College of Liberal & Creative Arts

The student hood recipients will represent their academic colleges at the University’s 123rd graduation ceremony May 24

A dozen outstanding graduates will be honored during San Francisco State University’s 123rd Commencement ceremony, to be held at Oracle Park Friday, May 24. They will represent their more than 7,300 graduating peers in the Class of 2024.

As part of a longstanding tradition, each of the University’s six academic colleges selects an undergraduate and a graduate student to represent their classmates and wear their college’s academic hood during the ceremony. Additionally, two of the hood recipients, one undergraduate and one graduate student, will each deliver a Commencement address.

More details about the ceremony are available on the Commencement website. 

Multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau has collaborated with pop stars like Lizzo, Shawn Mendes, The Weeknd 

When hip-hop legend and actor André “3000” Benjamin released an album by surprise last fall, he was not the only multi-hyphenate involved. San Francisco State University alumnus Nate Mercereau is a member of the nine-time Grammy winner’s ensemble on the album, “New Blue Sun,” and on tour.  

Mercereau (B.Music, ’10) is in a different universe of guitarists. He uses an electric guitar, a guitar synthesizer and a Midi-guitar.  

“He hardly ever sounds like he’s playing guitar, but he’s an awesome guitarist,” Benjamin, of the hip-hop group OutKast, told National Public Radio. “He’s kind of like a magician in a way.” 

On stage, Mercereau samples the band’s live performance by hand, using Abelton software to record a loop of sound, creating an in-the-moment composition. This improvisational technique creates a new sound with every note.  

“I have a microphone going directly into the sampler, and I also plug my own guitar into the sampler,” Mercereau says. “I’m either sampling the sound of the group live with me, or I’m sampling myself live. ... The sample becomes my ‘instrument,’ pitched all up and down the fretboard.” 

Mercereau’s magic is not just on guitar. He plays up to a dozen instruments on songs he has co-written for Lizzo, Shawn Mendes and Leon Bridges. Drums, piano, violin, French horn, glockenspiel, you name it.  

Mercereau’s own recordings are more exploratory, describing them as exploratory, “music with a sense of discovery and “a searching quality.” In 2021 he garnered national press for an album of “duets” pairing his guitar work with the wind-blown hum of the Golden Gate Bridge.  

Dissonant sounds 

Before being admitted to San Francisco State’s School of Music, Mercereau had to audition. He didn’t know it yet, but his ambitions would swerve in a different direction.   

“They ended up accepting me as a guitar student with the caveat that I would also play French horn in the Wind Ensemble,” he said. 

Exceeding that requirement, he played in over five other student ensembles and made a name for himself off campus. 

“I was playing every possible gig I could,” he said. “I was playing weddings. I was playing restaurant gigs. I was playing bars and clubs all around the Bay and also in the church.” 

Joining the SFSU Gospel Choir band, led by student Mike Blankenship, opened Mercereau to an entirely different way to play music. No longer did it have to be an academic, conceptual exercise. 

“It was like, ‘Let’s get to the stuff. Let’s deliver this music. Let’s really play,’” Mercereau said, noting Blankenship’s mentorship. After graduation, they both joined Sheila E.’s band for five years of touring worldwide. 

“Nate was one of those students who just has it. I could tell that major success was ahead of him,” said Paul Wilson (B.Music, ’08), the longtime staff technician for the SF State School of Music. “His musicianship was always off the charts, and he was also just the nicest humble guy.” 

Deep listening 

Mercereau is still absorbing lessons from SF State Professor Hafez Modirzadeh. Modirzadeh told students that he enjoys listening to two radio stations at the same time to hear how the dissonant sounds blend together. It took Mercereau years to decipher. 

“I find through the years an influence in the small things that he did say to me, or even just a look in his eyes when he would walk by,” Mercereau said. “When he was talking about stuff like that, I wasn’t ready for it, but it was something that stuck with me. And now I think about those things a lot more.” 

