Tour of the Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation: Amelia Fuller, Betty Young, John Birmingham, David Hess. Photo courtesy of Sean Collins

Greetings from the sepia-toned skies of Santa Clara!

Smoke from the many wildfires was lofted by strong winds high into the troposphere, blocking the sun and creating a “film noir” all around us. Despite the bewildering, eerie light, I am grateful that the state's many firefighters are doing heroic work protecting us and, in many cases, keeping us from experiencing the very worst this season has to bring.

We are two weeks away from the start of fall quarter. I heartedly applaud all of the faculty and staff who have doubled down on preparations for remote instruction as we embark on another academic quarter of teaching through computer screens.

Thank you also to all who participated in Wednesday's March and Rally for Racial Justice. More than 300 students, faculty, staff, and community members showed up to make their voices heard and call for justice.

Looking ahead to next week, don't miss the Fall Convocation on Tuesday, September 15th at 10:00 AM — of course, it will be on Zoom, but no less of a chance to celebrate the wonderful College community and its accomplishments, while we also look ahead to this next academic year. The links to join are included at the end of this newsletter.

See you then!

Daniel

Highlights

Paul J. Schutz (Religious Studies) and Julie Hanlon Rubio (Jesuit School of Theology) have received a $40,000 grant from Fordham University. These funds will support a research study entitled "Critically Examining Whys and Hows: Measuring and Understanding How Structural Clericalism Enables Sexual Violence."

With the goal of measuring structural clericalism and assessing its relationship to clergy sexual abuse, Paul and Julie will collaborate with Thomas Plante (Psychology) and Sonny Manuel (Clinical Psychology, JST) to implement quantitative and qualitative instruments to gather data from students in ministry formation, priests, and lay ecclesial ministers. In dialogue with existing research, this research will seek to inform our understanding of structural clericalism and its relationship to clergy sexual abuse. A particular focus of qualitative study will be JST and SCU’s Graduate Program in Pastoral Ministries, which together train priests, religious sisters, scholastics, deacons, and laypeople for ecclesial ministry. The study will also survey programs of ministerial formation at other Jesuit institutions and, if possible, other contexts.

Members of the Carter-O'Connell Lab celebrating a successful summer research program. From left: Yazmin Torres '20 (Biochemistry), Braden Yoshinaga '20 (Biology), Miles Yamasaki '20 (Biochemistry), Damon Rideaux '19 (Biology), Ian Carter-O'Connell, Sean Wallace '19 (Biochemistry), and Leila Chihab '20 (Biochemistry).

Last month, Ian Carter-O'Connell (Chemistry & Biochemistry) was awarded an Academic Research Enhancement Award (R15) from the National Institutes of Health to support his lab's project: "Defining the Biochemical Function and Therapeutic Utility of Unique PARP14 and PARP15 ADP-Ribosylation Sites."
   
This project builds on the early work performed in the lab and will involve the study of a family of proteins known as poly-ADP-ribose polymerases (PARPs). PARPs catalyze ADP-ribosylation of target proteins, altering their cellular function. PARPs have been implicated in a number of physiological and pathophysiological functions – including cell development, viral infection, and cancer progression – but the links between unique ADP-ribosylation events and their downstream effects are unknown. The proposed work will define the role of specific ADP-ribosylation modifications during viral infection while developing novel peptide-based inhibitors as probes and therapeutics to selectively block PARP activity.
   
This project will benefit from a multidisciplinary, institution-spanning collaboration between the Carter-O'Connell lab and the labs of Amelia Fuller (Chemistry & Biochemistry), Larry L. David (Chemical Physiology & Biochemistry, OHSU), and Matthew Daugherty (Biological Sciences, UCSD).

Tom Plante (Psychology) published a journal article in August 2020 with colleagues (Anthony Isacco, Katie Finn, Dominick Tirabassi, and Kate Meade), "An examination of the psychological health of applicants to the Catholic priesthood and diaconate," in Spirituality in Clinical Practice.

Heather Noel Turner (English) published an article titled "Visualizing Translation" in the peer-reviewed journal, Kairos: a Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Written with co-author Laura Gonzales from the University of Florida, the article presents a longitudinal study conducted with translators and interpreters at a small non-profit organization serving Latinx communities, through data visualization. Connecting scholarship from Technical Communication, Digital Humanities, and Rhetoric and Composition, "Visualizing Translation" documents the various activities and intellectual practices that translators exhibit in their everyday work. The article enacts its scholar argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of web design and interactive data visualization to illustrate how translators negotiate a wide range of technical, cultural, and intellectual resources to complete their work.

Photo: A chord diagram used to visualize some of the connections between translators and their community, between the community and researchers, and between researchers and stakeholders in the publication process. All of these relationships influence the processes and activities of translation work and should be embedded and highlighted in data visualizations related to translation research.

When comparing monolingual (A) to code-switching (B) stories, younger children were equally successful at learning new words from either story type, but older 4- to 5-yr-olds saw a word learning boost from the code-switching books.

Kirsten Read (Psychology) and three alumnae, Paloma Contreras '19 (Psychology), Bianca Rodriguez '15 (Psychology and Spanish Studies) and Jessica Jara '17 (Public Health Science) published the Read Lab's 10th peer-reviewed research paper this month on how Spanish/English bilingual children learn new vocabulary from different storybook types meant for bilingual learners in the journal Early Education and Development. The work was supported by a 2017/18 DeNardo Science Scholars grant and is an innovative new look at shared reading with preschool-aged bilinguals with surprising findings that will help us rethink language mixing and preschool pedagogy with young bilinguals. The work is already getting attention from other scholars of bilingual learning across the country and in Canada.

