South Coast Repertory’s world premiere of Vietgone by playwright Qui Nguyen is a highly anticipated event for us, as we’ve had the unique experience of watching this play’s metamorphosis since its inception. Qui, who hails from Brooklyn, NY, originally had tossed around the idea of writing a script about Vietnamese gangsters in Little Saigon. However, during his residency in the summer of 2013, SCR staff invited the three of us to meet with Qui and share the work we were doing in the local Vietnamese community.

The player one day wakes up, realizing that they don't recognize who they are. The game takes the player through to find who they are, who they were in the past, as well as questioning who they want to be in the future.

Exploring Young Adult Female Burn Survivors and Sexual Intimacy

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

In this first comprehensive study of Vietnamese American place-making and community-building, Karin Aguilar-San Juan bridges the sociology of immigration and place with critical race studies in her Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. Based on research conducted between 1994 and 2005 in Boston, Massachusetts and Orange County, California, Little Saigons suggests that the process of ethnic place-making in these distinct urban and suburban sites, respectively, reflects a conscious effort by Vietnamese Americans to “stay Vietnamese” in a “multicultural” American society. Yet, rather than embrace an essentialist view of cultural identities as fixed and unchanging, Aguilar-San Juan underscores how the terms and parameters for being Vietnamese in diaspora are being negotiated through the mutually constitutive processes of place-making and communitybuilding. Ethnic places both cushion American ethnics from the violence of racialization while marking them as outsiders to the national polity

Beginning as the science of life, biology has been transformed and expanded throughout the years to give rise to fields such as ecology, molecular biology, biophysics, and biochemistry. The distinction among these disciplines is perhaps artificial as the study of any particular biological process or system often spans multiple fields. The research on energy metabolism to follow involves three fields: bioinformatics, bioengineering, and systems biology. The informatics aspect deals with the mining, organization, and management of genomic, proteomic, microarray and biochemical data for reconstructing metabolic networks. The engineering aspect employs the application of mathematics and scientific fundamentals to construct constraint-based models for examination. The systems biology paradigm allows the analysis and interpretation of the models and data from a holistic perspective. Specifically, the findings of this work center on energy metabolism as understood by resource allocation and roles or mitochondria in mammalian cells in health and diseased states. The constraint-based framework provides the facilities for biological discovery using tools from the three mentioned disciplines. This modeling approach describes a biological system as a network of components whose behaviors can be predicted upon the application of constraints. Energy metabolism of four systems - mitochondria, cardiomyocytes, hepatocytes, and fibroblasts - is investigated here. The application of linear constraints on metabolite mass, reaction reversibility and substrate utilization allows an exploration of network capability and topology. The capability and topology of the mitochondrial metabolic network are evaluated based on the theoretical energetic yield of substrates, the number of alternate pathways satisfying the same metabolic objective, and the effects of diabetic and ischemic conditions on feasible steady states. The second part of this dissertation involves the use of stable isotopes to uncover physiological steady states assumed by the cell. Nonlinear constraints are used to balance isotopomers and select for a set of flux distributions that match GC-MS data. Results from studies with cardiomyocytes and hepatocytes elucidate the paths undertaken by substrates as well as effects of media composition on intracellular flux distributions. Most significantly, results from tissue culture study identify complex II as the deficient complex in fibroblasts derived from a patient affected with Leigh's disease