Mercereau thinks about Modirzadeh when sharing the stage with Benjamin’s ensemble. He appreciates the professor as “a creative thinker.” 

Benjamin and each member of the “New Blue Sun” ensemble are also creative thinkers, on the same wavelength. Connecting on levels musical and personal, they practice “deep listening”: being present, open, emotional and thoughtful with each other. 

“Each of us is bringing our whole lives to the moment of creation together,” Mercereau said. “I’m very into being here on the Earth, and I’m very into getting involved in things and feeling how it feels to be alive. To move through life with that level of awareness, it feels really powerful.” 

Learn more about the SF State School of Music. 

Olivia Clarke and Mayuu Kashimura are the 2024 National Moot Court Champions in the Respondent’s Brief category

Two San Francisco State University students beat teams from colleges across the country to win the American Moot Court Association (AMCA) Brief Writing Competition. Olivia Clarke and Mayuu Kashimura’s brief prevailed over more than 200 others submitted by students from schools like Yale, Clemson and UC Berkeley.   

“I was in shock when I first found out we won,” said Kashimura, a Political Science major who expects to graduate next May. “I remember calling Olivia as soon as I found out, and we were screaming.”

“I was ecstatic when I found out the news,” said Clarke, who’ll earn her Political Science degree this spring. “It was very surreal finding out that the brief we spent hours working on together had secured first place in the entire competition.”

Moot courts prepare students for the rigors of arguing a legal case. The brief competitions focus on the written arguments submitted by opposing sides. Clarke and Kashimura’s brief took the side of the respondent — the individual in the case rather than the government — to argue for a hypothetical woman’s right to use birth control as part of her freedom of religion and freedom of privacy.

“We picked this side because we felt like we were best equipped to argue a pro-respondent side,” said Clarke.

Clarke and Kashimura are members of San Francisco State’s relatively young Moot Court team. The team was created in 2017 when Nicholas Conway came to SF State as an assistant professor specializing in public law.

“As a part of joining the University and my college community, I wanted to contribute something and build a program that would allow our students to shine,” said Conway, who’s now an associate professor. “I had previously coached moot court while a graduate student, and after taking the job at SF State I wanted to leverage my prior efforts to give our students a vibrant educational experience. Luckily, I had a receptive audience in my Political Science department and in the College of Liberal & Creative Arts.”

The new Moot Court team met with success almost immediately. Gators Yana Gagloeva (B.A., ’19) and Liam Sidebottom (B.A., ’19) were the 2019 AMCA National Brief Writing Champions, and the team was ranked No. 19 in the nation last fall. Two other members of the team — Alistair Lee and Mckenna Clausman — placed 12^th in the respondent’s brief competition, while two more — Lucien Tomlinson and Kira Hammons — advanced to the final 16 in the oral arguments competition before being eliminated.

Though moot court is often seen as a way to prepare students for law school and the legal profession, Conway says the skills it develops are useful in any field.

“Moot court helps students develop important critical thinking skills,” he said. “As a part of the oral argument portion of the competition, students must argue both sides of a case during tournaments. In preparing their arguments over the course of several months, the students really investigate their legal questions inside-and-out. I believe it is important for students to be able to hear differing perspectives and critically evaluate them to enhance their reasoning skills and better understand their own views.”

Another benefit is the bonding that comes from working together as a team.

“When you’re a ‘mooter,’ you work hard and spend a great deal of time with your teammates in practices, traveling to competitions, actually competing together, etc.,” Conway said. “In those processes, students get to know one another and become friends. Former competitors from many years past are close friends to this day. I think that sense of friendship and community in moot court can be an enriching experience for a college student.”

Learn more about SF State’s Moot Court team or email Conway to get involved as a team member or supporter.

Alie Ward was unhappy with her career until her love for the sometimes grubby natural world opened new doors

Science communicator Alie Ward (B.A., ’99) has unique advice for anyone starting a new career: “Get in like a cockroach.”

