Blog Articles

Myrlie Evers-Williams at Pomona

With the announcement this week that Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 will give the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 21, it’s worth taking a look back at her time in Claremont.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of her husband, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who was shot in the back outside their Jackson, Miss., home on the morning of June 12, 1963, while Myrlie and their three children were inside.

The next year, Evers-Williams decided to move to Claremont, as she recounted in a 1965 piece for Ebony magazine titled “Why I Left Mississippi.” In that piece, she wrote that she found purpose in speaking engagements, but was like the “walking dead” when she returned to her house and the memories. Ultimately, it was the welfare of her children, particularly her oldest son who was nine at the time, that prompted the move:

“They were awake that terrible night, and heard the thunderous roar of the death shot. They saw their father lying in a scarlet pool of blood as his life ebbed away,” she wrote. “… So it was that in the spring of 1964, while on a speaking engagement in California, I asked friends to ‘look around’ for a house for me.”

She chose Claremont, Evers-Williams wrote, for the college town atmosphere, and more specifically because it was home to Pomona College, where she enrolled. Her time in Claremont received widespread media attention — in 1965 alone her life here was featured in Look, Good Housekeeping and in the Ebony magazine cover story, as the Claremont Courier noted in a story about the stories.

Evers-Williams told Look that she had to wake at 3 a.m. to juggle the demands of school, raising kids and writing down her memories of Medgar. “Someone asked me what I wanted for Christmas,” she told the magazine. “I told them: a secretary.”

While still a Pomona student, Evers-Williams wrote a book (with Peter Williams), For Us, the Living. After graduating in sociology in 1968, Evers worked for several years at The Claremont Colleges, starting at the new Center for Educational Opportunity. In 1970, she ran for Congress as a Democrat, losing in the largely Republican district that included Claremont.

She went on to work for ARCO as national director of community affairs, served as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works and, in 1995, she was elected chair of the NAACP’s national board of directors. The next year, Pomona College awarded her an honorary degree and she delivered the Commencement address in Bridges Auditorium, where she had graduated nearly three decades earlier.

Stray Thoughts: When Bad Things Happen

It’s a famous truism that bad things happen to good people. What isn’t so clear, sometimes, is that bad things also happen to good institutions.

 This thought came to me recently as I contemplated the black-on-black cover of the latest issue of the Penn State alumni magazine—about the terrible scandal that has rocked that university to its core—and thought about another, very painful situation closer to home: the work authorization dilemma that in recent months has left many here at Pomona feeling saddened, disillusioned or angry. (If you aren’t familiar with this situation, I suggest that you visit www.pomona.edu/work-documentation before reading on.) After a great deal of thought, we at PCM have decided not to try to cover these events hurriedly in this spring issue of the magazine, but to wait until the summer issue, which we plan to devote primarily to the issues surrounding immigration and borders here in the U.S. and around the world. However, as I was considering what I should do in this little introductory missive, my thoughts kept turning back to why bad things happen to good institutions.

 Besides costing 17 longstanding Pomona employees their livelihoods, the chain of events unleashed by a complaint to the Board of Trustees last year has plunged us all into the midst of a divisive political issue, strained the College’s relationships with important segments of the College community, generated a range of conspiracy theories, threatened the College’s reputation for inclusivity, driven many to tears of sorrow or anger or frustration, and raised legal and moral questions to which there are no easy answers—or, at least, no answers that satisfy everyone. When must complaints be investigated? What do our immigration laws really require of us? Must we always obey those laws? Can anyone commit an entire institution to a path of civil disobedience? Who can we blame for the bad things that happen in our midst?

 Few today take the Medieval view that bad things happen as a judgment from God. Still, when we hear about bad things happening to presumably good people, our sympathy is sometimes leavened with judgment. Lung cancer? Must have been a smoker. AIDS? Probably promiscuous. Auto accident? Careless driver. At heart, we may understand that sometimes bad things really do happen to people for no good reason, but it’s more comforting to think that they somehow invited it. It’s easier to sleep at night when you believe that character is synonymous with fate.

 Maybe that’s why, when bad things happen to good institutions, we’re so quick to assume that maybe they weren’t quite as good as we thought. Or even that there was something sinister going on behind the scenes. An assumption of ill will simplifies matters. It makes it easier to believe that if we had been there making those decisions, things would have turned out differently. We would have been wiser, better, braver, more perceptive, more compassionate—more something.

 It’s much less comfortable to imagine good, smart, caring, thoughtful people agonizing over intractable problems without the benefit of hindsight and making hard choices from a range of painful options, knowing full well that their actions will have a ripple of consequences only some of which they can predict but for which they will always be judged.

Memories of War

 

Students in Professor Tomás Summers Sandoval’s Latino Oral Histories class spent the fall semester interviewing Chicano Vietnam veterans as part of a project that will live on for posterity.

The histories will be added to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, which compiles first-hand accounts from U.S. veterans so that future generations may “better understand the realities of war.”

The number of histories in the collection from Vietnam veterans is growing, but Summers Sandoval notes that only a small minority of those histories are from Chicanos. Contrast that with estimates that Chicanos, who often served on the front lines in Vietnam, accounted for a disproportionately high percentage of U.S. casualties in comparison to their proportion of the U.S. population.

To Summers Sandoval, who grew up in Southern California, the stories he’s collecting hit close to home—his father, uncle, and “pretty much every male I knew growing up” were Vietnam veterans. “I approach it as a historian, but it also has a very personal connection for me,” he says. “It’s an endeavor to retrieve and start to analyze what is part of larger [Chicano] history.”

The project involves recruiting volunteers, recording their oral interviews and compiling the interviews in a digital format to eventually be posted online. To find participants, Summers Sandoval and his students first targeted alumni networks of 1960s grad classes from East Los Angeles high schools, and have collected about 25 oral histories so far—in a year, he hopes to have 100.

“They’re not just interviews about Vietnam, they’re life stories,” says Summers Sandoval, assistant professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies. “There’s a strong sense of the entire process of surviving— adapting and learning to be a veteran of this war, learning to be one of the ones who survived, learning to live with post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a culture of survival.”

The interview process isn’t always easy, dealing with subjects that can be hard to talk about, not to mention events that occurred 40 years in the past.

A Vietnamese American, Evyn Le Espiritu ’13 noted in her final reflection piece for the class that she had initially felt some wariness about how the veterans might view her. But her fears were not realized and the interviews were “intimate but not threatening.”

“I felt honored that the veterans shared their stories with me,” she wrote. “I was struck by their intimate association with death, by the fragile miracle of their survival, by the lasting effects of war on their psyche and well-being. I realized that there was a way to feel heartfelt respect and admiration for these veterans as individuals, without compromising my pacifist politics.”

Professor Summers Sandoval notes that after plenty of preparation, the students as a whole have been doing “very well.”

“It’s a very humbling thing to hear someone’s life story—I’m always very grateful that a stranger is willing to share that with another stranger,” says Summers Sandoval.

He has noticed a common thread among the veterans. “For a lot of them,” the professor says, “at times … it seems like they’ve found some kind of peace with the past.”

Stellar Vision

Professor Choi with Will Morrison '12 and Daniel Contreras '13

Tucked away in the basement of the Andrew Science Building, Room 58 carries a light-hearted vibe as students trickle in after lunch, chatting and cracking jokes as music blares in the background.

Then, back to work. Alongside Astrophysics Professor Philip Choi, the students turn to the tiny instruments that are deliberately arranged on a large table in the center of the astrophysics lab. This has been their calling for the past two years.

In January 2010, Choi and his research team received a four-year, $637,138 National Science Foundation grant to build a groundbreaking adaptive optics system for the College’s Table Mountain Observatory one-meter telescope in Wrightwood, about a 45-minute drive from Claremont in the San Gabriel Mountains. The optics will correct for the distortion in the atmosphere that is manifested in the twinkle of stars. The result? Image quality rivaling that produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Choi explains that the turbulence in the atmosphere—a result of clashes in air density and temperature—causes the distortion of stars, planets and other astronomical bodies viewed through telescopes. This is analogous to ripples in a swimming pool blurring the image of a penny at the bottom of the pool. Adaptive optics systems solve this problem with deformable mirrors that bend beams of light back on track based on how much distortion has altered their paths.

First, wave front sensors measure the distortion of light from a reference star. The sensors then send signals via high-powered computers to flexible mirrors that compensate for the distortion by deforming ever so slightly, as though there are little fingers pushing and pulling them from behind. This must occur every 1,000th of a second to keep up with the ever-changing atmosphere. If the system has done its job, stars that are blurred due to the turbulent atmosphere instantly come to a sharp focus, with a factor of 10 improvement in image resolution.

The adaptive optics system is set to be integrated into the Table Mountain telescope by the end of 2013. Although the opacity of the atmosphere in some wavelengths will prevent adaptive optics telescopes from rendering space telescopes like the Hubble obsolete, Choi says that adaptive optics will allow scientists to “tailor the space missions to complement what we’re doing from the ground.”

Interestingly enough, Dr. Choi went into his undergraduate years planning on majoring in philosophy. A poor freshman enrollment time locked him out of philosophy seminars and opened up a slot for Astronomy 101. He came to realize that the natural sciences in general and astrophysics in particular would be the perfect avenue to allow him to continue exploring “the big questions…of why we’re here, how we got here, where we’re going.”

Choi’s research team includes Pomona Astronomy Professor Bryan Penprase, along with additional co-investigators and collaborators from Caltech, Harvey Mudd and Sonoma State. Add to that a crew of Pomona undergrads; among the most recent are Daniel Contreras ’13, Claire Dickey ’14, Anne Hedlund ’14, Lorcan McGonigle ’13, Will Morrison ’12 and Alex Rudy ’11.

Choi enjoys doing research with undergraduate students because they are “not jaded. They’re doing it for the enjoyment and for the love of it. … To be in that exploratory mode is the most exciting part of science, I think. And so to be working with students who are all in that mode is inspiring.”

For their part, the students like working on so many different aspects of the project, from software and programming to optical alignment and machining. Contreras notes the feeling of being “in the lab working on the code behind our instrument and just seeing everything work and everything just fit together so nicely. It’s really awesome.”

The research team also fits together well, with occasional In-N-Out runs when their work is done. As Morrison puts it, Professor Choi is “a fun person to be locked in a lab downstairs with for eight hours.”

 

Rockin’ History

Professor Kevin Dettmar

In today’s session of Flashpoints in Rock ‘n’ Roll History, Professor Kevin Dettmar recounts the 1980s rise of Irish rock band U2 to peak popularity with The Joshua Tree. The band becomes known for its sincerity and social consciousness, but Dettmar notes questions to consider regarding how U2 goes about promoting its causes.

The professor plays U.S. concert footage from U2’s 1988 Rattle and Hum documentary in which the band performs an extended version of its early anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” about the conflict in Northern Ireland. Lead singer Bono interrupts the song with a fiery speech: “Irish Americans who haven’t been back to their country in 20 or 30 years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution. … What’s the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? … No more!”

That sets off the classroom discussion, abridged and edited here. Does the midsong monologue undermine the music— and the message? Can Bono’s American concert audience even grasp what he’s talking about?

DETTMAR: So tell me what you saw …

WILLIE: Bono was very emotional throughout. That’s part of what makes him such a good performer. He was becoming really close with his audience, talking about the terrorism in his country.

LEE: The monologue in the middle just seems kind of over the top. If I had gone to see a band I really like I would mostly be going there to listen to their music, not to have them tell me about how I should change the world.

DETTMAR: I think that the band and Bono, they have the best of intentions. … But you can question their strategy. Part of the problem with these sermons in the middle of songs is they are implicitly saying the songs aren’t powerful enough to do the work that we want them to do: We don’t trust the song to carry the message.

SHERIDAN: The song keeps losing its momentum. All of a sudden Bono starts talking and preaching for two minutes. Then the song ends. Then they start playing again. They’re trading off the actual musical quality for the preachiness and the message.

SARAH: Maybe they don’t trust their songs to carry the message, but people in America do have a really big problem with not knowing what’s happening outside of the U.S. I think this is one of the ways, maybe, that they can get people’s attention.

DETTMAR: The problem is that if you don’t understand the political situation—if you don’t understand that they’re from Ireland and that the violence is actually in Ulster, for instance—then what he says is too telegraphic. You’re never going to understand it.

BEN: I find it interesting that people react against Bono being “preachy.” Without that preachy nature, what is U2?

The Professor: Kevin Dettmar

At Pomona since 2008, Kevin Dettmar is the W.M. Keck Professor of English and chair of the English Department. He splits his research and teaching between British and Irish modernism, with an emphasis on James Joyce, and contemporary popular music. He is the author of Is Rock Dead?, editor for Oxford University Press of the book series Modernist Literature & Culture and general editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature.

The Class: Flashpoints in Rock ‘n Roll History

Rock ’n’ roll has both endured and enjoyed a rocky public reception since its earliest days: Bill Haley & the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” (1954) provoked riots across the country. We will trace the “scandalous” history of rock ’n’ roll through its public controversies. In such moments, we learn a great deal about what rock hopes to be, about its intrinsic contradictions and structural instability, and about the resistance it meets from its own fans.

Acting Globally

As a high school exchange student in Japan, Sam Holden ’12 developed a strong interest in international relations and Asian studies. At Pomona, he has twice conducted summer research in Japan, studied abroad in Germany and lived in Oldenborg’s language halls. He speaks four languages and is a mentor to two international students from Asia. A native of Colorado, Holden plans to pursue graduate study in Japan, with a focus on how that country’s shrinking population and economy inform new approaches to sustainable urbanism.

Digging Beneath the Surface: “The summer after my freshman year, I went to Japan to make a documentary about Brazilian immigrants. I taught myself some rudimentary Portuguese and made contacts with both Brazilian and Japanese organizations. Japan appears to be a homogenous and equal society, so it was a very eyeopening experience to go to a community where the majority of the people are foreigners and don’t speak Japanese, and to see the struggles they were going through.“

A New Frontier:“I’ve become very interested in the idea of post-economic growth society. In a country like Japan, where the population is declining and the economy has been stagnant, the question is: what does a society do when it can no longer count on growth to sustain the social systems we rely on? Post-economic growth theory is about the need to move from competitive to cooperative economies, to think creatively about building robust communities that use fewer resources.”

Community of Learners: “Oldenborg Center has been essential in helping me develop my language skills. I lived in Japanese Hall my sophomore year and in German Hall for a semester, and I still go to the language tables in the dining hall. Any time you’re in a community of learners like that—and this goes for Pomona College as a whole—it helps to reinforce what you’re doing in class.”

Pray for Japan: “I had the opportunity to translate a collection of Twitter messages that were sent after the March earthquake and tsunami. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a 20-year-old Japanese college student created a website cata loguing some of those messages. The site went viral in the first week, and about 70 of the messages, along with photos of support from around the world, were turned into a book, with parallel pages in Japanese and English. Pray for Japan has sold 100,000 copies, with all the money going to disaster relief.“

Financial Aid: “It’s a gift that I think about every day. I’m grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to discover who it is I want to be and what I want to pursue. And to be able to do that free of financial concerns and the stress associated with student loans is extraordinarily important. I want to make the most of the opportunities I’ve had here, and then use my education to give something back to the community.”

No Time to Look Back

Cruz Reynoso ’53

Cruz Reynoso ’53 during his time on the California Supreme Court

Since the 2010 release of an award-winning documentary about his life, Cruz Reynoso ’53 has been appearing with producer- director Abby Ginzberg at high school, college and law school screenings around the country. But the 80-year-old, who led a ground-breaking fight in the ’60s for the rights of farm workers and served as the first Latino justice on the California Supreme Court, has not stopped for long to look back.

An emeritus law professor at UC Davis who still teaches one semester each year, Reynoso is spearheading two investigations— one into the death of a young farm worker shot by police and another into the pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis during a peaceful protest last fall.

“I’m too active,” says Reynoso with a laugh. “I’m also a member of the board of California Forward, a group that is trying to reform our dysfunctional state government. One of the things we are trying to do is get an initiative on the ballot this year to reform how the budget is put together. We realize how difficult it is to do anything, and we’re prepared for failure. But we have to try.”

That persistence is illustrated in the new documentary about his life. Shown on PBS stations nationwide and recently released on DVD, Cruz Reynoso: Sowing the Seeds of Justice (www.reynosofilm.org) combines archival footage and interviews with Reynoso and his contemporaries to tell the story of a turbulent time in California and U.S. history. “What makes biographies interesting to me is the historical period in which a person lived,” says Ginzberg, a former attorney who has been making documentary films for almost 20 years.

