‘This hope, this profound inspiration  from the young who say, “Yes, we can. Yes, we will. Yes, we are.” It is the delight of my life to be here, working at this time with these people to try and change our climate future.’

— Joellen Russell, oceanographer, climate scientist and University of Arizona Distinguished Professor of biogeochemical dynamics

Joellen Russell phrases what she calls “the problem of our age” as a question: “How do we bend that carbon dioxide curve?”

Her high-tech research seeks answers in the depths. South of 30 degrees latitude, far beneath the surface of the Southern Ocean, she and her colleagues at institutions across the country submerge tubular yellow robotic floats for observation and modeling. 

And even here, in mountainous, semi-arid Tucson, Russell — an oceanographer, climate scientist and University of Arizona Distinguished Professor of biogeochemical dynamics — is far from alone in her wondering. That’s mostly because she’s right beside UArizona students and faculty, about whom she speaks with enthusiastic praise: “amazing,” “awesome,” “outstanding.” 

Russell, who came to the department of geosciences in 2006 after research positions at Princeton University and the University of Washington, holds one of two Thomas R. Brown distinguished chairs of integrative science; Jessica Tierney, also in geosciences, holds the other. Russell regularly welcomes UArizona undergraduates into her lab, offering paid research experience through grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  

Swimming in this pool of talent, support and spirit, she says, “gives me hope.” 

“Everyone’s so worried, so doom and gloom, and this is how we do it,” she says. “This hope, this profound inspiration — from the young who say, ‘Yes, we can. Yes, we will. Yes, we are.’ It is the delight of my life to be here, working at this time with these people to try and change our climate future.” 

The biogeochemical Argo floats — about the height of a person, with sensors measuring dissolved oxygen, nitrate and pH — descend more than 1,000 meters into the Southern Ocean, sinking to between 11 and 20 football fields deep. The data is returned via satellites and supercomputers to Russell and her collaborators on the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project. It helps tell a story, one with a past, present and future: the story of what Russell calls “this climate journey on planet Earth.” 

In a College of Science public lecture delivered at Centennial Hall in 2016, Russell noted that “global warming is ocean warming”: The oceans shoulder and reveal the brunt of climate change’s effects. And so Russell — born in Seattle and raised in Kotzebue, Alaska, a fishing village of 3,000 at the edge of the Baldwin Peninsula in Kotzebue Sound — studies our world’s largest bodies of water.

Relentlessly optimistic, she says she’s found “the best place in the world to do this work,” however ironically in the landlocked, often rainless Southwest. 

“It actually makes an incredible difference to everything we do to have this unbelievably supportive, loving, extraordinary community,” Russell says. “I never felt it at any university I worked at before. It’s just here.” 

A proud champion of Russell’s work is an environmental and community advocate in her own right.

When Sarah Smallhouse and her sister, Mary Bernal, were small, they had a pretty simple life. The Tucson home where they lived, far from fancy, was appointed with utilitarian furniture standardized by their dad for the company he’d co-founded, which applied early transistor technology to new products. 

Thomas R. Brown — engineer, entrepreneur, husband, and then father — started the Burr-Brown Corporation in 1956 with his friend Page Burr, a researcher in New York, and his wife, Helen, who built early products alongside him in their garage. Tom and Helen based the company in Tucson because they thought the Sonoran Desert was a beautiful place to live and raise a family. 

Helen passed away in 1967, when Smallhouse was 9 and her sister 6. Smallhouse says that thereafter, her father “was kind of like two parents rolled into one.” And even if their childhoods were unconventional and somewhat businesslike, she says, “He was a great father. We loved him so much and miss him deeply.” 

Sometimes Tom took his daughters on business trips to visit the company’s international sales offices. He thought it was important to show his daughters life beyond Tucson. “He exposed us as best he could to what he thought we should appreciate about diversity in the world,” Smallhouse says.

No wonder, then, that as president of the Brown Foundations — which support economic education, STEM education and research, civic leadership and workforce development, including through research support and scholarships at UArizona and Pima Community College — Smallhouse’s concerns are global. 

“I’m deeply concerned about climate change — understanding it, mitigating it where we can and adapting to it when we must,” says Smallhouse, who chaired the Southern Arizona Buffelgrass Commission for years and currently chairs the Biosphere 2 advisory board.

“How are we going to address the very serious consequences that arise because of rapidly changing conditions?” 

And it’s also no wonder that Smallhouse values wholeheartedly the work being done by Russell, whose faculty chair was recently extended. 

Of Russell, Smallhouse says, “It is pretty much impossible to be around her and not develop a sense that we’re focused on the right thing, and there’s reason to be aggressive and determined — positive change is possible, and we are figuring out how to make it happen.

“Joellen is contributing something that is very precious indeed,” she continues. “I wish there were thousands of her. But there is just one, so both Mary and I are enthusiastic supporters of her work.” 

The mission at Burr-Brown was to “provide something of value to humankind.” The Brown Foundations are perpetuating the legacy of Tom Brown and Burr-Brown through their support of Russell’s work. 

Smallhouse says that everyone has a part to play in slowing down global warming and that solutions require us all to embrace our individual roles. As for the part she’s playing, and how her father would see it? 

“I think,” she says, “he’d be pleased.”

What does wonder make you do? Find out more and read more stories at wonder.arizona.edu.

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If it hadn’t been for the copper mines of Morenci, Arizona Territory, little Ettore DeGrazia might never have become the hard-nosed artist Ted DeGrazia.

His parents, Domenico and Lucia, were Italian immigrants who came to the U.S. with streams of other foreigners looking for work. Domenico labored underground in the dark of the mines from sunup to sundown, while Lucia tended to their brood. Ted was born in 1909, the third of the seven hungry children who needed to be fed on their father’s poor wages. 

Life could be bleak — especially during the mine’s periodic shutdowns. But the family loved playing musical instruments, and as they grew older Ted and his brothers played in a combo band. Ted also was enamored of the desert’s beauty, and he started making art as a little boy. 

James W. Johnson, a now-retired journalism professor at the University of Arizona, wrote “DeGrazia: The Man and the Myths” with his wife Marilyn D. Johnson. Published in 2014 by University of Arizona Press, Johnson’s biography gives us much of what we know of DeGrazia’s life.

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Johnson writes that young Ted made flowers, animals and birds out of colored paper, which he then sold for pennies. As he grew older, he was inspired by the colorful stained-glass saints and martyrs looking down at the faithful in candlelit Catholic churches. One of his early works was a portrait of a suffering Jesus — in the form of a bread sculpture baked in his mother’s kitchen, inspired by a painting she had brought from Italy. 

As an adult, the multitalented DeGrazia made art, music, books and even ballet stories that were performed by a dance troupe. He also was an architect, designing and building a much-admired home/studio in midtown Tucson and another in the foothills, below Finger Rock in the Catalina Mountains. That 10-acre plot is now home to a museum called the DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun, open to the public.

Despite his accomplishments, DeGrazia was known to be difficult and hold grudges.

According to Johnson, DeGrazia once declared that he was “not saint nor devil, but both.” He admitted that he neglected his family (he married twice, keeping a long-time lover during his second marriage, and had four children). He despised art critics. And though he studied at the University of Arizona on and off for 13 years, eventually earning a double master’s in music and art, he often tangled with school officials. 

In a way, it was the Morenci mine that brought DeGrazia to UArizona. He had worked there a bit after high school, and he saw his father’s hardships. He had no intention of spending his life down in the mine. 

Phelps Dodge shut down its underground operations in the late ’20s. Mine jobs disappeared, and as the Great Depression rolled on, jobs of all kinds were fewer and fewer. Ted wasn’t keen on college, but he didn’t have much choice. In 1932 he arrived in Tucson and signed up to major in music and art.

The campus was beautiful, there were new friends aplenty, and he liked his music professors. One had even played in the John Philip Sousa Band. DeGrazia joined the school concert band on trumpet, and to earn money, he formed his own 10-piece ensemble on the side. 

But by and large, DeGrazia didn’t care for his art classes. He did warm up to Katherine Kitt, a beloved professor who recognized his talent. But other professors, he complained, insisted on old-fashioned art exercises that he felt were a waste of his time.

“I had come to school because I was a painter, not to become one,” he once declared. 

In 1936, he bailed from college — for a time — after marrying his college sweetheart, Alexandra Diamos, whose father owned movie theaters around the state. The pair moved to Bisbee, where DeGrazia was to manage a cinema. But he didn’t give up painting.

The year before, the university had done something marvelous that changed DeGrazia’s idea of art: It had mounted an exhibition of work by Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, two titans of Mexican art. Their stunning paintings honored the poor, especially the Indigenous peoples of Mexico. DeGrazia was enthralled. 

After he moved to Bisbee, he made an extraordinary painting in the style of Rivera and Orozco. But DeGrazia’s painting was about his own world: the mines and the miners of Morenci. The three-panel work, titled “Mining,” depicted the darkness below, the machinery and the smoke spewing out from the stacks. In the center, a helmeted miner bends over his tools in the shadows. The figure could easily be his father, who eventually died of lung disease. 

A few years later, DeGrazia managed to meet Rivera in his studio in Mexico City. To his amazement, the great artist liked DeGrazia’s pictures and invited him to stay for two months as a student assistant. The young artist did lowly work, sweeping the floors, but Rivera also advised him to do a series of 20 paintings in a desperate neighborhood where he could see and paint the tragedies of the poor.

And Orozco invited him to work on a mural painted on a corner of a hospital.

Before he left town, DeGrazia showed his art in the prestigious Palacio de Bellas Artes. Returning home with positive reviews and letters from his two famous patrons, he was confident that his own university would give him an exhibition. But it declined and, as Johnson says, DeGrazia never forgot the slight. 

Nevertheless, DeGrazia returned to school. In 1944, the editor of the Wildcat, the student newspaper, invited him to paint a mural in the paper’s office. DeGrazia agreed, and he unleashed his anger in a painting denouncing the university’s values, making a kaleidoscope of wild horses and skeletons wearing graduation caps. 

Before long, the university higher-ups discovered the art, which they considered a travesty. A worker was dispatched to the journalism headquarters with orders to destroy the mural, ironically named “Power of the Press.” The deed was done with a bucket of whiteout, Johnson writes.

DeGrazia felt that he had been destroyed himself. He finished his master’s degree the following year, but had little to do with the university until several decades later. 

During those years, he became an international artist with great financial success. His first break came when Arizona Highways magazine began featuring his paintings. Then, in 1960, UNICEF chose “Los Niños” — a painting of Native American children dancing — for a Christmas card. The card sold in the millions; the barefoot boy of Morenci became a star.

He abandoned the serious styles of Rivera and Orozco and made happier and brighter work, mostly images of Tohono O’odham and Yaqui peoples. His critics skewered this new work, which they considered campy commercialism. DeGrazia himself argued that he was still painting pictures of the poor.

In 1972, the university finally approached him to do a solo show at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. DeGrazia was still angry at his alma mater, but after some prickly negotiations he agreed. One hundred and nine paintings hung for nine weeks, and the exhibition was a hit all around town.

DeGrazia died in 1982. In 1998, the UArizona Museum of Art mounted the show “Tucson’s Early Moderns: 1945-1965,” curated by Maurice Grossman and recognizing important Tucson artists. Eight of DeGrazia’s paintings, mostly from his early career, were on view.
 

“Woman-Ochre,” a painting by Dutch-American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, came to the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1958 — not long after its creation — and stayed there until its theft by a middle-aged couple the day after Thanksgiving in 1985.

The painting’s whereabouts remained a mystery for more than three decades until, in 2017, three antique dealers in Silver City, New Mexico, stumbled on the modernist piece hanging from a bedroom door in an estate sale in a rural area near Silver City and Gila National Forest. The dealers — David Van Auker, Buck Burns and Rick Johnson — contacted UAMA after customers began to ask if the work was an authentic de Kooning, setting in motion the painting’s return to Tucson.

“Woman-Ochre” had lost paint and had been sliced from its frame, so before its official UAMA return it was sent to conservators at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. This autumn, the painting at last returned to Tucson, stowed in a wooden crate inside an 18-wheeler escorted by Homeland Security. An exhibit introducing viewers to the earth-toned painting as well as its theft and homecoming will be held at UAMA through May 20.

As for the people involved in the painting’s recovery, the antique dealers and museum staff, including Interim Director Olivia Miller, have become friends. Says Miller, “We feel like the luckiest people in the world that the painting fell into their hands.” 

‘Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.’

Just east of Pascua Yaqui land, in what was once Hohokam Middle School, there is a decorative partition symbolic not of division but of hope. Designed by Yaqui architect Selina Martinez, the silver metallic installation — suspended from the ceiling mere feet inside a classroom — features large floral cutouts providing glimpses of the space within.    

For those who arrive at the threshold of this remade room, the artistic feature signals entrance into the Sewa Ania, or ‘Flower World,’ a zone of replenishment in the Yaqui faith. It is, as such, a marker of both space and time, a turning from a difficult there and then to a brighter here and now. 

Hohokam Middle School turned out its lights in 2013, due to low enrollment and struggling students. That was then. Now, in its place, the building offers fresh hope for the future: a microcampus, an extension of the University of Arizona, built to serve a tribe whose sovereignty was recognized just 44 years ago, in a city that sits on its own and others’ ancestral lands. 

“The Yaquis believe that there are different worlds that we operate through and within,” says Serina Preciado, Pascua Yaqui director of education, a leader in the microcampus effort. “One of those is the Sewa Ania, sewa meaning ‘flower’ and ania meaning ‘world.’ And part of what that world represents is rebirth and renewal. 

“The idea is that when we have been given agency over the resources around us, we know how to repurpose those spaces and utilize them in the ways that serve us best.” 

Preciado says the microcampus is a place where Pascua Yaqui students — some of them formerly students of Hohokam Middle School — “can get a second opportunity” that honors the past yet is grounded in the present. 

In 2021, UArizona and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe formed an intergovernmental agreement, or IGA, that affirmed the land-grant university’s commitment to serving the tribe. The IGA built on the campus-wide land acknowledgment finalized a month before; both followed UArizona’s hiring of Levi Esquerra as senior vice president for Native American advancement and tribal engagement in 2020. 

The microcampus is the first major breakthrough to come out of the IGA — a welcome milestone, since at times it seemed that the agreement, negotiated in the midst of the financial uncertainties of the coronavirus pandemic, would not come to fruition. 

“Truth be told, December of 2020, I think both parties were going to wash their hands and walk away from it,” Esquerra says. “There were some things that you had to work through, right? I remember talking with UArizona Regents Professor Robert A. Williams Jr., and we said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to give it one more shot.’” 

“The IGA is aspirational,” Preciado adds. “These are the things we want to see happen, but there’s no detailed list of who and how and when. Teacher and public-health education, sustainability, cybersecurity, those areas that we need to develop for our nation, for our tribe — the microcampus serves as the point of delivery for all the other projects coming up the pipeline.” 

For Williams, an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the microcampus also signifies hard-won movement toward what he calls “real self-determination for Indian people.” 

His words echo a quotation posted in bold letters in the microcampus classroom: “Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.” 

The quotation comes from the late activist and legal scholar Vine Deloria Jr. In 1982, Deloria founded the country’s first master’s program in American Indian studies at UArizona. Alongside Williams and former Regents Professor James Anaya, he also created the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the university’s James E. Rogers College of Law. Deloria died in 2005 after a 35-year teaching career at institutions across the American West. 

Today, Williams remains a faculty member at UArizona, having previously served as chief justice of the Pascua Yaqui Court of Appeals.

He also is the author of four books, including “The American Indian in Western Legal Thought,” winner of the 1990 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. 

When the microcampus opened to about 40 students for its inaugural seven-week term in December, Williams did the teaching, offering a course on comparative Indigenous rights. 

Preciado estimates that 60 Pascua Yaqui students currently study on the UArizona main campus. Now, the microcampus will permit members of the tribe to receive higher education nearer to home, in the company of classmates whose experiences closely align with their own. The space includes the main classroom, which seats up to 50 students; two adjoining conference rooms for group or private study; and a computer lab with eight stations, a printer and access to the UArizona Wi-Fi network. 

“The great thing about the microcampus is the U of A has invested in all the latest classroom technology,” Williams says. “It really is the classroom of the future. We can run courses on D2L, our online courses. We can do simulcast courses. It gives us a lot of flexibility to meet tribal needs, and particularly to tailor our programs to the community itself.” 

The microcampus is the first established by the university in service to one of the state’s 22 federally recognized Indigenous tribes. Williams says it also is likely the first such microcampus created globally by a so-called “R1” university, an institution with very high research activity. Esquerra’s office has plans for more such campuses throughout Arizona and then beyond — making the Pascua Yaqui campus the first strands woven into what could become an expansive tapestry. 

Says Williams, “We’re forming relationships with Indigenous-serving institutions in Africa, in Asia, in South America, and these would all be under the umbrella of a school of Indigenous governance and development, an online virtual university focused on the needs of Native nations and Indigenous peoples around the world.” 

Esquerra is ready for the challenge. “If we’re going to be that leading institution serving tribal nations, then we have to step up to it.” He says that there has recently been interest in a microcampus from Hopi Tribe Chair Timothy Nuvangyaoma.

Serving Native students across Arizona

But microcampuses are not the only way that UArizona is promoting higher-ed access for Indigenous students. The Arizona Native Scholars (ANS) Grant, announced in June after the creation of a kindred program by the University of California system, will fill in all gaps in tuition, mandatory fees, tuition differentials and program fees for main-campus Native undergraduates who are Arizona residents and enrolled and verified members of federally recognized Arizona tribes. 

ANS funding is added after other federal and institutional financial aid, such as the Pell Grant and merit scholarships, says Kasey Urquídez, UArizona vice president of enrollment management and dean of undergraduate admissions. This ensures that, after those modes of funding have been applied, students will receive the additional aid via ANS to make college possible.

Students can access ANS funding for up to eight semesters, and aid received through their home tribe does not count against the amount available to them through ANS. Urquídez says that this distinguishes UArizona’s program from others like it. 

“Everything that we do is really with our commitment to help students be retained and graduate,” Urquídez says. “To have the ability to do their coursework and be involved without that financial strain that they may have had prior to this award being out there, and [to] be able to persist and graduate — that’s our No. 1 goal.” 

Cherokee Hanks, raised in the Navajo Nation near Cedar Ridge, Arizona — a rural area about 40 miles south of Page — is a first-year student receiving support through ANS. Drawing inspiration and belief from her father, who holds a master’s degree in public administration from Grand Canyon University, she intends to earn a bachelor’s in nursing and then, perhaps, work in hospitals on the reservation. 

Hanks’ family struggled with basic needs during her youth, including access to both water and, having no electricity at home, heat.

Now, homesick in Tucson, she phones her parents and half-siblings every day and spends time with UArizona junior Ashlyn Adakai, who also grew up in the Navajo Nation. Adakai attended high school in Page with Hanks, where together they played basketball and ran cross country. 

“I want to be the best version of myself,” Hanks says. “I want to make my people proud — the Navajo people proud. And I just want to become a really good role model for other Native Americans.

“And I just want to be happy — explore new things, travel, try new stuff, too. And just live life.” 

Each of these milestones — the microcampus, the grant program — offers a step toward self-determination, the possibility of following one’s path as far as possible. Preciado said in October, “We are the arbiters of our truth, of our own destiny.” She was speaking of Pascua Yaqui, but her words would seem to carry a more blanketing truth. 

“I grew up in Parker, on the Colorado River Indian reservation,” Esquerra says. “When I was growing up, I knew I was going to college. I didn’t know where, but my mom instilled in me, ‘You are going to college. You are going to college.’ Some of my friends, it was always a dream, because they never knew — ‘How can we pay for this?’ 

“That changed my trajectory and my life — the opportunities I have, not only for myself but my family.” 

Today more than ever, students like Hanks, Adakai and those at the Pascua Yaqui microcampus can say the same. 

“Access is one of the cornerstones of control for marginalized communities, right? What do we have access to, and how are we able to use the resources around us to be self-determined?” Preciado says. 

“As Native people operating under a sovereign system, we need to be able to develop independent systems that come from our ways of knowing for us to be able to rectify the legacy of marginalization against Native peoples within the country.” 
 

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“Many alumni,” wrote the editors of the University of Arizona’s inaugural alumni magazine issue, “will not receive this publication because their address is lacking in the office of the Alumni Secretary. In an effort to locate these alumni we are publishing a list, asking the help of all in locating them.” 

The date of publication was Nov. 15, 1923. The magazine’s name was, and would long remain, Arizona Alumnus. The list of alumni with unknown addresses included 186 names, short enough to fit on a single page of the magazine — which was printed on paper sized closer to a paperback novel than the glossy periodicals we know today.

This was the beginning: UArizona had not yet turned 30 years old, and the earliest “lost” graduate, Edward M. Boggs, bore a class year of ’97, as in 1897. The globe spun in the short breath between the Great War and the devastation of a second submerging conflict.

Only a few years before, the Spanish Flu had spread unabated, claiming the lives of 50 million people around the world.

The first editors of Arizona Alumnus — Harold Wilson ’22, C. Zaner Lesher ’17 and A.L. Slonaker ’21 — intended their publication of 11 pages to unify and inform, but they must also have meant to entertain. 

A two-page spread encouraged readers to watch the Wildcat football team, whose players did not then wear helmets, “wallop” Santa Clara on Thanksgiving Day. A half-page section titled “On the Campus” declared Yuma’s Marion Doan the “brainiest” student in the first-year class, reporting that “in the Alpha army test,” administered to the whole year by Dean Frank Pascal, “she scored 189 points out of a possible 212.”

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Arizona Alumni Magazine turns 100 this year, though publication stuttered from 1937 to 1940 as the United States braced for and then entered World War II. And to hop, skip and jump through a century of issues is to watch the publication chase the intentions of Wilson, Lesher and Slonaker — and to see how the publication reflects not only the university but also the nation and world within which the university exists.

The magazine has morphed again and again since November 1923. Then, the saddle-stitched booklet featured a photograph of Old Main on the cover, the image presented in a washed-out blue, the rest of the issue in black and white. Ten years later, the magazine’s subscriber base had jumped from less than a thousand to 3,700 — a number that would only continue to rise, touching 6,000 before 1937 and 100,000 by 1986. In 2022, when the university enrolled its largest and most diverse class ever, the magazine was sent to 260,000 alumni.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the magazine printed on a stark, black cover a call for togetherness from then-UArizona President Peter Likins: “We are a University community. We gather people from all races and religions of the world, and we all belong here. We must hold together.”

In 1934, on the other hand, the staff had tried mostly for humor, serving up a surprise parody issue: an imitation of Time magazine that made mention of the seemingly apocryphal Wildcat football figure “John Tucson.”

“The reaction [to the issue],” wrote the editors — who included Pearle Hart, likely the first woman to serve in an editorial capacity at the magazine — “varied from scathing criticism and personal denunciation (a copy of which was sent to [then-University] President [Homer LeRoy] Shantz) to highly complimentary remarks from the editorial sanctum of Time itself.”

If the magazine reveals something of the university’s spirit and character through the simple action of chronicling its milestones, the image distilled is often in the direction of inclusivity and access, however delayed. In the protest-propelled ’60s, the publication produced a series of “student-participation issues,” with articles like Judy Sampson’s “Of Curbs, Crosswalks and Stairways” giving those then on campus the chance to use their voice.

Spring 1970, bearing the subtitle “Black Talk,” gave its opening pages to the voices of Black campus leaders such as Gale Dean, then chair of the Black Students Union. Dean spoke, in that issue, of his “disenchantment with student body government as it is today.”

Just 10 years ago, the magazine retired “alumnus,” the masculine singular term for a graduate, in rebranding itself as Arizona Alumni Magazine — “alumni” being plural.

For a stretch in the ’60s, the magazine also included a game on the inside back cover: the “J-crostic,” not quite a crossword puzzle, not quite an acrostic poem, yet borrowing elements from each.

To leaf through 100 years of Arizona Alumni Magazine is, too, to be reminded of the giants of their fields who have graced the university’s grounds, including Andrew Ellicott Douglass, whose early work in dendrochronology led to the founding of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in 1937; golfer Annika Sörenstam, who won the 1991 NCAA title as a first-year student-athlete before setting records on the professional tour; and Fritz Scholder, a self-defined expressionist whose work was on exhibit this summer at Phoenix’s renowned Heard Museum.

“I always knew I would succeed and do what I always wanted to do, which was simply to paint,” Scholder said in a 1986 first-person profile, also describing his first trip to Tucson, when “a race car driver friend drove [him] across the desert at 100 miles an hour.”

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Then there is Lute Olson, who guided a men’s basketball team that included future NBA standouts Jason Terry and Mike Bibby to the 1997 NCAA championship, and the Wildcat softball program, winner of eight national titles between 1991 and 2007 behind coach Mike Candrea.

The magazine’s register, of course, mirrors the events it is charged with bringing to a wide readership.

In 1978, the publication extolled the achievements of the UArizona astronomy program, where researchers at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory had developed an imaging telescope aboard Pioneer 11, the first NASA space probe to reach Saturn.

Decades later, in winter 2011, the magazine published a poignant special issue devoted to the shooting of then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, featuring images of and statements from President Barack Obama, who came to Tucson in hopes of consoling the community, and Daniel Hernández, who had saved Giffords’ life.

“The editors of this publication realize that they have only made a humble beginning, but they propose to make it bigger and better with each issue,” wrote editors Wilson, Lesher and Slonaker in January 1924. It’s a statement that resounds even today.

Highly ranked universities like the University of Arizona must move in tandem with the world around them, reflecting changes in culture, in the law, in business and more. That requires them to be remarkably nimble as they adapt to the needs of the community beyond campus — the hungry job market, shifting student career goals — and translate those changes into an education that meets the moment. 

Consider the James E. Rogers College of Law, where hundreds of students have graduated with a ground-breaking bachelor of arts in law degree, first offered in 2014, that prepares them to work in fields from government regulation to human resources. Or Health Sciences, which soon will offer degrees for physician assistants, physical therapists and nurse midwives, with the goal of training medical professionals for underserved communities. 

Across campus, the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture is not only partnering with the department of civil engineering and engineering mechanics to create a discipline-spanning degree but is also offering innovative, hands-on design-build classes and opportunities for students to spend spring break on real jobs with professional companies.

These changes are driven by a combination of data and sophisticated market-watching. 