“Don’t wait to be invited in like a vampire,” said Ward, the host of “Ologies,” an award-winning popular science podcast, and a Daytime Emmy Award-winning science correspondent for CBS’s “The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation with Mo Rocca.” “Get under cracks and doors.”

Ward says that can include repeatedly sending cold emails, volunteering, asking questions, being authentic and weird, and generally being persistent.

While emulating roaches might not be common career advice, it’s paid off for Ward, who followed a winding road in her journey to science podcasting. (She also points out that despite their bad rep, cockroaches are fastidious, resourceful and humble.)

“It took me until my late thirties to really find science communication as a goal. I didn’t even know that you could do it,” she explained. Instead, she spent many of her early years debating whether she should follow her passion for science or her love of arts and entertainment.

Initially, she leaned into science by becoming a Biology student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After a year, she transferred to a community college, largely due to affordability, and then transferred to San Francisco State University to finish her undergraduate career as a Cinema major.

“I loved science, but I was also really missing the arts aspect. I thought maybe I would go into science illustration, but I was missing performance and writing and humor,” Ward said. She hoped she’d eventually find a way to combine science with film. “I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to pan out but I did it anyway.”

After participating in dozens of student films and building an entertainment-focused network, Ward got an agent, relocated to Los Angeles and moved further away from science. After acting for a few years, she worked as an illustrator for LA Weekly, a writer/editor for The Los Angeles Times and even a culinary TV personality with the Cooking Channel. She’d sprinkle in science when she could, but she no longer felt authentic, and she became increasingly dissatisfied with her career path.

Yet through all of this, one thing remained consistent: Ward’s lifelong fascination with bugs. She began posting about them on social media simply for the joy of it and caught the eye of Lila Higgins, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Higgins invited Ward to the museum for a behind-the-scenes tour and encouraged Ward to volunteer. Ward listened. Volunteering — something she did purely for fun — helped Ward feel like herself and led to her becoming a science correspondent for CBS.

“I love science. Yes, I also love TV and film. Yes, I also love being on [‘The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation with Mo Rocca’]. You know what’d be a little bit better? If they had to do less with tech and more with biology,” Ward said. “You just start to whittle down what’s really at the root of what you love and who you are.”

In 2017, nearly 20 years after she pursued science at school, she launched her podcast “Ologies.” It now ranks consistently among the top science podcasts on Apple Podcasts. Each week, Ward chats with an expert about their field and their passions, unafraid to ask seemingly silly questions she knows she and her listeners have.

The conversations are led by her guest’s passion and Ward’s curiosity. She didn’t want expert sound bites that lacked any personal depth. She adds “asides” in her voice to provide necessary explanations or context. She realized she could also provide little “brain breaks” in the form of tangents, like one about wicker furniture in the middle of a conversation about molecular biology.

She also keeps in the occasional expletive — though she agonized over whether she wanted her podcast marked by a little “E” for explicit. None of the other top science podcasts had an “E.” But eventually she decided to opt for personal authenticity over phony decorum.

“If everyone’s shaving off parts of themselves to make this smooth surface, then the smooth surfaces look identical to each other. Then where’s your impact? Where’s your voice?” she asked. “Being gravely weird can sometimes be the most comforting thing. I would rather have a hundred people like my authentic self than a thousand people like a façade.”

Learn more about SF State’s School of Cinema.

The Ethical AI certificate provides a foundation in the computer science, philosophy and business of ethical AI

U.S. President Joe Biden recently issued an executive order on managing the risks of artificial intelligence (AI), and the European Union is discussing AI laws abroad. While the news has been flooded with stories of self-driving cars, Chat GPT and how AI will affect jobs, a group of San Francisco State University faculty has been concerned by the ethical implications of AI for years.

