Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Instructor: Justin Dunnavant

Subject Area: African American Studies

Course Description: This one-credit class examines the evolving landscape of archiving within the African American community of Los Angeles, highlighting the innovative methods Black communities use to preserve, reinterpret, and share Black histories. Through a combination of lectures, case studies, and hands-on activities, students will explore how digitization strategies?such as those employed by the Black Image Center and the Los Angeles Public Library’s Memory Lab?enable individuals and families to reclaim and safeguard their personal and collective memories. The course also investigates the creative possibilities of remixing archives, sampling, collage, and multimedia storytelling. Additionally, students will engage with the vibrant tradition of zine-making as a form of self-archival activism, reflecting on its role in amplifying marginalized voices and fostering community dialogue. By the end of the course, students will understand how these approaches challenge conventional archival paradigms and empower communities to document and narrate their own histories.

Faculty Biography: Dr. Justin Dunnavant is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology who specializes in the archaeology of Africa and the African diaspora. He does terrestrial and underwater archaeology and more recently has taken an interest in understanding how memories are conserved and shared through material objects, culture, and archives.

Instructor: Monica Smith

Subject Area: Anthropology

Course Description: UCLA has consistently been ranked the nation’s number 1 public institution, but how did the concept of “public” universities emerge at all and why are they so numerous? Today in the U.S. there are least 1,500 other public colleges and universities, more than any other country in the world. In this seminar we’ll explore the history, meaning, importance, financing, and image of public universities as a key component of American life. We’ll examine the internal workings of public universities within state and federal systems of financial support, the ways in which American public colleges and universities are viewed from abroad, and how they compare with public university systems elsewhere in the world.

Faculty Biography: Monica Smith is a professor in the Anthropology Department and in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, as well as serving in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Her research includes work on the role of institutions in early cities and states and the role of heritage in modern societies. Her books include Cities: The First 6,000 Years and A Prehistory of Ordinary People. She holds a BA from UC Santa Barbara, an MA degree from UCLA, and a PhD from the University of Michigan, and is proud to be a faculty member in a public university!

Instructor: Irene A. Chen

Subject Area: Chemistry Engineering

Course Description: Innovations in biotechnology labs power a growing number of biomedical products in our lives. From the first applications of molecular cloning to produce insulin to modern-day gene therapies, this seminar will examine the process of discovery and translation from bench-to-bedside. This course will introduce fundamental concepts in biotechnology and specific applications in biomedicine. Students will present case studies, discuss how pivotal decisions are made, and join interviews with guests from academic and industry labs.

Faculty Biography: Irene Chen is a professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Faculty-in-Residence at UCLA. She received a B.A. in chemistry and an M.D.-Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard, and was a Bauer Fellow in systems biology at Harvard. Her laboratory studies life-like biochemical systems and emerging challenges in biotechnology.

Instructor: Sharon Traweek

Subject Area: Disability Studies

Course Description: In this course we ask how motorsports both reflects and resists broad social and cultural shifts in access, inclusion, embodiment, and innovation, using ideas from Disability, Entrepreneurial, Innovation, Intersectional, and Media Studies perspectives. Neurodivergent drivers and those with physical disabilities (like Alex Zanardi, Robert Kubica, Frederic Sausset, Lando Norris, and George Russell) can show us what combinations of changing technologies, techniques, strategies, images, representations, society, and people make a difference in high performance racing. Motorsports include many activities (racing, strategizing, coaching, building, maintaining, designing, researching, testing, writing, imaging, marketing, reporting, attending, regulating, measuring), at many sites (factories, garages, studios, labs, offices, tracks, and grandstands), with many kinds of materials and devices. What happens when people with physical and cognitive differences engage with that world? What changes? Where is the innovation and entrepreneurship in that ecology? What are the catalysts and obstacles?

Faculty Biography: Seminar co-taught by Prof Sharon Traweek, UCLA Gender Studies, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, Center for the Study of Women, who does research on collaborative knowledge making practices, WWII-present, in Japan, Switzerland, and US universities and STEM fields; Dr Fred Ariel Hernandez, Lead Scientist, Sports & Society Lab, UCLA Disability, and visiting researcher, Waseda University in Tokyo, who studies youth coaching, sports, and pollution in Japan and the US.; and Steven Meckna, Motor Sports Historian, Long Beach.

Instructor: Achuta Kadambi

Subject Area: Electrical Engineering

Course Description: No math required, but critical thinking a must. For students of all majors. Prepares students for intuitive understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is applied to societal problems affecting innovation. UCLA is birthplace of inventions (such as Internet) that have shaped modern AI landscape. As future leaders, students should aim for understanding in three topic areas: capabilities of AI; limitations of AI; and exploration of how AI will shape the process of innovation.

Faculty Biography: Achuta Kadambi is a UCLA Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is an expert in innovation, particularly in the field of spatial AI that deals with how AI moves objects in space. Since receiving his PhD from MIT in 2018, he has started and sold 2 robotics companies in AI and filed over 70 US patents.

Instructor: Arvind Thomas

Subject Area: English

Course Description: When we think about innovation, we think about what makes us unique as a species. Are animals that we consume as food or consider “pests” also capable of innovation? We hardly think of chickens, cows and fishes as intelligent, let alone innovative. But as scientists have discovered, chickens are much more than “bird brains”: they can add and subtract numbers. Cows have spatial intelligence whereas pigs have used mirrors to find hidden items. Likewise, not only can rats navigate mazes but they can also imagine places they have never visited. Such animals, as recent scientific research has been uncovering, demonstrate that their innovations are more about reflexive intelligence than about reactive instinct. What, if any, are our ethical obligations to innovative animals that many of us within both the humanities and the sciences tend to treat as less worthy of respect than fellow humans? More generally, to what extent does animal innovation challenge and complicate our long-cherished beliefs about human innovation?

Faculty Biography: Arvind Thomas is a medievalist who works on the intersection of law, literature, and the sciences in Latin, German, and English. He teaches courses in medieval law, saints’ lives, and Latin. He has also been working on food studies, critical animal studies and its relevance to questions of human rights and environmentalism.

Instructor: King-Kok Cheung

Subject Area: English

Course Description: This seminar promotes the learning of and preservation of Cantonese through Cantonese opera, “The Ballad of Mulan,” and popular songs. It reveals the impact of Cantonese culture on Chinese Poetry, American History and literature. Students learn Cantonese by studying “The Ballad of Mulan 木蘭辭,” watching the performances of Cantonese opera excerpts (“Purple Hairpin Pickup 拾釵” from Purple Hairpin Saga 《紫釵記》and “Fragrant Sacrifice香夭” from The Flower Princess《帝女花》), and reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976), which resounds to Cantonese cadence and idioms. Cantonese Opera is listed by UNESCO as an Immaterial Heritage of Humanity. The work to preserve the Cantonese language has engaged community partners such as Asian Pacific Community Fund, Save Cantonese Organization, Perfect Harmony Cultural Exchange Association, Chinese New Life Women’s Club, Southern California Cantonese Association, and the Lion’s Club (all non-profit organizations) to be innovative and entrepreneurial to ensure its survival.

Faculty Biography: King-Kok Cheung is UCLA Research Professor of English, Professor Emeritus of English and Asian American Studies, and Special Advisor of the US-China Education Trust. She is author of Articulate Silences and Chinese American Literature without Borders (both monographs have been published in Chinese), An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography, and co-editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, and the 2023 recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Lifetime Career Achievement Award.

Instructor: William Newman

Subject Area: Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences

Course Description: Natural disasters have shaped landscape of human history for millennia. Exploration of science underlying question of why natural disasters occur. Focus on how to develop resilience and essential preparedness to minimize impacts of natural hazards. Through California landscape sites, students learn about plate tectonics and how it contributes to state’s vulnerability to earthquakes. Focus also on how earthquakes have driven innovation: from Chang Heng’s 132 CE seismoscope, to Gutenberg and Richter’s 1954 modern seismometer developed at Caltech, to California Integrated Seismic Network that sent first-ever statewide alert in April 2025. Includes full-day geology field trip on November 9 to 1973 Sylmar earthquake site; Vasquez Rocks County Park and its spectacular display of tectonic uplift; and Lamont-Odett Vista Point, to view part of San Andreas fault including sag pond it created, known as Lake Palmdale. Trip transportation arranged by instructor. Class meets once before and after field trip.

Faculty Biography: Professor Newman first presented a Fiat Lux 20 years ago in response to the Indian Ocean Tsunamis that caused nearly 250,000 individuals in India and East Africa to perish. He then created the GE and DEI satisfying course EPS SCI 13 Natural Disasters. Among his research interests, he has published research papers and edited books on natural hazards including earthquakes, avalanches, forest fires, the greenhouse effect, and climate change. Previously, he was elected to serve on the executive of the American Physical Society Topical Group on the Physics of Climate.

Instructor: Vetri Nathan

Subject Area: Fiat Lux

Course Description: Why are animals never understood or valued as innovators?experts that turn necessity into the mother of invention? Why are plants, mushrooms or viruses not considered by us humans as expert entrepreneurs?

This Fiat Lux seminar explores how multispecies collaborations have been some of the most successful problem-solving units in human history. Incubated within a new humanities lab at UCLA (www.multispeciesfutureslab.org), this interdisciplinary seminar takes us beyond the restrictive and deeply damaging human/nonhuman and nature/culture cultural divides in order to bring back value to multispecies life and its immense capacity for ethical innovation (both with and without human collaborators). By adapting a humbler approach to understanding our multispecies ecocultural systems, us human learners will examine the immense yet deeply undervalued creative capacities of “more-than-human” multispecies life, including that of animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms. Three total class meetings, including two “multispecies field trips” off-campus in the greater-L.A.

Faculty Biography: Professor Vetri Nathan is Associate Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. He is founder and director of the new Multispecies Futures Lab at UCLA (www.multispeciesfutureslab.org). He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and undertakes research and teaching in the Environmental Humanities, Mediterranean Studies, Digital Media Studies, Food Studies and Italian Cinema.

Instructor: Thomas Harrison

Subject Area: Italian

Course Description: The late 1960s were a time of great social upheaval and artistic revolution in Italy, producing some of the most radical innovations in the budding idiom of classical rock that had been launched by the U.S. and U.K. “Progressive Rock” as it came to be known (or for our purposes RPI–“Rock Progressivo Italiano”), pushed popular music to the most extreme political and aesthetic ambitions. To the standard ensemble of guitar, bass, and drums, it added a time-warped amalgam of flutes, saxes, violins, symphony orchestra, Moog Synthesizer, and Mellotron. RPI also turned music away from the traditional service of “love and romance” to political engagement. The heated Italian “decade of bullets” of the 1970s saw the country almost broken by civil war, divided between Marxist uprisings, on the one hand, and neo-Fascist law and order, on the other. RPI changed the very nature of youth music forever. Corporate recording, too, has never again been as independent, enterprising, daring, and embracing of novelty as it was in that landscape of guns and roses.

Faculty Biography: Professor Thomas Harrison, half Italian and half American, is a dedicated fan of rock and jazz music in several incarnations, both international and American. An amateur musician (bass and flute), he spent his formative years in Rome, Italy. In addition to his regular UCLA course assignments in European literature and film, he has taught several Freshman Seminars on British and Italian progressive rock, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, and rock lyrics. He may, indeed, be one of the few people still around who saw both The Beatles and Hendrix perform live.

Instructor: Rana Khankan

Subject Area: Life Science

Course Description: How do people build solutions when formal systems fall short? How can storytelling spark innovation, connect people, and change how we think and feel? In this seminar, we will use the acclaimed TV series “Reservation Dogs”, UCLA’s 2025-26 Common Experience selection, to guide our exploration of empathy as both a social force and a neurological process that can be understood, cultivated, and applied in everyday life. Students will examine how cultural narratives shape community responses to real-world challenges and how authentic storytelling can drive ethical innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. We will investigate how empathy functions in the brain, why it matters for leadership and collaboration, and how creativity and culture intersect in the development of responsive, community-centered solutions. Through discussions, reflective writing, and hands-on activities, students will discover how storytelling builds meaningful connections, supports problem-solving, and develops skills that can be applied across personal, academic, and professional contexts.

Faculty Biography: Dr. Rana Khankan earned her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Physiology at UCLA and aims to empower students to explore the interplay between the basic and social sciences.

Instructor: Arash Naeim

Subject Area: Medicine

Course Description: This seminar explores how innovation and entrepreneurship are reshaping modern medicine through emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), wearable devices, and software as medical devices (SaMD). Students examine how these tools are transforming diagnosis, treatment, health monitoring, and preventive care, while also analyzing the startup ecosystems, regulatory pathways, and business models that bring them to market. Topics include AI in clinical decision-making, digital therapeutics, mobile health in global settings, and ethical challenges such as data privacy, algorithmic bias, and health equity.

Through a combination of case studies, student-led discussions, and guest speakers from the health-tech and medical sectors, students gain insight into the forces driving digital health innovation. This course is ideal for students curious about the intersection of medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship, and for those eager to think critically about how healthcare advances can be designed and deployed to serve diverse communities around the world.

Faculty Biography: Arash Naeim, MD PhD is a Professor of Medicine and Bioeingineering and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for AI & SMART Health and the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Brennan Spiegel, MD, MSHS, is director of Health Services Research for Cedars-Sinai, Director of the Cedars-Sinai Master’s Degree Program in Health Delivery Science, and the George and Dorothy Gourrich Chair in Digital Health Ethics. He directs the Cedars-Sinai Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CS-CORE), a multidisciplinary team that investigates how digital health technologies.

Instructor: Jennifer Silvers

Subject Area: Psychology

Course Description: Scientific breakthroughs don’t happen in a vacuum. Behind every major advancement-from vaccines to climate tech-is a system of funding agencies, public needs, and researchers navigating constraints and opportunities. This seminar explores the hidden infrastructure behind scientific innovation in the U.S., focusing on how federal funding influences what discoveries are made, who benefits, and which problems are prioritized. Through case studies and discussions, students will examine how science moves from labs to society, how equity and ethics intersect with innovation, and how funding structures shape the pace and direction of progress. We’ll also explore alternative models of innovation led by communities and nontraditional scientists. In the final week, students will propose bold, creative ideas for building a more inclusive and impactful science ecosystem. This course invites students to think critically-and optimistically-about the future of innovation.

Through a combination of case studies, student-led discussions, and guest speakers from the health-tech and medical sectors, students gain insight into the forces driving digital health innovation. This course is ideal for students curious about the intersection of medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship, and for those eager to think critically about how healthcare advances can be designed and deployed to serve diverse communities around the world.

Faculty Biography: Dr. Jennifer Silvers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. Her laboratory conducts neuroscience and psychology research on childhood adversity as well as emotional and cognitive development, and is funded generously by the NSF and NIH. Dr. Silvers teaches courses on developmental psychology and neuroscience and is also a faculty in residence on campus.

Instructor: Warren Scott Comulada

Subject Area: Public Health

Course Description: Exploration of how artificial intelligence is reshaping public health disciplines from biostatistics and community health sciences to health policy and management. Students examine how AI powers digital health interventions like chatbots, AR/VR (immersive) experiences, and social robots-and the analytic methods that inform and guide their development. Through interactive demos and case studies, students learn ethical and practical strategies for incorporating AI into public health research and practice. Discussion focuses on AI benefits and challenges, including automation, improved disease prediction and management, personalized interventions, algorithmic bias, data privacy, explainability, fairness, and trust. Designed for students interested in the evolving intersection of AI technology and public health.

Through a combination of case studies, student-led discussions, and guest speakers from the health-tech and medical sectors, students gain insight into the forces driving digital health innovation. This course is ideal for students curious about the intersection of medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship, and for those eager to think critically about how healthcare advances can be designed and deployed to serve diverse communities around the world.

Faculty Biography: W. Scott Comulada is Professor-in-residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine and Fielding School of Public Health (FSPH). He received his Dr.P.H. in Biostatistics from UCLA. He directs the Semel Institute Center for Community Health and the AI-Scientific Working Group through the UCLA-CDU Center for AIDS Research. He also chairs the UCLA Extended Reality Initiative (XRI) Health and Wellness Subcommittee. In 2024, he served on the FSPH Committee on AI and Public Health. His research develops digital health interventions that incorporate chatbots, XR, and other AI-driven technologies.

Instructor: Angie Otiniano Verissimo

Subject Area: Public Health

Course Description: This seminar explores how communities confront health disparities through Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and the Promotor (Community Health Worker) model, both of which are innovative methodologies that empower communities to serve as agents of change. Both redefine public health research by centering community leadership and disrupting traditional top-down models of intervention. Students will explore how to directly address health equity, social justice, and cultural humility by incorporating promotores as educators and co-researchers, embodying ethical and respectful engagement with marginalized communities. The course includes real-world case studies and a mini community-driven research project that allows students to practice collaborative methods and witness grassroots leadership as a transformative force in public health. Students will also have the opportunity to explore emerging technologies, such as virtual reality, as tools for storytelling, healing, and public health interventions. No prior public health or research experience required.

Faculty Biography: Dr. Angie Denisse Otiniano Verissimo is an Associate Professor of Teaching at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health where she earned her PhD and MPH. Her research examines (1) how discrimination contributes to health disparities, particularly among the Latine community, (2) the health and social advantages of engaging community members in research and intervention processes, such as through the Promotor Model, and (3) interventions that incorporate virtual reality as a means of storytelling and healing.

Instructor: Paula Tavrow

Subject Area: Public Health

Course Description: This seminar focuses on how international human rights law can be employed as an innovative framework to advance reproductive health. Denial of abortion and contraceptive services, inadequate maternal care, or lack of trauma counseling after sexual violence can be construed as reproductive injustices that are violations of international human rights conventions and treaties. Rather than relying solely traditional legal and policy mechanisms, students will examine how these human rights conventions and treaties can be used in creative ways, such as categorizing denial of abortion as a form of torture, or upholding a positive right to trauma care. This novel approach for influencing policy at state and national levels ultimately disrupts previous strategies for achieving more equitable reproductive healthcare, and can also catalyzes broader social change. Students will learn about the legal and policy dimensions of sexual and reproductive autonomy through readings, discussions, and case studies to identify solutions that extend beyond traditional judicial remedies.

Faculty Biography: Paula Tavrow, PhD, MSc, MALD, Adjunct Professor in Community Health Sciences Department. Former Director of UCLA Bixby Program in Population and Reproductive Health and founding Co-Director of Center of Expertise in Women’s Health and Empowerment at UC Global Health Institute. Current research interests on adolescent reproductive health, coerced sex, abortion, female genital mutilation, and contraceptive access. Winona Xu, UCLA undergraduate student who has written on human rights law, will be a guest lecturer.