AnonymousBy Sonia Fernandez, UC Santa Barbara
Carolina Arias, an assistant professor of biology at UC Santa Barbara, has received the 2021-22 Harold J. Plous Award. One of the university’s most prestigious faculty honors, the award is given annually to an assistant professor from the humanities, social sciences or natural sciences who has shown exceptional achievement in research, teaching and service to the university.
Carolina Arias
The award is presented by the College of Letters and Science, and was established to honor the memory of Harold J. Plous, an assistant professor of economics. It is the highest honor the College of Letters and Science can bestow upon a junior faculty member.
“Carolina Arias is a prime example of a scholar who uses the tools of her research to help her community,” said Pierre Wiltzius, dean of mathematical, life and physical sciences at UC Santa Barbara. Her development of rapid COVID-19 testing for our campus was an essential and invaluable part of our response to the pandemic. Carolina is extremely deserving of this award.”
“It’s an honor to be commended by my colleagues for all the efforts we’ve made,” said Arias, who with her lab has been on the front lines of the university’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A virologist by training, Arias’s work has been instrumental in the development of the campus’s asymptomatic COVID-19 surveillance program, the establishment of a clinical-grade CLIA laboratory for COVID-19 testing and the development of a program for genomic sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the identification of its variants. Through collaborations with fellow researchers, as well as with colleagues at UCSB’s Student Health Services, Cottage Hospital and the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department, tracking of the virus’s movements through the campus and wider community has been enabled, and community members are kept up to date with the latest developments.
“There is so much information to sort through,” Arias said. “I felt that one good use of my time could be in trying to make sense of it myself and then transmitting what I understood to everyone.” She is also a member of UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang’s COVID-19 Response Team.
The COVID-19 activity is on top of ongoing research, teaching and mentoring Arias continues to conduct throughout the pandemic, focusing on genomic techniques to uncover how viruses gain control of their host cells.
Arias is originally from Bogota, Colombia, where she received her B.S. and M.S. in microbiology at Universidad de los Andes. She received her Ph.D. in microbiology at New York University’s Sackler Institute for Graduate Biomedical Sciences in 2008, where she studies virus-host interactions in herpesviruses and poxviruses. As a postdoctoral fellow at UC San Francisco and then at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, she studied the genome-wide transcriptional and translational regulation of Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus. In January 2016, she conducted comprehensive drug screens to identify FDA-approved compounds that could be used to curtail Zika virus infection. Arias joined the UC Santa Barbara faculty in 2016.
Virologists who spend years learning what is true and what is not true are not appreciated in our society where people would rather listen to martial-artists-turned-podcasters and real-estate-conmen for medical advice. Hence, the run on horse dewormer, chlorox bleach and I will leave it at that. Congratulations to Professor Arias!
I swear Sac…. you are the perfect example of the negative consequences of the for-profit media. Trump never recommended drinking or injecting bleach, his followers thought that he did because of the way the for profit media edited, clipped, paraphrased then added their own commentary over. If you read or watch that press conference in full, you’ll realize how mistaken you are. You also propagating false information with Joe Rogan recommending horse dewormers, which 100% did not, he to a doctor provided human medicine called Ivermectin. Idiots went out and took horse dewormer because…. the for-profit called it horse dewormer. You trying to defend this only proves my point more as neither of those things actually happened and you’re merely regurgitating the same click bait talking points that have caused actual harm to people.
So VOR you are saying that Trump supporters are idiots, I agree.
“It was literally all over the news.” my point exactly Sac, misinformation has literally been all over the news, and people take it as fact, and the consequces have been dire.
VOICE – “people take it as fact, and the consequces have been dire” – that is exactly my point. People take Trump’s words (and Rogan’s words) as gospel. That’s why people drank bleach, why they attacked our capitol, why they thought for so many months that covid was “harmless,” etc etc etc…. Words and actions have meaning and consequences. No more excuses for those who chose to ignore that phenomena.
Sac, seriously, how are you missing this? Those weren’t Trumps words, nor Rogans words, those were the (for-profit) MEDIA’s words that people took as gospel. The media twisted around what both said into something completely different and that is what caused the harm. Neither of them said ‘bleach’ or ‘horse dewormer’, the media did, and here you are, a perfect example of my point, repeating what the media said, NOT what the people actually said. _Rogan: my doctor prescribed me Ivermctin and several other drugs, I got better quickly. _Media: Joe Rogan takes horse dewormer and recovers quickly. _Idiot: goes to the animal supply store and buys horse dewormer. _Sacjon: Joe Rogan recommended horse dewormer.
VOICE – you’re not getting it are you? I never said they said the exact words you’re saying I did. I said they mentioned things in front of their loyal followers that were taking literally and caused injury. Stop twisting this around. My point is and has been that even announcing that you are taking invermectin (Rogan) or suggesting injecting disinfectant to your loyal band of pro-conspiracy, anti-vax followers is reckless and will lead to injury or death.
Stop blaming the “for-profit media” (as if Newsmax, Fox, OANN, etc are not for profit) for the actions of loyal followers of “leaders” who are careless with their words.
The run on horse dewormer and bleach is the result of the for-profit media propagating false information for clicks and views. The martial-artists-turned podcaster certainly didn’t take, nor recommend taking, horse dewormer just as the real-estate-conmen never recommended drinking bleach. Both are great examples of how the for-profit media has led society astray, with significant negative consequences, solely in the name of making more money.
VOICE – again, Trump didn’t say drink it, but his followers sure did try after he suggested injecting it ( https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-06-05/cdc-some-people-did-take-bleach-to-protect-from-coronavirus). Nice of you to skip that, again. As for Joe Rogan not recommending horse dewormer, that’s just a lie. He bragged about taking it and saying it, along with other meds, was working. It was literally all over the news.
You keep ignoring the fact, the well known fact, that when a person has millions of followers, they are just that, followers. So when that person says anything, they listen. You can’t excuse people for their actions just because they didn’t say the words “you followers of mine, do this or do that.”