Santa Clara Magazine

12/02/2025

“If I ask you what is most important in your life, you are likely to say family, friends, work, health, religion, education, and society. But we need money for all that. We cannot support a family without money. But money alone does not get us to life well-being.

“There is a huge amount of literature on well-being in psychology, sociology, and economics, but it is largely unknown to people in finance. Academic findings are precise but dry. It was fun to breathe life into dry findings by adding real-life stories that illustrate them,” says Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business Glenn Klimek Professor of Finance Meir Statman.

Statman has long advocated for bringing real human wants and behavior to the forefront of an industry that often glosses over humans as whole persons. In his newest book, A Wealth of Well-Being, Statman considers how we complicated humans balance the many domains of our lives, finances, family, friends, health, work, education, religion, and society, combining them to enhance our life well-being. https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/fall-2024/a-wealth-of-well-being/

08/02/2025

Coined in 1918 by American inventor Henry A. Wise Wood in the aftermath of World War I, the “new normal” refers to the final of three periods that sum up a particular timeline—war, transition, “new normal.” The buzzword has since been used to describe societal changes after national and global crises like 9/11, the Great Recession, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the world collapsed into itself in 2020, it felt like a kind of war. We stayed inside, away from each other, afraid of an invisible, extremely transmissible virus. When the vaccine arrived the next year, we grabbed onto this Hail Mary and held tight. That was the transition. Almost half a decade later, we’re living in a permanently altered society.

For those of us who are able, we move forward by embracing the new normal. But some may be left behind. Either because they’re stuck longing for what was, or they don’t have the ability to move into something new.

Read more: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/spring-2025/whats-normal-anyway/

31/01/2025

“The family becomes the first church community that children know. Parents are tasked with the religious education of their children,” says theologian Pearl Maria Barros, assistant professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University. And, in most families, “Women are the ones who are seen as the keepers of the faith, in terms of transmission.” In many households across many faiths, mom or grandma leads the predinner prayer, drags half-awake children to weekly and holiday religious services, and fosters fidelity to what has come before.

But outside the home, women’s roles in faith often shrink.

In the Catholic Church, as the number of men entering the priesthood has sharply declined, women are being called upon to work more, in both informal and formal roles. But only as unordained Church members. Conversations about allowing women to become deacons earned much attention in the 2023 opening of the Synod, an assembly of bishops and other leaders in Rome to discuss and resolve doctrine issues. However, recent statements strongly suggest women will not be able to become deacons any time soon.

Read "A Woman's Place" in the Fall 2024 issue of SCM: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/fall-2024/a-womans-place/

30/01/2025

While attending graduate school in the United States, associate professor of psychology Birgit Koopmann-Holm received news that her grandmother had died back home in Germany. Navigating grief from afar, Koopmann-Holm was struck by the gestures of compassion from her new acquaintances—particularly American sympathy cards that felt too upbeat for the occasion. “I realized that this is not how my friends back in Germany would respond to this,” she says. Intrigued by this stark contrast, she began to ponder: Why do we express compassion so differently across cultures?

Koopmann-Holm dove headfirst into this inquiry, dedicated to researching the ways in which cultural factors shape people’s emotional lives. Recently, she teamed up with students Alex Beccari ’24 and Monet Oosthuizen ’24 to publish an article on the ways people from different cultural backgrounds notice suffering and show compassion in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

Read more: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/fall-2025/the-heart-of-compassion/

29/01/2025

For the better part of the past decade, a group of big-name, big-tech investors now known as California Forever has been quietly purchasing thousands of acres of ranchland about an hour and half ’s drive from Santa Clara.

Their plan? To create a new kind of American city. One with enough housing to eventually accommodate 400,000 people, who could work, shop, and go to school within walking, biking, or busing distance of their homes. Everything would be built to the highest environmental standards. And if residents must leave, well, the San Francisco or Oakland airports aren’t far.

Will the possible future citizens of this proposed utopia in Solano County love their city? Opinions are mixed on our historic campus of whether a place dreamed up by a billionaire, created from scratch to answer the national call for more housing and more sustainable urban development, can truly foster a dynamic culture and build an inclusive, proud community.

Read more: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/fall-2025/unpacking-utopia/

25/01/2025

The latest issue of Santa Clara Magazine is all about access:

How increasing access to higher education makes a profound difference in the trajectory of first-generation students’ lives.

How access to housing and green space and diversity makes for a more civically engaged population.

How accessing well-being in all areas of life, not just the moneymaking parts, makes for a better financial portfolio.

How spirituality and religion is most often accessed at home.

Read more at https://magazine.scu.edu/

16/10/2024

Round-trip, the journey from Earth to Mars and back again is estimated to take about three years. Kamak Ebadi Ph.D. ’20 did it in 45 days. Well, sort of. After earning a doctorate in electrical engineering from Santa Clara University with an emphasis in robotics, Ebadi completed a simulated journey to the red planet inside NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) habitat at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Read more about his experience in the Fall 2024 issue of Santa Clara Magazine: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/fall-2024/mars-within-reach/

12/09/2024

Hopefully, this will make all the kitchen gadgets more polite :)

SCU School of Engineering’s new program in responsible artificial intelligence aims to lay the groundwork for a holistic understanding of AI.

