Professor Amy Rowat receives 2025 Gold Shield Faculty Prize

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The annual award honors a mid-career faculty member with a distinguished record of teaching, research and service

Read the original post by Wendy Soderburg | Photos by Osvadlo Tarula | September 15, 2025

When Amy Rowat — a UCLA professor in the department of integrative biology & physiology — was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University back in 2010, she was presented with a unique opportunity. One of her fellow postdoc colleagues had invited famed Catalan chef Ferran Adrià — widely known as a pioneer of modernist cuisine — to visit the campus. Rowat was tapped to participate because she had previously developed public events that engaged general audiences, especially families and children, in scientific concepts using food and cooking.

“We were shocked when almost 1,000 people showed up to see Chef Adrià’s lecture,” Rowat said. “Chef Adrià was excited to develop a collaboration with Harvard, so my colleagues and I put together the first ‘science & cooking’ class, which introduced concepts in soft matter physics to undergraduates. Each week, we presented a different scientific concept — think foams and emulsions — and a top chef flew in to do a demo.”

When Rowat joined the UCLA faculty in 2011, she created a class with a similar format, “science & food,” with scientific concepts presented each week that align with real-life examples of food and cooking. Before COVID, the class even included an apple pie bake-off, where students applied the scientific concepts they learned in class to bake the perfect pie (as featured in this New York Times piece).

This kind of creative thinking, alongside her work in cancer research and in the field of cellular agriculture, are just some of the reasons Rowat was chosen to receive the 2025 Gold Shield Faculty Prize, sponsored by Gold Shield, Alumnae of UCLA. One of UCLA’s oldest affinity organizations, Gold Shield has been awarding the faculty prize since 1986 to mid-career faculty with extraordinary accomplishments in teaching, research and service. The prize comes with an unrestricted $30,000 award.

Researchers in Rowat’s lab are pioneering next-generation mechanotyping technologies that are reshaping how we understand — and treat — cancer. By identifying compounds that make cancer cells stiffer and less able to invade surrounding tissue, their work opens new therapeutic avenues aimed at blocking metastasis and making cancer treatments more effective and less toxic for patients.

And while cancer remains a central focus, the lab applies similar principles to engineer tissues that can nourish people sustainably; a major goal of this emerging field of cellular agriculture is to supplement conventional meat production to feed the world’s growing population. Rowat’s research offers a powerful platform to advance human health — demonstrating how fundamental science can drive transformative change across industries from cancer clinics to food security.

Students in Rowat’s food studies and physiological sciences courses, meanwhile, have been thoroughly inspired by her teaching. An undergraduate in one of her classes praised the biophysicist’s teaching style. “The materials required help us to know the material more in-depth, and we are provided with the direct correlations between what we learn on paper and what we see in the world,” the student said. “Professor Rowat does a wonderful job of bridging the gap between numbers and meaning, science and life.”

Rachelle Crosbie, professor and chair of the department of integrative biology & physiology, emphasized how perfectly Rowat, who is also a member of the UCLA bioengineering department, the Center for Biological Physics, the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Broad Stem Cell Research Center, matched all the criteria for the Gold Shield Faculty Prize. In her nomination letter, she described how Rowat uses food to transform the public’s understanding and appreciation of inquiry-based research, and how her tremendous accomplishments in education are driven by her motivation to reach and teach the next generation.

“Professor Rowat’s research program in mechanobiology continues to be funded by competitive national and international awards and grants,” Crosbie added. “Her accomplishments to create and develop innovative curricula, including the ‘science & food’ public lecture programs and K-12 curricular resources, are borne out of her dedication to increase accessibility of science careers to all.”

Besides being founder and director of Science & Food — a UCLA organization that promotes knowledge of science through food — Rowat holds the Marcie H. Rothman Presidential Chair in Food Studies and is an Allen Distinguished Investigator. She also serves as vice chair of graduate education in the department of integrative biology & physiology; faculty chair of the food studies minor; and faculty director of the Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies.

Born and raised in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, Rowat said she was always drawn to biology but was disappointed to discover that her college classes in the subject were dry and boring. By contrast, her physics professor was extremely engaging and provided the opportunity to solve problems through experiments in the classroom.

“I shifted my focus to physics, but through my training I always sought out projects that applied physics to biology,” she said. “As an undergraduate, I designed capacitive sensors to measure the forces I exerted while running; as a graduate student, I was captivated by understanding why blood cells have special material properties that allow them to deform through narrow gaps to circulate throughout the body, and a particular shape that enables them to maximize the exchange of gases. This link between cell shape, form and function is a theme that still fascinates me and inspires our lab’s research.”

“What set professor Rowat apart was the rare combination of creativity, academic rigor and meaningful impact across teaching, research and service,” said Michellene DeBonis, chair of the Gold Shield Faculty Prize Committee. “She has a gift for making complex science approachable — using food as a lens to explore biophysics in ways that are both intellectually rich and deeply engaging for students. Combined with her groundbreaking interdisciplinary research and her commitment to building community at UCLA, she truly embodies what this prize is meant to honor.”

Rowat is excited and grateful for the $30,000 in prize money, which she says will support her lab’s research on cancer cell mechanobiology. “Using a new platform we developed based on tumor cell deformability, we recently discovered new targets to block cancer spread. The Gold Shield award will allow us to advance mechanotherapeutics with the ultimate goal of better controlling cancer,” she said.

Jack Bobo wears a blue suit and glasses. He looks to the side as he listens to the speaker.

Back to school with UCLA’s Food Studies program

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Read the original post by Evan Kleiman | Photo Courtesy of Jack Bobo | August 22, 2025

Jack Bobo wears a blue suit and glasses. He looks to the side as he listens to the speaker.

Although he leads Food Studies at UCLA, Jack Bobo also has an entry in Wookieepedia.

Yes, food studies at the university level is a thing — as it should be. All the joys and ills of human life — health, the environment, social equity — are a venn diagram with food.

Jack Bobo, the Executive Director of the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, has an impressive resume. He was the Director of Global Food and Water Policy at The Nature Conservancy and a senior advisor on global food policy at the U.S. Department of State. And, because you never know where life will take you, he has an official entry in Wookieepedia.

A friend of his from junior high who earned a PhD in paleontology got a call, one day, from Lucasfilm to help them track down locations in Tunisia. So he ended up working for Lucasfilm and writing several best-selling Star Wars books. “One night, he called me up and said, ‘I need to do a spread on lightsaber combat. I know you’re a fencer. Can you help me?'” Jack says. “So we spent a weekend designing the different forms of lightsaber combat for George Lucas.”

Jack Bobo presents a slide about global land. He wears a blue suit and red tie and stands with his arm extending outward as he speaks.

“In many ways, there’s nothing that has a bigger, more negative impact on the planet than agriculture,” says Jack Bobo.

So what is Food Studies and why does it matter? “It’s really broad, and it really touches on our entire food system,” he says.

UCLA offers a Food Studies minor and the law school is home to the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy. There’s the Healthy Campus Initiative, which aims to prioritize the health and wellness of students, staff, and faculty. So across the institution, there are several initiatives and programs that touch on food. The goal of the Rothman Family Institute is to bring them together.

“We’re trying to figure out, how do we have the biggest impact with what we’re doing? How do we identify the challenges, both at the societal level and the planetary level, as well as the individual level? In many ways, there’s nothing that has a bigger, more negative impact on the planet than agriculture yet there’s also just nothing more critical for our daily survival,” Jack says.

Portrait of Jack Bobo wearing a brown checkered suit and smiles at the camera.

In his role overseeing food studies at UCLA, Jack Bobo aims to connect many disparate programs and initiatives.

And what is his role in UCLA’s Food Studies program?

“There are a few things that we’re trying to do. The first is we want to connect all the research that touches on food and agriculture at UCLA already. If we can connect that research, hopefully we can do a better job of all the things we’re already doing. That’s the internal part of it,” Jack says.

Externally, he serves as an ambassador for that research, bringing that research to the world. “How do we talk about problems in a way that actually brings people together to find solutions, instead of further polarizing society?” he muses. “I’m really interested in how we change the nature of dialogue so that people are excited to work together instead of working against each other.”

Professor Vetri Nathan, standing, with students seated and listening to his lecture.

Food studies class spurs discussions on consumerism, sustainability, ancient cultures and more

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Read the original post by Ashna Madni | Photos by Sean Brenner | May 21, 2025

Professor Vetri Nathan, standing, with students seated and listening to his lecture.

For many students, Vetri Nathan’s global food studies course is an introduction to the humanities.

In a new UCLA Humanities course, the saying “You are what you eat” takes on a whole new meaning.

The class, Global Food Studies: Ecocultural Diversity and Sustainability, brings together students from a wide range of academic majors to explore the history, cultural impact and personal connections to a subject that links all human beings: food. It is led by Vetri Nathan, a UCLA associate professor of European languages and transcultural studies.

“Food is not just nutrition,” Nathan told students during an early-May lecture. “It is a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behaviors. Food is culture.”

For many students, the course is an introduction to the humanities. That’s important to Nathan, who asserts that no subject or discipline exists in isolation; the humanities, he said, are critical for tying together the messy connections among interconnected disciplines. (The course grew out of his Multispecies Futures Lab, which incubates research and teaching projects in the environmental and multispecies humanities.)

“The humanities are really great at training students to make sense of and better respond to a complex world,” he said. “Approaching food studies through a humanities lens is key to understanding why, how and what we eat. Our food habits, traditions, local-to-global food systems and even our relations with other species we eat are shaped by cultural norms, emotions, desires and imaginations.”

The course, which is cross-listed with UCLA’s food studies minor, demonstrates the power of interdisciplinary scholarship, said Amy Rowat, faculty director of the Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies.

“Providing a much-needed global lens, Professor Nathan’s innovative course expands and enriches the UCLA Food Studies curriculum, and offers an exciting opportunity for students to engage with food issues across global scales,” said Rowat, UCLA’s Marcie H. Rothman Presidential Chair in Food Studies and professor and vice chair of integrative biology and physiology.

Professor Vetri at the chalkboard for discussion.

In one recent class, Nathan and his students considered some of the evocative terms food and beverage brands use in their advertising.

By the end of the quarter, students will have explored topics ranging from timballo to molasses, and from Los Angeles street tacos to tanka-me-a-lo, a Cherokee buffalo stew. Using those foods as anchors, lectures have covered the role of food in ancient empires, the transatlantic slave trade, gender roles within and beyond the family and the rise of brand culture.

“It’s really useful when you’re studying these broader concepts to have the food in focus to come back to as a concrete example,” said Elliot Heywood, a first-year history major and food studies minor. “But it’s also helpful as a jumping off point to explore other examples that we find interesting and lean into those discussions.”

Exploring family narratives

One of the course assignments, for example, encourages students to study global food-related narratives from their own lives.

Heywood delved into the history of a cookie recipe that her family makes every year for Christmas Eve. She called her grandmother to learn more about its origins.

“It turns out it’s derived from a German cookie recipe called speculatti,” said Heywood. “But no other speculatti follow the same recipe. So I’ve been looking at the adaptations of the recipe, how the recipe came to the U.S., how it has evolved and how it was eventually passed down to me. It’s been a cool way to connect with my grandma and understand my identity and culture in a more tangible way.”

The course will culminate with an exploration of solutions for a more sustainable future for the planet’s food systems. Through cultivating the art of attentiveness in students, Nathan hopes they will be better equipped to live, eat, cook and share food with more intention, and with care for themselves and the common good.

“By engaging in this kind of humanistic training, I hope students will notice that every dish or food item they eat is also the final product of a distinct global interplay of multispecies cultures, lives, bodies and ecosystems,” he said. “And perhaps that will allow them to create more joyful and ecoculturally sustainable food experiences.”

Bruin Plate's legendary green shakshuka — sheer yumminess in a skillet

Dinner Is Served

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Read the original post on UCLA Newsroom.

Bruin Plate's legendary green shakshuka — sheer yumminess in a skillet

Impress your guests with these three delicious campus recipes — from Bruin Plate and Plateia — at your next soiree.

How to make your next dinner party your best dinner party? Turn to the Bruins wielding the spatulas. Here, three easy-to-make, better-to-eat recipes from the kitchens of our campus’s award-winning eateries. (Worth it for the pictures alone!)

Bruin Recipes

Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Spring 2023 issue.

Chef Julia, here teaching the art of good guac, says in her prior career she used to constantly fret about her students. “I couldn’t stop worrying,” she recalls. “Were they getting enough to eat?”

A Different Kind of Course Work

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The UCLA Teaching Kitchen is part of a whole new campus ecosystem putting Bruin ingenuity to work in the world of food.

Read the original post by Anne Pautler | Photos by Diana Koenigsberg |

It’s five minutes before Culinary Bootcamp even starts and I’ve already made my first mistake.

“Don’t use that sink,” Julia Rhoton, chef and culinary arts coordinator at the UCLA Teaching Kitchen, tells me. I’ve reached for the first faucet I see. But I should be using the small hand-washing sink, not one of the deep, three-compartment commercial kitchen sinks. Chef Julia’s soothing voice is a constant feature of bootcamp. She instructs, she explains, she cautions.

Designed to teach basic knife skills and cooking methods, Culinary Bootcamp — held at a clubhouse in the Los Angeles Tennis Center complex — is a single-session workshop that’s free to students, with all equipment and ingredients provided. Some of the students who enroll are minoring in food studies; others are merely hoping to learn some life skills. All will leave with a free, healthy meal: today, a veggie quesadilla and fresh guacamole.

But the impact of the Teaching Kitchen is much greater than cooking lessons. In this space, health sciences trainees master menus specific to chronic diseases; science students explore the origins of food texture and flavor; and campus groups hold team-building workshops.

The Teaching Kitchen is brightly lit, with no chairs or stools. Chilly stainless steel dominates: the sinks, the shelves, the prep tables. Each student is presented with a neatly folded apron. On this day, bowls — yet more stainless steel — hold a bright still life of vegetables: deep green avocados, zucchini and limes; a fistful of lacy cilantro; half a jalapeño; a quarter each of onion, red pepper and tomato. Thin plastic cutting mats add a patchwork of color, each overlaid with a chef’s knife. Countertop induction burners are shared, with one burner for each pair of students.

Chef Julia, here teaching the art of good guac, says in her prior career she used to constantly fret about her students. “I couldn’t stop worrying,” she recalls. “Were they getting enough to eat?”

There isn’t much chatter as the six students arrive and don their aprons. Chef Julia looks stripped for action in a simple black T-shirt, her face bare of makeup and dark hair hidden by a neatly tied bandanna. It’s time to get started.

Guacamole first. Chef Julia posts the recipe on an overhead screen. Under her exacting eye, we tentatively pick up our knives.

The workshop is dense with insights, from how to properly grip a cutting knife to how to adapt a recipe for vegans. There’s even a reference to climate impact: the environmental trade-offs between fresh and frozen and local and imported ingredients. I learn a lot right off the bat: Cut a pepper from the inside. For onions, the trick is to leave the root end intact.

As neatly diced vegetables begin to crowd our cutting mats, another student appears. I mentally christen him Late Guy. He becomes my workstation partner.

We use forks to mash our avocados. We add diced tomato, onion, jalapeño and cilantro, to taste. I spill most of the chili powder on my cutting mat.

Chef Julia steps to my workstation, calmly flexes the mat and dumps the chili powder into compost. I’m embarrassed, but her shrug is reassuring, conveying “I’ve seen worse.” I rinse my chili powder-coated hands — in the proper sink.

Making social change through food

Launched in 2017, the Teaching Kitchen is both a place and a concept. UCLA is part of a network, the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative, that uses teaching kitchens as catalysts for change.

Chef Julia is a key player. She earned her culinary degree from the famed Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts and spent more than 17 years working and learning in Los Angeles kitchens. In 2018, she earned a degree in elementary education, but student teaching taught her something important about her own strengths and limitations. “I couldn’t stop worrying about the children when the school day ended,” she says. “Were they getting enough to eat?”

In 2019, Summer Discovery — an enrichment program that uses UCLA and other college campuses as venues — gave Rhoton a chance to work with older students. There, she came to the attention of UCLA Recreation; she ended up becoming UCLA’s first-ever culinary arts coordinator.

All ingredients in the Teaching Kitchen are measured and prepped before any class begins. Here, students learn the proper technique to chop cilantro to add to their guacamole.

Today, the Teaching Kitchen mixes academic aspirations, student desires and administrative know-how in a creative, innovative blend. In 2014, Wendelin Slusser, associate vice provost for the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative at UCLA, convened a “Food Summit” on campus to brainstorm a vision for nurturing a world-class food studies program. More than 60 campus decision-makers — academics, administrators and student leaders — gathered to hammer out a wish list. “One of the dreams we had was to have a chef,” Slusser recalls. The food studies minor for undergraduates and the food studies certificate program for graduate students were created and approved in little more than a year. UCLA Recreation made space for a community garden at Sunset Canyon and offered the staging kitchen in the LA Tennis Center as a home for the Teaching Kitchen.

A UCLA food collaborative was born.

Learning is on the menu

Multiple campus departments pooled money to transform the catering prep kitchen into a culinary kitchen. Like many remodels, the project ran over budget. Alumna Marcie Rothman ’68, known on radio and TV as “The $5 Chef,” came to the rescue with the needed funds — and an enduring commitment to food studies at UCLA.

The completed Teaching Kitchen is a triumph of cross-campus cooperation. Slusser is proud that so many campus entities contributed, from her own Semel Healthy Campus Initiative to Recreation, the Community Programs Office, the College of Letters and Science and the David Geffen School of Medicine. “Our role is to open the doors and windows and silo-bust,” Slusser says, “so we can create a learning community that will better our own campus and beyond.”

Bruin Plate has the cuisine students want to know — and eat — better. Read the story.

UCLA biophysicist Amy Rowat was teaching “Science and Food: Physical and Molecular Origins of What We Eat” before a Teaching Kitchen was even dreamed of. She’s not nostalgic for those early days of searching for science classrooms uncontaminated by chemicals and improvising with hot plates, toaster ovens and extension cords. Now the Teaching Kitchen is the course’s laboratory, used by guest chefs and students alike. It’s not easy (read: it involves physics and math), but most students thrive in an atmosphere enhanced by guest chefs. The course typically ends in a “scientific bake-off,” where pies or other baked goods demonstrate the scientific whys and hows behind recipes.

Rowat, now UCLA’s Marcie H. Rothman Presidential Professor of Food Studies, taught “Perspectives on Food and Society” in Spring 2022. In that course, students considered broader issues that included climate, human health, health disparities and food access. For Rowat, a highlight of the course was the visit from African American chef Martin Draluck, who cooked over a live fire in the community garden. As they ate his savory rabbit and grits, students were mesmerized by learning about the chefs enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. In their course evaluations, students used the word “revelation.” “They learned new ways of thinking about food and how it impacts society,” Rowat says.

Catherine Carpenter, who teaches nutrition to future health providers, knows that many chronic diseases can be prevented or managed with improved eating habits. When she started using the Teaching Kitchen, her course became a can’t-miss event, engaging and enjoyable. Students pursuing a master’s in nursing choose from sessions pegged to specific diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis and colon cancer. “If we can provide the students with a lifestyle skill of cooking a healthy meal for lowering the risk of disease,” Carpenter says, “then they can teach their patients. And their patients can teach their families.”

Pilot efforts began in 2018. After the pandemic struck, Carpenter switched to a virtual model. She personally prefers the virtual approach, she says, because people can replicate what they’ve done in their own kitchens, using their own equipment. She’s working on a more polished online version of the course to reach even more health providers.

Cambria Garell was also involved in the pilot program. An associate clinical professor in pediatrics, her major focus is pediatric residents. Most of them, she says, have some working knowledge of cooking. Like Carpenter, Garell believes in a “train the trainer” approach. Health professionals who engage in healthy lifestyles themselves are more likely to counsel patients, and more effective when they do.

A pleasant surprise to Garell was that the Teaching Kitchen experience actually improved the behaviors of the pediatric residents involved — not just their nutrition, but in terms of healthier lifestyles (even including a little more sleep). Garell says, “There’s something about the community-building that happens around cooking together, learning together, delivering these skills to the community … that supports our own wellness as health care providers.”

Meanwhile, back at bootcamp …

Late Guy takes charge of our burner as Chef Julia explains the “HAHA” acronym: Heat the pan, Add the oil, Heat the oil, Add the veggies.

Late Guy adjusts our burner to 190 degrees. To our diced zucchini, onion and red pepper, we each add about a quarter-cup of corn and the same amount of black beans.

With the savory, sizzling smell of the cooking vegetables encouraging us, we cover our whole-wheat tortillas with shredded cheese. We layer the cooked veggies over the cheese-topped tortillas, then top with a plain tortilla.

Soon, the whole kitchen smells of fresh-cooked veggies and crisping tortillas. When it’s time to turn the quesadilla over, Chef Julia shows us a trick. She uses her spatula to lift the quesadilla from the pan, then inverts the pan over it and flips quesadilla and pan together. In minutes the second side is brown.

It’s almost the end of class time when I cut my quesadilla in quarters and put it in a container with my guacamole. It turns out Late Guy does not like either guacamole or quesadillas, but Chef Julia persuades him that his roommate might appreciate the free lunch.

Culinary Bootcamp is over, for today, but the Teaching Kitchen is just getting started. Extra teaching space has been added in UCLA’s newly opened Tipuana Apartments, where up to 30 students can be accommodated. Even more important is the establishment of the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, an interdisciplinary institute devoted to research, teaching and policy about food, which now houses the food studies minor and graduate certificate program. A gift of $13.5 million provides ongoing funding for research, curriculum and library resources, including the first endowed food studies librarian at a university, as well as more hands-on experiential learning opportunities and a chef-in-residence program.

UCLA, Chef Julia says, “is uniquely positioned as a leader in food studies.”

And its guac rocks, too.

Image by Jessica Magaña at RedHeart Media

Global Cuisine: “Abuelita’s Kitchen: Mexican Food Stories”

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Image by Jessica Magaña at RedHeart Media

Join the EatWell Pod of the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center at UCLA at the Fowler Museum for a screening of Abuelita’s Kitchen: Mexican Food Stories (2022), directed by Ebony Marie Bailey and produced by USC professor of food studies Sarah Portnoy. The documentary shares the food stories of 10 Indigenous, mestiza, Mexican-American, and Afro-Mexican grandmothers in Los Angeles, including their personal journeys as immigrants, and their knowledge of traditional dishes. These grandmothers have cooked, preserved, and passed on Mexican food traditions, while creating communities and cultures unique to Southern California. A post-screening conversation with producer Sarah Portnoy and film participants will follow. Afterward, join us for a tasting of Mexican food and drinks in the Fowler courtyard.

Space is limited for this in-person program. RSVP is required through this link.

This program is presented in partnership with support from the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center at UCLA, which is envisioned and supported by Jane and Terry Semel, and with support from the Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies at UCLA.

Parking available in UCLA Lot 4, 198 Westwood Plaza, directly off Sunset Blvd; $3/hr or max $14/day. Rideshare drop-off at 305 Royce Dr.

Image by Jessica Magaña at RedHeart Media