I am an adjunct faculty member at ELAC in the Life Science Department, where I teach Physiology 001, Introduction to Human Physiology, to students entering the biomedical professions. I truly love teaching, and get great satisfaction out of helping prepare my students to enter this challenging fields.
I received my Ph.D. in Marine Biology (Neuroscience) from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD in 1995. My research specialty was neurophysiology, and I worked as an biomedical researcher in the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine, at the Center for Ulcer Research and Education (CURE) from 1997 to 2013. I continue to hold an appointment there as a project scientist, where I assist colleagues develop experimental protocols involving the recording of a variety of physiological variables.
In the 1990’s I became passionate about civic media, and particularly community radio. My activism in this area led me to a long involvement with KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, and its parent network, the Pacifica Foundation. I served as first Vice-Chair and then Chair of the KPFK Local Advisory Board from 1995-2001, and later, as a member of the foundation’s Board of Directors, first as Treasurer and then Chair of the Pacifica National Board. I think this experience, more than any other, prepared me for a role in union governance, both in terms of the skill I developed in parliamentary procedure and familiarity with non-profit budgeting, but also in dealing with the types of conflicts that arise in a mission-driven organization full of people with strongly-held but starkly divergent views of how the organization should be governed and how it should grow. I also learned, to my sorrow, how much easier it is to organize people around common enemies than around common goals. I hope that those lessons, and whatever insight I may have gleaned from thinking about them over the years since, about people and about institutional politics, will help me navigate the challenges facing our union in resolving its difficulties and in getting the most from our membership.
Outside of my work at ELAC, I spend much of my time writing about problems with the foundational concepts in physiology, particularly those related to my area of expertise, the autonomic nervous system.
Additionally, I run a recreational non-profit, the LA Throwback Foundation, where I serve as Executive Director and Board Chair. Our mission is to promote the playing of the sport of Ultimate Frisbee, particularly Beach Ultimate. More importantly, we seek to teach young people to become organizers of the sport, to realize that we are all responsible for how the sport develops, and for how it serves the community. The other part of our mission is to promote the civic engagement of our community, meaning that we want to leverage the community we create through sport to become active in issues confronting our larger community, and to work to make the sport reflect the demographics of the broader communities in which we live.
One of the key projects of LA Throwback is our Ultimate Border Project, involving work in Tijuana with the migrant population living in shelters and, more recently, encampments, providing frisbees and teaching the sport of ultimate to children there who, along with their families, wait often months or even years for asylum hearings. We do this work in close collaboration with Psicólogos Sin Fronteras Baja California. More recently we have adopted housing justice here in LA as our second key focus for promoting civic engagement.