With three road wins under its belt, gymnastics returns home for Arizona meet

The Bruins are back home after three weeks on the road – but it may not seem much different.

“It’s almost like everywhere we go, it’s our home court,” said associate head coach Chris Waller. “Our athletes get introduced and the crowd is cheering for them like we’re at home.”

After competing in front of record-breaking, sell-out crowds in its last three road meets, No. 3 UCLA gymnastics (5-0, 4-0 Pac-12) will return to Pauley Pavilion to host No. 25 Arizona (1-4, 1-3) on Saturday.

“When we’re at home, we really do feel like we’re putting on a show,” said freshman Margzetta Frazier. “That’s where we get the most magic.”

Junior Madison Kocian notched a 10 on uneven bars at the Bruins’ last home meet against then-No. 19 Arizona State on Jan. 21. Since then, UCLA has recorded three more perfect scores – one by senior Katelyn Ohashi on floor exercise and two by junior Kyla Ross on uneven bars and vault.

Frazier, who has scored a 9.825 or higher on every routine she has competed this season, said she has become more focused and disciplined over the last few weeks.

“Before I came to college, I feel like I mastered the mentality of being consistent,” Frazier said. “Here it’s very different because the skills may be easier than elite (gymnastics), but you have to be perfect. It’s a different kind of mind power.”

Arizona has only one win this season against then-No.12 California on Jan. 26 in which they upset the Golden Bears. Arizona fell to No. 4 Utah and No. 12 Oregon State the last two weeks.

Waller said UCLA has been testing different lineups throughout the season to see which groups of athletes can score the highest in each rotation. The Bruins have competed with different floor, beam and uneven bars lineups in each of their last three meets.

“We have our core, but it’s still evolving,” Waller said. “We’ve got athletes who are hungry and excited about getting in the lineup and the more that this team is both connected (while) also being competitive to fight into that lineup, the more it elevates everybody.”

Junior Grace Glenn – who returned to the balance beam lineup Sunday after suffering an injury in the first meet of the season – said she has been moved down in the Bruins’ beam lineup in hopes of notching a higher score.

“With UCLA, I feel like we never really have a finalized lineup,” Glenn said. “I’m usually the leadoff on beam but this last meet (against Washington) I was second. As leadoff, we haven’t really had anyone get a 10 before, so that’s a goal of mine (going second).”

The Bruins will take on the Wildcats beginning at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.

“Coming back home is going to be amazing cause it’s just so much darn fun,” Waller said. “I expect a packed house.”

BruinX provides programs for promoting diversity and equity on campus

A unit within the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion aims to increase its engagement with undergraduate students through mock graduate-level classes.

Devon Carbado, associate vice chancellor of BruinX, said he came up with the idea to hold mock graduate classes at an event called “BruiNext: Pathways and Possibilities” last year. BruinX expanded the event to more students this year, drawing over 100 attendees per day on both Jan. 17 and Jan. 24.

“Last year we got interest from other constituents and we thought it made sense to broaden it to other undergraduates at large,” Carbado said.

BruinX is a research-focused unit of the UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion that collects and evaluates data on the campus to create more equitable learning opportunities and more inclusive work environments, according to its website.

“There was a realization that transfer students don’t have a lot of time to anticipate the ‘What next?’ question,” Carbado said.

Students generally rated the courses favorably and expressed a desire for more course offerings in the future, according to 133 evaluations compiled by Aaron Kinsfather, a BruinX research assistant.

Courses at the event included business, law, sociology, medicine, and social psychology and education. A reception after the event allowed students to interact with graduate school representatives.

Radmehr Nowroozi, a third-year political science student, attended the law course that was instructed by Carbado. Nowroozi said he appreciated how Carbado made the material approachable but still representative of a real law course.

“The mock class was by far the most helpful in assuring me that I wanted to go to law school,” Nowroozi said.

Madilaine Venzon, a fourth-year English student, said the event made her more confident she could pursue graduate school.

“It made me feel like this could be a possibility for me, and that this is something that I’m definitely considering pursuing in the future,” Venzon said.

BruiNext is part of a larger effort by the BruinX team to inform and engage the campus community about issues related to the aims of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Carbado said.

One of BruinX’s projects involves collecting demographic information on campus leadership, faculty, staff and students, and presenting them through the BruinX Dashboards on their website.