Aparajita Nanda (English) just published “Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)” in African American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs, 3 vols. (Series: Cultures of the American Mosaic). Ed. Omari L. Dyson et al. California and Colorado: ABC-CLIO, 2020.

Michelle Burnham (English) gave a talk at the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore on September 3, 2020. "From Malaysia to Massachusetts: Corporations and the Globalization of American Cultural History" sketches out connections between early modern Syria, Indonesia, India, Denmark, England, and North America through joint-stock companies, their support for linguistic translation, and their relationship to indigenous peoples. These global networks, and the violence they enacted, are invisible to nation-centered narratives of American exceptionalism. Recovering those global connections is crucial to developing new narratives about North America's colonial origins, its puritan and other writers, and their relationship to the rest of the world.

Jamie Suki Chang (Public Health), Katherine Saxton (Public Health) and Madison Rodriguez '21 (Public Health Science, Anthropology) are researchers on a groundbreaking new report on homeless health needs released at a press conference on September 3, 2020. The report is a collaboration between Santa Clara University, UC Berkeley, SF State University, and our community partner, the SF Coalition on Homelessness, and is based on surveys of almost 600 unhoused residents in San Francisco, and 25 focus groups. The findings inform policymakers on the health needs of the homeless community in preparation of the release of Prop C "Our City Our Home" funds, which was passed by voters in 2018. Unhoused participants were asked about their experiences with shelter systems, substance use treatment, mental health treatment, and the study had a focus on transgender community members.

Craig Stephens (Biology and Public Health), Kat Saxton (Biology and Public Health), and Margaret McLean (Markkula Center for Applied Ethics) published an opinion piece for the San Jose Mercury News, "Opinion: Ignore CDC’s new, unscientific COVID-19 testing guidelines." In it, they argue that recent changes to guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that deemphasize COVID-19 viral testing are not warranted by scientific evidence, and may be politically motivated. These faculty have been part of the operations teams planning SCU's careful response to the COVID pandemic, and wanted to make clear that SCU and other universities should continue to try to identify and follow the best available science and public health practices - including extensive coronavirus testing - in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on campus.

Photo: CDC Director Robert R. Redfield speaks as President Donald Trump listens during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in April. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

Pearl Maria Barros (Religious Studies) was selected by a panel of judges from the editorial board as a first-place winner of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion’s Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award for 2020. Barros’ article, "Rethinking Women’s Suffering and Holiness: Gloria Anzaldúa’s 'Holy Relics'" will be highlighted as the winner in the upcoming published issue of JFSR (September 2020), but the award will be announced earlier on the JFSR website and at the 2020 (virtual) meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November. The Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award was established several years ago in order to encourage and give recognition to the emerging voices of new scholars, whose research and insights will shape the future of feminist studies in religion. The prize comes with a cash award of $1000.

C.J. Gabbe (Environmental Studies & Sciences) recently published two papers about climate vulnerability for low-income Californians. The first, co-authored with Greg Pierce in the journal Housing Policy Debate, focuses on affordable housing residents’ vulnerability to extreme heat. The second, co-authored with Pierce and Efren Oxlaj '19 (Environmental Science, Economics) in the journal Environmental Management, analyzes the intersection of affordable housing and wildfire hazards. These two papers—products of a multi-year grant from the State of California's Climate Change Research Program—will be followed by analyses of manufactured housing residents' vulnerability and local climate adaptation policies. The authors also are developing policy briefs for state and local officials.

Evelyn Ferraro (Modern Languages & Literatures) was selected as one of the winners of the Leonardo 2020 Awards by the Leonardo da Vinci Society of San Francisco and the Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation (ISSNAF). ISSNAF is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote scientific, academic, and technological cooperation among Italian researchers and scholars active in North America and the world of research, academia, and industry in Italy; the Bay Area Chapter of ISSNAF was established in 2017. The Leonardo Award was established in 2019 on the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death to recognize outstanding contributions of Italian/Italian American early career scientists/scholars working in the San Francisco Bay Area. An online gala will take place in late September to officially recognize the achievements of the Leonardo 2020 awardees.

Peter Minowitz (Political Science) published a 3100-word essay, "How to Be a Better--and Less Fragile--Antiracist," at Cafe Hayek.

Photo By Charles Barry

Chan Thai (Communication) and Giannina Ong '18 (English, Classical Studies, Women's and Gender Studies) published an article titled "Assessing the Impact of a Patient Navigator Intervention Program for Vietnamese-American Women with Abnormal Mammograms" in the Journal of Cancer Education. The project was a collaboration with colleagues from the non-profit, Boat People SOS, which provides services to Vietnamese immigrants across the United States. The paper reports the effectiveness of a community-based patient navigator program on (1) increasing follow-up appointment adherence and (2) improving psychosocial outcomes for Vietnamese women given an abnormal mammogram result. Vietnamese-American women generally have the longest follow-up times for abnormal mammograms and higher rates of mortality due to breast cancer. All 96 women who participated in the program attended a follow-up appointment within 90 days of receiving abnormal mammogram results. Of the 9 psychosocial outcomes examined, only "feeling in control" was significantly improved for the women who were not diagnosed with breast cancer. The findings suggest that patient navigator programs may be a useful strategy to increase follow-up rates for Vietnamese-American women with abnormal mammogram results. More work is needed to further understand the unique intersections of culture, socioeconomics, political history, and beliefs of this population that influence their psycho-social outcomes.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar