2022
Minions for Well-being: Accelerating progress towards a digital app to promote children’s emotional well-being in healthcare settings and schools
PI: Jeffrey Burke (Theater)
Co-PI: Wendelin Slusser (Healthy Campus Initiative)
Healthcare settings can be stressful for children and are prime settings to test childhood stress reduction strategies, especially since some chronically ill children with toxic stress could experience long-term negative health consequences. In a partnership of the Schools of Theater, Film and Television, Medicine and Public Health, we seek to develop a digital app for children to support emotional well-being, using the Minions characters to use in healthcare settings with applicability to other settings, including schools. Our transdisciplinary team aims to create a high-impact app leveraging new technologies to apply evidence-based interventions in the Minion world. This TRAG supports: 1) a pilot research study aimed at understanding how children respond to prototyped app activities; 2) observational research to gain a thorough understanding of healthcare settings children encounter, and; 3) development of a 5-year project roadmap informing the stages of current and future development of the app.
You See (UC) Lavender: Assessing Sexual Violence and Harassment Among Sexual and Gender Minority Students at UCLA
PI: Stephanie Davidson (Law)
Co-PI: Jennifer Wagman (Community Health Sciences)
Through a survivor-centered, trauma-informed, and intersectional mixed-methods research approach, You See (UC) Lavender aims: (1) to assess how University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) sexual and gender minority students (SGMS) experience discrimination, sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH), and institutional betrayal during their time at UCLA; (2) to understand the help-seeking behaviors of SGMS and their experiences with reporting SVSH; (3) to assess how race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, and other social determinants intersect with sexual orientation and gender identity to produce varying levels of barriers to care on campus; (4) to produce recommendations for programs and policies to increase resources for SGMS on UCLA’s campus, including health, safety, and training programs and protocols on SVSH prevention and survivor resources. This study aims to integrate the fields of public health and law to evaluate how on-campus services provide culturally competent, inclusive, and gender affirming care for SGM survivors.
Storytelling in times of trouble: Hope, healing, and health among immigrant youth
PI: Immaculada Garcia Sanchez (Education)
Co-PI: Jocelyn Meza (Psychology)
This proposal seeks funding to conceptualize and implement a community-engaged pilot program in partnership with school-aged children and families of mostly Spanish speaking immigrant origin in West Los Angeles and the West Los Angeles branch of the public library. Bringing together psychosocial and academic components, the pilot program will provide a strong program of biliteracy development to emergent bilinguals (programa de lectoescritura bilingüe) focusing on emotional wellbeing through story-making and storytelling. Because emotional well-being and success in learning are complex and related processes, a transdisciplinary approach, involving experts in education and youth’s (mental) health, is needed to do justice to this complexity, as well as to provide sustained, comprehensive, culturally and linguistically responsive services to the community. This proposal is timely given the urgent youth mental health crisis affecting the nation, particularly among (im)migrant youth with a history of adversity.
Place to Be - Non-Traditional Services for Wellbeing Among Unhoused Angelenos
PI: Dana Cuff (Architecture & Urban Design) | Rayne Laborde Ruiz (Architecture & Urban Design)
Co-PI: Wendelin Slusser (Health Campus Initiative)
Among unhoused Angelenos, the housing crisis is paired with a health crisis that is rooted in the ineffectiveness of traditional methods of service delivery. This study examines de-institutionalized and open-access case studies for enhancing wellbeing among unhoused Angelenos. Through a transdisciplinary approach recognizing intersections between public health, architecture, and urban planning, our evaluation assesses key spatial conditions, and how to measure impact on wellbeing. In partnership with both providers and unhoused constituents, we will undertake key informant interviews, thick-mapping, analysis of wellbeing metrics, and participatory design research. These methods target the benefits and challenges of the case studies, particularly conditions of access, temporality, and geographic networks of provision. The study will evaluate research instruments for measuring emotional, physical, and social wellbeing in service models; and offer guidance for public health providers, planners, designers, and policy makers seeking new, open-access ways to connect with and serve the needs of unhoused Angelenos.
Community Voices Communicating Heat Risk: Utilizing Community Engagement as a Strategy Against Thermal Inequity in Los Angeles
PI: Bemmy Maharramli (Center for Community Engagement)
Co-PI: Stephanie Pincetl (Institute of Environment and Sustainability)
Urban extreme heat events are a growing threat, encompassing a range of social and ecological issues and necessitating a trans-disciplinary approach. There is a need for co-produced public service announcements (PSA) that are part of a strategy to build awareness, resilience, and center equity. We seek to explore what lessons can be learned from a co-productive process to integrate the voices of residents in the development of a heat resilience PSA campaign. UCLA’s Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability and the Center for Community Engagement will work together to integrate a cross-cutting community-engaged component in LA County’s extreme heat PSA project. We will assemble a Community Advisory Group to collaborate across all project phases, including facilitating a series of focus groups. We will learn what, if any, additional or new PSA measures are adapted through the use of a community-engaged approach to extreme heat messaging.
