On April 12th, as part of Make-A-Difference (MAD) Day with the Caltech Y, seven other Caltech community members and I joined Lila Rodriguez-Aceves at the Chief Ya’anna Regenerative Learning Village—12 acres of unceded land in El Sereno, about 20 minutes from campus, where we helped tend the land. The Ya’anna Village is the first parcel of land returned to the Gabrielino Shoshone Nation, one of the original Indigenous peoples of Los Angeles. It is stewarded in partnership with Anawakalmekak, the first and only Indigenous public K-12 school in California.
At the Kill the Cuts rally on April 8th, I gave the following speech to Caltech and USC contingents in front of the 300 North Los Angeles Federal Building. I hope its words resonate with the current scientific/political/cultural moment. They represent my truest feelings, the joyous and the vitriolic, as best as I can compress and verbalize them.
JPL implemented its third round of layoffs in 2024 on November 13, cutting 325 employees—roughly 5% of its workforce. This latest reduction follows earlier waves: 100 contractors in January and 570 additional employees and contractors in February. As a result, JPL’s workforce now stands at approximately 5,500 employees. These job cuts stem from a funding crisis centered around the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, a flagship NASA initiative designed to retrieve and analyze Martian rock and dust samples on Earth.
