UCLA Connects: 9 ways scholarship and service benefited campus, LA and the world in 2025

In 2025, Bruins embodied the spirit of UCLA Connects, changing lives by applying scholarship to real-world challenges, strengthening our connections to local and global communities, pursuing international learning and scholarship, and creating spaces for meaningful dialogue that focuses on empathy and understanding.

The stories below reflect the commitment of faculty, staff, students and alumni to service, collaboration and connection and highlight kindness, innovation and civic responsibility as core elements of what it means to be a public research institution in a complex and interconnected world.

UCLA's message is simple: Today's most pressing challenges don't respect borders, and neither should good ideas. Across campus, the Bruin community is weaving global thinking into everyday work, from internationally connected research and teaching to community-focused programs and service initiatives that draw on Los Angeles' links to the wider world.

At a December conference, campus leaders discussed this "glocal" approach, in which UCLA, as a world-class public research university in one of the world's most diverse and dynamic megacities, is taking advantage of these local-global connections to effect positive change on campus, in local communities and around the globe. The university, said Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt, is continuously working to "develop strategies to strengthen our international efforts and global leadership … reflecting UCLA's nature as a global leader dedicated to addressing both global and local problems."

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As heat waves continue intensify, UCLA researchers are taking aim at one of the most urgent - and solvable - climate threats: extreme urban heat. UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation and American Forests launched a first-of-its-kind "shade map" that shows where shade from trees and buildings exists across more than 360 U.S. cities and towns. The new tool gives local leaders data to fight extreme heat and develop cooling solutions - a big step toward saving lives and making cities more livable and more equitable.

In many other ways, UCLA scholars and students are showing how smart design and science can make a difference when it comes to heat. Researchers working with the U.S. Forest Service, Cal Fire and nonprofit partners are investigating how many California K-12 schools lack basic shade and green surfaces, while others are partnering with USC and civic leaders to cool neighborhoods across LA with trees, shade structures and heat-aware urban planning. Beyond traditional shade, UCLA engineers are also advancing radiant-cooling technologies that make outdoor spaces feel cooler, and students in the university's Heat Lab studying how rising temperatures affect real people - from students to outdoor workers - and helping turn research into practical solutions for a warming world.

UCLA's cityLAB, an arts-research center at the School of the Arts and Architecture, is lending its expertise to ongoing fire recovery efforts by providing smart, practical and affordable solutions to help Altadena residents rebuild - and quickly. Working with community partners and those affected by the Eaton fire, the center released a new guide, "The Altadena Prefab Housing Handbook," to help homeowners understand the benefits of prefab, and organized a public showcase of six prefab housing options.

The center's work, which aims to bridge architecture, urban design and public policy with community-driven research, also extended this year to the Los Angeles region's broader affordable housing needs. In partnership with the city of Los Angeles and the community organization LA4LA, cityLAB launched Small Lots, Big Impacts, a first-of-its-kind initiative to turn vacant small lots into new starter homes - with implications for the future of affordable homebuilding in LA.

From preparing meals at food banks to cleaning up riverbanks, 1,300 UCLA volunteers fanned out across Los Angeles in September, rolling up their sleeves to make a difference and remind Bruins and the city why service is at the heart of the university's mission. The annual rite of passage invites new and returning Bruins, along with faculty, staff and alumni, to forge connections with local partners and L.A.'s diverse communities while tackling real-world projects in their own backyard.

This year, volunteers spread their light across 45 locations, from senior centers and elementary schools to veterans' facilities, homeless shelters and community gardens, with Chancellor Julio Frenk and students joining Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in making 25,000 meals for unhoused people as part of a collaboration between UCLA's Volunteer Center and the city's Shine LA volunteer initiative.

Creating space for open, trusting dialogue at UCLA and elsewhere is more than an act of radical optimism. At a time when toxic polarization is threatening stability at the individual, institutional and national levels, our very survival comes down to the work of connecting with one another. It is a cornerstone of a growing, interdisciplinary movement to create the robust conversation that, in the words of Chancellor Julio Frenk, can help us move from polarization to pluralism.

At UCLA, the Bedari Kindness Institute and its Dialogue across Difference program and Initiative to Study Hate - distinct yet interconnected efforts related to kindness, hate and dialogue - have created a rich ecosystem of scholarly activity yielding exceptional contributions to research, teaching and service. And they unite us all around a single, critical question: How can we harness the power of the public university as a force for good in the world?

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With a big, blue-and-gold-tinged celebration, UCLA helped bring Westwood Village's new Broxton Plaza - the largest pedestrian plaza in the city of Los Angeles - to life this February. Hundreds of Bruins, local business owners, policymakers, and residents and their families gathered for a street party and ribbon-cutting ceremony trumpeting the 14,000-square-foot, car-free commercial stretch in the heart of the neighborhood that features al fresco dining, live music, movies, street markets, UCLA's First Thursdays events and other community activities aimed at building the buzz around Westwood for the local and broader Los Angeles communities.

The UCLA connection - along with the tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff who live, work and study in Westwood and on campus - is helping fuel the area's renewal. "Broxton Plaza will be a place where UCLA connects, a place that brings people together," Frenk said. "This is the kind of community we want to help build - one where people do not simply coexist but connect. Place matters too, and together we are bringing Westwood back."

When devastating fires tore through Los Angeles in January, the UCLA community responded with compassion, coordination and a deep commitment to helping Angelenos recover. Bruins across campus stepped up to support students, colleagues and neighbors through volunteer efforts, community gatherings and fundraisers for basic needs, while the university provided fire-impacted students, faculty, staff and families with financial assistance, housing, food and mental health resources.

Beyond campus, UCLA extended a helping hand throughout the region, hosting a FEMA disaster recovery center at the UCLA Research Park, deploying mobile medical units to help residents, offering free legal assistance and convening events that fostered connection and healing. Through their efforts, Bruins underscored how even in the face of tragedy acts of kindness serve to strengthen bonds across UCLA and the city it calls home.

UCLA's Engineers Without Borders club is turning classroom smarts into real-world impact by partnering with communities around the globe to build sustainable infrastructure and improve lives. From drilling a clean-water well in a Ugandan village to designing greenhouses in rural Colombia and constructing a poultry farm in Nepal, these students are tackling engineering challenges alongside local partners and nonprofits - gaining hands-on experience while making a lasting difference.

The student-led group's projects have spanned nine countries and multiple continents, and include building a schoolhouse in Nicaragua, rainwater catchment tanks in Guatemala and a poultry farm in Nepal, showing how interdisciplinary teamwork and a global mindset can help solve pressing problems both near and far.

UCLA celebrated the opening of its new Latinx Success Center with a vibrant, standing-room-only ceremony that brought together hundreds of students, faculty, staff and alumni for music, food, dance and speeches - including remarks from Chancellor Julio Frenk about the center's role in helping students "flourish at UCLA and beyond."

The new hub, created largely through student vision and effort, will offer academic advising and support, leadership and mentorship programs, and welcoming spaces designed to boost achievement, belonging and connection for all undergraduates while advancing UCLA's goal of becoming a federally recognized Hispanic-Serving Institution. It's "a place where our students feel like home," Claudia Salcedo, assistant vice provost for academic partnerships, said.

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