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Assistant Professor of Physics Sabrina Stierwalt was awarded 180 hours of time on the Very Large Array to study the gas kinematics of interacting dwarf galaxies. The award comes for significant funding for students, including the Oxy undergraduates working with Stierwalt who were co-authors on the proposal.

Assistant Professor of UEP Claire Cahen was awarded two grants! She won the Labor Researchers and Action Network Early Career Research Grant, which includes funding to study school district debt, fiscal crisis, and their effects on teachers' unions currently organizing for fully-funded, well-resourced public schools.

She was also selected as one of eight fellows who will participate in the Summer Institute in Economic Geography this summer in Singapore. There were over 300 applicants for the fellowship, which includes funding to cover travel, room, and board, and brings early career scholars into conversation with renowned economic geographers from across the globe.

Associate Professor of History Jane Hong has won a John Randolph & Dora Haynes Foundation faculty fellowship to support her next book project, "Orange County's Political Paradox: How Im/migrants of Color are Changing U.S. Conservatism and Race." The book explores political polarization among communities of color since the 1970s, with a focus on Asian American and Latinx/a/o conservatives.

Professor of Religious Studies, Kristi Upson-Saia was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to fund her research on teeth in the ancient Mediterranean. Building on her previous study of bioarchaeological evidence of dental pathologies and medical sources' discussions of dental ailments and treatments, this grant will fund her study of dentition (teething).

Assistant Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs, Syeda ShahBano Ijaz, has been awarded the prestigious American Association of University Women (AAUW) Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship. This fellowship will provide support for her book project on "Aiding Accountability: The Politics of Last-Mile Access in Pakistan" during the AY 2025-26.

Broderick (Brody) Fox, James Irvine Professor of Media Arts & Culture, has been awarded a Fall 2024 residency fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. During his residency, Fox looks forward to completing principal editing on his latest documentary Through Flood and Fire, in which a group of queer American teenagers seek out LGBTQ+ community elders to imagine more inclusive futures. 

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Teddy Pozo and co-PI Dr. Ari Gass were awarded an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant to pilot a new digital publication, the Trans Games Digital Zine Project. This project is a platform co-designed by transgender, nonbinary, genderfluid, and gender non-conforming game developers, scholars, and gamers, to share and create games and games criticism.

Assistant Professor of Geology Nikki Seymour and her collaborators have been awarded  to study the metamorphic history of the Pelona-Orocopia-Rand schist, an enigmatic rock found in the Mojave Desert. She and Oxy undergraduates will use the mineral garnet to better understand the geologic history of the western United States.

She was also awarded along with co-PI Jay Chapman (UT El Paso) an NSF grant to study igneous rocks across the Mojave Desert. They will use a novel combination of analyses on zircon crystals formed in melts to probe the composition in the deep Earth, looking for subtle isotopic shifts to map the presence recycled sediments not exposed at the surface.

Additionally, Prof. Seymour also been awarded a New PI grant to study the factors that lead to the breakup of continents. She, along with two Oxy students, will travel to southern Italy to sample the deep crust brought to the surface by rifting. They will then apply geochemical techniques to determine whether and to what degree increased heat flow aided in the breakup process.

Professors Dan Pondella (Biology), Amber Stubler (Biology), and Darren Larson (Geology) were awarded a $539,140 grant by the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation Program to purchase high-resolution multi beam sonar system for sea and lake-floor mapping. This system will be used on Oxy's three research vessels for both scholarly research and undergraduate coursework in Biology and Geology. 

Amber Stubler, Dan Pondella, and Joseph Schulz (Biology Dept) have been awarded an National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation grant ($341,830) to purchase a microCT scanner. The microCT will be transformative for our Oxy faculty and student research endeavors and will enrich the undergraduate STEM and art curriculum. Primary users will be from the Biology, Geology, and the Art & Art History departments.

Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy Karla Peña has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad fellowship to support three months of fieldwork research in Ecuador in summer 2025. Professor Peña's fieldwork will build on her on-going research on bananas and climate justice and the subsequent shifts to clean energy infrastructure and sustainability along the supply chain.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Jeff Cannon was awarded a three-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study chemical reactions driven by harvesting energy from visible light. The grant will support the study of fundamental chemical reactivity as well as the involvement of undergraduates in synthetic organic chemistry research.

The Chemistry Department has also been awarded a Jean Dreyfus Lectureship for Undergraduate Institutions. This award will bring a distinguished chemist to campus to provide two seminars, one that is aimed at the general public. During their visit, the lecturer will also interact with 511���� faculty and students around interests and topics in chemistry.

Professor of Biology John McCormack and students and staff of the Moore Lab  the evolutionary history of an elusive groups of jays that made an incredible journey to South America and back starting 5 million years ago, including the description of a new species in Mexico. In a trio of new articles, Dr. McCormack and colleagues (including two former students) published complete genomes of three California bird species--, and the --as part of a collaboration on the UC system's California Conservation Genetics Project. Dr. McCormack also joined with over hundred scientists from across the world  describing the fundamental insights gained from biodiversity specimens and the need for their continued collection in a changing world. Finally, Dr. McCormack joined forces with Mexican collaborators to  in a elusive wood-partridge of conservation concern, finding evidence for distinct evolutionary lineages in Mexico's different mountain ranges.

Assistant Professor of Physics Sabrina Stierwalt gave a Distinguished Lecture for the Math & Physical Science Division at the headquarters for the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. Her lecture highlighted results from her research into galaxy mergers, including the work of Oxy students, and the importance of female & first generation role models in STEM.

In July, Associate Professor of History Jane Hong  led a 2-week National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Institute for 6th-12th grade teachers, titled "Pacific Crossings: Asian American and Pacific Islander Histories, 1870s to the Present." Selected from a pool of 325 applicants, the 36 participants hailed from the continental US, Alaska, American Samoa, and Hong Kong and included four state teacher of the year honorees. This was one of the first NEH seminars hosted by Oxy  and the second K-12 teachers' history institute Hong has brought to Oxy in partnership with the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History.

Associate Professor of Economics Bevin Ashenmiller participated in a Panel titled, "" for the Costs and Approaches for Municipal Solid Waste Recycling Programs a Committee of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine.

Professor Clair Cahen has been appointed as a research fellow for the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive climate and policy think tank. She will work with the institute to draft a policy report with recommendations to encourage declining school districts to hold on to their "excess" properties and convert these to green social housing. 

Assistant Professor of Sociology Ben Weiss has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to examine why Lithuania lags other European nations in addressing gender-based violence (GBV). During his time in the Department of Criminology at Vilnius University, Professor Weiss will interrogate the role Lithuanian non-governmental organizations play in bridging state and supra-state GBV prevention and intervention efforts.

Visiting Assistant Professor Chris Blakley has been awarded two  travel grants! First, Professor Blakley will use the History of Medicine Collections at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Duke University. They will be conducting research on the histories of race science, Manifest Destiny, and sensory knowledge in the U.S. Exploring Expedition, which mapped the Pacific Ocean and surrounding lands between 1838 and 1842. Then, they will  conduct research at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Here, they will be researching the military-scientific expeditions during the 19th Century, including the Raynolds Expedition, the Hayden Geological Survey, and the work of pioneer and scientist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden.

Associate Professor of Diplomacy and World Affair Igor Logvinenko the award for Best Book in International Political Economy by the International Studies Association for 2021-2023. His , Global Finance, Local Control: Corruption and Wealth in Contemporary Russia, sheds light on the intersection of global finance and the fights over property rights in post-Soviet Russia. 

How do pop-culture themes increase engagement and academic achievement among students and faculty? Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Susan Geffen and coauthor have been awarded a grant from the Association for Psychological Science’s Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science. Abigail McLaughlin (‘23) will contribute to the project, entitled "Assessing Student and Faculty Outcomes of Themed Courses."

Professor of Psychology Andrew Shtulman was elected the 51st president of the , the premier scientific and educational organization for philosophically interested psychologists and psychologically interested philosophers.

 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Alec Arellano gave a lecture entitled "Continuity and Change: John Dewey on Navigating Democratic Identity" at Southern Oregon University. Professor Arellano’s contributed to SOU's annual campus theme speaker series. His talk highlighted how the vision of post-Christian spirituality elaborated in Dewey's book "A Common Faith" contains a valuable yet under-explored component of Dewey's account of the dispositions of character that are requisite for democratic citizenship.

Assistant Professor of Physics Sabrina Stierwalt gave a plenary talk at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, the main professional society for astronomers in the United States. She highlighted the student research being done in the and received a standing ovation from the ~3,000 people in the audience.

Professor of Biology John McCormack has been selected as a 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community. 

 

Professor of History Marla Stone was elected to the in November 2023, one of the most prestigious scientific and scholarly institutions in Europe (the Italian equivalent of the US National Academy of the Arts and Sciences). Kudos!