One of 11 children, Reynoso grew up in Southern California, working in the orange groves alongside his parents. At 16, he made what Ginzberg describes as the most pivotal decision in his life, when he chose to pursue an education, despite his mother’s wishes that he continue working. A scholarship brought him to Pomona College and, after serving in the military, he went to law school on the G.I. Bill at UC Berkeley, where he was the only Latino in his class.

After graduating, he started a small law practice and joined the Community Service Organization, where he met Cesar Chavez. It would be the first step in a life devoted to public service. “One needed to do something beyond simply having a job just to support your family,” says Reynoso in the film. “That was important. But the community and what was happening around you was always important to me.”

In 1966, he was named director of California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA), the first legal aid program aimed at helping the rural poor. The success of CRLA drew the ire of agribusiness and Gov. Ronald Reagan, who vetoed funding for the program and accused it of undermining democracy. Reynoso led a successful three-year court battle to overturn Reagan’s veto and is credited for helping to save the organization. “I think the fact there is an institution still there defending workers is a testimony to the ability of people like Cruz to navigate the shoals when you have enemies like Gov. Reagan,” says Jerry Cohen, a former general counsel to the United Farm Workers Union who was interviewed for the documentary.

Ginzberg calls Reynoso an unsung hero of the legal profession and describes him as calm, focused and vigilant, even during the most trying periods of his career. ”He could rise to the temperature of the moment, but he never raised the temperature, and that really made a difference,” says Ginzberg.

Appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to the state Supreme Court in 1981, Reynoso again became a political target, when supporters of the death penalty and business interests mounted a campaign for a statewide retention vote that ousted Chief Justice Rose Bird, Justice Joseph Grodin and Reynoso.

“With respect to the attacks on the court, I never took it personally because I knew the attacks were false,” says Reynoso. “Sad to say, those who were attacking the courts were very vigorous, and those defending the court had never been involved in that type of issue before, so they were in disarray. Most of what voters heard were attacks on the courts, particularly that we were not following the law. I told people if I believed what was being said, I’d vote against me.”

“Cruz was the first Latino on the California Supreme Court, which was one of the biggest honors you could have, and then he suffered one of the biggest defeats four years later,” says Ginzberg. “Neither one defined him. His attitude was: what can I do next? He didn’t sit around licking his wounds.”

In 2000, Reynoso was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton. The following year, as vice chair of the Civil Rights Commission, he led the only official investigation into voting irregularities in Florida in the Bush-Gore presidential election.

As a professor, Reynoso has become a role model to a new generation of idealistic young attorneys, says Ginzberg, who admits she too has been influenced by the subject of her film. “I’ve sort of adopted his view. He told me, ‘I’m an incurable optimist. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I’ve done in my life.’ Cruz also says that you can’t think something is going to be easy, or because you win one battle you’re not going to have to fight another. Justice is a constant struggle and we have to keep fighting.”

Reynoso says he sees that same need to keep fighting reflected in the students he’s met as a professor and during his travels with Ginzberg. “My life is simply a continuum in terms of the many hundreds and thousands of people who’ve come before me, who have been struggling for human rights, for social justice,’’ he says. “I see it in the faces of those young people who will continue the struggle. It confirms my notion that things are never still; they’re always moving, and we have to be there to protect those who don’t have economic or political power.”

CRUZ REYNOSO ON:

THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT: “I have really been pleased to see the Occupy Movement because it came at just the right time to balance the political scene. The reality of the last 20 to 30 years is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is disappearing, and that is not a good thing for a democracy.”

EDUCATION: “Education is a key to doing well in society. I hate to use harsh terms, but we’ve practically become immoral by placing the financial burden for education on the people least able to pay—the students—instead of having us as taxpayers, who are working or who have retirement pay, carry that burden. It’s so different from what we’ve done in the past.”

JUSTICE: “As a youngster I had what I called my justice bone. When I saw something that was really unfair or unjust it hurt, and so I felt compelled to do something about it to relieve that hurt. And I think that is still true today. So in some ways, what I do is a selfish effort to not hurt by taking on some of those issues.”

GOVERNMENT: “We’re now having a debate about whether the government should be big or small. I’ve always thought in a democracy that government should do what people want it to do irrespective of those descriptions of large and big. In some instances, big programs might be good, in others, small programs might work.“

THE GOOD FIGHT: “I have always felt that even if you lose a good fight, you have gained something by helping educate people about the issue. So, hopefully, you win a number of the battles you’re in, but even when you lose, you’ve done some good. Those of us who feel strongly about those issues have a duty to continue fighting, and I find that invigorating.”

Taking the Baton

Sharon Paul ’78 may never have launched her career in choral conducting if the late William F. Russell, Pomona’s music director from 1951-82, hadn’t been tardy to choir practice. Paul serendipitously took the baton in his stead, unaware of her professor’s arrival.

“I think he watched from the back and thought, ‘Oh! That’s what Sharon should do with her life,’” Paul says. “He saw my abilities, felt I had strengths and nurtured them. I don’t think I would have found conducting if I went to any other school.”

Since then, Paul has carved out an illustrious career in choral conducting and, in February, will return to the Pomona campus as clinician of the 2012 Pacific Southwest Intercollegiate Choral Association (PSICA) Festival. Pomona, a founding member of the association in 1922, is hosting the festival for the first time in the College’s recorded history. Per tradition, the host school’s choral director selects the festival’s clinician. Donna Di Grazia, Pomona’s choral director and music professor, knew exactly who she wanted.

Sharon Paul '78

Di Grazia, who is coordinating the festival, points not only to Paul’s talent as a musician and choral conductor, but also to the fact that her “professional work serves as a terrific example of how a liberal arts education can set a foundation that can lead to a significant career in the performing arts.”

Paul, who entered Pomona at age 16, is equally pleased. “I’m so excited, I feel silly. I’m so happy to be coming back,” says Paul, who lives in Oregon with her husband of 16 years and their seventh-grade son. “I’m feeling very nostalgic about my time at Pomona, and the further I get in my career, the more I realize how seminal that time was. I can’t wait to walk the campus, be in the music building, just remember.”

Paul has directed choirs around the globe—Berlin, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Singapore and elsewhere. Holding an M.F.A from UCLA and a D.M.A. in choral conducting from Stanford University, Paul currently serves as professor of music, chair of vocal and choral studies and director of choral activities at the University of Oregon. For eight years prior, she was the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) and conductor of the organization’s acclaimed ensembles, Chorissima and Virtuose. Paul joined the SFGC following what she called a “quirky career move,” having left a tenured professor position at Chico State to do so.

As clinician of the 2012 festival, which will bring together about a dozen Southern California collegiate choirs to perform for each other, Paul will provide expert critiques of each choir’s performance, lead a two-hour master class comprised of eight singers from each ensemble and conduct these top vocalists in a performance. She also will coach student conductors during the master class. Visiting performers will find in Paul an engaging conductor and teacher, enduringly influenced by her former instructor, Leonard Pronko, a Pomona professor since 1957. “He was the most engaging educator I’d ever seen, and that stuck with me,” Paul says.

The PSICA festival will be held Feb. 25. Information: www.psica.org.

Top of Mind

In an impressive feat for Pomona, a pair of alumni will helm the nation’s 40,000-plus neuroscientists in back-to-back presidencies of the prestigious Society for Neuroscience.

Moses Chao ’73 has been in the lead since November 2011, and in October, President-elect Larry Swanson ’68 will take over. Both began their scientific careers in Claremont as the study of the brain and nervous system came of age.

Moses Chao '73

Moses Chao majored in biochemistry at Pomona, where he did research with Professor Corwin Hansch.

After a break from academics, working as a counselor in New York City, he returned to Southern California to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry at UCLA. It was not until he started his own laboratory at the Cornell University Medical College in New York in 1984, that Chao turned his attention to something brain-related: a molecule called nerve growth factor, or NGF. He sought to identify the receptor that nerves use to grab onto NGF, like catching a baseball in a mitt.

Today, in his laboratory at New York University, Chao still works on growth factors including NGF and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). As their names suggest, these proteins promote nerve survival and growth, so they are crucial during early child development. But they continue to work in the adult brain, maintaining the connections between nerve cells. With aging, these growth factors often start to disappear, and the nerve connections begin to disintegrate. Too little BDNF, for example, might lead to Alzheimer’s disease, Chao says.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that scientists have tried providing growth factors as treatments for diseases of the nervous system such as Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease. But they have had little luck; the problem, Chao says, is that growth factors are large, sticky proteins that do not cross the blood-brain barrier and penetrate to the right location.