The Semantics of Cancer
PI: Jessica Rett (Linguistics)
Co-PI: Joseph Crompton (Surgical Oncology)
There is a pandemic of low-risk cancers for which over-treatment is a major concern, and a missed opportunity to reduce treatment-related harm in patients. While it has been shown that patients' anxiety plays an important role in their treatment decisions (Ferrer & Ellis 2019), there is relatively little work examining the effect of diagnostic language on patients' anxiety, outside of medical jargon. Our preliminary evidence suggests that patients and their physicians have different understandings of the term “cancer,” with patients more regularly and reliably associating the term with concepts like lumps, spread, and death. We hypothesize that this semantic difference leads to diagnostic miscommunication and ultimately contributes to an over-treatment problem for low-risk cancers. The goal of this project is to better understand, quantify, and compare expert and non-expert interpretations of the word "cancer," which will feed into future projects of how to address the discrepancy and resulting over-treatment.
Automatic Medication Reconciliation Software For Reducing Medication Errors During Transitions of Care to Nursing Homes
PI: Li Zhou (Medicine)
Co-PI: Richard Korf (Computer Science)
Nursing home patients are medically complex and vulnerable due to their high rates of memory impairment. Due to the complexity of their medication regimens and low ratios of nurses to patients at these facilities, medication errors are frequently made which can lead to devastating consequences. The risk of medication errors being made is especially high when patients are transferred from hospitals to nursing homes. The process of preventing these errors and ensuring that patients are receiving the proper medications during these transitions known as medication reconciliation. However, this process is tedious and error prone. We endeavor to create a computer program that will assist physicians in performing medication reconciliation more quickly and accurately, and reduce the number of medication discrepancies and errors during transitions of care from hospital to nursing home.
2021
Fire Resistant Home: A Prototype for High Risk Zones
PI: Hitoshi Abe (Architecture and Urban Design)
Co-PI: Kian Goh (Urban Planning)
Housing protection and access are key to wildfire management. Protecting homes from fire is essential for human safety; providing access to housing is essential for diverse communities. It will be difficult to achieve both as we confront climate change. An innovative housing solution is needed. 4.3M acres burned in California last year destroying 10,000 structures and costing $12.079 billion. The Wildland - Urban Interface (WUI) is where major fires occur. It's the fastest growing area type in the US, as people seek lower housing costs away from cities. As more homes are built on hotter dryer lands, more structures will burn - fueling an untenable cycle of rebuilding. Many in the middle class are drawn to small towns for their proximity to nature and strong community networks. Wildfires destroy not just homes, but also those social safety nets and affordable economies. Our proposal for housing protection and access is a fire resistant, affordable dwelling prototype.
Taking a Great Leap: The Process of Building Community Arts Archives
PI: Nina Eidsheim (Musicology)
Co-PI: Michelle Caswell (Information Studies)
“Taking a Great Leap: The Process of Building Community Arts Archives” is an interdisciplinary community-led participatory action research project led by Professor Nina Sun Eidshem (UCLA Department of Musicology), Professor Michelle Caswell (UCLA Department of Information Studies), and artist Nobuko Miyamoto from Great Leap, a Los Angeles-based Asian American performing arts organization. The project asks:
- How can community arts organizations document their own stories and create their own archives?
- By what processes can academic researchers collaborate with community arts organizations to design and build independent archival collections?
- How do the unique needs, values, and histories of grassroots arts organizations representing minoritized communities challenge dominant Western archival theories and practices?
Using community-led participatory action research (PAR), this project will result not only in academic research answering these questions, but also a practical plan for Great Leap to build its own archives, preserving its past and documenting its present for future generations.
Mitigating Gender and Racial Bias in Automated English Language Proficiency Assessments
PI: Mark Hansen (Education)
Co-PI: Kai-Wei Chang (Computer Science)
Automated assessment systems using Natural Language Processing (NLP) have the potential to make English language assessments more accurate, authentic, and accessible. Yet, without preliminary testing and modification, NLP may exacerbate gender and racial prejudices, particularly against marginalized groups. Considering the rapid pace at which NLP is being applied in multiple fields, including English language assessment, there is a pressing need to address these problems before widespread adoption. Our goal is to explore sources of gender and racial bias and to demonstrate how NLP can be applied to a K-12 English language proficiency assessment system in a way that mitigates such biases. As debiasing techniques have not yet been applied to automated language assessments, our findings may teach others how to address gender and racial bias in their own automated assessments.
Modulating Our Better Angels: A brain stimulation study of the cognitive processes underlying effortful control of racism
PI: Chad Hazlett (Political Science / Statistics)
Co-PI: Marco Iacoboni (Psychiatry)
Efforts that many people make to avoid showing biases toward other ethnic or racial groups, while not always sufficient or effective, are critically important to how we treat each other and to the functioning of our diverse society. While this “effort to control racism” has long been studied in social psychology, we know little about its neurocognitive underpinnings. Our previous work shows that two prefrontal areas of the brain modulate generosity towards others, with the DLPFC particularly operative in controlling racist impulses. We posit they may also control racism. Using multiple assessments of bias and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) we aim to show that transient inhibition of these areas may reduce the ability to override implicit biases, enhancing racially biased behavior. These results will contribute to an early understanding of how to modulate functional mechanisms to overcome racial bias.
Special Circumstances Conviction Project
PI: Grace Hong (Asian American Studies / Gender Studies)
Co-PI: Randall Akee (Public Policy)
The Special Circumstances Conviction Project (SCCP) collects and analyses data on the prevalence and impact of the use of special circumstances in criminal sentencing in California. Under California law, “special circumstances” delineate the conditions under which people can be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole (LWOP).
Working in partnership with community-based organizations at the forefront of addressing LWOP convictions, including the Felony Murder Elimination Project and the Drop LWOP Coalition, SCCP has collected never-before-available data through Public Records Act requests filed with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and with county courthouses and District Attorney’s offices. Our research will create the first comprehensive data on incarcerated persons with a sentence of LWOP.
Understanding Algorithmic Bias in AI and New Media
PI: Jungseock Joo (Communication)
Co-PI: Kai-Wai Chang (Computer Science)
Despite the rapid progress in artificial intelligence, recent studies have reported that machine learning models contain biases and systematically produce discriminating outcomes against certain populations. It is difficult to measure biases in these models because they are trained from proprietary datasets and their internal mechanisms are not interpretable. These models do not only reflect biases observed in datasets; they can also amplify the biases, which can further lead to societal biases. To address these concerns and promote fairness in AI, we propose to develop a generalizable framework for bias measurement and mitigation. The framework will incorporate multimodal data, text and images, by combining natural language processing and computer vision models. We will also create novel datasets from diverse sources and augment data using generative models. The study will also focus on understanding real-world impacts of AI bias. Our project will contribute to enhance fairness and transparency in AI and media.
Anticipating Anticipatory Governance of CRISPR and Kelp
PI: Timothy Malloy (Law)
Co-PI: Siobhan Braybrook (Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology)
Synthetic biology enables the intentional, direct engineering of organisms to create novel or altered traits. The Braybrook lab at UCLA is currently developing practical methods to alter kelp’s genetic code using CRISPR technology. Synthetic seaweed is within our grasp but what should be done with it? And who should decide? Historically the development and deployment of emerging technologies has outpaced society’s capacity to consider and respond to its ethical, legal, and social impacts.
This project lays the groundwork for comprehensive research and development of an anticipatory governance framework covering genetic engineering of seaweed for habitat restoration, aquaculture, and biofuels production. Anticipatory governance provides a framework and methods to facilitate responsible innovation. This project will generate the data, methods and capacities needed by the project team to craft a pilot anticipatory governance framework. We will use that pilot to secure extramural funding supporting development of a comprehensive anticipatory governance framework.
Biophilia Treehouse
PI: Rebeca Méndez (Design Media Arts)
Co-PI: Pamela Yeh (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)
Due to habitat loss and fragmentation, urbanization threatens biodiversity and biotic communities. At the same time, environmental injustice means disproportionate access to urban nature and its benefits. Using Los Angeles as a case-study, the Biophilia Treehouse is a response to goal number five (“Thriving ecosystems, habitats and biodiversity”) in the LA County Sustainability Plan. We propose a place-based public artwork in the form of a landscape intervention that reconnects the fragmented habitats of the L.A. basin for local birds and native plants to thrive while healing legacies of injustice through community storytelling and placemaking. Working hand-in-hand with under-resourced communities, our transdisciplinary team of architects, designers, scholars, community organizers, and scientists will prototype, install and test the effectiveness of our first Biophilia Treehouse, a landmark that will pave the way for a profound reconsideration of how we understand ourselves in community and in the natural world.
