Blog Articles

What Is the Hive? (And Why Is Everyone Buzzing About It?)

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Photo by Mark Wood

What is creativity? How does it happen? Is it inborn or can it be taught? How does such an intangible ability—or should I say capacity, quality, or maybe mindset?—fit into the structure of a liberal arts education? The faculty, staff, students and advisors who organized the launch of the new five-college Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity this fall don’t pretend to have all the answers, but they do share a strong belief that collaborative and creative thinking across disciplines will be essential to solving the problems of the 21st century.

“There’s already plenty of opportunity for creativity within your discipline,” says Associate Professor of Physics Dwight Whitaker, who, along with Harvey Mudd College Professor of Engineering Patrick Little, is serving as co-director of the Sontag Center until a national search for a permanent director is completed. “If a student is truly passionate about physics, they can get an awesome experience working in our research labs, doing creative, cutting-edge stuff that no one else has done before. They can really develop their creative chops as a physicist. We’re already doing that, and I’m confident every department does that very well.”

What’s missing, he believes, is the opportunity to develop those “creative chops” in collaborative settings that bring together experts from different fields to tackle problems that resist disciplinary definition.

“The really messy, important problems that we face are ones that don’t fit into a discipline,” Whitaker says. “I think if you look at the environment, the really messy problems like end-of-life issues, creating an inclusive space for all Pomona students on a local level, these are not going to have a solution that lies within any department. I think the way that these problems are going to be solved is going to be people with vast expertise truly collaborating, getting in the intellectual muck together and doing the messy business of working out mindsets. Being generative and appreciating that their mindset approaches the problem differently than your mindset. That’s a really hard skill to develop.”

So how do you go about developing the creative skills involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations in an academic setting dominated by its distinct disciplines? That was the problem Rick and Susan Sontag—1964 graduates of Harvey Mudd College and Pomona College, respectively—sought to address with their $25 million gift to create the new center that bears their names.

But that remarkable gift was just the start. To help get this innovative new program off the ground, the colleges turned to design experts Tom Maiorana and Vida Mia Garcia of Red Cover Studios, who devoted a big portion of the last year to helping the center’s planners develop a conceptual framework and bring those concepts to life in the form of actual programming.

The result is a work in progress, but a very busy work in progress. Already nicknamed “The Hive” for the buzz of creative thought and collaborative activity it is designed to foster, the new center occupies renovated spaces inside what was once Pomona’s Seeley G. Mudd Science Library, with Pomona serving as lead campus. A chalkboard sign out front invites passersby inside to see what it’s all about. A new website (creativity.claremont.edu) invites students to: “Take chances. Mix things up. Make mistakes. Learn from them.”

That theme of risk-taking is central to the Hive’s purpose. Garcia says students have heard all the familiar clichés about the importance of exploring fearlessly and learning from failure, but the stakes for students at a place like Pomona are just too high to risk failure in anything that counts. The Hive, she says, offers a place where students can take risks in “a low-stakes way” and develop the kind of intellectual resilience that allows them to see that failure is just part of the learning process.

“Intellectually, they understand that, yeah, sure, you need to fail to learn, but where are they going to do that?” says Garcia. “There are precious few venues for that in life, but especially here at the 5Cs, because everybody is so overachieving and everybody sees that in everybody else. So how do we give them that safe space? We heard that over and again in the student interviews, in the ethnography at the outset, and we wanted to bake that into the ethos of this place.”

Those interviews with students and faculty also brought to light another significant concern: time. “They want chances to explore and fail,” Whitaker says. “They want chances to be experiential rather than just critical and writing papers. But then we also definitely heard from both groups, the students and the faculty alike, that, “Yes, we want to do all that. But we have no time.”

With that in mind, the Sontag Center’s programming has been designed to offer a range of activities, with a sliding scale of time and commitment required—from mini-workshops to pop-up courses, guided explorations and full-credit courses.

“I think there are some people who will make the time, and there are some people who will want to just dip their toes in the water,” Whitaker says. “That’s what the workshops are really good for. I think the hope for those is that it sparks something. If it sparks something, then you will carve out the time and you will make the commitment. But I think unless you get in the door, u unless you start to get exposure to these ideas and these mindsets, you’re never going to carve the time out.”

This year’s mini-workshops have ranged in topic from an introduction to improv theatre to empathetic listening to shoemaking. In the latter, students use plastic wrap, a hair dryer and tape to create a prototype of a shoe. Of course, the final products of that workshop will never make it to the shelves of your local shoestore. In fact, you’d barely recognize most of them as shoes. But that’s not the point.

“There are few disciplines where you are expected, if not required, to be a maker, right?” explains Maiorana. “You’ve got engineering, possibly physics, studio art. So those students are going to have some level of comfort and facility with making. But the vast majority actually might not, or might not do it on a regular basis.”

The point, he says, is to demystify the creative process, which is loaded down with preconceptions and misconceptions, and to give people a taste of what it feels like actually to make something. “It’s really rudimentary, but it doesn’t feel rudimentary,” he adds. “Creating physical objects is a way to have a very visceral experience of the lessons we’re trying to impart.”

However, that example also illustrates one of Whitaker’s concerns, not about the center itself, but about how it might be perceived.

“Prototyping is one of the great tools of designers,” he says. “That’s just one of the great tools of creativity, having an object that you can play with. But the kind of low-resolution prototyping we use is pipe cleaners and construction paper, so definitely there’s a danger that it can look like preschool. People walk in and say, ‘This is an academic center? You’re doing design-thinking? You’re just playing with toys.”

But in truth, the playfulness inherent in the program is an essential part of the design. “One of the challenges we have is that the approaches to creating a new mindset, a creative mindset, tend to involve ignoring the rigor to some degree,” Whitaker says. “Because in that early stage, it’s not about the details yet. It’s about forming the question. So you need to create a generative space where everyone feels valued and all ideas are good before you start critiquing them.”

Rigor comes later in the creative process, and there’s plenty of it to go around at the upper end of that sliding scale of activities, which includes project-based learning. That’s where teams of students and faculty take on daunting problems in the real world, a prospect that Co-Director Patrick Little of Harvey Mudd College finds particularly exciting, both for the experience the students will receive and for the potential to make a real difference in the world.

“One of the open-ended problems we’re just in the process of getting started looking at is reimagining certain parts of the health care experience for patients with cancer,” he says. “And if you think about that, if you put that in any kind of a disciplinary framework, what ends up happening is that you necessarily limit the ways you can imagine that. So if it’s an engineering program, it wouldn’t make sense to talk about this in non-technical solutions, because you’d be moving away from the very thing you’re good at. Or if you were to think of it in the context of a computer science program, you would normally be thinking: ‘How can we provide software or applications?’ The beauty and, I think, the power of the Sontag Center is that it can start by dealing with the question of ‘What are the needs?’ rather than ‘What are our capabilities?’”

It might be surprising to think of college students helping to solve some of the world’s big, messy problems even before they earn their diplomas, but Little thinks they may be particularly well suited to this sort of cross-disciplinary, out-of-the-box thinking. “They haven’t yet been told these problems are beyond them,” he says. “They haven’t yet been told they have to stay in their silo. And as a result—whether you’re talking about something that’s really playful like making shoes or whether you’re talking about something practical, like the work that’s being done right now to reimagine the design of the GIS facility over at the library or whether you ask them about one of these large global problems—they just bring incredible energy.”

As its reputation spreads, the center has also begun to attract groups from across the 5Cs that want to make use of its creative resources and ethos. For instance, Pomona’s Quest Scholars recently met there for a brainstorming session. “We came to the Hive to brainstorm in groups and kind of figure out what we want out of our Resource Center,” says Ashley Land ’16. She goes on to add: “The space is just so great for being creative and being able to take an idea and make something bigger out of it, or take no idea and make an idea.”

Indeed, the ultimate success of the Sontag Center may be the influence it has on the rest of the five campuses. Gail Gallaher ’17 hopes that students will carry a little of the ethos of the Hive back into the rest of their college experience. “You’re always thinking about how you can grow and how you can learn, even from mistakes and failures. You’re not afraid of challenges because you know you’re going to learn from them. I think the whole 5Cs could benefit from that spirit.”

New Knowledge

December 2, 2015 by Staff Comments Off

Nutritional Prejudice

Is Vitamin C better for you than an orange? Are omega-3 fatty acids more important for your diet than the fish they come from? This may sound like topsy-turvy nutritional logic, but a new study from Cornell University and Pomona College found participants judged individual nutrients as healthier than the whole, natural foods that contain them.

Published in the Journal of Health Psychology, the study by professors Jonathon P. Schuldt of Cornell University and Adam Pearson of Pomona College was sparked after the research partners read Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, in which the author speculates about an effect he dubs “nutritionism.”

Schuldt and Pearson devised a study to put this idea to the test: Two groups of research participants read an identical description of a moderately-healthy young man, but one group was told he made sure to include a variety of healthy foods in his diet, like bananas, fish, oranges, milk and spinach. For the second group, those foods were replaced with nutrients associated with those foods: potassium, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin C, calcium and iron.

The group that read about the nutrients considered the man to be at significantly lower risk of developing a number of leading chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke—and study participants who described themselves as diet-conscious or who had higher SAT/ACT scores were even more inclined to do so. The results aren’t surprising, Pearson said, in a society where people are constantly bombarded with health claims about nutrients and supplements. People who are more diet-conscious may be especially attentive to and influenced by these claims.

“It points to the insidious ways that the marketing of nutritional information can actually be harmful,” Pearson said. “If we are biased toward privileging the low-level properties of a food, we may overlook the many other healthy aspects of eating whole, natural foods.”

City of Trees

A tree

For their capstone project, a group of graduating seniors in Pomona College Professor Char Miller’s Environmental Analysis 190 class went out on a limb last spring and sought to map all of the public trees in the city of Claremont, sometimes called “The City of Trees and Ph.D.s.” The result is a convenient online guide mapping more than 24,000 trees and serving as an educational resource for the community.

Ben Wise of the Tree Action Group of Sustainable Claremont, a local nonprofit, contacted the Environmental Analysis (EA) Program and proposed that a team build a digital inventory and guide to city street trees. Wise’s aim was for people to see a tree in Claremont and then have a way to find out more about it.

So together, Alison Marks ’15, Naomi Bosch ’15, Nadine Lafeber SC ’15 and Sydney Stephenson CMC ’15—with help from geographic information system (GIS) specialist Warren Roberts at Honnold/Mudd Library—developed a website called Claremont Urban Arboretum (claremontsurbanarboretum.wordpress.com ) complete with an interactive GIS map and information on many of the life histories and origins of the tree species lining Claremont streets.

Environmental Analysis majors must complete two capstone projects: one individual and one group. “EA 190 is a group initiative defined by a real client with a real problem that must be resolved by the end of the spring semester,” says Miller, director of the EA Program. The aim is to push students to synthesize all they’ve learned over four years and translate that knowledge into action, he says.

Miller says public awareness about trees is a live issue, especially these days. “Claremont, the self-described City of Trees, has had a long love affair of the arboreal. But the current and crushing drought has made it essential that the community know more about the trees that are rooted into our stony soil,” he says.

Once Upon a Time in the Cambrian

Rendering of Yawunik kootenayi

Once there was a lobster-like predator with two pairs of compound eyes and large, toothed claws that prowled the Cambrian seas. After its death, its fossil lay waiting in a place now known as Marble Canyon—a newly discovered part of the renowned Canadian Burgess Shale deposits—for more than half a billion years before a team of researchers, including Professor of Geology Robert Gaines, brought it to light once more.

In a paper published last spring in the journal Palaeontology, Gaines and his co-authors announced the discovery of this strange new creature, named Yawunik kootenayi. Gaines was also part of the team that discovered the Marble Canyon deposits last year.

Letter Box

December 2, 2015 by PCM Readers Comments Off

Dreamers

I found the Summer 2015 issue very interesting and informative, which has been increasingly the case over the past few years. The “American Dreamers” feature got me thinking about a great use for this issue once I’ve finished it. In the past old issues have found a home on a coffee table shelf before they were recycled. This issue is bound for the waiting room of my physical therapist’s office where it may be browsed by an undocumented immigrant or someone who knows such a person, who in reading the Dreamers feature may use this information. Keep up the good work!

—Steve Lansdowne ‘ 71
Austin, Texas

I don’t believe I’ve ever missed a year donating to Pomona College since I graduated in 1976. My reasoning was that since someone paid for half my education, it was up to me to pay that back, and forward. But I have to admit a few years ago I did ask a Pomona fundraising person why I should still be donating, as Pomona has such a large endowment already. I never felt I really got a good answer until I read an article in The New York Times earlier this year, which I believe listed Pomona as having the fourth most economically diverse student body in the U.S. That was very gratifying.

And now I have a second reason—the Dreamers, as profiled in the recent issue of PCM. I love that my money is going to supporting these great young adults in their quest for high quality college education. As someone who has a conservative/libertarian bent, I am appalled at the racist and xenophobic immigration laws enacted in the last 130 years or so. From my perspective, these young adults are Americans in every sense of the word, so I’m proud to read that Pomona College feels as I do.

P.S. In a bit of irony, my conservative/libertarian political views were largely defined after taking a political science course from the late Dr. Krinsky, whose views were far to the left of where I ended up. When I hear people decry the liberal viewpoints nominally espoused in the typical college curriculum, I think they undersell the typical student’s underlying curiosity and convictions. I spent the semester arguing for Dr. Krinsky’s positions, as students often will, but in the end, I was not convinced. However, although Dr. Krinsky was a true believer in leftest ideals (the benevolent dictator), he invited a group of young libertarians to come speak to the class. He wanted us to hear opposing views, and for me it was a truly pivotal moment in my Pomona education.

—Steve Rempel ’76
Los Gatos, Calif.

