Recently in ISG

Derek W. Ren, Human Biology and Society B.S., class of 2024 has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Program award for the 2024-2025 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

The UCLA Heat Lab, directed by ISG faculty Bharat Venkat, is featured in a story on NBC4 for their research on LA food trucks.

Congratulations to ISG Faculty, Bharat Venkat!  His book, At the Limits of Cure (2021) was co-awarded the 2023 Edie Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing.

The study analyzed 180 in-custody deaths in 10 Maryland detention centers and found that about half of those people died within the first 10 days of incarceration.

July delivered an irrefutable argument about the extent of climate change: A recent analysis suggests that 81% of the Earth’s population lives in places that experienced extreme heat attributable to global warming sometime during the month. Extreme heat is not just uncomfortable; it can be debilitating, and even deadly.

The National Weather Service has issued an excessive heat warning for many parts of the U.S. this week. Parts of LA, like the San Fernando Valley, are headed for triple-digit temperatures this weekend. Heat negatively affects some people more than others — UCLA Heat Lab Director Bharat Venkat looks at it as thermal inequality.

Heat preparedness has generally improved over the years as forecasting has become more accurate, and as meteorologists, journalists and government officials have focused on spreading the word of upcoming danger. Chicago, for example, has expanded its emergency text and email notification system and identified its most vulnerable residents for outreach.

Since the time of the Greek physician Galen, knowing what causes a disease has been taken to be a critical step toward finding its cure (an idea we still hold dear in our time of mysterious syndromes and phantom pains). But a cure that specifically targeted the rod-shaped bacterium that causes tuberculosis…

The NY Times published a guest Opinion Essay by ISG faculty Danielle Carr’s article “Mental Health is Political”. “What if the cure for our current mental health crisis is not more mental health care?”

An ongoing study conducted by [Chase] Niesner, Christopher Kelty and Spencer Robins suggests that the same survival skills that enabled coyotes to outlast federal extermination campaigns during the 19th century has allowed them to flourish in some of the most densely populated urban centers in the world.

Congratulations to ISG Faculty member, Nick Shapiro, who was selected  as one of five inaugural faculty members to receive the Mellon “Data, Justice, and Society” grant. The new grant is dedicated to develop new undergraduate or graduate courses to teach in the areas of critical data studies, data and society and digital…

The Intercept recently published two articles featuring Nicholas Shapiro’s ongoing research on carceral ecologies. In addtion, the same publication produced an interactive map using data Shapiro and his lab collected titled Climate and Punishment.