That’s why they developed San Francisco State’s Graduate Certificate in Ethical Artificial Intelligence in 2019. The program was created by Computer Science Professor Dragutin Petkovic, Lam Family College of Business Professor Denise Kleinrichert, and Philosophy Professor Carlos Montemayor. They’ve seen the impact of this program on students and think this type of education is as important as ever. Any SF State graduate student and anyone with a bachelor’s degree (non-matriculated post-baccalaureates) can apply for the program.

“People don’t understand the issues of AI and its impact to society. It can create problems because now it’s everywhere,” Petkovic explained, noting that the potential problems are not just limited to a single industry. “In my opinion, [ethical AI education is the] most consequential project I’ve been working on by far.”

AI technologies continue to grow and impact everything from health care, defense, media, education and more. Despite advances, AI systems can still produce errors, demonstrate biases and lack transparency in decision making. The faculty knew that everyone — AI users, educators, politicians, lawyers, auditors and others — would need access to ethical AI education to make informed decisions.

“The professors are not talking to you as though you’re already an expert in the subdomains,” said Rafael Ayala (M.A., ’22), who works at the software corporation Autodesk in third-party risk management. “They are making sure we have access to broad scopes of knowledge and bringing people together.”

Ayala came to SF State with a background in philosophy and education. As a first-generation student and the first in his family to go to college, it wasn’t easy for him to tell his family he was leaving his paid job to pursue a master’s degree in Philosophy. Though he partly chose SF State because of the Ethical AI program — he could see its growing prominence in everyday life — he had no aspirations for a career in tech.

“The program did a great job of helping me build up that technical prowess and having the vocabulary I needed,” he explained, crediting the certificate for building his confidence to work at Autodesk. “I am working in tech, and … artificial intelligence is huge and we need to constantly evaluate [it].”

As part of Adobe’s legal team, attorney Ted McCullough became more interested in AI two years ago. He enrolled in the certificate program because he wanted to know about the ethical dimensions of the technology, but also had technical computer science questions. He was recently promoted to a director role on the legal team at Adobe, in part due to the AI expertise he gained from the certificate program.

“[SF State’s program] seemed like a really good fit because it had everything that I was looking for in terms of a computer science curriculum, a philosophy curriculum and a business curriculum all with a practical bent,” he said.

Coming in with an academic background in computer science and philosophy, McCullough feels there’s often a curriculum gap between the math and science of AI and the policy issues, but that this certificate helps begin filling that gap.

The certificate was designed to be accessible for any non-expert, Petkovic said. He hopes more students, working professionals, and employers take advantage of the University program. Though the certificate requires a bachelor’s degree for enrollment, he encourages undergraduates and anyone else interested to reach out to the him and his faculty colleagues about possible options.

“We need to educate people, but then there has to be some level of regulation … ,” Petkovic said, emphasizing why everyone from computer scientists to government officials should receive a holistic education on AI. “We are one part of the puzzle.”

Learn more about the Graduate Certificate in Ethical Artificial Intelligence.

Professor of African and World History Trevor Getz presenting his research project to guests of the event. 

SF State hosts showcase featuring research projects funded by 2018 gift, largest in University history

In 2018, San Francisco State University announced a $25 million gift from alumni and philanthropists George and Judy Marcus, the largest gift in University history. Five years later, the gift continues to have a tremendous impact on the liberal and creative arts at San Francisco State.

To celebrate that transformation, SF State hosted an event yesterday showcasing some of the innovative research, scholarship and creative activities made possible with this gift. Leaders from across the state were present, stressing the importance of liberal and creative arts and recognizing how the Marcuses have advanced these fields through their philanthropy. Special guests included California Gov. Gavin Newsom, California State University Board of Trustees Chair Wenda Fong and Consul General of Greece in San Francisco Socrates Sourvinos.

“They saw what was possible in our city decades and decades ago, but in particular they saw what was possible at San Francisco State,” Newsom said of the Marcuses. “Their support has resulted in groundbreaking, best-in-class research that you’re seeing highlighted and showcased here tonight.”

Throughout the evening, faculty members across academic disciplines — journalism, liberal studies, theatre and dance, to name a few — presented their projects, many of which students participated in, giving them valuable research experience. One of the research projects was from Professor of African and World History Trevor Getz. Getz presented “Youth Participatory Action History in Ghana,” his research and curricular framework that uses community-engaged methodologies to empower and train youth in Ghana to collect, interpret and publish their own community’s history. It’s a novel approach that positions students as expert history researchers, exploring the potential for historian-assisted communities to use this method to understand their relationship over time to the spaces and networks in which they live.

Another project was from Professor of Theatre and Dance Yutian Wong, who talked about her book “Dancing in the Archives of Sincerity.” The book explores the intersection of a global health crisis, the resurgence of anti-Asian racism and dance studies. Using the Korean pop music act BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondon) as a case study, the book examines how conversations about racism, xenophobia, homophobia, cultural hierarchies and the roles and responsibilities of the artist in society are taking place from the space of Asian popular culture.

The evening concluded with remarks from the Marcuses, who emphasized how SF State faculty and students participating in the liberal and creative arts are doing great work.

“You have intelligence, you have incredible capability, you’re very special people,” George Marcus said. “That’s what we need. We need people [who] can create ideas.”

Learn more about how SF State is providing unique learning opportunities in the liberal and creative arts.

Juan Gonzales was honored at El Tecolote’s Golden Legacy Gala on Aug. 26 in San Francisco, which celebrated five decades of bilingual journalism in service of the Bay Area’s Latinx community.

Founder of state’s longest-running bilingual newspaper launched paper at SF State

From an early age, Juan Gonzales was always starting small businesses in and around his Stockton neighborhood. First, there were the Kool-Aid stands, then he picked fruit from his neighbors’ trees and sold them up and down his street. In middle school, he developed a passion for writing and later journalism. As a young adult, he combined entrepreneurship and journalism into one dream: starting a newspaper. But it was a goal he didn’t think he’d achieve until he reached his 40s.

But in 1970, six months after graduating from San Francisco State University’s Journalism program, 23-year-old Gonzales achieved his dream early — he launched El Tecolote, a bilingual newspaper serving San Francisco’s Mission District residents. How that paper came to be had a lot to do with what happened to Gonzales as an undergraduate student at San Francisco State. The paper, now in its 53rd year, is still going strong and is the state’s longest-running bilingual newspaper — a legacy that was recently celebrated at a special fundraising gala where Gonzales was also recognized.

After graduation, a professor asked him to teach a journalism class in SF State’s newly formed College of Ethnic Studies in the La Raza Studies Department. His class was called “La Raza Journalism,” and he taught students to write journalistically. Right away he realized there was a problem: There was no place to publish his students’ work. That’s when the idea came to launch a bilingual community newspaper in the Mission District.

With the help of SF State students and Mission residents, he launched El Tecolote in August of 1970. Gonzales promised he’d commit to the paper for at least five years. “Publishing one edition is easy, but consistency is key,” he said. “If you want to establish the paper as part of the neighborhood, people want to be able to see it every two weeks.”

For more than 50 years, El Tecolote has been the paper of record for the Mission District, documenting everything from gentrification and the housing shortage to conflicts between the police and the community. It’s done this at a time when community newspapers are vanishing. Gonzales credits the paper’s longevity to his and others’ dedication and “to the army of volunteers,” he noted

“The community is relying on [the] publication, and I think if you establish yourself as really providing good information and being relevant then the readership will stay with you, and hopefully even financially support you,” he said. And it’s helped that Gonzales doesn’t compromise on quality. “We have to give our readers quality work — good writing, good photographs, good layout … They expect the best, and we should give the best.”

Check out SF State’s Journalism department and the Latina/Latino Studies program.