Dear College Faculty and Staff,

Today concludes BD Wong’s visit to campus for his Winter Residency. What a warm, talented, inspiring artist. Not content to drop in for a performance or two, BD attended many classes and rehearsed, then performed with many of our students. He has truly been "in residence," so present in mind, body, song, spirit and art!

In this College Notes I'd like to report on my explorations regarding internships. A big focus of mine going forward is increasing the College’s capacity to find, sponsor and evaluate academically excellent internships for our students. This week, I started a discussion with department chairs about what that could look like here in the College.

Unsurprisingly, there are common differences of opinion about internships—Should they always be paid? Is an unpaid internship for academic credit a form of exploitation? Are internships valuable in all disciplines? What makes for an academically valuable internship? All of these questions and more will have to be answered if we move forward with increasing internship support.

Regardless, I can't overstate the value of internships, whether paid or for credit. During my entire academic career, I’ve seen great transformation in students through internships and I would love to expand those types of opportunities for students in the College.

On a different internship note, as many of you know, REAL Program applications are currently being accepted. As a way to help promote the program to students, partners, and potential donors, I am hosting a conversation with two alumni next Tuesday, February 22 that I invite all of you to tune into. Noel Simms ’20 (Biology) and Bjorn Thyrring ’20 (Political Science and Religious Studies) will join me on LinkedIn Live as we talk about their REAL internship experiences and how it shaped their paths after graduation.

I hope you can join us!

Daniel

Student Advisory Council

Valeria Rojas is a senior studying Neuroscience and Public Health, hailing from Gilroy, California! She was inspired to be a part of the Student Advisory Council because of her work with SCU's Rainbow Resource Center (RRC) which educates, empowers, and celebrates the experiences and identities of the LGBTQ+ community at Santa Clara University. Her goal while on council is to increase diversity within STEM-related fields and create safe spaces within the College of Arts and Sciences for marginalized and minority voices. A fun fact about Valeria is that she has a four-year-old Maltipoo named Ginger!

The Student Advisory Council was started during Fall 2021 and is made up of 10 students from across the College. They meet twice a quarter with Dean Press to discuss their aspirations, suggestions for new initiatives, and their responses to issues of the day.

Highlights

Team Beetle 2021, taking a break from a busy summer of experiments. Back: Shelby Rocereto '20 (SCU-Biology), Spencer Wang '22 (SCU-Biology), Justin Basil '21 (SSU), Claire Toney '21 (SCU-Biology), Dr. Elizabeth Dahlhoff (SCU Biology), Cameron Olson '23 (SSU), Harvey Chilcott '23 (SCU-Biology); Middle: Annie Loc '21 (SSU), Ruby Kaiser '21 (SSU), Chloe Howard '22 (SSU); Front: Derek Lindsey '21 (SSU), Dr. Nathan Rank (SSU Biology). Photo Credit: Nathan Rank

Beetles in the news!

Recently published research by Team Beetle, supervised by SCU's Elizabeth Dahlhoff (Biology) and collaborator Prof. Nathan Rank (Sonoma State University) was featured in an article in The Scientist, "Could Dad’s Mitochondrial DNA Benefit Hybrids?" The article discusses surprising evidence that moms may not be the only parent that pass on mitochondria to their offspring.

The work is also currently featured as a "favorite" instructional module at the Understanding Evolution website. 'The Beetle Project: Investigating insects in a warming world' was developed in collaboration with UC Berkeley professor Dr. Caroline Williams and the Understanding Evolution team.

Beetles get REAL-closer to home, you can learn about Team Beetle 2021 member Harvey Chilcott's summer REAL adventure on the @santaclarauniversity Instagram REAL Program highlight (tap through to the last 10 stories).

Kieran Sullivan (Psychology) coauthored a chapter entitled Couple Therapy, with SCU alum Kyle Stephenson '07 (Psychology), which will appear in the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia of Mental Health.

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, an award-winning book by the late Catherine Bell, has been reissued in Japanese in a translation by Atsushi Hayakawa of Tohoku Fukushi University. The volume, originally published by Oxford University Press in 1992, was reissued in 2009 with a Foreword by Diane Jonte-Pace (Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies). Professor Bell, who passed away in 2008, taught for many years in SCU's Department of Religious Studies.

Image: Catherine Bell's Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, reissued in Japanese.

Lee Panich (Anthropology) and Tsim Schneider (University of California, Santa Cruz) recently published an edited volume, Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence, with the University Press of Florida. The book challenges deeply entrenched narratives of Indigenous extinction that have permeated scholarly examinations of colonial encounters across North America. The contributors to this volume, including Indigenous scholars and Tribal resource managers, examine different ways that archaeologists can center long-term Native presence in the practices of fieldwork, laboratory analysis, scholarly communication, and public interpretation. The collected essays show how these new archaeological approaches can help expose silenced histories, modeling research practices that acknowledge Tribes as living entities with their own rights, interests, and epistemologies.

Paul J. Schutz (Religious Studies) received the Graves Award in the Humanities. The Graves Award recognizes "outstanding accomplishment in actual teaching in the humanities" and supports a scholarly project that integrates research with ongoing teaching development. Paul will use the Graves Award to support research for his first monograph, Reimagining Creation: A Theology of Creaturely Flourishing (Orbis Books, 2023). Alongside his teaching in the area of religion, ecology, and science, Reimagining Creation links science with studies of social well-being, sustainability, and ethics in service of a theological vision of intersectional justice oriented toward the flourishing of all creation in communion with their Creator. Like his courses, Paul's book will ponder the evolutionary and ecological connections humans share with other creatures and aims to cultivate a ‘cosmic common good’ on a planet threatened by ecological and social degradation. This research will enable Paul to deepen his commitment to teaching in the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis, with a distinctive emphasis on how the formation of the whole person orients students toward the service of justice through thoughtful, compassionate, critical inquiry and action. With the support of the Graves Award, he hopes to discover new texts, images, and imaginaries to employ as his classes explore what it means for creatures to flourish—and what barriers stand in the way of authentic flourishing—by integrating theological and scientific perspectives on race, gender, ability, class, and ecology in a holistic vision of socio-ecological justice that promotes the well-being of all that is.

Juliana Chang (English) contributed the foreword to a new edition of Janice Mirikitani’s Awake in the River and Shedding Silence from University of Washington Press. Mirikitani was one of the foundational figures of the Asian American and Third World literary movements of the 1970s. Her writing was formative in fashioning early Asian American cultural and political sensibilities, and in marking them from the beginning as intersectional and coalitional. She was a co-founder and founding president of Glide Foundation in San Francisco, and her community leadership has been lauded for its combination of activism, social work, and programming in the creative arts. Mirikitani was named poet laureate of San Francisco from 2000 to 2002.

Lindsay Halladay (Psychology, Neuroscience) was awarded an external research grant from The Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical research institution. The two-year grant is part of Jackson Laboratory's Diversity Outbred Pilot Grant Program, a new initiative to better understand the impact of genetic diversity on experimental outcomes.

Research using rodent models often use inbred strains with genetically similar backgrounds that enable narrow focus on specific biological processes. However, inbred mouse models lack the genetic diversity observed in human populations, which is potentially problematic for translating experimental findings. Jackson Labs recently developed a “diversity outbred” mouse strain that recapitulates the breadth of human genetic variation, beyond any other available mouse line (>50 million genetic variants). Lindsay was one of a handful of researchers across the country selected to incorporate this new model into biomedical research.

The Halladay lab has published prior studies in mice detailing the neural and behavioral consequences of early life trauma. This grant will enable comparison of these findings to similar studies using the new diversity outbred strain, an imperative step to ensure the body of work stemming from mouse models of early trauma is valid and relevant to humans. This research has important implications for understanding aspects of human socio-emotional disorders resulting from early life trauma.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar