People

Gene Block

Gene Block

Chancellor, University of California at Los Angeles

Biography

As UCLA’s chief executive officer, Gene Block oversees all aspects of the campus’ three-part mission of education, research and service.

A champion of public universities, Chancellor Block serves on several leading national associations and advisory boards, including as chair of the council of presidents of the Universities Research Association, an international consortium of 86 leading research universities.

He has called for UCLA to deepen its engagement with Los Angeles, a city that offers a microcosm of the global community, and to increase access for students from underrepresented populations. An advocate of interdisciplinary scholarship, he emphasizes broad-based, campus-wide planning.

Chancellor Block holds UCLA faculty appointments in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences in the David Geffen School of Medicine and in physiological science in the College of Letters and Science. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he specializes in circadian biology, which deals with the functioning of 24-hour rhythms in higher organisms (See Academic Interests).

Dr. Block became chancellor of UCLA on August 1, 2007. Previously, he served as vice president and provost of the University of Virginia, where he held the Alumni Council Thomas Jefferson Professorship in Biology and directed the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center for Biological Timing. He also headed an NIH graduate training program aimed at increasing the number of scientists from underrepresented groups.

Chancellor Block joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1978. He served as vice provost for research from 1993 to 1998 and then as vice president for research and public service until his appointment as vice president and provost in 2001. In 1998, he received the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Outstanding Public Service Award for his work with Virginia’s business community.

A native of Monticello, New York, Chancellor Block holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Stanford University and a master’s and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Oregon. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, studying with Colin Pittendrigh, “the father of biological timing,” and Donald Kennedy, who later served as president of Stanford.

The inventor of a number of devices, Chancellor Block holds a patent for a non-contact respiratory monitor for the prevention of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and he is an avid collector of vacuum-tube radios.

Chancellor Block and his wife, Carol, have two children.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE