UC Davis assistant professors shed light on how their projects will revolutionize the future of science

Twelve members of UC Davis faculty were awarded the 2021 CAREER grant, an early-career award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

“All NSF grant proposals have some aspects of research, intellectual merit, educational activities and impacts to society,” said Laura Starkston, a CAREER grant recipient and an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics. 

The award allows faculty to focus on a single principle of investigation and develop ways to promote education and scientific research over the span of five years. 

Katerina Ziotopoulou, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is researching soil liquefaction and will be developing new approaches to reduce earthquake damage. 

Ziotopoulou said that she has been working in the field since her Ph.D. for years and has developed numerical tools that help predict hazards in the soil.

“After I trained myself [and] attended multiple workshops, I started getting more and more convinced that [this project] really does have the potential to reshape the way we do liquefaction,” Ziotopoulou said. “Even if the five years that I do this project don’t reshape [liquefaction], I was convinced that it would pave the way for newer developments.”

The project will also be implementing education to include the community in the change and inform them about liquefaction and earthquake damage prevention. 

“We are looking at developing workshops for teachers from the broader Yolo County and seeing how we can help them develop new demos and tools for the classes to propel their ability to talk about geotechnical earthquake engineering,” Ziotopoulou said. 

Tran Nguyen, an assistant professor of environmental chemistry, was awarded a CAREER grant for her research project on sulfur radicals, a simple radical molecule consisting of one hydrogen and one sulfur atom. Nguyen was inspired to pursue the idea when her students noticed an unusual reaction inside the classroom.

“We found that when we photolyzed [used light to break down molecules], the sulfate solution close to the concentration that they would be found on atmospheric particles, [the solution] generates reactive radicals and it started to react with all of our organics,” Nguyen said.

Surprised by the reaction, Nguyen was interested in pursuing this further.

“Sulfate is everywhere in the environment, and it’s thought of as very stable,” Nguyen said. “We photolyzed it, and it produced a bunch of organosulfate products, which is the sulfate anion turning into something reactive enough to start attacking organics and attaching itself to the organic molecule, becoming organic sulfate.”

When atmospheric particles have organosulfates on them, the organosulfate goes to the surface of the atmospheric particle, allowing the particle to interact with water better. As a result, aerosol particles with organosulfates can nucleate clouds more efficiently. “Cloud aerosol reactions and interactions have been identified by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] as the biggest uncertainty in our human understanding of anthropogenic climate change,” Nguyen said.

This project may shed light on the new chemistry’s effects on climate.

“It could be that it makes aerosols a little bit easier to nucleate clouds, and therefore maybe we’re underestimating the cooling effects of aerosol or underestimating the lifetime of clouds,” Nguyen said.

The project investigates how some of the chemistry has the potential to be very metastable—a stable state lasting for a relatively long time—in the environment. 

“We need to do these reactions and get the fundamental constants that can come out of it,” Nguyen said. “Then, we need to plug it into a global atmospheric model and see how it changes.”

Nguyen plans to share this project with the community by making chemistry more accessible to students.

“I plan to integrate open access data into undergraduate education,” Nguyen said. “I also plan to work with a group that uses social media to distribute more accessible information about environmental chemistry to people around the high school age and parents who do homeschooling.”

Laura Starkston, another grant recipient and an assistant professor in the math department, plans to use math to break down four-dimensional spaces in a way that is easier to visualize.

“We are not very good as human beings at visualizing four-dimensional space,” Starkston said. “The goal of the project is to give some concrete, hands-on ways to mathematically represent or get a visual handle on these spaces that are inherently unvisualizable.”

Starkston shared an analogy to show how this project will express four-dimensional spaces as two or three dimensions. 

“It’s kind of like if you’re building some giant piece of architecture or a bicycle,” Starkston said. “You’ve got a bunch of little pieces, a simple piece of metal or a simple piece of wood, and you put them together in a complicated way and that builds something complicated.”

Starkston plans to provide tangible ways to mathematically visualize these four-dimensional spaces.

“The goal with these four-dimensional spaces is to break them down into pieces and encode the way that they fit together in some kind of drawing that serves as an instruction manual for those connections,” Starkston said.

This project will be applicable in the realm of physics and areas where the marriage of math and science is necessary to better explain the four-dimensional spaces that represent space and time.

“A lot of times with abstract math, mathematicians explore it because it’s interesting and there’s something that we don’t understand that we can try to learn,” Starkston said. “Over time, science runs into problems where they need an abstract idea to explain what’s going on, and they look to the math that’s been developed.” 

Starkston plans to use the grant money to fund research, employ graduate students and hold workshops for experts all over the country who are interested in the project.

“I [also] want to use the grant money for a program that will connect graduate students and undergraduate students who are interested in math,” Starkston said. “This is a reading program to prepare them to get some extra experience with some specialized topics that they might not find by just taking classes.”

Other recipients of the grant include Jonathan Herman, Ambarish Kulkarni, Xinfan Lin, Scott McCormack, William Putnam, Marina Radulaski, Nitzan Shabek, Aditya Thakur and Jesús Velázquez.

The recipients are hopeful that COVID-19 restrictions will be lifted in order to safely access university equipment for their research.

“We’re hoping everything goes back to normal with COVID so that we can be in the lab a little bit more and access more instruments and do more experiments,” Nguyen said.

Written by: Maddie Duley — campus@theaggie.org

Resources such as CARE and Empower YOLO are available to offer free services to survivors

The initial COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 forced the world into a new isolated way of living where many Americans have dealt with job loss, housing insecurity and financial hardship. Recently published studies conducted by UC Davis Professor Clare Cannon and colleagues suggest that these stressors may be behind the increased rates of intimate partner violence (IPV) reported during the pandemic. 

“When COVID-19 happened, my colleagues […] and I got together to do research about stress resilience and intimate partner violence during the pandemic,” Cannon said. “We were interested in what stressors might be brought on by the pandemic that might exacerbate intimate partner violence. We have research that indicates IPV is on the rise during the pandemic. We set out to try to understand what were the push and pull factors.”

The researchers used validated scales to measure perceived stress and resilience, finding that as reported stress levels are up, resilience is down. Specifically, their data revealed that nutritional stress, income stress and rental stress were all higher in the group reporting intimate partner violence. Cannon said that they were surprised to discover that reliance on friends and neighbors was negatively associated with resilience which is atypical for disasters. 

“There’s something unique about COVID,” Cannon said. “We argue that as an infectious disease characterized by the spread of contagion, that if you think you are going to need help from friends, family, neighbors then you are going to be less resilient. Because if you need help from those people, they can also infect you.”

Unfortunately, because of safety measures employed to slow the spread of the virus, people experiencing intimate partner violence may be stuck at home with their abuser. 

Sarah Meredith, the director of UC Davis’ Center for Advocacy, Resources & Education (CARE), said that people experiencing domestic abuse can have immense difficulty seeking help, especially during the pandemic. 

 “I notice that many survivors in our own community have a hard time making connections with some services because of the isolation and monitoring that is often associated with intimate partner violence,” Meredith said via email.

Resources available for survivors have adjusted in response to COVID-19 restrictions. CARE provides services to all UC Davis students, faculty and staff, and its staff are available to provide services remotely in a manner that is safe for survivors. 

“CARE staff are still available to provide all services remotely,” Meredith said via email. “The advocate will work with the survivor to find a way to meet remotely that feels most safe for the survivor, whether that’s a video conference meeting, phone call, or simply communicating via email. We are still available for 24/7 in-person emergency response.”

Empower YOLO offers free services for survivors of intimate partner violence (including counseling and legal services) that are not limited to UC Davis affiliates. Natalia Baltazar, the director of development and community relations of Empower YOLO, said that in the first few months of the pandemic, the organization had more clients report feeling unsafe in their homes.

“We had several clients feeling like prisoners in their homes,” Baltazar said. “Lockdown was not safe for them.”

Cannon and her colleagues have proposed using COVID-19 infrastructure to screen for intimate partner violence, similar to what is often done at doctors’ offices. 

“Now, particularly in the U.S.—but this could also work globally—we have this COVID-19 public health infrastructure: testing sites and vaccination sites,” Cannon said. “We could use that to triage and identify those at risk for experiencing intimate partner violence.”

At Empower YOLO, there are a wide range of services available—from childcare to food services. Baltazar said that domestic violence often comes to the surface during intake. 

“[Clients] come in for an array of things,” Baltazar said. “Sometimes they come in just for clothes, they’ll come in for food or diapers. In their intake process, we found out there has been abuse there and they actually want services for that. We’re really proud that we have these wrap-around services for clients, and with the pandemic obviously things have gotten so stressful for many of our clients.”

There is concern about the underreporting of intimate partner violence as bias comes into play using self-report measures like surveys used in Cannon’s research.

“We fully expect with all of our work on intimate partner violence that things typically are more dire and more prevalent than our data suggests,” Cannon said. “So we say what we’re finding is probably a conservative estimate given the difficulties in people being able to report, acknowledge and express. [This is] both because of internal processes, such as shame, but also because of external consequences: The very real threat of, ‘If I tell someone, that might make it worse.”

Meredith said via email that survivors who are also members of historically marginalized groups are at higher risk of trauma from several different causes. However, intimate partner violence in sex and gender minority communities is vastly underresearched, according to Cannon. 

“Another really important dynamic at play here is the compounded trauma for BIPOC survivors, LGBTQIA survivors, undocumented survivors, unhoused survivors and survivors from other marginalized communities,” Meredith said via email. “Not only are they experiencing trauma related to the abuse, but they are also vulnerable to trauma associated with experiencing racism, xenophobia, cis-sexism, poverty, etc.”

Many community members in Yolo County may not recognize, or may not have seen first-hand, their friends and neighbors dealing with issues like intimate partner violence. 

“One really important takeaway for the general public is the ongoing silent epidemic of intimate partner violence,” Cannon said. “In the U.S., research suggests that one in four women will experience some form of IPV in their lifetime, and one in five men will experience it. So this is something that is affecting our family, our friends, our neighbors, our community—whether we know it or not. And usually we don’t know it.”

Baltazar said that she would like people to learn about these topics and be mindful, and that she is constantly impressed by the strength of her clients at Empower YOLO.

“Our clients are super resilient,” Baltazar said. “It amazes us how even though they are under all of these stresses, they are trying to move forward and be positive in their lives; that ability to survive and be resilient and healthy is pretty amazing.”

Written by: Rebecca Gardner — campus@theaggie.org

Commission chairs and senators discussed the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, among other things.

Vice President Emily Barneond called the meeting to order at 6:10 p.m. 

Barneond introduced and assigned four new bills, including SB #58 to outline procedures for consolidation of ASUCD units, SB #59 to edit Chapter 23 of ASUCD bylaws, SB #60 for hiring practices for ASUCD unit directors and executive office staff and SB #61 to legitimize executive task forces and redefine their purpose. 

Old legislation included SB #56 to differentiate between special committees and executive task forces, SB #57 on commission schedule cancellation and rescheduling notifications and SB #62 to clarify the role of the student government administrative office in maintaining the format of ASUCD bylaws. Additionally, SR #9 to oppose campus and systemwide labor layoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic and SR #11 to limit proctored exams on campus were considered. 

Commission Chair Yalda Saii of the Ethnic and Cultural Affairs committee (ECAC) commented on SR #9, stating that the ECAC is “agreeing with the authors that layoffs during a pandemic that has exacerbated financial strain particularly on marginalized communities is inherently immoral and it’s not something that benefits anyone during a pandemic.” 

Senator Maahum Shahab who introduced SR #11 spoke about how proctored exams harm different communities and are “intrusive, discriminatory and ableist.” Along with research, she hopes this bill will get professors to acknowledge the research and speak on it to limit proctored exams.  

All five passed unanimously. 

Of those bills was SR #10, which urges the university to update ASUCD when guidelines and policies change. It was introduced by the Gender and Sexuality Commission Chair Jane Casto. 

“One of the problems that we’ve come across frequently in our work is the fact that the policies we have set in place do not actually follow through the bylaws,” Casto said. “One of the common instances we saw happening within the bylaws [is] we would be referred to Section X, Y and Z of the UC Davis proposal manual for example, and when we went to go look for that manual, that section no longer exists. When they’re talking about something as serious and severe as our policies for sexual misconduct that is incredibly vital that we have that information readily accessible.”

While President Kyle Krueger mentioned respecting the authors’ intentions, he also said that this, “was not the right way to go about it.” 

“I think the administration is going to read some of [the whereas clauses] like this and think, ‘It sounds like ASUCD is telling us they can’t handle their own policies,’” Krueger said. “I think as a 501(c)(3), it is our job to handle our own affairs.”

Senator Kabir Sahni and Environmental Policy and Planning commission (EPP) Chair Hunter Ottman commented on the resolution’s language used, with Sahni saying it was “volatile” and Ottman saying that the table needs to be cautious of how it writes resolutions to not come off as “callous.” 

SR #10 was tabled. 

Controller Alexis Lopez-Perez recommended Vice Controller nominee Isabelle Poux and was granted the position with no objections.

For quarterly reports, the Housing Advising Undergraduates’ projects included assessing student needs and connecting them with guidance and resources through Housing Week. For next spring, they are planning on working toward centralizing housing resources and holding educational events. 

The EPP presented their quarterly report and announced the projects they have been working on including: the Fair Trade project, which has a goal of enacting a UC-wide policy that encourages campuses to earn and maintain a Fair Trade University certification, which provides food and catering services for UC students. E-Talks, a virtual form of Toilet Talks, which shared informational posters on bathrooms on campus, provides educational graphics on sustainable living and environmental justice and a sustainability Webinar series. 

They have also been providing support for the Office of the External Vice President’s bill amendment which, according to Otterman, will allow for a more timely review process for student housing projects.

“There are significant hurdles with getting student housing projects approved,” Ottman said. “A huge portion of it has to do with misreporting or using the [California Environmental Policy Act (CEQA)] process. So, this bill will provide student housing projects not to have an exemption from CEQA but a more fair review process, one that has a timeline in site.” 

ECAC reported on their work including committee reviving and SB #53 on the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee Restructuring; SR #8 on caste discrimination, anti-Asian discrimination signage and resources and Black History Month resources; and an ethnic studies expansion project. 

Internal Affairs Commission Chair Julian Garcia reported on the commission’s bylaw references clean-up project as well as their search for a new chair due to him graduating. 

Senator Ryan Manriquez reported on hiring Evan Rodricks for Chief of Staff and co-authoring SR #11. 

Senator Kristin Mifsud reported on attending and conducting interviews for Student Government Administrative office manager and meeting with the Disability Task Force to discuss disabled students’ needs on campus. 

Senator Tenzin Youedon reported on fundraising planning and holding space with Sigma Omicron Pi, the Asian-American sorority due to the rise of hate crimes nationwide. 

Krueger worked on the Police Research Task Force, discussed the issue of P.E. with the Vice Chancellor and posted more unit director vacancies, interim senator vacancy. Krueger also reported on a vacant senator spot next quarter. 

External Affairs Vice President Maria Martinez reported on lobbying Congressman Garamendi about COVID-19 relief and the Double The Pell panel and movement.

DREAM Committee Chair Alejandro Cervantes reported on the committee’s food voucher program, scholarships and finding a permanent place for the lending library. 

During public comment, Nico Gist, the campus organizer for CALPIRG, announced CALPIRG’s lobby day with 150 student leaders who met with 70 legislators to advocate for bills to fight climate change and clean electricity. 

Martinez announced an upcoming lobby day for transfer students on April 27-28. 

The ASUCD meeting was adjourned at 10:01 p.m.

Written by: Annette Campos — campus@theaggie.org 

Many challenges remain for international students at UC Davis amid the pandemic

International graduate students at UC Davis continue to face obstacles to conducting their research, and these problems are exacerbated by both the pandemic and the challenges of working under an F-1 visa. 

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the F-1 visa permits people from abroad to study in academic institutions in the U.S.. Students must be fluent in English and must support themselves financially for the duration of their course of study. They cannot work outside of their academic institution of choice, meaning that international graduate students at UC Davis are unable to pursue off-campus jobs or U.S.-based projects outside of the university, even if they are research-related. 

According to a fourth-year doctoral student who spoke to The California Aggie about his experiences on the condition of anonymity, the stringency of these visa guidelines, as well as the complexity of the U.S.’s relationship with his home country of Peru, has made conducting research difficult. 

He talked about the challenges of undertaking research with indigenous leaders in Peru, who were denied entry to the U.S.. 

“When [a visa] gets rejected, you never get any explanation,” he said. “It’s not even that they tell you that you’re missing something.” 

He noted that the rejection of his research collaborators occurred under the administration of former President Donald Trump.  

“This is me speculating, because there is no official record, but I assume they saw these indigenous leaders not as leaders working with a university, but just as poor people from a poor country,” he said. “Maybe [the government] thought they were at risk of staying illegally.”

Federal and state funding is also largely off-limits to international students. 

“By coming here and doing my Ph.D. here, I am promoting and I am benefiting U.S. academia in the same way that a student who is not international is,” the student said. “So why am I not eligible for that kind of funding? I pay taxes here like everyone else, and I don’t get the right to vote or anything like that. It’s taxation without representation, literally.” 

A doctoral student from China also spoke about a lack of access to federal funding in her field of cultural anthropology. 

“I feel like I’m in a weird position,” she said. “My home country doesn’t recognize me as someone foreign living in the U.S., and the U.S. doesn’t recognize me as a resident living here.”

She explained that non-U.S. citizens are ineligible for prestigious grants and fellowships like the Fulbright or the MacArthur Innovation Grant.
“I was thinking, since I’m here, I should contribute to society here, but it hasn’t included me so why should I even bother?” she said. 

COVID-19 has also complicated international students’ efforts to undertake research. Last year, the doctoral student from Peru was unable to conduct research at his field site since Peru’s borders were closed due to the pandemic. 

Because his research is based on performance practices there, the pandemic has delayed his degree progress. 

An eighth-year doctoral student in performance studies spoke about a similar experience. Her F-1 visa mandates that she be employed solely by the university, making it impossible for her to be a part of art initiatives happening outside of the UC, despite the fact that these initiatives are at the core of her research and artistic practice. 

“Even though I have invitations from people in the States to do art, legally I’m not supposed to,” she said. “I’m not supposed to get paid or be doing work outside of the umbrella of the UC. It’s hard to develop my art and my network of art practices here, which then hinders my visa.” 

The student’s spouse is under an F-2 visa, meaning that they are a dependent of someone with an F-1. According to the Department of Homeland Security, a dependent can enroll at an accredited institution in the United States provided that they aren’t pursuing a full course of study. 

Dependents are unable to work or apply for a social security number in the country. Because of this, the student’s spouse has been unable to work for five years.

Additionally, due to the collaborative nature of her work and the challenge of teaching performance classes online, the student has taken an extra year to complete her dissertation.

Having been diagnosed with cancer at the beginning of her doctoral studies, she is now one quarter over the time frame that UC Davis is able to fund, meaning that she can no longer benefit from the non-resident supplemental tuition fellowship (NRST) waiver which extends to the fourth and fifth years of doctoral studies post-candidacy.  

In a previous article by The California Aggie regarding the limitations of the NRST waiver, Performance Studies Chair Joe Dumit said that the waiver doesn’t account for complications like illness or family emergencies despite the extension it offers.

 Although the university has offered individual solutions to some graduate students regarding funding during COVID-19, visa-related issues mostly remain up to the federal government. 

“I don’t think the university can do something tangible other than filling the gaps of the federal government in the short run,” the doctoral student from Peru said, referring both to the limitations of his student visa and the complicated relationship the U.S. has with Latin American countries. “But in the long run, I think there should be an organized push towards integration rather than highlighting the differences between national and non-national students,” he said.

Though his department has supported his studies despite limited funding available in the humanities, federal regulations have proven to be quite different. 

“[The relationship between the U.S. and Latin America] has never been a collaborative space, the way I’ve seen it, in which everyone comes as an equal,” he said. “I think there’s this strong discrepancy between what my department is trying to put forward and create and what the federal government allows people to do.” 

Written by: Rebecca Bihn-Wallace — campus@theaggie.org