years,” Kibar says.  “The data—we are sharing it with the FDA, and we shared it with the doctors. Beyond that, no matter what we share, people will either not understand or not care or not believe. So those are the skeptics. And in certain programs, they may turn out to be right. We haven’t done it yet.”

The Pokémon Master

The Pokémon Master: What does it take to become the most accomplished Pokémon GO player in the world? Ask Nick Johnson ’11, the first person to catch all 145 Pokémon around the world.

Photos by Casey Kelbaugh

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It was lunchtime on a bright early autumn day in Madison Square Park, a peaceful, leafy rectangle in New York City. The park was busy with office workers, chatting, eating, or just enjoying the mild weather. I, however, was trying to avoid walking into a tree.

“The trick is to not watch your phone,” said Nick Johnson, a tall young man in a t-shirt that reminded the reader to “Hustle 24-7-365.” Johnson was indeed hustling: he had a long stride and only an hour to teach me how to play Pokémon GO.

“Look out for that fence,” he said.

Pokémon, you may recall, are fictional creatures that battle each other with the aid of their human “trainers.” The franchise was created in the late ’90s for the Nintendo Game Boy. It has since spawned dozens of iterations, from card games to plush toys to shrieking cartoons that you wish your kid had never found on Netflix.

pcm-fall2016text39_page_23_image_0001The latest version is the wildly successful app, Pokémon GO. Since its launch in July of 2016, Pokémon GO has been downloaded more than half a billion times—and grossed more than $500 million dollars. For a little perspective, that’s over twice as much money as Ghostbusters II.

The point of the game is fairly straightforward. You walk around “capturing” Pokémon. But when I downloaded the app, I had some trouble figuring it all out. First of all, I’m one of those unimaginative types who like to make their avatars resemble themselves. Unfortunately Pokémon GO offers no way to create a myopic bald man. (Are you listening, Nintendo?)

Once I got the game set up, I had problems figuring out how to play it. I was convinced that there was a Pokémon in my kitchen. After 20 or so minutes of fruitless searching, I realized that it was time to call in an expert.

It is no exaggeration to say that Nick Johnson is the most accomplished Pokémon GO player in the world. He was the first person to catch all 142 Pokémon in the United States. Then he was the first person to catch the three remaining Pokémon in Paris, Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia.

When we met in the park, Nick also turned out to be a pretty good teacher—or, Pokémon trainer trainer, if I may.

Like many games, Pokémon GO is simultaneously simple and complicated.

As Nick put it, the game is just a “fancy skin on Google Maps.” Meaning that when you’re hunting Pokémon with your phone, you’re searching for creatures superimposed upon the map. It’s not hard to get the hang of it once you grasp the proportions. For example, what I thought was my kitchen was actually my local coffee shop.

When you get close enough to a Pokémon, you swipe to hurl your Poké Ball—a parti-colored sphere—at the creature. And when the ball hits, the creature is yours.

In Madison Square Park, it took me a few tries to catch my first Pokémon, a cross-eyed, bucktoothed, purple vole named Rattata. It was waiting for me by the statue of William Henry Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state.

When the ball hit the Pokémon, my phone emitted a satisfying ping.

“There you go,” Nick said mildly. Meanwhile I experienced an absurdly outsized feeling of triumph. Perhaps not as triumphant as Seward felt when he blocked British recognition of the Confederacy, but triumphant nonetheless.

The more complicated parts of the game are the hovering “cube lures,” and hatching Pokémon, and raising up levels, and the possibility of having Pokémon battles with nearby players.

Nick explained all this stuff very patiently, and if most of it didn’t take, that’s more my fault than his. Nevertheless, I did glean some wisdom from the Ted Williams of Pokémon.

First of all, don’t use the camera.

“It makes it harder to catch them, and it kills your battery life.”

Second, as he’d already mentioned, “Keep your head up so you don’t die.”

Indeed, as we walked around Pokémon hunting, I almost walked into about 12 people. But Nick looked more at the real world than at his screen. Which is why he’s never had any Pokémon GO–related injuries. Unlike some other people.

