The minute Bernard Hamermesh picked up the microphone, he transformed from a resident of the Belmont Village Senior Living community and resumed his role as a professor.
“Physics impacts your daily life right when you wake up,” Hamermesh told an audience of about 40 fellow residents on Monday in a lecture titled “Physics’ Impact on Your Life.”
After listening to Hamermesh speak, the Belmont residents responded to the discussion with questions about how physics affects the medical field and asked Hamermesh about his opinions on nuclear power plants.
Hamermesh, a professor emeritus at UCLA, has been teaching physics for 70 years and is not the first to share his expertise with the Belmont community.
Since opening last year along Wilshire Boulevard’s “Millionaire’s Mile,” Belmont has provided its residents with the opportunity to attend free academic lectures, most of them given by UCLA professors.
Many of the community’s residents are UCLA alumni, retired UCLA staff or faculty, or related to UCLA staff or faculty.
UCLA professors, retired and active, present lectures about two or three times each month and cover topics ranging from health to literature. Most of the lectures are given by UCLA emeritus professors, a few of whom are residents at Belmont. One lecture was presented by Charles E. Young, UCLA Chancellor Emeritus. An average of 30 residents attend the lectures that take place in the facility’s screening room, which is usually used to show movies.
For Sylvia Lieberman, a 93-year-old Belmont resident and children’s book author, attending as many lectures as she can has become a priority.
“It is important that as you get older not only to make sure your body is healthy, but you have to keep your mind active,” she said.
Lieberman said she uses the lectures to introduce herself to different subjects to see if she finds one worth exploring more. Belmont’s proximity to UCLA also allows residents to take classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, an extension program geared toward adults who are more than 50-years-old.
“There is no reason to stop trying new things just because you are older,” said Lieberman, whose daughter is a member of the clinical faculty at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute.
Lieberman said her favorite lectures have included a discussion of health care policy reform by Thomas Rice, UCLA vice chancellor for academic personnel and professor of public health, as well as a presentation called “Reel Justice” given by Paul Bergman, UCLA professor emeritus of law, about the influence of movies on attitudes about the justice system.
Rice said his lecture about the recent reforms in health care was particularly engaging for Belmont residents who were interested in policy. He said some residents asked questions about how health care reform affects their lives.
“Health care policy is particularly important to retired people because they use health care more and are more affected by its reform,” Rice said. “The idea of Belmont was to allow the retirees to continue being involved with UCLA, in education and learning.”