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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.

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.”

Music Restored

December 2, 2015 by Staff Comments Off

The statue being restored On August 14, 2015, Burt Johnson’s 1916 sculpture “Spanish Music,” was reinstalled on the fountain in Lebus Court. The sculpture, which was a gift to the College from the Class of 1915, had remained in place in the courtyard until earlier this year, when a section of the fountain collapsed. Based on photographs of the original fountain, the fountain was rebuilt, and the College took the opportunity to have the statue restored and its broken flute repaired.

This is Your Brain on Counterfactuals

December 2, 2015 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Suzanne Thompson, professor emerita of psychology at Pomona, conducts research on how people react to personal threats, particularly those with delayed consequences. She and her undergraduate research group are investigating a variety of ways in which different perceptions of threat influence the processing of threatening information and guide health and safety behaviors.

PCM: As a psychologist, how do you see the role of “what if” thinking in human affairs?

Suzanne Thompson: The theme that you’ve chosen is especially interesting because “what if” or “if only” thinking is such a basic part of human cognition. And there seem to be good evolutionary reasons for that. It has helped us develop the ability to control things, to anticipate—if I do this, what’s going to happen?—and then to carry that several steps down the line.

Or looking back, it allows us to analyze what has gone before and play out these little scenarios of what else could have happened, which is full of information about causes and effects.

PCM: What kind of research has been done in this area?

ST: When thoughts like these refer to the past, they’re usually called counterfactuals, and when they refer to the future, we call those anticipatory factuals or prefactuals. I would say most of the work has been done on counterfactuals, or what’s sometimes called “cognitive undoing.” There are two basic types—upward and downward counterfactuals. An upward counterfactual is when we undo what did happen and imagine a better outcome. For example, if I’m a student who got a C on a test, and I imagine, “If only I had skipped that party and studied hard, this could have been a B or an A.” Alternatively, we can imagine a worse outcome—a downward counterfactual, such as, “I’m glad I at least covered that material or it could have been a lot worse. This could have been a D or an F.”

The two kinds of counterfactuals have very different effects and different advantages and disadvantages. Imagining something better tends to lead to unpleasant emotions—regret or maybe self-blame. And if it involves other people’s behavior, we might blame them. That’s the downside, those negative emotions and reactions.

But the upside is that there’s a lot of information there about what we can do to change things in the future, and people can use that. One study asked college students about the kinds of counterfactuals they were making for their grade on the first big exam. Then the researchers followed them for the rest of the semester, and found that the students who had made upward counterfactuals felt more regret and blame, but also tended to have a stronger sense of control and got better grades over the course of the semester. That gives support to that idea that upward counterfactuals are very useful.

In contrast, the downward counterfactuals—“it could have been worse”— led to more positive emotions, but were not as instructive. They didn’t have useful information about how to change your behavior to get a better outcome.

PCM: So no pain, no gain?

ST: That’s right. Research has also looked at what we “undo” in a counterfactual. We tend to look mainly at our own behavior, maybe because we have more control over that or it’s more useful. We also tend to undo things that happened fairly close to the event. And if something unusual happens—if you had a break in your routine or took a different route to work and then got into an accident—that’s what’s going to pop out as something to undo.

PCM: What about people who get obsessed with their “what if” thoughts?

ST: Yes, it can get pushed too far. There are people who get immersed in “what if” and “if only.” For people who have gone through some traumatic event, like losing a loved one in an automobile accident or to disease, it’s very common initially to do this kind of counterfactual thinking. It seems useful early on, but if people are still doing it years later, it’s a sign of not coping very well. It is better to get your information, and then get out and not get stuck in the “undoing” side of things.

PCM: Are there certain kinds of situations that tend to provoke counterfactual thoughts?

ST: Research has shown that near misses are particularly powerful. There’s a classic example that I use with my classes. Mr. Crane and Mr. Tees are going to the airport and they both get there a half hour late and miss their plane. When Mr. Crane gets to the airport, he finds that the plane left on schedule, a half hour before. When Mr. Tees arrives, he finds that his plane was delayed, and he just missed it. Almost everyone recognizes that Mr. Tees would feel worse, even though the situations are identical in terms of what happened to them. But emotionally, psychologically, we pick up on the fact that it could have so easily have been different, and that has a big impact on us.

Another good example comes from an article that was in the L.A. Times maybe 10 years ago about a guy playing the lottery who always played the same number again and again, and then one day he doesn’t and his number wins. And we all understand what that would feel like—that near miss. In fact, the Oregon lottery uses that as a slogan in some of their ads: “What if your number won without you?”

PCM: Have you thought about how counterfactual thinking connects with your own research about possible threats somewhere in the future?

ST: In a 2002 study, I examined people’s reactions to 9/11 a year after the event. And I found such amazing variety—from people who weren’t fazed at all to people who were highly sensitized to danger because of the event and were never going to fly again. That got me interested in individual differences—how we don’t all think about threats and the future the same way.

We all know people who are very sensitized to threat and also people who just brush it off, easy deniers. It is possible that those who have a great sensitivity to future threats are using anticipatory counterfactuals, and anticipating bad outcomes that could happen. For others who are not so sensitized to threat, the possible negative outcomes just don’t occur to them. A little bit of anticipating threats is a good thing, but a whole lot of thinking about every possible future threat—“if I do X, this bad outcome could happen”—can be paralyzing.

People who get more anxious about threats are more likely to protect themselves, which is good, but they may not be as discriminating about what really is necessary. You can see this play out in society sometimes. Around the time when AIDS was first identified, we didn’t know a lot about it, but medical researchers did know that it wasn’t easily spread. You can be in the same room with someone, even touch them, but not be at risk. But many parents wouldn’t let their kids go to school with another child who was identified with AIDS or had a relative with HIV or AIDS. Sensitization to threat can lead to that type of over-reaction.

It is easy to see how this ability to play things out and anticipate outcomes allows you to identify more negative things that could happen, and that can heighten anxiety and lead to over-reactions. My research has not yet tied threat hypersensitivity to counterfactuals, in particular, but now that I have talked with you about this, it is something I want to do. Does the hypersensitivity to threat come from being very prone to counterfactuals and especially prone to ones in which you play out the scenario to a negative ending?

PCM: There’s one aspect of “what if” thinking that we haven’t discussed yet. That’s the fact we also do it for fun—like in this issue of the magazine. We read counterfactual stories. And we play games, like chess, that are all about pre-factual scenarios.

ST: Chess is a good example. You’re following a line of thought with all the branches and possibilities. What chess masters can do—thinking many moves ahead—is an amazing ability. Because counterfactual and prefactual thinking are such important abilities from an evolutionary viewpoint, it makes sense that we find them rewarding. The fun is our incentive for practicing these very useful ways of thinking.

“Here, Let Me Show You…”

December 2, 2015 by Feather Rose Flores ’17 Comments Off

David Haley working with electronics If you are ever offered a tour of the new Millikan Laboratory and Andrew Science Hall with David Haley as your guide, take it. A 21-year veteran of physics departments, he has an enthusiasm for his subject that is nonstop and infectious. Completely at ease in the corridors of Millikan’s new underground laboratory, he misses no opportunity to point out the fascinating creations of Pomona students and faculty.

“This one is a sonoluminescence project,” he says, referring to one of the many capstone projects he’s kept over the years. “It uses sound to compress a bubble, which produces light. And this—” He gestures to a nearby rolling chair contraption. “—Is a fire-extinguisher-propelled rocket cart. You sit on it and you squeeze the handle and you launch yourself down the hall. It’s for talking about Newton’s laws.” Before exiting a workroom, he pauses to flick on a homemade air hockey table, explaining: “I’m trying to convince one of the students to create 3D shapes that we can print and use to teach conservation of momentum.”

Haley, who has been working at Pomona since the summer of 2001, describes himself as a “physics roadie.” As the senior lab technician of the Physics Department, he is primarily responsible for handling the equipment for labs and the lecture demonstrations, in addition to supporting faculty research and student projects. “One of the nuances of my job is making the process more streamlined and straightforward for students, so they’re less worried about how things work and more focused on the concepts behind the lab,” he explains. “If I do my job right, you’ll rarely know I was there.”

Haley graduated with a B.S. in physics from Kansas State University, after which he spent seven years working as a lab technician at New Mexico State University before moving to California. Luckily for Pomona, he was informed of the open position by chance, after contacting a former coworker who happened to attend the same summer meeting of the Physics Instructional Resource Association (PIRA) as Pomona Professor of Physics David Tanenbaum. “I didn’t really realize the caliber of Pomona when I first got the job,” Haley confesses. “It was just a name to me. But once I started working here, I realized what a special place this is. It makes me believe in karma.”

If good karma is a reward for good deeds, Haley deserves a lot of it. He recently gave a presentation to the Southern California chapter of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) detailing the Pomona College Lending Library of physics equipment, which he manages. Composed of experiments ranging from electricity and magnetism to mechanics to superconductivity, the library serves physics teachers from around Southern California, who can request to borrow experiment kits for their lessons once they’ve attended a Pomona faculty-run workshop. “This is part of Pomona College’s mission,” says Haley. “We’re obligated as educators to help teach not only our students here at Pomona, but the general populace. I like that I can use what I do, and the equipment I have, to get people interested in science and the world around them.”

Since Haley is an enthusiast for science in general, you’d think choosing to focus in only one field would have been tough for him, but this isn’t the case. “I like the applied nature of physics,” he says. “The world is a very beautiful place, and I want to understand it better. Why do objects have mass? Why is there gravity? The more evidence you get to support a theory, the more you believe it’s accurate, but you can never really take it as truth. But that’s what I like about physics. It’s always a reiteration.”

And yet despite the reiteration, Haley’s job is never boring. Particularly exciting for him was the opportunity to use his many years of experience to help design the new science building. The Physics and Astronomy Department seized the opportunity to reorganize their space, implementing prep rooms between labs and behind lecture classrooms.

His favorite parts of the building also include the new student research project space, which was absent in the old Millikan. And new perks of the job include selecting items for Millikan’s first-floor display case. Haley is eager to point them all out: “These are Lichtenberg’s figures; they’re basically electric sparks encased in acrylic. This is a laser-etched glass figurine. This is the Milky Way galaxy, and this is a large-scale galactic structure. Those are some of our antique Gessler tubes from the 1920s. Those are all meteorites. And here’s a 3D-printed figurine of a student wearing a hat.”

Below ground again, as Haley enthusiastically indicates each of the projects that live in the basement of Millikan, he tells the stories of their creators. The student who created a rail gun as his senior thesis is now working at Los Alamos. Another student started his own software company.

Haley keeps all of his thank-you notes in a special place of honor on his desk. Smiling to himself as he goes through each one, he remarks, “It’s easy to come to work when you have things like this. To work with people like this is amazing. Plus, I get to play with soap bubbles and Tesla coils and shoot balls across the room. It’s really—can you see the colors in the film now?”

He gestures toward his workbench, where he has set up an old junior project, a soap film encased in a clear box. “The colors have to do with the thickness of the film. It’s an interference of light demonstration, pretty much the same idea as an oil slick on water.

“Here—let me show you.”

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.

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