“We want to provide useful information that can inform policy choices that different parts of the campus might make,” Carbado said.

Another initiative is called CrossCheck Live, a series of public events that promote discussions around topics such as free speech, police violence and sexual harassment, Carbado said. These events were launched in 2016 and can be attended in person or viewed online.

“The CrossCheck Live is important because it’s community-wide engagement on some matters that we think the campus is interested in learning more about,” Carbado said.

The BruinX team also offers anti-bias training to faculty and staff when requested, Carbado said. These training initiatives are also offered as workshops to the campus at large, according to their website.

The team is also engaging students through other projects such as the BruinXperience app that launched last quarter. The app enables BruinX to supplement more traditional surveys to understand how students at different points in their academic careers feel about their experiences at UCLA, Carbado said.

“This is a way to get students to react in more real time about how they are experiencing themselves at UCLA,” Carbado said. “So you might be able to look if there are differences between say juniors and sophomores.”

BruinX will release a statement on the results and findings of the app by the end of the academic year, Carbado said.

Many of BruinX’s initiatives are still ongoing and BruinX remains a work in progress, Carbado said.

UCLA Law Trial Team takes second place in national mock trial competition

The UCLA Law Trial Team won second place at a national competition in January.

The team placed second in the American Bar Association Section of Labor and Employment Law’s Law Student Trial Advocacy Competition, following their success in November in the West Coast regional competition.

Four UCLA School of Law students traveled to New Orleans to represent the team and compete for the national title. Participants were required to engage in a mock trial case. The topic of this competition’s mock trial involved sexual assault in the workplace and prison reform. Half the team represented the defense, and the other half the plaintiff, and each student had specific jobs such as making opening and closing statements.

Deeksha Kohli, a graduate student in law and one of the co-presidents of the Law Trial Team, said the trial was very complicated because of the sensitivity of the sexual harassment topic.

“Trying to be the defense was difficult because you never want to sound like you’re victim-blaming,” Kohli said.

Justin Bernstein, the director of UCLA School of Law’s A. Barry Cappello Program in Trial Advocacy, said one of the challenges the team faced was adapting to the views and customs of a different region in the country.

“One challenge is that, when you advance from a regional competition to a national competition, you have to get used to the local customs. That can be as small as vocabulary differences in courtrooms in New Orleans as compared to California, but it’s also a different juror pool,” Bernstein said. “Obviously you don’t want to paint with too broad a brush and you don’t want to overgeneralize, but you also know that people are going to have different views about things in different parts of the country.”

Bernstein added the UCLA team’s preparedness and dedication allowed it to stand out from other competitors.

“Some of the things that make our team so successful starts with preparation; our students work really hard and are extremely talented,” Bernstein said. “They’re bright, they’re diverse, and they come with great amounts of experience before law school and that shows in the courtroom.”

Mikayla Wasiri, a graduate student in law who competed with the team, said she thinks the team was successful because of its energy and its calculated approach to the topic.

“I think we were just a lot more dynamic and we also had a much stronger case theory. I was on the defense and we chose a case theory that wouldn’t alienate the audience,” Wasiri said. “Because it was sexual harassment, we chose not to attack the plaintiff.”

Wasiri added Bernstein was instrumental to their success in this process.

“Having (Bernstein) be a part of the program has really transformed the UCLA law mock trial program,” Wasiri said. “It’s grown so much in the one year I’ve been on it.”

Bernstein said the results of the competition were consistent with the past results of the team.

“It’s pretty representative of all of our results this year. We’ve been to four competitions and at those four competitions we’ve sent seven different teams,” Bernstein said. “The worst result that we’ve had at any competition is reaching the semifinals.”

He added all seven teams who have competed so far this year have made the playoffs at their individual competitions.

The next competition for the UCLA Law Trial Team will be in March, and three of the four students who competed in New Orleans are preparing for that event.

Bernstein said, regardless of how the team performs, he is impressed with the group’s dependability.

“Obviously we’re very proud every time we bring home the first place trophy, but even more than that, I’m pleased with the students’ consistency,” he said.

Researchers develop more accurate method of determining age of death

UCLA researchers have developed a new tool to predict when someone will die, but don’t start planning your funeral yet.

In a study published last month in the journal Aging, researchers in the lab of Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics and biostatistics, developed a new method of predicting the population lifespans that is 14 percent more accurate than previous methods. Still, Horvath said the technology, called DNAm GrimAge, is not ready to be used by the public.

The tool is a version of an epigenetic clock, which uses biological characteristics to measure age and risk of mortality. In 2011, Horvath showed how DNA methylation, a process affecting gene expression, could predict chronological age using tissues from anywhere in the body. He later used this technique as the basis of DNAm GrimAge. Most researchers before this used measures such as self-reported history, body mass index and blood pressure to predict lifespan.

Austin Quach, a postdoctoral student and an author on the study, said DNA is like a giant book of blueprints, and methylation determines what part of the DNA is read. Molecules in cells add methyl groups to the cytosine bases in DNA to flag genes that need to be transcribed into proteins.

“Methyl groups are like bookmarks,” he said. “Sometimes bookmarks change with age, sometimes bookmarks change with lifestyle.”

Quach said other researchers did not expect DNA methylation to be a strong predictor of age and had created epigenetic clocks with blood samples. However, Horvath showed it was possible to use other tissues, such as a cell from your toe, to predict age. This prompted Ake Lu, the first author on the paper, and others in Horvath’s lab to develop DNAm GrimAge.

Horvath said he and his team took frozen blood samples from the 1990s to build a statistical model used to make predictions based on new data in DNAm GrimAge. He said they extracted DNA from the blood to measure its degree of methylation and then related it to the risk of mortality.

He said traditional risk factors, such as gender and age, were taken into account to make adjustments to the measure.

Lu said she can accurately predict how many packs of cigarettes someone smokes a day by analyzing their age and degree of methylation. The prediction was more accurate than self-reported smoking history.

However, there are some factors epigenetic clocks cannot account for.

“In principle it’s hard to predict how long a person will live because there’s randomness to death; factors such as sheer bad luck and lifestyle can also affect it,” Horvath said.

Horvath said predicting lifespan with DNAm GrimAge should not inform clinical decisions because it can’t help patients combat aging. He added the general public may not fully understand the information and its implications. Instead, he said it should mostly be used as a tool for aging research, such as in the development of anti-aging drugs.

Neil Wegner, a professor of medicine and the director of the UCLA Healthcare Ethics Center, said he thinks this tool is a big improvement on existing technology. However, it still cannot accurately predict the lifespans of individuals, and is better suited to analyze lifespans of populations.

“We are eons away from predicting for individuals,” he said.

Wegner said he thinks using DNAm GrimAge does not pose new ethical questions, as life insurance companies and doctors are already using health prediction tools to determine how to set insurance rates and whether to do preventative testing in doctors’ offices.

Even as epigenetic clocks become more advanced, Quach said he thinks preventing aging is a complicated issue that is hard to solve with a single device.

“There won’t be one silver bullet pill that would solve aging,” he said.

Westwood Neighborhood Council opposes The Agora plans amid building controversy

The Westwood Neighborhood Council voted to maintain its opposition to a high-rise housing project in Westwood.

The WWNC reviewed its initial vote in January to oppose The Agora, a 16-story housing project on Hilgard Avenue, on Wednesday. Lisa Chapman, council president, said the city attorney recommended the council revote on the housing development in their February meeting due to a complaint from Aaron Green, an Agora spokesperson, regarding possible biases from council members.

Scott Whittle, a neighborhood council member, made a motion to validate the WWNC vote from the January meeting, and Ann Hayman, a member of the Land Use Committee, seconded the motion. The motion passed unanimously with one abstention.

The Agora project developers announced plans in November to build a 16-story building on Hilgard Avenue that is to have a total of 231 bedrooms spread over 64 residential units. The developers doubled the number of beds to 462 last month. The project has been met by both support and opposition from different neighborhood councils and community groups.

The WWNC voted in January to request that Los Angeles Councilmember Paul Koretz, who represents UCLA and Westwood, oppose the development project and any changes to city guidelines or ordinances that would facilitate the approval of the development project.

Chapman previously said the council would consider repealing its initial opposition to be fair to The Agora developers and give them a chance to respond. The council invited The Agora representatives to present at WWNC’s February meeting, but they did not attend.

According to the agenda for the council’s February board meeting, groups supporting and opposing the project were invited to participate in the discussion. However, only Esther Magna, a proponent for the Save Hilgard Avenue opposition group, attended the meeting.

Chapman voluntarily recused herself prior to council deliberations as per the request of the city attorney and left the room before discussion began.

Chapman said the city attorney asked her and Sandy Brown, council vice president, to recuse themselves from council deliberations to avoid the perception of bias. She added she was unsure of what biases she or Brown may have had.

Green said in a letter to the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment he thought Brown was biased because she is a homeowner, and he thinks she had preconceived opinions on the housing project before it was brought before the council. He also thought Chapman was biased because she sent messages to him about the housing project that he thought were threatening.

Chapman said she sent messages to Green, but not on behalf of the council. She added she thought posts made by The Agora on Facebook were based on inaccurate stereotypes of local homeowners. She added she recused herself so that her vote could not potentially be used against her later.

“I recused myself last night for the discussion and vote so that he would not be able to use this as any kind of leverage in the future,” Chapman said about Wednesday’s vote in an email statement. “So last night was a clean vote.”

Brown said the city attorney also asked her to recuse herself, but she did not leave because she did not think it was right to single out Chapman and herself and not other members. Stephen Resnick, council secretary, chaired the discussion in Chapman’s absence.

Magna asked the WWNC to oppose The Agora project because it exceeds both height and density restrictions allocated for the land.

The Agora housing project was also discussed at a Undergraduate Students Association Council meeting Tuesday to discuss its impact on students, where Agora representatives were also present. Magna said she also presented then in opposition of the project.

She said she thinks The Agora representatives were using scare tactics at the USAC meeting to encourage students to support the project.

At the USAC meeting, Green said The Agora is a first step toward addressing student homelessness and asked students to think of it as a precedent for future development projects.

“If this project can’t be built, what student housing can be built in Westwood?” Green said. “If you give into this, if Westwood gives into this, if students give into this, what’s going to change? Westwood is going to continue to die, and future generations of students are going to have it much worse.”

Magna said that she was surprised to hear the different perspectives USAC members brought to the discussion, both for and against the project, but ultimately thought students may be leaning toward supporting The Agora project.

USAC was unable to vote on the development during the meeting because they did not have quorum at the time of the presentations.

USAC is set to vote on The Agora at the Tuesday forum.

UCLA medical center nurse receives national award for exceptional patient care

Melissa Reider-Demer would frequently check on her patients even when she was not on shift.

Heidi Eddy-Dorn, the mother of one of Reider-Demer’s patients, said she was impressed by Reider-Demer’s ability to be so empathetic while also being clinical and professional.

“I remember one time she came in jeans and (was) clearly on her way somewhere, (and she) goes, ‘I just wanted to check on her.’ I was so impressed by that combination of empathy and compassion and absolute profession,” she said. “Those things for her were not divorced.”

Reider-Demer, a nurse in the neurology department of the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, received the national Nurse of the Year award in November from Press Ganey, a healthcare organization that seeks to improve the patient experience by focusing on patient-centered care.

The award aims to recognize nurses who show exceptional care to their patients, said Christy Dempsey, Press Ganey’s chief nursing officer.

“(Reider-Demer received this award) based on a series of transformational contributions that she had made to her department’s critical care and quality programs since her arrival in the neurology department,” Dempsey said.

Reider-Demer said she was shocked to receive the award.

“I was so thrilled that not only was my work being appreciated and noticed on a global level, but that there’s hope that my implementation can be used elsewhere,” Reider-Demer said.

As part of the neurology department, Reider-Demer has helped patients access urgent care more efficiently, streamlined the upload process for patient scans from outside providers and reduced the length of patient stays to save money for the hospital and the patient to allow more patients to get care.

Reider-Demer said people always ask her why she chose to be a nurse instead of going to medical school.

“In nursing you’re taught to look at the whole situation: the patient, the environment, the families, the whole thing,” Reider-Demer said. “I wanted the aspect of working and seeing everything, implementing the changes around the whole patient.”

Reider-Demer received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UCLA in 1996 and 1998 respectively, and has a doctorate in nursing practice. She has worked for different medical departments at UCLA, including the Stein Eye Institute and the department of neurosurgery. She has also worked in the neurology department of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Reider-Demer said her job at UCLA is fulfilling, despite the challenges that come with working in the medical field, such as treating patients in some of their worst moments.

“As much negative stuff that’s being thrown my way, there’s not a day that goes by that there isn’t someone or some mechanism that is showing appreciation for what I do,” Reider-Demer said. “A lot of times I think people don’t get that, and so I’m lucky that I do have that.”

Eddy-Dorn said Reider-Demer fosters strong connections with her patients and their families. Reider-Demer cared for Eddy-Dorn’s daughter when she was in a horseback-riding accident in 2016.

Eddy-Dorn said she thinks Reider-Demer is exceptional because she prioritizes building relationships with her patients.

“She knows her way around the hospital and she knows the people to call when the client needs something. Also she’s really, really smart,” Eddy-Dorn said. “She can answer a lot of questions about neurology.”

Eddy-Dorn said she was particularly struck by Reider-Demer’s ability to balance the responsibilities of her profession and her genuine care for her patients.

She added she and her family still speak with Reider-Demer on a regular basis, and often contacts her for advice.

“I think what’s gratifying is that you do something every day that is affecting somebody’s life in some aspect; that’s a very powerful thing to be able to do,” Reider-Demer said. “You’re literally making an impact on the person’s life or family and I take that very seriously.”

In the future, Reider-Demer said she hopes to take on more leadership roles in her profession.

“I think I have the energy and the insight to see what could be beneficial changes and I practice what I preach,” Reider-Demer said. “I think if I were to get more into a leadership role, it would serve many well.”

Reider-Demer said she thinks her creativity in nursing is what makes her unique.

“Nothing I’m doing is that special, I’m just someone that had the boldness to say, ‘I’m going to look at this a different way, and I’m going to try it and see what happens, and then go with it,’” Reider-Demer said.

Op-ed: USAC has responsibility to make student government more accessible UCLA community

If you were to speak to a handful of random undergraduates on Bruin Walk, many would probably be unfamiliar with all USAC can do for them.

Most would be aware there exists some sort of student government. But when it comes to understanding specific details or really any information beyond knowing that USAC stands for “Undergraduate Students Association Council,” they are left in the dark.

This is especially troubling considering the fact that USAC is supported by students’ tuition and fees, and populated by 14 – soon to be 15 – elected officers who have the right to decide what happens with that money. The council’s most recent surplus allocation, for example, was hundreds of thousands of dollars. When there are certain student communities for which USAC is unfamiliar and inaccessible, these students are unable to obtain the resources offered by the offices designed to represent their interests.

The mechanisms by which our student government has typically supported student organizations – whether it be town hall events that get relatively small attendance, or social media blasts framed as “outreach to the UCLA community” – have been anything but entirely inclusive. When outreach is confined to social media platforms or word-of-mouth from our own offices, we miss the students who need outreach the most: those who aren’t already connected to USAC and don’t have friends in offices.

While there is still much more to be done, the Office of the Internal Vice President has improved upon its outreach since last spring, and has continued to make efforts to reach out to students who have never been reached out to before. We have tried to be intentional with our efforts by refining and determining the best way to successfully connect with and garner support, involvement and participation from student organizations and communities that have historically been excluded from the inner-workings, programs and resources of student government.

It goes without saying that UCLA’s undergraduate student government can always do better at outreach, especially to student organizations. And though personal outreach may seem a tedious task, doing so with an organized, thorough and impassioned effort has reaped considerable success for my office and the organizations it has assisted.

In just a few months, the office’s “Reachableness” campaign directors Kimberly Bonifacio and Fernando Oggier, with the assistance of their committee members, have been in contact with more than 130 student organizations, and have assisted in making dozens of projects come to fruition.

USAC offices can support initiatives that stem directly from our student community, be it by helping dozens of organizations book rooms and access contingency funding applications, including more student voices on entities like Campus Safety Alliance or supporting larger projects like the UCLA Piano Project and UCLA Pride Week.

Yet, even with these efforts, more needs to be done. Until there is an easy and efficient way to outreach to student organizations that do not already know about UCLA’s student government, USAC offices will have to continue to make efforts to reach out to organizations and communities that they may not have interacted with in the past.

Reaching out to student organizations is no easy task for any student or office, but the IVP office has devoted an entire committee solely to making these connections. We in student government have more work to do to truly act in the best interest of our student body, but it starts with structuring our offices in a way that prioritizes student communities and organizations.

This can be a daunting and time-consuming undertaking. But it is nonetheless a responsibility that every student-government leader holds.

Watson is the USAC internal vice president.