For historian Natalia Molina, the family stories shared around her aunt’s kitchen table were the compass that guided her toward a career exploring race, immigration and belonging.

“I grew up in a family of storytellers,” says Molina, a MacArthur Fellow. Many tales focused on her grandmother, Doña Natalia Barraza, a Mexican immigrant who founded the Nayarit — a beloved restaurant in Los Angeles’ Echo Park that became a refuge for the marginalized, including immigrants and the city’s LGBTQ+ community.

“My grandmother strove to build a welcoming community where Latino immigrants could make a new home,” says Molina, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity. “She sponsored many herself so they could work at the restaurant and live lives of joy and dignity.”

The world Molina experienced growing up, rich with culture and connection, stood in stark contrast to the few, flat portrayals of Latinos that she saw in media and popular culture. “I was inspired to tell stories about Latinos that were more complex and three-dimensional,” she says.

At home, education reigned supreme. Her grandmother’s mantra — “Get a good education. No one can take that from you” — shaped family priorities. Homework always came before housework, a quiet defiance of traditional gender roles.

Childhood experiences also sharpened Molina’s awareness of race and belonging.  On family trips to Mexico to purchase restaurant supplies, she remembers the tension inherent in returning across the United States border. “We would need to perform our American citizenship,” she says. “I was asked to sing the national anthem as a child.”

Those moments planted a belief that would define her path: “With an education, with a title, you can speak truth to power.” That conviction led her into academia, where she blends oral history and archival research to honor her grandmother’s legacy.

Molina’s book A Place at the Nayarit preserves this history, weaving her family’s story into the broader fabric of L.A. and reaffirming her commitment to making scholarship resonate far beyond the ivory tower.

At right: Natalia Molina’s grandmother, Doña Natalia Barraza (fourth from left), and mother, Maria Perea (far left), celebrate at the Nayarit in 1968. (Photo: Courtesy of Natalia Molina.)

Alison Dundes Renteln was inspired to become an academic by her late father, Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.

“My father was a professor for more than 40 years. From him I learned the great joy of exploring libraries, conducting interdisciplinary research and mentoring students. I also saw the benefits of belonging to a vibrant intellectual community,” says Renteln, professor of political science, anthropology, public policy and law.

She remembers the lively gatherings hosted with university colleagues in their home — a house overflowing with books. “Growing up in an environment where people were so enthusiastic about their research and their ideas influenced me,” she says.

Renteln accompanied her father on research trips, living in Denmark for a year and spending three months in Siena, Italy. At 14, she joined him at an international folklore conference in Helsinki, followed by a trip to the former Soviet Union — travels that deepened her early fascination with other cultures.

“My father was strongly opposed to censorship and considered no topic taboo,” she says. “When he tried to give out copies of a paper analyzing anti-Soviet jokes and his Russian colleagues were afraid to accept it, that experience sparked my interest in political freedom and human rights, topics on which I continue to focus.”

Dundes often used the word “worldview,” reminding his daughter that not everyone sees the world through the same cultural lens. Together they coedited a two-volume collection of essays, Folk Law. Renteln has written, edited and coedited many other books since, among them The Cultural Defense, Cultural Law, Multicultural Jurisprudence, Bioethics and Human Rights, and International Human Rights: A Survey.

“From my father, I learned the importance of identifying ethnocentric attitudes, so we can be more compassionate and accepting of people who come from diverse backgrounds,” says Renteln, who today researches the legal protection of cultural traditions. “Inspired by my father, I encourage students to reconsider their tacit assumptions, appreciate different points of view and use their research to make the world a better place.”

At right: Alison Dundes Renteln and her father, Alan Dundes. (Photo: Courtesy of Alison Dundes Renteln.)

Born during the Vietnam War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and University Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen escaped Vietnam with his family at age 4, when Saigon fell to the Communists.

Growing up as a refugee in San Jose, California, where he watched his working-class parents struggle to run a small grocery store, deeply influenced both Nguyen’s emotional world and his future writing, including the novel The Sympathizer and the books Nothing Ever Dies and The Refugees.

He describes himself as “an eyewitness to eyewitnesses,” shaped not by direct memories of war, but by his parents’ trauma and his community’s anti-communist politics. Literature first captivated him with its beauty, but refugee history gave it weight. “Beauty had enormous meaning in the context of all the history and suffering,” says Nguyen, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English, American studies and ethnicity and comparative literature.

“Those 13 years of childhood and adolescence, very much shaped by the refugee context, indelibly imprinted on me all kinds of emotional issues that have provided the energy for a lot of my writing.”

