In two weeks, UC San Diego Health orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Sonya Ahmed will head to Lillehammer, Norway for the 2016 Winter Youth Olympic Games. Ahmed is a former elite athlete herself—competing internationally in gymnastics and in collegiate pole vaulting. But this time she’s heading to the world stage not as an athlete, but as a doctor.
UC San Diego will honor African-American history with events throughout February, including art exhibits, lectures, film screenings, spoken word performances and the annual Black History Month Scholarship Brunch. The Feb. 27 brunch will feature renowned filmmaker, actor and activist Danny Glover as the special guest speaker.
Where others might see obstacles, Dejanay Wayne sees opportunity. For the past two months, the UC San Diego undergraduate has taken the initiative to meet one-on-one with campus leadership to share her ideas on how to make the university more welcoming to students of color. As a result of her newfound alliances, she secured bookstore giveaways to help recruit underrepresented students to UC San Diego, introduced ethnic hair and skin products to campus, and is now working to develop a retention program that pairs current undergraduates with first-year underrepresented students.
UC San Diego Department of History Professor Natalia Molina, who also teaches urban studies and serves as associate vice chancellor for faculty diversity and equity, was recently awarded the 2015 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship for her book, “How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts.” Molina’s publication examines Mexican immigration from 1924 to 1965 to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are established. She will discuss her research publicly as the next keynote speaker in the Division of Arts and Humanities’ Degrees of Health and Well-being lecture series, Wednesday. Jan. 27, 7:00 p.m., in UC San Diego’s Great Hall.
Katharine Anderson, a historian of science in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, will present a free public lecture, “Experimenting with the Expedition: Renewing the Ocean Sciences after World War I,” on Feb. 8, 2016, at 3 p.m. at the Robert Paine Scripps Forum for Science Society and the Environment on the Scripps Oceanography campus (8610 Kennel Way, La Jolla, CA 92037).
The University of California, San Diego’s New Writing Series (NWS) is anything but new. In fact, the series, originally rooted in poetry, is among the longest running programs in the state, dating to the early 1970s. Each quarter the Department of Literature hosts the “new” writing series, and this winter’s series, which began Jan. 13 and runs through March 2, takes a transnational focus with guest writers John Gibler, Lorena Gomez Mostajo, John B. Washington and Marivi Blanco. The next presentation, featuring Washington, takes place Jan. 27, 4:30 p.m., in the Visual Arts Presentation Lab on campus.
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