Producing Racial Disparities in Neighborhood Thermal Conditions through Everyday Land Use Decisions: A Case Study of Watts, Los Angeles
PI: V. Kelly Turner (Urban Planning | Geography)
Co-PI: Marques Vestal (Urban Planning)
Co-PI: Bharat Venkat (History | Institute for Society & Genetics)
Communities of color are disproportionately burdened by hot outdoor conditions in cities due to disinvestment in “cool” infrastructure and siting of “hot” infrastructure. Historic racist redlining housing policies serves as an indicator of contemporary uneven heat exposure; but the land use and infrastructure decisions through which disparities emerged is not well understood. This study examines the historic production of contemporary heat disparities through urban land development processes in Watts, Los Angeles during the 20th century. We will develop the first ever model of historic thermal comfort conditions using aerial photos, archival records, oral histories, and climate data to identify heat-relevant land use changes, quantify the resulting heat burden, and determine how race and geography factored into such land use decisions. Our findings will inform ongoing efforts in Watts to address urban heat burden, leveraging existing independent work by investigators on race and land development, heat inequity, and climate modeling.
2020
Ritual Histories in Ghana's Slave Forts and Castles, 1482-2020
PI: Andrew Apter (History)
Co-PI: Miriam Posner (Information Studies)
Despite the monumental significance of Ghana's slave forts and castles during the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, the lesser forts along West Africa's historic Gold Coast remain largely understudied. Through transdisciplinary and transatlantic partnerships with faculty from UCLA, University of Ghana, Legon, and Harvard University, our goal is to conduct a systematic survey of shrines, rituals, deities, and dungeons associated with these monumental sites of human commodification to locate these forts within Afro-European "conjunctures" that linked hinterland captives to overseas markets. By studying these sites of Atlantic slavery in Ghana and the "ritual archive" that they enshrine, we highlight the African parameters of early modern capitalism, rethink the standard narrative of its historical development, and encourage new forms of digital scholarship that deepen rather than disavow our collective engagement with its legacies as we commemorate over 400 years since the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the Americas.
Visualising Justice: A Research and Creative Collaboration
PI: M. Kamari Clarke (Anthropology)
Co-PI: Nathan Su (Architecture)
New technologies now make it possible to render visible -- literally -- what has long been hidden in dominant institutional approaches to mass atrocity crimes: the social, political, and historical contexts in which these crimes occur. By focusing on specific incidents, international law and human rights advocacy de-contextualizes and reframes mass violence according to legal logics. The proposed research aims to disrupt these framings by exploring various international legal cases that are under investigation and making visible what falls outside the rubric of institutions, such as the International Criminal Court. It seeks to do so by developing a novel 3-Dimension computer-generated platform for showing what is otherwise not seen. Through an innovative transdisciplinary approach that brings insights from anthropology, history and law together with architectural practices of modelling and visualization, the project collaborators will explore ways of depicting layers of violence beyond what legal forms "see" in order to advance.
Hostile Terrain 94
PI: Jason DeLeón (Anthropology)
Co-PI: Hirsch Perlman (Art)
Hostile Terrain 94 is a global participatory exhibition combining art, social sciences research, and community outreach at its interdisciplinary core to raise awareness about the humanitarian crisis occurring at the U.S./Mexico border. A crisis that has claimed over 3,200 lives since the mid 1990s and continues to do so each and every day. From May to November of 2020, HT94 with occur simultaneously in nearly 150 cities around the world. As the project approaches the exhibition season, we are faced with the looming question of how to sustain spreading our vital message after the final show closes in November. We seek to continue and expand this exhibition work via two pathways: 1. The creation of a permanent sculpture version of the exhibition that can travel. 2. A website that would combine a digital gallery allowing the viewer to interact with the exhibition and to access an online education portal.
Measuring placental stress to understand the link between negative socio-cultural experiences and adverse birth outcomes in Latina women
PI: Molly Fox (Anthropology)
Co-PI: Hsian-Rong Tseng (Medical and Molecular Pharmacology)
Latino Americans are an underserved community facing unique and severe cultural and socio-economic stressors, such as discrimination and poverty, which contribute to health disparities. Latino Americans experience disproportionately high rates of adverse birth outcomes, problematic for both women's health and child development. We posit pregnant women's experiences of socio-cultural and economic stress may induce psychological and physiological changes, perturbating maternal-placental-fetal biology and ultimately promoting adverse birth outcomes. Specifically, we predict that socio-cultural stressors lead to disturbance in the placental epithelium that releases extracellular vesicles (EVs), which we propose as a novel biomarker of maternal-placental-fetal stress. We will utilize PI's ongoing, longitudinal cohort study of socio-cultural experiences among Latina pregnant women and integrate Co-PI's nanotechnology-enabled diagnostic platform for dynamic monitoring of placenta-derived EVs from maternal plasma. Results may reveal opportunities for early identification of at-risk individuals and intervention strategies to mitigate the perpetuation of poor health across generations in minority communities.