The elegantly written piece, “American Dreamers,” expresses the highest aspirations of our College’s founders, of whom my great grandfather was its first dean. Investing in our future leaders, and in this matter, of our immigrant youth, is a passion I share. I am “invested” in this enterprise as a matter of carrying “our riches to all mankind” and have done so in teaching and adopting four of these immigrant kids.

—David Lyman, ‘66
South Pasadena, Calif.

Hurray for Introverts

There are many reasons I am happy to be a new Sagehen mother, one of them being the wonderful Pomona College Magazine. When my daughter Natalie McDonald ‘19 read your essay “The Power of Quiet,” she exclaimed with delight, “Yet another reason I am so excited to be going to Pomona College!” We had so many conversations about Susan Cain’s book, and I even wrote a post about our dinnertime conversations about it. We found it liberating and, as you observed, “reassuring” to understand and appreciate the special gifts of being introverted in an extroverted society. And then I read your recent essay “Stories Matter,” and all I could say to my husband Bill and Natalie was: “Wow…”

—Pamela Beere Briggs P’19
Los Angeles, Calif.

Memories of Little Bridges

Thanks for Professor Beeks’ wonderful tribute to Little Bridges. I was especially interested in his note that 1962 marked the beginning of annual collaborations between the choir and orchestra. In April 1962, I had the honor of performing as concertmaster of the orchestra in the very first such collaboration. Under the baton of Professor William Russell the combined forces of orchestra and chorus performed Brahms’ A German Requiem (in English, interestingly enough) for a full house in Little Bridges. As noted by Professor Beeks, we actually had to build an extension of the stage to accommodate all the musicians for that concert, but Bill Russell had the vision to make it happen and to continue the tradition thereafter.

My other favorite memory of Little Bridges and of Bill Russell is from the concert presented in the same year by the band. Professor Russell wanted to do a program for winds, and I suggested that he include the Second Suite for Military Band of Gustav Holst. This piece includes the “Song of the Blacksmith,” featuring a part for (what else?) an anvil. As a violinist, I didn’t normally play in symphonic bands, but Professor Russell invited me to sit in on anvil for this concert. Once we located an actual anvil for the purpose it turned out neither of us liked the sort of clanky sound it made. Then he remembered that he had a 3-foot length of railroad rail at his house. We hung it from one of those beautiful side balconies over the stage, and I rendered my first (and only) performance with concert band using a large hammer on the stage of Little Bridges Hall of Music. What a glorious, ringing sound it was!

Thanks again for the memories, and Happy Centennial to Little Bridges.

—Paul Bent ’65
Long Beach, Calif.

I found this most recent issue of PCM a particularly good and interesting one. I recall Graydon Beeks leading the tenors and baritones/basses of the choir to learn the new music. This was 1982–1984; 1985–1986, when I sang tenor in the P.C. choir. (The choir director Jon Bailey assisted the sopranos and altos to learn their parts.) But when I read Beeks’ article, that opens the issue, I was really pleased to find that his organ teacher was Doc Blanchard, because my mother, Margaret Lindgren (née Fuller), a Pomona alumna, has often told me the (true) story of Doc Blanchard, who was organist of the Claremont Methodist Church, having to leave in the middle of the Sunday morning church service to go put out fires as he was on the Claremont Fire Brigade!

Especially meaningful to me in this issue, however, is the large section on undocumented students, including the as-yet unpassed DREAM Act and DACA, which President Obama pushed through and still stands, allowing undocumented individuals, under specific circumstances, to remain in the Unites States with full legal protection and renewal every two years, even though they are not granted U.S. citizenship. Citizenship is what the President would really like to see, but cannot without the full backing of the Congress. This act is truly bipartisan, with both Democrat and Republican Congressmen originating and voting for it.

Finally, I thank you for posting my most recent volume, The Wood of Green: Poems, Stories, and Studies. You have done a good synopsis except, I think, regarding the studies or essays. There are only several studies that are of a philosophical nature. Most are human-experiential studies concerning human and divine. I do understand the difficulty to bring all this into focus in such few words.

I enjoyed reading this entire issue; it is one of the best I have read since I began receiving PCM many years ago (over 25 years).

—Alan Lindgren ’86
Culver City, Calif.

More Walton Memories

Thank you, Judy Bartels, for your letter about Jean Walton. In my time at Pomona she was important to women for her skill and caring as dean of women and because she was a rarity, a female professor (mathematics). Mark Wood tells us that stories are important, so I want to share one. One day Dean Walton joined a group of women students for coffee in the village and we began to talk about math and how puzzling it was for many. Dean Walton enjoyed the conversation and began answering questions. I mentioned that I had noticed dividing by whole numbers yielded smaller numbers while dividing by fractions did the opposite. She gave a simple, elegant explanation that differed so from my experiences in math classes that I was charmed. I pondered this for some time and 20 years later, when I decided to teach, I chose secondary math. I hoped to open the door for others that Dean Jean had opened for me. I am retired now, but in my community I am often introduced as “the math teacher” because, I hope, I was able to discover ways to do that for my students. Teachers often have no idea of their impact, and Dean Walton never knew about my teaching, but if I was able to open some doors, I think she would be pleased.

—Frances DuBose Johnson ‘54
Newbury Park, Califirnia

[Alumni and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.]

The Making of The Martian

December 2, 2015 by Carla Guerrero ’06 Comments Off

When producer Aditya Sood ’97 came across writer Andy Weir’s self-published book The Martian in 2013, it was selling on Amazon for 99 cents a download. Sood read the book and knew he had found something incredible—this is part of his job: find great, new material and projects to turn into movies.

The film The Martian, starring Matt Damon, opened on Oct. 2 and is now a box-office hit making nearly $100 million worldwide on opening weekend.

“When I read The Martian, I was blown away,” says Sood. “It is one of the best books I have ever read. I hadn’t seen anything like this, it’s a warm, human book which is so rare in science fiction, which can be a cold and distant genre.”

Sood, who is the president of Genre Films, brought the story to his company partner Simon Kinberg, and soon had Twentieth Century Fox behind it. With an incredible screenplay written by Drew Goddard, they were able to get Matt Damon and director Ridley Scott on board.

“We gave the script to Ridley Scott on a Friday and by Saturday, he called us to say he was in. Six months later, we were in Budapest starting filming,” recalls Sood.

Many of the positive reviews of the film highlight the accurate science and meticulous research that makes The Martian so good.

“More than anything, I’m just happy that we were able to translate Andy’s book into a movie that captured all of its values,” says Sood. “I wasn’t a science major at Pomona, but I’ve always loved science, and I get frustrated when movies don’t get science right but The Martian does. It tells a story that is entertaining and scientifically accurate—we used science to tell the story.”

Sood did major in Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE) at Pomona, but he took it upon himself to pursue his passion of films, signing up to receive the Hollywood Reporter in his school mailbox, and interning at New Line Cinema and Dreamworks. Sood passed over film school to come to Pomona and valued what the liberal arts had to offer.

“The greatest thing about Pomona was taking classes in any field. I’d always wanted to be an astronaut for the first 12 years of my life and so I took Bryan Penprase’s astronomy class my first year, which was great,” says Sood.

But Pomona holds a fond spot in his heart for more than academics. It was at Pomona that as a sophomore he met Becky Chassin ’98, his future wife.

“I was a sophomore with a terrible room draw, so my friends and I got doubles in Lyon. She was in a sponsor group right next door to us,” remembers Sood. “We introduced ourselves and became good pals. We were good friends through college and it wasn’t until many years later that we started dating. We got married three years ago.”

Along with the success of The Martian, Sood also recently celebrated the birth of his son, who he says “will hopefully be Pomona class of 2037.”

Sood has some advice for students wishing to make it in films: “Read everything you can—things that are movie-related, screenplays, books about the business, blogs, trade papers.”

He also tells students to find a group of like-minded friends who are into the same thing, friends who you can share information and experiences, and network with. That’s where 5C Claremont in Entertainment and Media (CEM) comes in. CEM recently organized a special screening of The Martian with a Q&A with Sood open to CEM and Pomona alumni.

“It’s incumbent upon students to figure that part out. It only helps you when you’re sharing experiences and information, that’s really valuable.”

Honor a Daring Mind

December 2, 2015 by Staff Comments Off

Daring Minds portrait collage

Who stands out when you think of Pomona’s daring minds? Over the years, many of them have been featured in the pages of this magazine—the array of portraits at the top of this page serves to remind us of just a few. But there are many, many more than we have pages in which to feature them.

That’s why, as Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds draws to a close, we are inviting you to join in Pomona’s celebration of the extraordinary Sagehens whose ideas and actions reflect the spirit of this historic campaign.

All you have to do is visit pomona.e
du/hdm to see who is being recognized and to make sure the Pomona professor, student, sponsor, coach, staff member or friend who inspires you most is listed among those being honored.

Here are a few recent honorees:

Martha Andresen
Sefa Aina
Lisa Beckett
Eleanor Brown ’75
Debby Burke
Betsy Crighton
Jo Hardin ’95
Rick Hazlett
Sid Lemelle
Susan McWilliams
Pat Mulcahy ’66
Jose Luis Ramirez
William Russell
Monique Saigal
David Foster Wallace
Frank Wells ’53
Dwight Whitaker
Wig 1 Back Hall Sponsor Group ’07

You can also help keep the spirit of daring inquiry and innovation alive for today’s Pomona students and faculty by making a gift in honor of your favorite Sagehen. Gifts received before the Campaign closes on Dec. 31, 2015, will be matched dollar for dollar by the Daring Minds Fund, doubling your gift in support of the daring minds of the future.

Honor your daring mind at pomona.edu/hdm.

Honor a Daring Mind banner

Joe’s Big Idea

December 2, 2015 by Andrea Appleton Comments Off

Joe Palca’s cubicle in NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters is strewn with bicycle gear from his daily commute, assorted piles of books about science, and random objects: a can of mackerel, a leaf-shaped bottle of maple syrup. From this cluttered perch, the longtime science correspondent has the power to shape what becomes news. If Joe Palca ’74 decides a story is worth putting on the air, roughly a million listeners hear it. And if he misses a story, well, some of those listeners may never hear about it.

In 1996, Science magazine published a study on a novel approach to treating cancer. Immunologist James Allison and his co-authors reported that they had successfully treated malignant tumors in mice by blocking molecules on immune system cells that act as a brake on immune response. Palca didn’t cover the study. “Nobody covered that paper,” he shrugs. “Everybody has cured cancer in mice.”

Two decades later, Allison’s immunotherapy methods have led to the first effective treatment for advanced melanoma. Patients used to die in less than a year; with treatment based on Allison’s research, some now live more than a decade. Allison has won dozens of prestigious awards for this work in recent years, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, often a precursor to the Nobel.

Someone, it seems, ought to have reported on that initial study. “If news is to tell you about the things that are important,” Palca says, “that’s the paper I should have been telling you about.” But out of all the promising studies published that week, Palca could not have known which one would make history. Reporters rarely do. “None of us in science journalism is smart enough to know which are the really important papers,” he says. “No one is.”

Nevertheless, the media generally presents scientific findings as if they were breaking news. As a result, Palca says, studies that will later prove inconsequential get the limelight, sometimes simply because they lend themselves to sexy headlines. Meanwhile, reporters inadvertently ignore research that, in hindsight, they ought to have covered (like that 1996 immunotherapy study). So a few years ago, after two decades as an NPR science correspondent, Palca had an idea. A big idea. What if he stopped trying to identify the important science stories and focused exclusively on the interesting ones?

Three years later, Joe’s Big Idea is going strong. The series tells the stories behind innovations: what drives scientists and inventors, how they come up with their ideas, and how they implement them (or try to). Palca has produced pieces on soccer-playing robots, ant traffic patterns, and a phone app that checks photos for eye disease. He’s followed efforts to end dengue fever, the search for life on Mars and the passionate quest for the perfect toothbrush. He hopes that by focusing on what’s intriguing about the scientific process, listeners will come to share his fascination. As he recently told an audience, “I want people to know there’s a joy and a delight and a beauty in science.”

The key to conveying that beauty is often the researcher. “You can’t tell a really moving story about a nanoparticle,” Palca says. “But the person studying the nanoparticle can be pretty interesting.”

Pediatric oncologist James Olson is a case in point. Olson developed a paint that makes brain tumors glow, helping surgeons to locate and remove them. While the story of the paint itself is fascinating—it’s derived from scorpion venom—the profile of the man behind it got the most emotional response of Palca’s career. It turns out Olson is a practicing physician. This is what drives his tumor research: He’s tired of telling parents their children are going to die. He’s “sick of seeing the devastation on people’s faces,” Palca says in the piece, “sick of feeling helpless.” Yet Olson has the rare ability to cast a child’s cancer prognosis in a bearable light. One parent tells him her 7-year-old’s death to cancer “was as beautiful as her birth” because he helped the family see it that way. Here’s a man who is not only trying to cure pediatric brain cancer; he’s helping parents part with children who’ve succumbed to it. A hundred listeners left grateful comments about the story online. “I had colleagues coming up and hugging me, telling me they were sitting there sobbing,” Palca says. ”And I understand it because it still makes me tear up.”

Of course, not all subjects have such inherent drama. Still, Palca says, scientists are not the cold-blooded, calculating creatures they are often presumed to be. “I’m sick of the caricature, of the white lab coat. The lab coat says ‘I’m an expert, not a person.’”

Palca’s irritation on this subject is personal. An animated guy with a mischievous streak and a penchant for tangents, he is himself a trained scientist. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology. Remember Jim Allison, the immunologist? Palca worked for him as a lab technician, his first full-time job out of Pomona College. (He also happens to be married to a molecular biologist, a deputy director at the National Institutes of Health.) Palca decamped for journalism immediately after earning his degree. Research was tedious to him. “You have to have a long attention span to be a scientist,” he says.

Palca’s attention span may not have served for years of lab work, but he has covered some impressively arcane research as a reporter. A giant hand-painted bowl in his office is proof. He received the bowl for delivering the 24th annual Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture to the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It was titled “Covering Complex Science, or How I Explained a Frank-Kasper Phase in Sphere-Forming Block Copolymer Melts to a Radio Audience.” Palca really did produce a story on a study by that name. In fact, he chose it precisely because it was so daunting. “I said I’m going to pick the most obscure thing I can find and do a thoughtful, serious story about it just to prove I can,” Palca says. (One charming detail from the piece: the researchers used marshmallows and coffee stirrers to model the molecules they studied.)

Palca claims no research is too obscure to make for an engaging story. He travels around the country giving lectures to scientists about how to couch their research in compelling terms. The trick, he says, is knowing what to leave out. Sometimes it’s the very detail the researcher is most fixated upon. Scientists tend to focus on what is new in their fields, he says, a habit that only perpetuates the media’s tendency to do the same. “A lot of the time scientists think that the ‘news’ is the new thing, which of course it is,” Palca says. “But in fact, the new thing may be pretty tedious.”

Take adaptive optics. This technology has been used in astronomical telescopes for several decades. It unblurs the blurring caused by the atmosphere. “So if you say you want to do a story about adaptive optics, well, the scientist will tell you about how they’ve tuned the laser and how the signal’s getting better and the interferometry,” Palca says. “And you say, ‘Wait a minute! You can do that? You can unblur the atmosphere?’ That’s where scientists get lost. They know about adaptive optics. It doesn’t occur to them that nobody else does.”

That’s because it’s easy to get lost in the details as a researcher, Palca says. The work can be monotonous. Palca recalls reporting on the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in the mid-1990s, an event that spawned headlines the world over. Scientific findings too often overshadow the work it took to get to them, Palca says. So his reporting focused on the tremendous effort it took to clone just one sheep. Palca did. “It took months of failure, months and months and months of boring, tedious, awful, discouraging failure to get one successful birth,” he says.

By interesting the public in the fits and starts that characterize scientific research and the personal drive that keeps researchers forging ahead, Palca hopes to convey a truer picture of how science really works. He says that the alternative, focusing on dazzling findings and reporting them as breaking news, gives the public the wrong idea. “I think it contributes to a sense of science lurching from breakthrough to breakthrough,” rather than as a continuum with incremental steps along the way, he says. It may also engender mistrust. “I wonder if the need to do more and more and more big science stories, the really exciting stories, has set science up for a fall,” Palca says. “Water on Mars? Wait a minute, I thought you figured that out already. Why are we still hearing about it?”

In the end, Palca hopes his own enthusiasm for science, and that of the people he talks to, is contagious. “The passion that people have and the desire to make a difference, it’s fun to listen to that,” he says. As he told an audience recently: “Not every study is going to lead to Teflon or Tang, but we’re going to learn something about the natural world. That’s got to be worth something in our culture.”

New on the Board of Trustees

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

The Pomona College Board of Trustees has a new chair and three new members. Samuel D. Glick ’04 took over the gavel this summer from Jeanne Buckley ’65. Joining the Board for the first time were Matthew J. Estes ’88, Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman ’92 and Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11.

Board Chair Samuel D. Glick ’04

Samuel D. Glick ’04 first served on Pomona’s Board of Trustees as the young alumni member from 2007 to 2011. He was elected to his current term in 2012. Glick is partner and San Francisco office leader at Oliver Wyman, where he advises the nation’s leading healthcare organizations on business strategy. At Pomona, he earned his bachelor’s degree in economics, with a minor in classics. As a member of the Board, he has served as chair of the Advancement Committee and as a member of the Finance Committee, Facilities and Environment Committee, Educational Quality Committee, Student Affairs Committee, Wig Fund for Teaching Committee and Honorary Degrees Committee.

Matthew J. Estes ’88

Matthew J. Estes built four companies in China during the past 24 years. He was founder & CEO of BabyCare Ltd., which manufactures and sells nutritional supplements via a chain of BabyCare Centers and a direct sales force of over 200,000 people in China. He was also founder of Yaolan New Media Ltd. (yaolan.com), a leading Chinese language parenting website with more than 11 million registered families. He sold BabyCare and Yaolan to U.S. companies. Previously, he was with Wella Cosmetics (now part of Proctor & Gamble) and Smithkline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline PLC). He served as Vice Chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and is currently focusing on healthcare- and internet-related venture capital.

Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman III ’92

As senior vice president of corporate PR for NBC Entertainment, Nathaniel “Nate” Kirtman III ’92 oversees the network’s corporate communications initiatives, media relations, charitable contributions, operations, events and digital communications efforts. His previous roles at NBC included overseeing publicity for late-night programs such as The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, talent relations and events. Earlier, Kirtman served as manager of marketing communications at GE-Aviation and led the corporate digital team at GE’s corporate headquarters. A government major and star athlete at Pomona, Kirtman was a ninth-round pick of the Dallas Cowboys. He is also chairman of the California State Lottery Commission and has served on Pomona’s Alumni Association Board.

Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11

Xiaoye “MD” Ma ’11 is the new young alumni trustee. Ma is a senior manager of business intelligence at 5.11 Tactical, a firm that innovates tactical gear for global special force operators, first responders, and outdoor enthusiasts. Prior to taking on this role, he was a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting. Graduated magna cum laude from Pomona, Ma was an economics and media studies major, freshman class president, ASPC commissioner of communications and RHS staff. Between high school in Singapore and Pomona, he spent part of his gap year as an actor in a Chinese television drama about firefighters.

How To

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Lesley Irvine magazine feature image There’s nothing particularly surprising in the fact that Pomona-Pitzer’s new athletic director has hit the ground running. Lesley Irvine has been moving fast ever since she was a child—first as a multi-sport athlete, then as a high-profile coach and finally as an athletic administrator. At Pomona, she has assumed a newly created full-time position as chair of Pomona’s Physical Education Department and director of the joint athletic program of Pomona and Pitzer colleges.

“I wanted to be at a place that was striving to be excellent both athletically and academically—a place that knew and believed that those things go hand in hand and support one another,” she explains in a clipped British accent softened at the edges by 16 years in the United States. “I also wanted to be at a place that was really striving to improve and be aspirational.”

Since her arrival, Irvine has been visible all over campus as she acquaints herself with every aspect of Sagehen sports—from intramurals to varsity—and begins to plot a course for the future. “As I think about the vision for Pomona-Pitzer Athletics, I think about broad-based competitive excellence,” she says. “I think about providing an experience that is at the highest level for our student-athletes. And I think about the visibility and connectivity of athletics on the campuses here.”

Number 1 Grow up in Corby, a steel town in central England where most people are of Scottish descent and speak with a Scottish brogue. Develop into an active child, always sporting a scraped knee. Get involved in athletics with the encouragement of your dad, an avid soccer player, coach and fan.

Number 2 Join a track and field club at the age of 9 and, since you excel in a range of athletic events, specialize in the heptathlon. In high school, find yourself playing almost every sport, from basketball to volleyball to soccer. Discover the game of field hockey and fall in love with it.

Number 3 Accept an invitation to play on the English junior national field hockey team at the age of 16, while also competing internationally in the heptathlon. Play for England in a victory over Scotland in the Six Nations field hockey tournament and have to explain to your teammates why your dad, a proud Scot, is rooting against you.

Number 4 Become the first member of your family to go to college, playing field hockey at prestigious Loughborough University. While there, win five national championships. During your second year, teach tennis at a summer camp in Maine (though you’ve never touched a tennis racquet before) and find yourself at home in American sports culture.

Number 5 After graduating, come back to the U.S. for graduate school, attending the University of Iowa and playing competitive field hockey for one more year, scoring the only goal in a 1–0 victory over Stanford University in your first trip out West and leading your team to a Final Four appearance. Earn your master’s degree in health, leisure and sports studies.

Number 6 Return to Stanford as assistant women’s field hockey coach. Discover that you love working with committed student athletes who love sports as much as you do. After two years, succeed the retiring head coach and spend eight years at the helm of Stanford’s elite program, guiding them to three straight NorPac championships.

Number 7 Leave Stanford to enter sports administration, spending five years at Bowling Green State University and rising to the rank of senior associate athletic director. Decide the job at Pomona-Pitzer is a perfect match for your abilities and your desire to help build something special for talented and motivated student-athletes while promoting wellness for a whole community

Tying the Knot

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

As Bridges Hall of Music celebrates its centennial, many Pomona alumni look back fondly at the place where they said “I do.” The Little Bridges Wedding Register is a historical record of marriages that took place in the building, starting with Howry Warner 1912 and Mary Roof 1912, married June 1, 1916. Compiled in the early 1970s, the register was maintained and updated through 1992 and includes the names of 453 couples.

ITEM: The Little Bridges Wedding Register
DATE: 1916–1992
COLLECTION: Pomona College Books and Periodicals Collection
DESCRIPTION: 29-page handwritten book (16” X 12” X 1”), registering the names of all the couples who were married in Mabel Shaw Bridges Hall of Music between 1916 and 1992.
ORIGIN: The book was created by the College to list couples who were married in Little Bridges and kept for many years at the Alumni House (Seaver House).

If you have an item from Pomona’s history that you’d like to see preserved in the Archives, please call 909-621-8138.