05/06/2024

The social sciences and humanities posted some of the biggest declines in majors over a 10-year period in 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Questions have been raised nationally about whether to continue requiring undergrads to take courses in these fields. And some states have specifically targeted fields like sociology and ethnic studies as part of an ideological broadside that has also included banning books, the teaching of Critical Race Theory, and diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

And yet... sociology remains “one of the most popular majors in the country,” says Santa Clara Professor Margaret Hunter. The recent scrutiny of sociology is disappointing, Hunter says, but not all that surprising. “Sociology has been characterized as an advocacy-oriented discipline that isn’t based in research,” she says. But that’s false. It’s scientific, producing quantitative or qualitative research: “It’s systematic investigation.”

Read more: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/fall-2024/sociology-gen-ed-and-breaking-the-rules/

29/05/2024

Maddy Javier ’23 worried what she’d do with her communication degree. “What am I going to do if I don’t want to go into journalism or film?” she thought. But then she was introduced to virtual reality, which opened the door to previously unknown opportunities in communications research. Now, she and a team from SCU’s Imaginarium Lab are preparing for a trip to Australia to share their findings on accessibility and inclusion in the VR platform Meta Horizon Worlds. https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/fall-2024/career-paths-multiply-in-a-virtual-world/

17/04/2024

Originally trained as a litigator at , S. Isabel Choi J.D. ’02 hoped to follow in the footsteps of her grandfather—who served as the chief justice of South Korea’s Supreme Court—in becoming a judge in California. But though she found work at a wonderful firm in the Bay Area, the work itself felt less than wonderful.

So she turned to writing, always a comfort. In 2024, Choi was named a creative writing fellow. Her generational memoir, Let the River Run, starts with the life story of that same grandfather. https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/spring-2024/from-litigator-to-writer/

09/04/2024

At any moment in a nondescript building that once held a bank vault just off campus, you might find a drum practice, album recording, or jam session. But you might not hear it. That’s thanks to renovations to Benton Street Studios, home to Santa Clara University’s jazz program.

Read—and hear!—more: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/spring-2024/drumroll-please/

27/03/2024

From Twitter’s origins in 140-character banter to becoming one of the world’s most consequential tech companies, the book unveils the human dynamics behind the platform’s corporate curtain. Through insider employee accounts and exclusive interviews, Kurt Wagner ’12 explores how the clashing personalities of a subtle Dorsey and a not-so-subtle Musk reshaped not just Twitter but the digital landscape around it, disrupting the flow of news and mass information users once knew. Read more: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/spring-2024/feathered-fortunes/

05/03/2024

As soon as she could drive, Gabrielle Pitre ’26 pre-registered to vote. She counted herself lucky to live in Washington, one of 18 states and the District of Columbia that allow 16-year-olds to pre-register, putting them on a list to be sent a ballot upon turning 18. For Pitre, voting is an elemental part of being a citizen, and her right to it as a person of color was hard-won.

Of course, not every college student is so motivated to exercise their civic duty. As Election Day 2024 nears—and California holds its primaries on March 5, which is also Super Tuesday—political scientists like Sekou Franklin ’94 hope to encourage young people to vote. Especially in light of ongoing voter suppression.

Read more: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/spring-2024/whats-in-a-vote/

21/02/2024

Like any revolution, the ultimate end is unclear at its spark. The true costs of developing more intricate, more powerful AI are unknown.

Questions circle the excitement: How will artificial intelligence used by the general public change lives? Will it replace or enhance human creativity and labor? Is training computers on human-generated work stealing? Will AI meet our expectations?

Read more from our Spring 2024 issue: https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/spring-2024/make-ai-the-best-of-us/

13/02/2024

Colloquially called the “Genius Grant,” the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship is an annual prize awarded to about 20 people whose work shows promise on moving the needle on some of the world’s most significant social challenges. Jason Buenrostro ’09, a first-generation college graduate, is the first Bronco to get the “genius“ nod for his research on gene expression. https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/2023/spring-2023/a-genius-among-us/

02/02/2024

Old spaces received snazzy updates and several new buildings opened their doors, thanks to gifts from the Bronco community. A billion gifts, to be exact.

The final new building to open its doors, the John A. and Susan Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation, includes lab spaces and room for interdisciplinary work. Get a feel for it and the other new digs on campus in our Spring 2024 feature, A Campus on the Rise.
https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/spring-2024/a-campus-on-the-rise/

30/01/2024

What can a super-powered Santa Clara University do? In the pages of our forthcoming special issue discover the impact—in scholarships, state-of-the-art facilities, research, and more—of a decade-long fundraising campaign. This monumental success, Santa Clara’s biggest fundraising campaign ever, makes SCU one of a small number of universities nationally to raise $1 billion. Thank you, Broncos, for building a better tomorrow. https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/2023/spring-2023/a-billion-for-tomorrow/