Roberta Marin is a psychotherapist with a particular interest in helping clients with relationship issues and personal growth. Roberta is deeply focused on providing meaningful, action-oriented guidance and helping her patients feel a strong sense of resilience. She received her Master's in General Psychology at NYU and a Master's in Mental Health Counseling from Columbia University.
Roberta Marin is a psychotherapist with a particular interest in helping clients with relationship issues and personal growth. Roberta is deeply focused on providing meaningful, action-oriented guidance and helping her patients feel a strong sense of resilience. She received her Master's in General Psychology at NYU and a Master's in Mental Health Counseling from Columbia University.
COVID-19 Response and Recovery Task Force
Faculty and Staff Town Hall: Well-being During the Pandemic
The COVID-19 Response and Recovery Task Force, in partnership with the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center at UCLA, Staff Assembly and the Wellness and Work Expectations Work Group, presents a virtual town hall meeting on Thursday, September 9 from 12 – 1 p.m. Hear from content experts on well-being as we transition this fall to more people working on campus. As we continue to cope with the presence of COVID-19 and the corresponding concerns about your safety and that of your family — especially as we transition this fall to more people working and learning on campus — we want to share information, address questions, and provide resources that relate to the personal well-being of staff, student employees and faculty. The event will include presentations followed by a Q&A session with:
Peter Katona, Chair of Infection Control Working Group, Clinical Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), Adjunct Professor of Public Health (Epidemiology);
Nava Yeganeh, Medical Epidemiologist - Infectious Diseases, Acute Communicable Disease Control Program, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health;
Brenda Bursch, Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Pediatrics;
Alon Avidan, Director - UCLA Sleep Disorders Center, Professor of Neurology;
Nicole Green, Executive Director - Student Mental Health Services.
Questions may be submitted in advance through the registration form below. Those participating via Zoom will also be able to pose questions during the town hall. Information on how to participate by Zoom will be sent after registration. The event will also be livestreamed on YouTube and a video recording of the town hall will be available for viewing on the COVID-19 resources website after the event.
Ursula K. Heise
Professor and Chair, Department of English
UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability
Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies
Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and former President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Western Europe, and Japan; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory.
Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur [After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture] (Suhrkamp, 2010) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is editor of the series Natures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave, and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Routledge, 2017) and Managing Editor of Futures of Comparative Literature: The ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline (Routledge, 2017).
She is also a co-founder of UCLA’s Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) and producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET.
Gilbert C. Gee, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. He received his bachelor degree in neuroscience from Oberlin College, his doctorate in Health Policy and Management from the Johns Hopkins University, and post-doctoral training in sociology from Indiana University. His research focuses on the social determinants of health inequities of racial, ethnic, and immigrant minority populations using a multi-level and life course perspective. A primary line of his research focuses on conceptualizing and measuring racial discrimination, and in understanding how discrimination may be related to illness. He has also published more broadly on the topics of stress, neighborhoods, immigration, environmental exposures, occupational health, and on Asian American populations.
His research has been honored with a group Merit Award from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a multicultural measures of discrimination for health surveys. In addition, he received two Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards from the Environmental Protection Agency for development of the Stress-Exposure-Disease Framework.
Dr. Gee shared the Delta Omega Award for Innovative Public Health Curriculum with student leaders from the CHS Grads for Racial Justice: Amelia Fay-Berquist, Elida Ledesma, Ashley Lewis, Sarah Jane Smith, and Marisol Torres.
Dr. Gee was the past the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. He has also been a guest editor for Child Development, Asian American and Pacific Islander Nexus Journal, and the Asian American Journal of Psychology.
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Information Studies where she serves as the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She also holds appointments in African American Studies and Gender Studies. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and has been appointed as a Commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance (OxCAIGG). She is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment. and serves on the NYU Center Critical Race and Digital Studies advisory board. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications.
Dr. Noble is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. Her academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology. She is regularly quoted for her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias by national and international press including The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The New York Times, and a host of local news and podcasts. Her popular writing includes critiques on the loss of public goods to Big Tech companies, as featured in Noema magazine.
Safiya is the co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of the Commentary & Criticism section of the Journal of Feminist Media Studies. She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards, and holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno where she was recently awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018. Recently, she was named in the “Top 25 Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers of 2019” by Government Technology magazine.
In 2020, she was awarded the Distinguished Alumna Award from the School Alumni Association (ISAA), and is also the inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Award winner from the Illinois Alumni Association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Chon Noriega has diverse research interests in film and the other arts; avant-garde film and video; the conjunction of film and television history; racial, gender and sexual difference within both alternative and national cinemas; and media access for underrepresented groups. He is author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (2000), and co-author of Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement (2008), L.A. Xicano (2011) and a three-part study of hate speech on talk radio that uses social and health science methodologies (2011-12). He is currently completing a book length study of Puerto Rican multimedia artist Raphael Montanez Ortiz, and a longitudinal study of online and social media strategies among nearly 180 art museums in the United States. He has edited anthologies on Latino, Mexican, and Latin American cinema, as well as the collected works of Carmelita Tropicana and Harry Gamboa, Jr. Since 1996, he has been editor of Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and he is editor of three book series and the Chicano Cinema and Media Art DVD series.
Noriega's professional activities situate his research interests within a broader public framework. He has helped recover and preserve independent films and video art, including the first three Chicano-directed feature films. He is co-founder of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), established in 1999, and served two terms on the Board of Directors of the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the largest source of independent project funding within public television. He has also curated numerous film programs and art exhibitions. As part of the Getty's “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-80” initiative, he organized and co-curated “L.A. Xicano,” four interrelated exhibitions at the Autry National Center, Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011-12.
Noriega is also director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, and adjunct curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As center director, he actively oversees the most extensive Chicano library and archival holdings in the United States, an academic press, and ongoing research projects focused on health care access, economic security, education pipeline, and commercial broadcast media. He serves on the advisory boards of the UCLA Center for Population Health and Health Disparities in East L.A. and the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity.
His awards include the Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, the Rockefeller Foundation Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, and the Ann C. Rosenfield Distinguished Community Partnership Prize. Noriega received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and his M.A. and Ph.D. in modern thought and literature from Stanford University.