TEARLESS
PI: Gina Kim (Film, Television and Digital Media)
Co-PI: Grace Hong (Asian American Studies, Gender Studies)
TEARLESS is an immersive media project on "US comfort women," forced by the South Korean government to serve US soldiers in camp towns outside the US military bases. This project focuses on these women's memories and voices within a detainment center called "Monkey House" a prison established by the South Korean government and staffed by the US military in the 1970s to isolate and treat comfort women with STDs. Tearless will be PI Gina Kim's second immersive media project on the topic.
(*Footnote: "Comfort women" is now officially understood as government forced prostitution in Korea (Seoul High Court 2018).)
Creating Common Grounds
PI: Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris (Urban Planning)
Co-PI: Dana Cuff (Architecture)
This study examines public space experiences for low-income older adults and youth in the Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Using a transdisciplinary methodological approach that blends urban planning, architecture, and spatial ethnography, we assess local stakeholders' relationships to, and experiences with three different outdoor public space settings in their neighborhood. Engaging both older adults and youth in a series of focus group discussions, thick-mapping, and participatory design interventions, the similarities and differences between the two age groups' experiences will be laid bare, making clearer where the interests of these two demographic groups intersect. Our findings will not only provide guidance for planners, designers, and policy makers seeking to create more inclusive public spaces, but will also yield implications for enhancing cross-generational connectivity in high-poverty, inner-city neighborhoods.
Enhancing Efforts to Decriminalizing Homelessness
PI: Sunita Patel (Law)
Co-PI: Sonya Gabrielian (Psychiatry)
In recent years, communities have increased the number of criminal and non-criminal offenses that target homeless persons' "acts of life," e.g., encampments. To decriminalize homelessness, solutions include: collaborations between behavioral health providers and law enforcement to connect homeless individuals with housing and social services; alternative justice approaches (e.g., homeless court); and enhancements in the continuum of care and social services. We propose a mixed-methods pilot project that studies these decriminalization efforts, with a lens towards practice disparities for persons with disabilities. We will obtain Los Angeles County arrest records on acts of living offenses to understand patterns of enforcement. We will triangulate these data with semi-structured interviews on homeless-experienced individuals with acts of living offenses (n=40), as well as court records for these individuals. This proposal will catalyze a larger scale evaluation of salient decriminalization approaches; it will also generate policy recommendations for further efforts to decriminalize homelessness.
Multi-media assessment of children’s lead exposure in Los Angeles
PI: Kirsten Schwarz (Urban Planning)
Co-PI: Jennifer Jay (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
Childhood lead poisoning as a public health crisis has suffered from both a lack of comprehensive exposure assessment as well as disjointed policies that focus on a single source of lead in the environment. Failure to respond to the connections among multiple exposure routes and how they interact is one of the reasons that lead poisoning remains a public health crisis. This project aims to address the shortcomings of a disciplinary approach by bringing together environmental scientists, community activists and organizers, public health officials, and urban planning and public policy to engage underserved communities in LA in a comprehensive assessment of lead exposure. Contributions from water, food, soil, and dust will be quantified where individuals live, work, and play. Results from the study will be used to develop a systems thinking framework for lead remediation that can inform connections among disparate policies regarding lead hazards in the environment.
The Biometrics of Criminalization: A Transdisciplinary Study of Forced Data Collection in US Immigrant Detention Centers and Refugee Resettlement Programs
PI: Lee Ann S. Wang (Social Welfare, Asian American Studies)
Co-PI: Jolie Chea (Asian American Studies)
While biometric data collection is a growing law enforcement tool, its implementation in US immigration detention centers and refugee resettlement programs is relatively new and understudied. In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security launched pilot programs to collect biometric data from immigrant detainees, refugees, and U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents sponsoring refugees. This qualitative study analyzes how law incorporates noncitizen and citizen bodies into biometric regimes, the role of race and sexuality in determining “fraudulent family” networks as qualifiers of forced data collection, international security logics driving refugee resettlement and eligibility to welfare programs. The project will conduct surveys and ethnographic interviews with social service providers and legal advocates working with clients in refugee and migrant communities in Detroit, MI, Eagle Pass, TX, and Los Angeles, CA.
