Recently in ISG

ISG Faculty, Hannah Landecker, participated last Apr 4 – 5 2025, in the Metabolic Futures workshop, at Stuttgart, Germany.  Where she presented the Keynote Lecture Distilled, Emulsified, Suspended: On Viscosity and Time in the Metabolism of Mass Production. 

ISG faculty, Jessica Lynch, research has been featured on a NewScientist article “Stone tools help monkeys thrive in hostile habitats”.

ISG faculty Danielle Carr discusses “the history and present state of American unwellness and how that’s been shaped by psychiatry, prescription drugs, neuroscience, popular culture, smartphones and social media.

Terence Keel and Nicholas Shapiro earned UCLA’s 2024 Public Impact Research Awards for groundbreaking work on police custody deaths and environmental injustices in prisons.

California’s board approved indoor heat standards protecting millions of workers in hot workplaces, but excluded prisons and jails, leaving incarcerated people vulnerable as climate warms.

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…