Dear staff and faculty colleagues, Over the last several weeks, many of our dear students, faculty, alumni, friends, and families find themselves within nature’s destructive path. Please hold them in your hearts as part of our enduring value to be in community with each other. As I mentioned in my weekly video from two weeks ago, Kristine Jacquin contacted all of our students and faculty who were affected by Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana, around 25 people. They all checked in and we are making sure that they treated compassionately in terms of their graduate work given that some of [...]

Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen, left, and Dr. Corley Connie Corley, PhD, lead faculty of Fielding’s Creative Longevity and Wisdom doctoral concentration, recently presented an award to Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen, PhD, for her outstanding contributions to the field of positive aging. Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen, professor and director of Healthy Generations Hartford Center of Excellence at the University of Washington, received the Creative Longevity and Wisdom Outstanding Scholar Practitioner Award during 2017 World Congress of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics (IAGG) in San Francisco last month, the largest-ever gathering of people in the field of aging. "Karen's groundbreaking work on the study 'Aging [...]

Fielding students and alumni enjoyed a three-day somatics intensive at La Casa De Maria in Santa Barbara this summer. The seventh annual somatics retreat focused on the body-mind-soul connection through Kundalini yoga, led by Human and Organizational Development (HOD) faculty member Valerie Bentz, head of Fielding's Somatics, Phenomenology, and Communicative Leadership concentration. Psychology alumna Evelyn Beck led sacred circle dancing from around the world, and participants were able to sit under a tree dedicated to the memory of Fielding faculty member Will McWhinney. Pictured above, from left to right: Fielding faculty member Connie Corley, alumna Martha Sherman, students Milly Mocodean, Susan Hoskinson, [...]

More than 20 Fielding faculty, students, and alumni from the School of Leadership Studies recently journeyed from Summer Session in Tucson to visit Biosphere 2, a science research facility in Oracle, Arizona.   More than three acres in size, the enclosed area houses five ecological systems or biomes, from a mini rainforest to a mini desert — with a mini-ocean in between. Constructed nearly 30 years ago at a cost of $200 million by a Texas oilman, Biosphere 2 was meant to be the second fully self-sufficient living system after Earth (Biosphere 1) and was inspired by the Apollo Space Program [...]

Patrice Rosenthal, PhD, a faculty member in Fielding’s Human and Organizational Development (HOD) program, takes over today as HOD Program Director in the School of Leadership Studies. She takes over for outgoing director Dorothy Agger-Gupta, PhD, who is returning to a core faculty position after four years of committed work in the role. Dr. Rosenthal joined Fielding six years ago as research faculty and quickly became known for her passion for research design. “I love to have conversations about research. It’s a great puzzle!” she says. “Research is just fun — in a nerdy kind of way.” She takes on her [...]