Many thanks to all College faculty, staff, and students who helped with Preview Days 2022!

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

College Notes is coming to you a day early since tomorrow—Good Friday—is a holiday.

What a Preview Day we had last weekend! The College turned out beautifully and in force, whether online or in person, with all departments and programs very well-represented. As for future Broncos, by the numbers, we had:

• About 650 admitted students attended across the morning and afternoon sessions
• Of that total, 292 students to the College of Arts and Sciences attended
• Families came from as far away as Canada, India, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
• 71 of the students who came are First-Generation
• 114 students who came had alumni ties to the University
• Most admitted students were from public high schools

Spending the day on campus, I couldn't help thinking that if I were a newly admitted student, how could I go anywhere else for school?! The warmth and affection on our campus last Saturday was so palpable. I leave you with this sentiment: amor mundum fecit!

Sincerely,

Daniel

Highlights

David Jeong (Communication), WAVE+Imaginarium staff Em Dang '20 (Computer Science and Engineering) and Mohammed Khadadeh '21 (Computer Science, Studio Art), and students Jia Seow '22 (Psychology), Elliot Lee '23 (Computer Science), Landis Fusato '23 (Computer Science), Jake Tsuchiyama '24 (Computer Science and Engineering), Cyle Tan '23 (Communication), Danny Lin ‘24 (Computer Science), Kyle Kinard '24 (Music), John Redinbo '25 (Environmental Science), Jessica King '25 (Undeclared), and Avi Patni '25 (Undeclared) attended the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, where they networked, attended sessions about new technologies and storytelling techniques in the game industry, and explored industry demos on the GDC expo floor. This event was supported by the College of Arts and Sciences Dean's office.

The WAVE+Imaginarium is also hosting a Grand Opening event next week, April 21. To celebrate the opening of the new space, they're welcoming people to an open house from noon to 5pm and will be showcasing VR equipment, student projects, and the library of experiences available in the lab. All students, faculty, and staff are welcome to join.

Francisco Jiménez (Professor Emeritus, Modern Languages & Literatures) is included in the book Latinx Business Success by Frank Carbajal and José Morey (John Wiley & Sons: New Jersey, 2022.) The book consists of interviews with professionals in a variety of fields, including education, healthcare, media, finance, and technology.

He was a featured speaker at the California Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference in the City of Garden Grove, California on March 5. In his presentation, Jiménez described the challenges he faced in learning English while trying to maintain his native Spanish language. He explained how those experiences informed his writing and his work during his ten years of service on the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and six years on the Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities (WASC).

Jiménez and Octavio Solis, a prominent Latino playwright, shared the stage in a moderated conversation about their writing and literary influences. The public event was sponsored by The Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, California on March 13.

He was interviewed by Damian Trujillo on Comunidad del Valle, a T.V. program. The focus of the interview was Jiménez’s book, Breaking Through, which has been optioned for a short movie by Normandie Productions, a small independent film company in Oakland. The interview aired on March 6 on NBC Bay Area and Telemundo.

Sonja Mackenzie (Public Health) published an article, "Social movement organizing and the politics of emotion from HIV to Covid-19," in Sociology Compass. This paper considers the emergence of Covid-19 activism as an embodied health movement that draws on and contributes to broader movements for racial, economic, and gender justice. Through analysis of the role of the affective domain in three social movement organizations that draw on anti-racist, feminist, and queer and HIV organizing approaches, the paper suggests that Covid-19 will become a key lens for articulating structural and social inequalities and through which broader social movements will leverage their claims for justice. Further, social movement mobilizing will continue to play a critical role to ensure that the focus on the Covid-19 pandemic shifts from pathogen to society. This research was conducted as part of Mackenzie’s sabbatical research based at Cambridge University (Department of Sociology and the Reproductive Sociology Research Group) in 2021 for a project entitled COVID-19 and the Common Good: An Examination of Structural Racism and Social Movements in the UK and US. The pre-print article is available online here.

Undergraduate researchers from Justen Whittall's (Biology) lab presented posters at the 52nd annual West Coast Biological Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference at Point Loma in San Diego on Saturday, April 9, 2022.

Kaitlyn Twadell '22 (Biology, Neuroscience), DeNardo Scholar, and Hope Olbricht '22 (Biology, Public Health Science), Honor's Program, summarized and described their research into the gut microbiomes of endurance athletes (both being long distance runners themselves on the SCU XC and Track teams). Their poster was provocatively entitled, "There is No Universal Endurance Microbiome" showing that although individual studies have detected certain bacteria are more common in the guts of endurance athletes, the results across studies are highly variable, inconsistent, and downright suspect. Craig Stephens (Public Health, Biology) and Brody Sandel (Biology) are coauthors of the study that will be submitted to PLOS ONE for publication.

At the same meeting, Sebastian Acevedo '23 (Biology, Environmental Science), LEAD Scholar, and D'Angelo Castillo '23 (Biology) shared the results of their summer bird molecular ecology research in their poster, "Feather DNA Solves Sex Determination Mysteries and Identifies Cryptic Species of San Francisco Bay Area Birds" based on an intensive summer lab course taught by Whittall in July-Sept of 2021. They won "Outstanding Poster" award for their description of how they used feather DNA to determine the sex of Yellow Rumped Warblers and applied the same technique to decipher cryptic species of Pacific Flycatchers. This work was done in collaboration with the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory and Stanford.

Alma M. García (Sociology) has been selected from a national pool of master's level writers to attend the Macondo Writers Workshop to be held (virtually) July 26-30, 2022 at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. Sandra Cisneros founded the writers' workshop in 1995 and named it after the town in Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The conference features writing workshops, seminars, and free public readings for poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. The faculty includes poet Urayoán Noel, fiction writers Jennifer De Leon and Nelly Rosario, and nonfiction writers Dorothy Allison and Kristen Iversen. Past workshop leaders have included Julia Alvarez, Norma Elias Cantú, and Helena Maria Viramontes.

Alma will attend the workshop on "Landscapes Borderscapes and Storytelling" led by Kristen Iversen, award-winning author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (2012). She will be working on her second book, Passages to Harvard: A Latina's Journey, a sequel to her Club Oasis: Childhood Memories, the recipient of the 2021 International Latino Book Award for the Best Young Adult non-fiction book.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar

Swoop in for the sixth ever tUrn week Monday through Friday 8:30 am to 10 pm, April 18-22, 2022—everyone on campus is invited. Sharpen your knowledge of the climate crisis, contemplate, build community, and learn about actions on every level that can make a difference to our climate story. Guest artists, activists, researchers and scientists from NOAA in Florida, Gonzaga University, ClimateMusic in the Bay Area, will present in-person on campus.

Kristin Kusanovich (Theatre and Dance) presented on tUrn at the Northern California Annual Phi Betta Kappa conference this winter and continues to expand the international connections through the UN PCCB Network. tUrn6 includes a three-hour Good Market outdoors by the library Friday, noon-3 pm, and two panels on public health, as well as Jewish, Muslim and Catholic climate activists, an environmental law symposium, climate destabilization simulations in the WAVE+Imaginarium, and more. Guests from the Philippines, Afghanistan and Mexico beam in via zoom but this spring we meet and enjoy their presentations in a viewing room, together. Shannon Rivers is our Indigenous Keynote speaker and BIPOC as well as other less-centered voices and causes figure prominently. Check out the tUrn website and go to the HEADLINERS tab.

Professor and pianist, Teresa McCollough (Music), returns to the SCU Recital Hall stage for the first time in over two years in a special performance with colleagues Ray Furuta (Music), flute, and Evan Kahn, cello, to celebrate Earth Day on April 22, 2022.

This is the final Headliner event in the tUrn Climate Crisis and Awareness Action Week, exploring the sounds of the environment through the music of Claude Debussy and George Crumb. The program features Crumb's seminal work, Vox Balaenae--music influenced by the voices of whales.

The first 100 tickets will be donated to the Earthday Network.