On a mental health mission.
Are you getting your daily minimum requirement of pleasant activities? Psychologist Ricardo Muñoz, ’72, is on a career-long mission to help prevent people with some symptoms of depression from developing a clinical disorder, and he says that doing things you enjoy—even if you don’t feel like it just now—is key to a healthy mood. Muñoz recommends activities that are pleasant or meaningful, or that involve mastery. And they don’t need to be complicated. Just listening to a song you like can boost your mood. Muñoz talked with Stanford magazine about his career, including his pioneering efforts to use digital interventions—which recent research shows can be effective—to offer more people help with mental health issues.
Speaking of digital self-help, in 2020, Stanford psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor Debra Kaysen and associate professor Shannon Wiltsey Stirman began developing Pause a Moment (or PAM), an online program to provide mental health support to health care workers navigating the long-term effects of the pandemic, such as chronic stress and post-traumatic stress disorder. Now it’s accessible to anyone with a computer or mobile phone who needs help. It’s also free.
To infinity and beyond.
As a former Navy SEAL, senior Nestor Walters knows what difficult is—and being a math major, he says, definitely fits the bill. Indeed, a recent Stanford course left his brain feeling as abused as his body once did during SEAL training. So what’s the point of choosing challenging—even impossible—paths? For answers, Walters turns to ancient Spartans as well as modern heavy metal musicians. “Because there is a tomorrow, or there could be, and it is worth something, or we can make it be,” he writes in Stanford magazine.
Itching for change.
In Africa, mosquito nets have long protected the sleeping from the insects that transmit malaria, but they don’t do a thing for dengue fever: The mosquitoes carrying that disease bite during the day. Now professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases Desiree LaBeaud knows what might help: picking up trash.
“[We] were astonished,” LaBeaud said when she realized what she had stumbled upon. While working to prevent the spread of dengue, Zika and other viruses transmitted by the daytime mosquito Aedes aegypti, she showed children in Kenya how to identify larvae and sent them out to find examples in their communities. But rather than floating in large water storage containers as researchers expected, 81 percent of the larvae were found in “containers with no purpose”—primarily bottles, bags, buckets and tires that contained standing water.
The discovery inspired LaBeaud to launch the Health and Environmental Research Institute–Kenya. “One of our main motivations is to educate and empower all of our community members so that they know about these mosquitoes, the diseases they cause and that trash is a problem.” That’s a tough mission in Kenya, where infrastructure is lacking and residents look down on trash collectors, but it’s an essential aspect of LaBeaud’s work to translate scientific findings into meaningful real-world improvements, according to LaBeaud. “From the beginning,” she told the Stanford News Service, “we have wanted to make impactful change that actually improves health—because if it’s not, then what’s the point of doing it?”
Just dropped in to say hello.
Photo: Andrew Brodhead/Stanford News Service
The newest public art piece in Meyer Green combines ancient Greek architecture with . . . a snake? The 15-foot-tall sculpture, Hello, warps a classical Corinthian column so the length curls around itself while the capital is poised high in the air like the head of a mutated serpent. Artist Xu Zhen, known for confronting political taboos and challenging cultural boundaries, created the piece for the Stanford Plinth Project, which will feature a series of temporary art pieces in Meyer Green. “While my work might appear direct, when you really try to understand it, I hope the meaning becomes a bit more blurry in the end,” Xu Zhen said in a 2020 interview. You can ponder its meaning for a while—the sculpture will be on display for two years.
Brain candy.
Carolyn Bertozzi’s introduction to the sugars that coat our cells was short and, well, sweet. She was taking a biology course early in her undergraduate career when the professor likened a cell to a peanut M&M. Both, he said, were encased in a sugar coating. Nearly four decades later, Bertozzi, a chemical biologist who directs Stanford’s Chemistry, Engineering and Medicine for Human Health institute (aka ChEM-H), uses the metaphor as a way to illustrate a still underappreciated fact: Our cells—like every cell on Earth—are shrouded with sugars as surely as the famous colorful confections, and yet we know little about our own candy coating. Bertozzi has spent her career trying to understand, explore and exploit the mysterious, apparently indispensable nature of these sugars, with implications for how we treat everything from common cancers to rare genetic syndromes.
Cultivating crops for a crushing climate.
Human existence revolves around plants, and not just for salad. They’re used in medicine, paper, bioplastics, textiles, rubber and a host of other products on which modern life depends. And that adds to the problems created by global climate change. Over the next three decades, for example, California’s San Joaquin Valley could lose up to 535,000 acres of arable land due to dwindling water supplies. Jennifer Brophy, an assistant professor of bioengineering, is working on creating “genetic circuits” within plants to help them withstand the rapidly changing conditions. “Climate variables are changing more rapidly than natural selection can keep up,” she said. “If we can engineer crops that are more drought tolerant, for example, maybe we can produce the same things with fewer resources.”
Working from home doesn’t stink, but you might.
Move over, yoga pants: The new work-from-home look is a whole lot shabbier. A survey of nearly 4,000 Americans who’ve worked full days at home at some point since the pandemic began showed that people spend an average of 19 minutes getting ready to work at home, compared with 28 minutes for in-office work. The decrease comes from abandoned grooming activities such as putting on makeup, wearing fresh clothing, showering and applying deodorant (which, evidently, a full 7 percent of people skip even when they come to the office?!). Said economics professor Nicholas Bloom, who helped lead the research: “I should be thankful Zoom only has audio and video.” The Loop raises a stick of Right Guard and a tube of mascara to you, sir.
But wait, there’s more.
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, including FSI director and former ambassador to the Russian Federation Michael McFaul, offers expert analysis and commentary on the crisis in Ukraine.
Graphic novels are sometimes dismissed as childish, but books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do are excellent ways to study global history, said Stanford history professor Tom Mullaney. “When I read a graphic novel, I feel prepared to ask questions that allow me to go into the harder-core, peer-reviewed material.” Mullaney has incorporated graphic novels into his Stanford courses since 2017.
Last week, former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence spoke on campus at a Stanford College Republicans event titled “How to Save America from the Woke Left.” In his remarks, Pence encouraged students to “be the freedom generation.” Student protesters were present outside the event.
If you spent Valentine’s Day alone, take heart in Daniela Saban’s new findings on dating apps. Saban, associate professor of operations, information and technology at the GSB, says that changes to dating apps, such as allowing only the minority group—say, heterosexual women—to make the first move (you’re ahead of the curve, Bumble) benefits the majority group—say, heterosexual men.
Three hundred years since Jonathan Swift wrote “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it,” lies still seem to be winning the race. Johan Ugander, an assistant professor of management science and engineering, uses machine learning to study how both types of information spread. False stories, he says, are more “infectious,” with wide-ranging consequences for how they spread. He ain’t lyin’.
A study led by Stanford Medicine researchers and published in Nature has shown that Epstein-Barr virus (a common type of herpes virus) triggers multiple sclerosis by priming a person’s immune system to attack the body’s own nervous system. “This is the first time anyone has shown rather definitively that a virus is the trigger for multiple sclerosis,” said Lawrence Steinman, professor of neurology and a co-author of the study. The findings pave the way for new clinical treatments of multiple sclerosis, and they could inform research on other autoimmune diseases, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Mitigating climate change doesn’t just mean reducing carbon dioxide emissions. It also means dealing with the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. Capture it, sure, but then what? Stanford engineers are working to convert CO2 into propane, butane and other hydrocarbon fuels. “We can create gasoline, basically,” said Matteo Cargnello, an assistant professor of chemical engineering.
Twenty-eight chickpeas, a tiny greenhouse and NASA are about to make delicious dip. Also history. Biophysicist Yonatan Winetraub, PhD ’21, and colleagues are attempting to germinate garbanzos in zero gravity. The legumes launched on February 19 and will be grown—remotely, using special software—on the International Space Station. All fingers are crossed for the success of space hummus.
Summer Moore Batte, ’99, is the editor of Stanfordmag.org and the Loop. Email her at summerm@stanford.edu.
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