What if there was a better way? In 2001, Chao and colleagues reported, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on another option: a small molecule, adenosine, which mimicked the effects of growth factors on cells living in a dish. Adenosine has side effects in many tissues, such as the heart—but Chao says the paper proved that it should be possible to find small molecules that move through the body to the brain cells that need them. A decade later, his hunt goes on:

“We’re still plugging away and trying to identify drugs that have protective effects,” Chao says.

With the Society for Neuroscience, Chao served on various committees, as secretary, and as an editor of the Society’s Journal of Neuroscience before his presidency. In his current role, Chao is focused on science funding. “Everybody’s anxious about funding because of the gridlock in Washington,” he says.

Larry Swanson '68

Larry Swanson discovered his love for neuroscience before it was called “neuroscience.” While studying chemistry at Pomona, he took a course with Professor Clinton Trafton in what was then referred to as “physiological psychology.” Hooked on the study of the brain, he furthered his studies with a Ph.D. in neurobiology, from one of the nation’s first programs at Washington University in St. Louis. There, he was wowed by scientists studying how different chemicals controlled the appetites of rats: one treatment made the animals hungry, another made them thirsty. How did the nerves in the brain control these desires? Swanson is still trying to figure that out today as a professor at the University of Southern California.

Although neuroscientists have a good handle on the interactions between one nerve cell and another, they don’t have an overall picture of the brain’s circuitry, Swanson says. The brain has between 500 and 1,000 regions, and they talk to each other via a myriad of mostly-unknown connections.

Swanson is part of an effort to map how all the different parts of the brain interact. This unified wiring diagram is the “connectome,” so-called in a nod to the sum of all genetic codes called the genome. It’s the nervous system equivalent of the old skeleton song—“the leg-bone connected to the knee-bone,” and so on— but with an estimated 100,000 connections, the brain’s interactions are unlikely to be summarized with a simple ditty. Swanson’s team is developing computer programs to keep track of all the interactions.

The current lack of a brain map is stonewalling researchers trying to develop medicines for conditions like schizophrenia. “We’re almost at a dead end in terms of trying to get effective cures,” Swanson says. “We need to know how the brain works in order to fix it.” For example, he wants to suss out the parts of the brain that connect together to control appetite. If he knew which part of that circuit goes wrong in someone who is obese, for example, he might be able to repair the wiring, shutting down hunger.

Swanson attended the first Society for Neuroscience meeting in 1971 and has come back every year since. Like Chao, he served on committees, as secretary and as editor for the Journal of Neuroscience. During his tenure as president, Swanson hopes to boost international collaboration among neuroscientists.

Edward W. Malan

Emeritus Professor Edward W. Malan ’48, one of the most influential members in the history of the Pomona College Physical Education Department, died Sept. 6, 2011, at age 88.

Malan came to Pomona as a student in the early 1940s and was already active in athletics, playing football and earning a letter as a running tackle, when, in May 1943, he was among a contingent of men who left campus for the U.S. Army. After serving with distinction in Europe, he returned to Pomona, graduating in 1948 and joining the faculty as an instructor two years later. He went on to earn a master’s at the Claremont Graduate School as well as an Ed.D. from UCLA, and in 1960 was promoted to professor of physical education and named director of athletics, a role he filled through 1978. During this time the challenging yet rewarding process of equalizing men’s and women’s athletics was begun, and the number of intercollegiate competitive sports rose from seven to 17.

In addition to coaching several years of both varsity and frosh football (including an 8-0 season with the 1950 frosh football team in his first year), Professor Malan coached track and field until 1966 and golf later on in his career. He founded the department’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 1958, oversaw its induction ceremonies for 42 years and in 1989 was himself awarded an honorary induction. That same year, he also received the SCIAC Distinguished Service Award. Along with serving as the College’s NCAA representative, he was very active in the NCAA Council and was elected to the presidency for Division III.

As a resident of Claremont, he was elected to the City Council twice, for the 1962-66 term and again for 1968-72, during which time he was mayor from 1970-72. He retired from Pomona in 1989 but remained active with the College and, in 2001, received its Alumni Distinguished Service Award.

“Coach Malan was a class act and a wonderful person,” says Athletics Director Charles Katsiaficas. “We all looked up to him; he was a great role model and mentor to so many of us through the years. We are blessed for the many years he shared with us here at Pomona.”