UCLA advised campus researchers to begin scaling down activities Jan. 12, citing the threat of the Los Angeles County fires.
A series of wildfires began burning through Los Angeles on Jan. 7. The largest of these fires, the now-23,000-acre Palisades fire, led to an evacuation warning bordering UCLA’s campus and prompted administrators to shift all nonessential campus operations online.
On Jan. 12, Vice Chancellor for Research and Creative Activities Roger Wakimoto and Administrative Vice Chancellor Michael Beck sent a campuswide email to UCLA faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and staff, advising all researchers to begin ramping down nonessential activities.
Wakimoto then addressed UCLA’s research community during a town hall Jan. 13, offering clarification on the mandated ramping down of research he announced.
Wakimoto said at the town hall that the proximity to campus of regions under evacuation warnings was the main decisive factor behind his mandate.
“It’s so close to us,” he said during the town hall. “We’re asking you to cease on-campus research activities that are deemed nonessential.”
Wakimoto also said in the town hall that all researchers need to be prepared in case of an evacuation. He added that the email contained a checklist for ramping down research and urged researchers to go through the list as they began to modify their laboratory activities.
As of Monday, no evacuation warnings or zones have included UCLA’s campus, and the evacuation warning bordering campus was lifted Friday.
Aparna Bhaduri, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry, said ramping down could significantly impact her laboratory work.
Bhaduri said she studies human brain development and brain cancer in her lab. She said her research requires many cell cultures that have to be carefully maintained three times a week by someone directly in the lab.
“If we were to skip even one of these, we would lose the experiment,” Bhaduri said.
Losing these cultures would require her team to completely start over, resulting in a loss of up to six months of progress, she added.
As these maintenance checks are an essential part of her research, Bhaduri said she continued them even during the fires, relying on volunteers to come into the lab and manually check the cultures. In the case of an evacuation order for UCLA, she said she had plans to transport the cultures to other facilities in different parts of California.
Similarly, Avishek Adhikari, an associate professor of psychology, said that mice – a critical part of his lab’s research – require constant care and monitoring that cannot be stopped.
Adhikari said he and his team investigate food-seeking and fear circuits in the brain through mouse models. He added that guaranteeing the mice’s safety in case of an evacuation would be crucial for their lab.
“It’s critical to feed the mouse and … give new water,” he said. “So in the event that there was an evacuation, that would be the one thing we couldn’t stop.”
Adhikari added that his team would either designate one volunteer to ensure the mice’s safety or rely on the help of UCLA veterinary personnel if an evacuation were ordered.
Carrie Bearden, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences as well as the Department of Psychology, said another potentially devastating consequence of a prolonged evacuation for laboratories on campus would be power outages.
While backup generators are in place to prevent damage to critical equipment in case of a power outage, not all essential equipment is connected to them because of limited space, Bhaduri added.
“If there were a power outage that was extensive, that would be very detrimental and expensive,” Bhaduri said.
Bearden added that maintaining freezers that house important biological samples – such as those used in Bhaduri’s lab – would be a significant challenge following a power outage.
Bearden said her lab focuses on understanding signs of elevated risk for the development of serious mental illness in adolescents. She and her team were able to shift most of their work to a remote model when the fires moved operations online, using their previous remote experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.
However, in-person patient visits and brain scans were not possible during week two, she said.
The vast uncertainty caused by the fires is a major challenge her lab has faced in the wake of the disaster, Bearden added.
“These assumptions that we hold in place that are fundamental to maintaining our sense of normalcy and routine are stripped away,” she said.
UCLA provided staff, faculty and students with a master list of evacuee resources for the wildfires, ranging from physical shelters to mental health services.
Bearden said her clinic plans to help provide some of these mental health resources.
“That’s not a short-term need,” she said. “That’s going to be ongoing for such a long time as people start to really grapple with this loss.”
Bearden said there has been some confusion regarding messages released by UCLA’s administration. She added that communication regarding the mandated ramping down of research was initially nonspecific and confusing for researchers.
Similarly, Bhaduri said UCLA’s updates regarding safety were overall satisfactory but could have been clearer.
“UCLA’s communication … has implied that we on campus are in substantially more danger than we are, and I think that this has resulted in a decent amount of panic amongst students in particular,” she said.
Bhaduri, Adhikari and Bearden, however, all agreed that UCLA prioritized the safety of its students, staff and faculty during this time.
“I think they’ve handled it as well as they could, given the incredible amount of uncertainty,” Bearden said. “It’s not like they know exactly which way the wind’s going to blow or what’s going to happen with these fires.”
Following the fires, Bearden said her main concerns are their impacts on prospective members of UCLA’s community along with their implications for future large-scale natural disasters.
Bhaduri said that the mandate did not significantly impact her lab’s research in the long term, but if it were to extend longer, it could substantially impact progress on papers and theses.
A follow-up email from Wakimoto and Beck on Thursday afternoon stated that all research could resume Saturday as a result of improved containment of the fires.
“The Palisades fire has reached 22% containment as of this writing,” they said. “The campus plans to lift all previously announced restrictions for on-campus research on Saturday.”
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