He hid his literary ambitions from his parents, who nursed expectations that he would study medicine, law or engineering. “For me, being a writer was always the fantasy, while being an academic was the day job,” says Nguyen, a MacArthur Fellow.  When he chose to pursue a PhD in English, his parents valued the title “doctor” more than the scholarship.

“The only thing that really impressed my parents about me becoming a writer was the fame,” he says. “When I won the Pulitzer for The Sympathizer, my father rang the next day: ‘The villagers in Vietnam called — you won the Pulitzer Prize.’”

Now, Nguyen says he hopes that in the future the evolving lens of age and experience will enable him to revisit his family’s legacy from new perspectives. He has already written one memoir, A Man of Two Faces, but is a firm believer that childhood memories offer “an endless well of material.”

At right: Viet Thanh Nguyen with his mother, Linda Kim Nguyen, at a rubber plantation in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam, in 1973. (Photo: Courtesy of Viet Thanh Nguyen.)

Computational biologist Jazlyn Mooney’s path to academia was inspired by the pioneering women in her family. Her mother, Sonya McKeown — one of the few women to earn a degree in computer science in the 1990s — taught Mooney to code, giving her daughter the foundational skill at the heart of her future academic career. Her grandmother, Gloria Madrid, who is of Navajo and Mexican descent, was a lifelong educator. She earned a PhD in education and business administration during Mooney’s childhood, and modeled advocacy through her dissertation on accessibility in higher education for marginalized students. Other family members also worked in teaching and computing, creating an environment where education, persistence and technical curiosity were the norm.

These legacies shape Mooney’s research in computational biology, particularly her work on genealogical ancestry for African Americans and her commitment to ethical genomic research. She emphasizes that science is inseparable from its political and historical contexts. While she was able to trace her mother’s lineage back to the early 1500s, her father’s side was a different story.

“My father is African American. And in that case, very quickly, we are no longer able to trace anything because of the lack of genealogical records,” she says.

In an effort to rectify that, Mooney, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology, led a landmark study of African American ancestry, using mathematical and computational analysis of publicly available genetic data.

As a professor, she carries forward her family’s values by fostering inclusive classrooms, setting high standards, and encouraging her students to pursue excellence with kindness.

Mooney sees her role as not only advancing science but also mentoring the next generation tobe critical, compassionate and unafraid of hard problems. “I think the biggest gift that my family gave me was encouraging me to never say I can’t do something, no matter how hard it might be.”

Ultimately, she hopes her legacy will mirror her mother’s and grandmother’s: not in accolades, but in the happiness and success of those she has taught and mentored.

At right: Jazlyn Mooney with her mother, Sonya McKeown. (Photo: Courtesy of Jazlyn Mooney.)

University Professor Peter Kuhn, a physicist, traces the roots of his research career to a moment of intense fear and confusion. He had just turned 17 when his father told him that Kuhn’s mother, Rosi, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was 48.

“While I had no idea what it really meant, somehow it was clear that everything had changed from one moment to the other,” says Kuhn, Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences and professor of biological sciences, medicine, biomedical engineering, aerospace and mechanical engineering and urology.

Although his mother underwent experimental treatment and survived, her hospital roommate wasn’t so fortunate, suffering an early relapse.

“During one of our last conversations, the roommate told me, ‘Keep doing what you are doing in physics, and one day you will help other moms to not suffer from this disease anymore,’” Kuhn recalls.

That comment — and the decades of lingering fear and uncertainty his mother endured, wondering if every ache or pain signaled the cancer’s return — stayed with him, inspiring him to dedicate his life to cancer research.

As he grew into his vocation as a physicist and cancer researcher, Kuhn remained motivated not only by his mother’s survival but by the losses of others, including some of her friends. He became determined to understand why cancer recurs, how it spreads and how detection could be improved. Eleven years ago, that mission brought him to USC to become founding director of the USC Michelson Convergent Science Institute in Cancer.

There, Kuhn’s personal history helped shape his pioneering work in “liquid biopsy” technology — a simple blood test designed to detect cancer earlier, monitor its progression, and ease the burden of uncertainty for patients. This minimally invasive alternative to tissue biopsies is now an important tool in managing late-stage cancers. It also holds promise for making screening for new cancers and recurrences more accessible and routine.

“Developing a way to screen for cancer across the lifespan was always my ultimate goal,” Kuhn says.

At right: Peter Kuhn with his mother, Rosi Kuhn. (Photo: Courtesy of Peter Kuhn.)