Dear Colleagues,

As I write this, the fires in southern California are still raging, and largely uncontrolled. Many thousands have lost their homes and their livelihoods in what will be a defining natural disaster for 2025. Among them are surely large numbers of our colleagues, friends, and students. The UCLA campus is currently on alert but not in immediate danger. I learned recently that the unincorporated community of Altadena, a historically Black community with a large Latinx population, is among the most severely damaged. At the moment there is little that we can do, as an…