“In all of the states and at the federal level, there is a regular flow of workforce projections in different disciplines and with different levels of training — high school graduates, undergrads, master’s degrees and Ph.D.s or equivalent degrees,” says Provost Liesl Folks, UArizona’s senior vice president for academic affairs. 

“We track all of it pretty closely to make sure we’re offering degrees that line up with the highest needs for the state of Arizona — and also for the nation, because we recognize that many of our students travel to meet their career objectives.”

And the changes aren’t only among employers: Employees’ goals and expectations are changing, too. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities reports that only 58% of workers are expected to return to the jobs they held before the coronavirus pandemic following what’s become known as the “Great Resignation.” But a job search can highlight gaps in an applicant’s education, skills or credentials, and those gaps can be substantial; according to the World Economic Forum, some 54% of workers will need “re-skilling” or “up-skilling” in the coming years. 

The upshot is that “labor markets are quite tight, which means that employers are really struggling to find workers,” says George Hammond, director of the Economic and Business Research Center in the UArizona Eller College of Management. “We’re also seeing a continuation of long-term trends toward increased automation. That doesn’t mean workers are necessarily being replaced by machines, but it does mean that we’re all going to be working with technology a lot more in the future than we had been in the past.”

This adds up to big challenges and big opportunities for UArizona, he says. “These kinds of larger technological trends mean we’re going to be seeing increased demand for advanced digital skills, entrepreneurship skills and leadership skills. We’re also seeing increased emphasis on creativity and complex problem-solving — the skills that higher education delivers to students.”

There’s a campuswide campaign to fulfill that mission, says Folks. “We’re always going back and looking at our curriculum to make sure we’re shaping it in those directions. The strong focus now is on things like digital literacy, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning — technical areas of interest that cut across disciplines.” 

“Data science and machine learning lead to interesting opportunities that are between traditional disciplines,” she continues. “There’s a huge amount of interest in health care informatics, for example — how can we literally use machine learning to dig into health care data about individuals and about populations? That would give us information about the services we need to provide to that individual or to a community. That’s one example of bridging a gap between traditional computer science, computer engineering and machine learning to help us provide operational efficiency in the health care sector.”

Another challenge is the growing expectation that new graduates hit the ground running, or being what Folks describes as “workplace ready.” “I think historically, companies were much more tolerant of giving students time to figure out how a professional workplace functions and what their role in it would be,” she says. But today, “there’s a lot of pressure to make sure that students are able to enter the workplace [and] quickly become productive within that workplace.”

What do those productive skills look like? “It means that they have excellent communication skills, that they understand the structure of the workplace — including their likely roles and responsibilities — and that they have an understanding of digital tools that they will be expected to use in the workplace.”

And on top of all the changes in the workplace, university campuses are seeing rapidly shifting student demographics. According to a recent report by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, college students now tend to be lower income and older than in the past, and they are more likely to be working in addition to attending college. In addition, 20% of them have children or childcare responsibilities.

In short, today’s student and workforce demands are enormous and rapidly changing. Read on for examples of how they’re being met head-on at UArizona.

Health Sciences

This year, the Arizona Board of Regents approved three new degree programs in UArizona Health Sciences — physical therapy, physician assistant and nurse midwifery — with an eye to expanding medical care in Arizona’s underserved rural and urban communities. Opportunities to add additional programs are being explored, according to Michael Dake, senior vice president for UArizona Health Sciences Dake calls the pandemic a major driver of this expansion, saying that it “put a fine edge on the fact that there are significant health care shortages, including in nursing and primary care.”

Another part of the solution is the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson’s bachelor of science in medicine degree. The four-year program — among only a few of its kind in the country —combines human medical science knowledge and clinical reasoning skills in four areas: medical technology; basic medical sciences; medicine and society; and integrative and practice-focused medicine. While not a medical degree, Dake says the program “expands the options students have to pursue a career in any health-related profession and prepares students to pursue advanced degrees in fields including medicine, nursing or pharmacy.”

Such changes are about not only increasing the number of graduates, Dake says, but also getting graduates into the field sooner, providing care and building healthier communities for all. “We are strategically picking programs that we know will have the most impact.”

The James E. Rogers College of Law 

The James E. Rogers College of Law offers a first-of-its-kind bachelor of arts in law program, created as a response to changes in the legal profession wrought by globalization, technology and an ever-evolving workforce. For the profession, these shifts mean that work once considered the sole domain of lawyers — from corporate compliance and legal technology consulting to human resources and business management — is increasingly being performed by people who don’t have a law degree but are nonetheless trained legal specialists.

Today, more than 1,500 students are enrolled in the program, says College of Law Dean Marc L. Miller. “Student demand has been huge, because they understand that this opens up a pathway to employment. It’s quite explicitly preparing people for the workforce, not as licensed attorneys, but able to work in legal and regulated settings.” 

Like most great ideas, this one didn’t occur in a vacuum, but instead arose from conferring with business leaders about their needs, Miller says. “When we talked to managing partners of firms, or in-house general counsel, or lawyers working on legislative committees or at nonprofits, we often found they had many more employees who were not trained as lawyers or paralegals [than] those who were. And when we asked about the background of those employees, the employer would laugh and say, ‘English? Math? Music?’ They didn’t know.”

Since non-lawyers were already filling those roles, why not replace them with graduates who were actually trained in a legal specialty — and would still cost far less than a lawyer to employ? “Why pay for the full and advanced training when what you really need is an expert to help you work through something?” Miller says. 

“Lawyers are trained as generalists. But you might need someone to help you in a family law setting, or with immigration, or specific real estate transactions where you need a person who understands that area and can help.” 

The College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture

The built world evolves around us just as the needs and expectations of the workplace do. CAPLA is constantly innovating its curriculum, with programs that include a combined architecture/engineering bachelor’s degree and a design-build program that deepens the student experience through hands-on projects. Among those projects is a series of row houses that were designed and built by undergraduate architecture students just south of campus. One of those row houses has become a residence for volunteer student emergency techs with University of Arizona Emergency Medical Services. 

“I think it’s particularly important for architecture students to have that real, applied experience,” says CAPLA Dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand. “It helps them to go into the workplace with confidence, skills and knowledge. It also ignites that passion for why they’re in architecture school in the first place.”

Another new program involves externships, where students during spring break travel to built environment firms across the country.

“They go to a firm for a week, shadow an employee in that firm, learn about life as a working professional and make connections,” says Pollock-Ellwand. “The students get that exciting taste of an intense experience in the workplace. They are establishing relationships and they are learning about the breadth and scope of their field. It’s been a great success, and as we build this out, we’re going to be expanding it to disciplines across the college.”

The externship is among several strategies the college has initiated to make sure its students are ready for professional roles when they leave school. “It’s important to underline that we are known for very good graduates who are ready to walk into the workplace,” Pollock-Ellwand says. “That’s something that we are very conscious of in the education we provide.”

Meanwhile, the college continues to collaborate with other disciplines across campus, from engineering to the humanities. “We’re teaching in the undergraduate applied humanities degree for students who are interested in design thinking,” Pollock-Ellwand says.

“And we launched the Object and Spatial Design emphasis areas within the Bachelor of Arts in Design Arts and Practices with the School of Art and School of Information last fall.”

Pollock-Ellwand calls the degrees part of a larger trend toward interdisciplinary collaboration, a reality in the workplace. “It’s really the way we have to address contemporary complex issues,” she says. “It is a natural movement that’s occurring, and that’s why I’m pleased to be working as a dean within the University of Arizona, where there is a mindset and commitment to collaborate.”
 

Dean Robert Q. Berry III of the College of Education is a former K-12 mathematics teacher who says he became a teacher because it was a teacher who saw his own potential. He comes to campus from the University of Virginia, where he served as associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion and professor of mathematics education. Equity issues in mathematics education are central to his research efforts, which include understanding Black children’s mathematics experiences and unpacking equitable mathematics teaching. 

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Q: Why was the College of Education a good fit for you? 

A: The College of Education has a strategic plan that aligned professionally with the things I wanted to engage around and has a reputation for knowledge in equity issues in education. The faculty wanted a dean who was thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion and interrogating how DEI shows up in our policies and practices. Having that strategic plan in place and the support of the faculty made my transition smooth. What I’ve been working on is taking that plan and making it actionable. When we say our goal is to build collaboration and community, what are the markers 
for success?  

Q: What is one innovative program within the college that you think has a lot of potential?

A: The Leadership and Learning Innovation Program. We have a lot of young people who may not want to become teachers but who want to impact their communities by being organizers or working for nonprofits connected to youth development. Oftentimes, we hear “College of Education” and only think of teachers, so I see a huge growth opportunity in educating our students of the multiple career pathways that can come from the education field. 

Q: Can you speak to the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in education as a whole? How do you see the College of Education having a role in promoting those concepts? 

A:  In terms of representation, when a student enters our college, there should be a faculty member they can connect with and who they see as a mentor or adviser because of the broad representation within our college. The College of Education already has this type of environment, but there is always room to grow. 
    
I also want to think about DEI in programming. When I was associate dean of DEI at Virginia, I started a monthly series called the Collective Learning Series where we focused on topics related to DEI like microaggressions, stereotype threat and deep dives into different identities. DEI creates a lens for us to build a space where we can learn from people in our community with different identities from us. 
 

Q: In five years, what would you like to be able to say you accomplished at the College of Education? 

A: I would like to accomplish a lot. I want us to be leaders in education who can respond to shortages in representation. Students need to see themselves in their spaces of learning. I hope that we can be the place people come to because of our strong research and knowledge around representational diversity. I want to have impact broadly, on the community — not just in education but outside of education as well.

Dean Lori Poloni-Staudinger of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences conceives of a “university of the future” wherein every discipline is embraced for the skills it encourages in curious minds. Her journey has included stops in Colorado and Indiana; most recently, she served at Northern Arizona University, also as faculty and dean. She brought a dedication to access, inclusion and leadership that she has honed throughout her career to SBS. 

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Q: How would you describe the ideal role of a dean? 

A: I mean, you’re the CEO of your college. You’re the leader of your college, and your role is to help shape and help draw out in the people in your college what their goals, beliefs and values are — and then to lead in a way that promotes those, while being in congruence with the larger university mission,
 goals and values. 

When I was in fourth grade, we did this character-education exercise about hot air balloons. One was up front, leading, and they were getting smaller and farther away. You were supposed to think about where you were most comfortable. The dean is both the balloon at the front and the balloon at the back, leading and setting a direction forward but also playing a support role for students and faculty to achieve their goals and to move the entire institution forward. You’re playing both roles — sometimes at the same time. Even then, in fourth grade, I circled the balloon in the front and the balloon at the end. 

Q: How has public education changed your life?

A: My grandparents were all immigrants — three from Italy, one from England. The one with the most education went to eighth grade, and it was my grandmother from England. Within two generations, they have a grandchild sitting in a dean’s office in a major research institution. We should be providing the same opportunities to the people coming behind me. 

Q: What have you explored in your own scholarship?

A: When girls and boys are really little, they say with equal numbers that they want to be president. That starts to diverge in high school and becomes more acute in college, with those who are male-identifying significantly more likely to say they see themselves moving into political leadership. I co-authored “Why Don’t Women Rule the World?” to increase political ambition among people who are female-identifying. 

Q: What do you do when you’re not at work? 

A: I like everything and anything to do with water, which is not lost on me — I’ve spent a couple decades in a desert environment, high desert and low desert. I really like paddleboarding. I ski. I like boating, swimming. Any kind of water-based activity is usually my favorite thing to be doing.

Q: What are your goals for SBS? 

A: One is to articulate the value of the social and humanistic sciences: their independent value and the value to society and students in pursuit of career goals. When you look at what employers want out of the next generation, it is the ability to communicate in writing and orally, critical thinking skills, entrepreneurial thinking and resiliency. Those are skills we teach across our degree programs. 
 

Dean Karthik Kannan of the Eller College of Management comes to Tucson from Purdue University, where he taught management and served as associate dean for partnerships at the Krannert School of Management, director of the Krenicki Center for Business Analytics and Machine Learning, and the Thomas Howatt Chair in Management. In addition to a doctorate in information systems, Kannan earned master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering as well as in public policy and management. He has a three-pillar plan for amplifying Eller’s prominence: creating impactful research platforms, investing in the next generation of education systems and developing corporate and community engagement platforms.

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Q: What are some of the throughlines of your academic passions?

A: At the end of the day, any strategy we pursue has to be broad enough to take different perspectives but also deep enough to have an impact. Engineering gives you a very quantitative ability, public policy gives you an economic perspective and being in a business school gives you the impact aspect. And so, if you think of these approaches as overlapping circles, I think of myself as being at the intersection.

Q: What brought you to the university and motivated you to serve as the dean of Eller?

A: Eller is a fantastic place. You have people like Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, who did seminal work here. You have Dan Dhaliwal, one of the intellectual giants for whom the accounting department is named, as well as Jay Nunamaker, who founded the management information systems department. There are so many people who have been a part of Eller who are not only gems but created an ecosystem for a strong business school in their own discipline. So, the potential at this university is great. The location is fantastic — there is huge potential for us to grow as a top university in the state. We’ll see more population growth here than in the Midwest or Northeast. All of these elements considered, Eller is positioned to become a thriving ground for success in the future.   

Q: How do you see your role as dean? 

A: First, it’s acting as a bridge between the college and the central administration. My role is to act as a conduit and an interpreter between these two entities. Second, I don’t know if people have considered the origin of the word “decide.” We know about “fungicide,” “insecticide,” “regicide” and all that, so we know “cide” is “to kill,” right? “Decide” can be thought of as cutting too many options and directing something in a certain pathway. Oftentimes, there are different stakeholders and people who want to take the school in a certain direction, which they think is the right way to go — and that may all be true, but given the uncertainty with regard to some decisions, somebody has to make the call. That’s part of the role that the dean will have to play. Overall, I think of it as being in partnership with the departments because it’s a collaborative environment.

Q: Do you have any favorite spots in town or on campus? 

A: I really love the Catalina mountains. They’re spectacular. We have just seen a little bit of Sabino Canyon, and we look forward to seeing more of it.
 

Richelle Thomas’ grandfather was a Diné (Navajo) medicine man, and her grandmother was a traditional herbalist. From the time she was a young girl, they taught her about plants, the spiritual protocols for harvesting wild herbs for medicines, and the ceremonies and prayers that accompanied them. 

Today, Thomas carries on her grandparents’ legacy of working with plants as a doctoral candidate in the University of Arizona Department of Environmental Science at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. 

“My grandpa was an Indigenous rights advocate and an advocate for environmental and human rights. He was big on the protection of spiritual practice of Native people and was passionate about the preservation of the environment and sacred sites,” Thomas says.

“As a young person, I watched his work, and it was natural for me to be curious about it. I went to school for science, but it wasn’t until I was working on my master’s degree that I started really questioning a lot of things.” 

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Thomas says that during the second semester of her master’s degree work, her grandfather asked her a question that stuck with her and has become the central focus of her work today. While visiting him, she explained that she was studying the impacts of uranium on the environment. “Before he passed on, he asked me, ‘How do heavy metals in the environment affect humans?’ Because we use plants from areas affected by mining: We smoke them, we drink [teas made from] them, we apply them to our skin like lotions and shampoo. And I didn’t have an answer for him at the time,” she recalls. 

Thomas says that a lot of medicine men and women had the same question, and she wants to discover the answer for them with cultural sensitivity toward the spiritual perspective. 

“Listening to my grandfather’s question and pursuing the answer has become my career,” she says.

Thomas’ dissertation research investigates how heavy metals like uranium and arsenic are absorbed by and accumulate in the medicinal plants traditionally utilized by the Diné. Other tribal communities, she says, use the same or similar plants and are also often impacted by mining.

“My grandfather used these plants pretty much every day, seven days a week, for over 60 years,” she says. “Even at a very low dosage, we have potential for a very long chronic duration of exposure to heavy metals. I want to look at things like the pulmonary risk and the renal risk and see how heavy metals in medicinal plants might have a significant role in someone’s health.”

Her fieldwork on the Navajo Nation consists of sampling soil impacted by uranium mining areas. After screening the soil for contaminant levels, she will use the soil in greenhouse studies at UArizona to grow medicinal plants from seeds. Because these medicinal plants grow in very limited quantities, Thomas won’t collect plant samples from the Navajo Nation, as doing so would put them at higher risk of extinction in the delicate ecosystem. 

“There’s so many different places on Navajo you wouldn’t think there are plants, because it just looks like desert,” she says. “But for generation after generation, the location has been passed down through oral history for where to find plants. Often these spots are less than half an acre.”

Thomas’ work also includes community engagement projects. In partnership with tribal communities and chapter officials on the Navajo Nation, Thomas plans to build a greenhouse and dedicate time to teaching STEM education focused on the history and impact of mining contaminants as well as the cultural and spiritual significance of medicinal plants. She also will partner with another community using a hoop house for educational programming. 

“One concern that came up in this community is the safety of the soil that people are growing their food in. Corn, for instance, is one of our sacred plants,” she explains. “We want to do an agricultural safety assessment, screening the soil there, and get them connected to experts in this area on how to alleviate some of the risks.”

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Translating her findings and communicating her research in the Navajo language so that traditional practitioners, who are often elderly, can better understand it is a deeply important part of Thomas’ work. She is adamant about keeping the communities informed about her research and encourages dialog throughout the research process, to ensure that the community understands the results at the end of the project.

“Researchers need to be more aware of how to do research in Native communities — and how to do research with them,” Thomas emphasizes. “Traditional people, like my grandpa, they’re more experts than I am on these topics, because they have more cultural and spiritual responsibility to these places. I had to be more sensitive to that. It’s being respectful and responsible to Native people.”
Thomas also plans on advocating for other  Indigenous communities around the world who have faced development that depletes their land of its natural resources in ways that negatively impact their cultural resources. “I think we need to preserve what we have left,” she says. “And I’m still thinking about how to do that. I’m looking more toward policy initiatives on Navajo as one avenue for preservation.” 

Thomas’ research may show that heavy-metal accumulation in medicinal plants has a negative impact on human health, but she says that doesn’t mean the solution is to simply stop using them. “Because of the spiritual use of these plants, you can’t necessarily say,

‘You can’t use this; you can’t practice your ceremonies.’ It’s insensitive, and it could even be traumatic,” she says. 

“I’ve been thinking about how we’ll solve the health risks if that comes up. And if that happens, we need to have an alternative area to harvest these plants.” 

She says that if it’s necessary to find alternative locations to collect ceremonial plants due to contamination risks, new options for harvesting will come from communicating with traditional healers. 

Thomas points to a photograph of her grandparents that she keeps next to her computer as a source of encouragement and inspiration for her work. And she draws from Navajo prayers as a source of resiliency and strength. “I always think about how my grandpa was able to integrate that into my education.

“Whenever I’m overwhelmed, I look at his photo and think about how he never complained. He always had time for people; it didn’t matter if it was midnight or 3 a.m., when people came to his house for medicine or ceremonies, he would open the door for them.”

She says she wants to find time for people in the same way. And answering her grandfather’s question keeps her motivated and curious. 

“It doesn’t feel like work. I feel like it’s just become a part of me.”
 

Creating and storing solar power is increasingly important as the United States moves toward its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Erin Ratcliff, a University of Arizona associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering and chemistry and biochemistry, is leading one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Centers to advance energy conversion and storage technologies using soft organic polymer electronic materials.

Funded at $10.95 million over four years, the UArizona-based Center for Soft PhotoElectroChemical Systems, or SPECS, will focus on the molecular-level science behind low-cost, highly scalable soft semiconductor technologies. These semiconductors will absorb light, create electricity and use the electricity to drive electrochemical reactions and create chemicals called solar fuels — a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels and batteries. A prime example is hydrogen produced from sunlight.

Energy Frontier Research Centers, or EFRCs, bring together interdisciplinary teams to tackle the toughest scientific advances in energy technologies. This year, the Department of Energy awarded more than $400 million to establish and continue 43 EFRCs.

“Leading an EFRC is an outstanding achievement for faculty members at any stage in their careers, but this is particularly notable because Erin Ratcliff, who began at the university as a postdoc, is an associate professor,” says David W. Hahn, the Craig M. Berge Dean of the College of Engineering. 

“Erin is an excellent researcher with a knack for bringing together experts from different disciplines, backgrounds and career stages to solve grand challenges related to sustainable energy. Her approach to science and engineering is perfectly aligned with the EFRC program.”

Durability and ‘exquisite control’

Most current energy storage and solar fuel-formation technologies are made of hard, inorganic materials. But those materials are increasingly costly and difficult to acquire. They also are difficult to scale, especially to the levels needed to achieve a carbon-free energy economy by 2050. At the molecular level, converting solar energy to electrical energy — and sometimes storing that energy for later use — involves a series of redox reactions, or electron exchanges between molecules.

SPECS will focus on using organic polymers: long chains of molecules that interact with one another at many points. Unlike traditional, inorganic devices, which are formed by attaching individual atoms, the multitude of interacting points in organic polymers increases reliability by providing more potential pathways for a chemical reaction to follow. 

Ratcliff says one analogy compares a network of polymers to a bowl of spaghetti, in which the strands overlap at many points. Even if the spaghetti shifts and one possible communication path is no longer an option, many other paths are still available.

“If you have a molecule and you break one bond, that molecule is now a completely different molecule, with new properties, new colors, new energy levels, new electrochemistry,” Ratcliff says. “But with polymers, you can break one bond and it can be possible to still do everything you need it to do.”

The tunability provided by synthesis and processing, combined with the multitude of pathways in polymers, gives researchers what Ratcliff calls “exquisite control” over the polymers’ properties — the ability, in short, to recalibrate the materials to work exactly as needed under different conditions. It also means the polymers can adjust themselves dynamically to maintain equilibrium — for example, swelling and relaxing as temperatures change.

The SPECS team is focused on a specific class of polymeric materials that contain alternating single and double bonds between molecules and are able to conduct electricity. Their chemical structure makes these polymers especially scalable and durable. To learn about and advance the properties of these materials, the team will develop new measurement approaches. Its findings will help advance the field of fundamental semiconductor science regardless of the project’s outcomes.

A journey comes full circle

The center has been years in the making for Ratcliff, who began her UArizona postdoctoral research in chemistry and biochemistry in 2007. When her adviser — Neal Armstrong, a Regents Professor of chemistry and biochemistry and optical sciences — began leading his own EFRC in 2009, he selected Ratcliff as the research scientist in the Center for Interface Science: Solar Electronic Materials. In this position, she coordinated efforts between center members across the country and received national recognition from the U.S. Department of Energy for her work. 

Along the way, she learned about EFRC best practices. “That includes the management and budget considerations, but also the nitty-gritty aspects of team science: keeping everyone engaged and happy and having to make hard decisions — but also learning how to empower everyone, especially the younger group,” says Ratcliff, now director of the university’s Laboratory for Interface Science of Printable Electronic Materials. “I’ve wanted to lead an EFRC since back in 2009. I love team science, and I’m really excited about my team. I hand-picked every single one of them.”

SPECS includes experts in photovoltaics and photoelectric chemistry at the University of Colorado-Boulder, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Kentucky, Emory University, Purdue University and Stanford University. The other UArizona faculty members on the team are Jean-Luc Brédas, Regents Professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Adam Printz, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering. Ratcliff selected people who bring not only a wide range of expertise but also varying experience levels and diverse backgrounds.

“If you look at the composition of that group, it is pretty jaw-dropping,” says Armstrong, now a senior adviser for SPECS. “She got everyone excited, and that was necessary since this is really high impact and high risk, which is exactly what these programs are about. 

“This is a big win for her, for the University of Arizona and its students, for the U.S., and for the DOE.”

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University of Arizona researchers have developed a new class of drugs that is able to cross the blood-brain barrier and could be used to treat degenerative neurological diseases and conditions.

“Francis Bacon said it best when he wrote, ‘Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,’” says Robin Polt, co-inventor of the new drug technology and a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry in the UArizona College of Science. “We’re taking nature’s own tools and using them to design drugs.”

Neurological disorders are the leading cause of disability and the second-leading cause of death worldwide. Traumatic brain injuries and brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and stroke affect over 8 million people in the United States each year and have limited effective treatments.

One reason for the lack of treatments is the body’s innate defense mechanism: The brain is protected by a natural barrier. This blockade consists of a network of blood vessels and tissues made up of cells that help keep harmful substances from entering the brain while allowing essentials like water, oxygen and carbon dioxide to pass through. Because the brain requires a large amount of energy to function, the barrier also allows sugars and other carbohydrates through, and some compounds that block pain, such as anesthetics and endorphins, can get through the barrier as well.

The challenge is that the blood-brain barrier keeps out compounds naturally produced by the body that can be used to treat neurological disorders. Researchers have been trying to find ways to alter these compounds so that they can get through the barrier.

Polt and his UArizona collaborators say the key to their innovation lies in a specific type of peptide called a glycopeptide, which is made up of amino acids that have carbohydrate groups attached to them. The researchers focused on taking naturally occurring chemical messengers that carry signals between neurons — called endogenous neurotransmitters — and converting them into drugs by attaching carbohydrates to them to produce glycopeptides. In doing so, they can change how these molecules interact with and pass through the blood-brain barrier. 

An important aspect of this new class of drugs is that they are metabolized into nontoxic amino acids and sugars in the body. This is different from traditional drugs, which can form toxins when the body breaks them down. 

With this technology, the researchers demonstrated that they can now reach previously inaccessible receptor targets in the brain. The original research that gave rise to the drug design was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. UArizona has now licensed the technology to the researchers’ startup, Teleport Pharmaceuticals, through Tech Launch Arizona (TLA), the university office that commercializes inventions stemming from UArizona research and innovation.

“We’re excited about what we’re doing now, but we’re looking at hundreds of other peptides that the brain produces that are opening more and more possibilities,” says Polt, a BIO5 Institute member who also has faculty appointments in the R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy’s Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and the College of Science’s Department of Neuroscience. “In looking at these glycopeptides, we’re opening doors that would otherwise be closed.”

In addition to Polt, the inventing team includes Michael Heien, an associate professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry; Torsten Falk, an associate professor in the department of neurology; and John Streicher, an associate professor in the College of Medicine – Tucson’s Department of Pharmacology.

“Robin and his collaborators have been a prolific, entrepreneurial team for many years,” says Bruce Burgess, TLA’s director of new ventures. “It’s wonderful to see a group with such a focus on creating impact from their research engaged and launching a company to bring their discoveries to bear on patients’ lives.”