“There was a Wall Street guy who was trying to get all the international Pokémon before I did. He broke his ankle in Sydney. He was hit by a car while trying to catch a Kangaskhan. After that he was like, screw this, and he went to Hawaii.”

Nick’s third rule: Walk in a straight line. There are rewards within the game for going certain distances, but the game measures distance as the crow flies: “So if you walk in a zigzag, it’s wasted energy.”

With Nick’s guidance, I caught a few more Pokémon. Then we grabbed a bench to discuss how a mild-mannered 20-something became the world’s greatest Pokémon GO player.

Did he consider himself a gamer?

“Gamer, nongamer—those categories don’t mean anything any more,” Nick said. “When you have 500 million people downloading an app, it just shows that in a way we’re all gamers. When I’m out playing, I meet everyone from little kids to retired people looking to get some exercise. My aunt is addicted to Candy Crush, but I wouldn’t call her a ‘gamer.’”

So if it wasn’t the gaming, how did he explain his obsession with Pokémon GO?

“There are two reasons I started. I watched the TV show when I was a kid, so there was that nostalgia aspect for me a little bit. The second reason was it’s kind of what I do for a living.”

Nick Johnson works as the head of platform for Applico, a tech advisory company. They help their clients build what’s called “platform” businesses. Many of today’s most successful companies—such as Google, Facebook and Uber—don’t make things; they own the platforms that connect people to one another.

In fact, along with Alex Moazed, an Applico colleague, Nick is the author of the recently published Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy (St. Martins). The book explains how companies like Facebook gain an almost unassailable market share by “building and managing massive networks of users.”

So Nick wanted to understand the platform of Pokémon GO and how people interacted with it.

Then it became an obsession.

“I was playing the game every day after work,” Nick said. “I’d leave the office and go catch some Pokémon. Suddenly I realized I was close to catching them all. so I figured why not go for it.”

It took Nick two weeks, averaging eight miles of walking a day.

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“Some nights I stayed up until 4 or 5 a.m. I’d go home, grab a little sleep, go to work, do it again. I mean, I was tired, but believe it or not, it was healthy. I lost weight. I started eating better, because you can’t be walking for hours on fried chicken. I learned a lot about New York City and I met people.”

“You met people?”

“I did. That’s the thing that a lot of people don’t realize—that there is a social aspect to the game. People are on Reddit exchanging tips and advice. One night I was at Grand Army Plaza in Central Park, and there must have been 300 people out catching Pokémon. Old people, young people, families, tourists. Justin Bieber was supposed to be around, but I didn’t see him.”

“Was that a disappointment?”

“No.”

After Nick caught the 142 Pokémon, he posted on Reddit about it.

“I answered some questions, went to sleep, and when I woke up, I had like 20 media requests.”

After appearing on shows like Good Morning America and in national newspapers like USA Today, Nick decided to take his Poké Ball around the world. In an admirable display of chutzpah, Nick got Expedia to spring for business class flights and Marriott Rewards to cover the lodging.

“I stayed in some sweet hotels,” he said.

In the span of four days, Nick caught the three remaining Pokémon in Paris, Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia.

Nick may be right about the pointlessness of categories like “gamer.” You’d expect someone with this level of devotion to be intensely single-minded. But he has other pursuits: He’s into soccer, or at least the European kind.

“American soccer is like Google+,” he said. “The only people interested are those involved with it.”

And with Nick there is a thoughtfulness alongside his intensity. Wind, Sand and Stars, the lyrical aviation memoir of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is his favorite book. He reads serious fiction by J.F. Powers, David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis.

While all these details demonstrate that Nick is a well-rounded guy, they don’t quite explain what drove him toward this kind of digital achievement. When I pressed him on this, he pointed to his T-shirt—“Hustle 24-7-365”—and smiled.

“If I do anything, I do it 100 percent,” he said. “I take everything to its logical extent.”

Nick had to get back to his desk. He had work to do. We shook hands, and the Pokémon GO master of the world headed for his office, his phone firmly in his pocket.

But I already had my phone out. I quickly canceled my next appointment. Then I stayed in the park to catch some Pokémon.