A Sense of Place
6/26/2007

Tenure has special significance for faculty member Janet Moradian Oldak.
By Veronica Jauriqui

Neatly arranged around Janet Moradian Oldak’s office at USC’s Center for Craniofacial and Molecular Biology are color photographs of her husband and two young children juxtaposed against xeroxed copies of amino acid sequences. 

As Oldak becomes the latest USC School of Dentistry faculty member to make tenure, it becomes obvious that these have been the two main threads in the researcher’s life.  Her new status is significant to anyone who makes a career out of balancing the demands of family with those as a principal investigator.  But given Oldak’s atypical road to academia, this accomplishment, she says, is especially poignant. 

 “I think about my father who had his high school diploma and was always very encouraging for all of us to continue college education. My mother only finished middle school, but was always very eager to learn new things. Although there were a couple of medical doctors in the Moradian family, I did not particularly come from a family of academics or professors.  That is what makes this tenure very special, and an extremely rewarding thing for me.” Oldak says.

Oldak was one of five children growing up to Jewish parents in the small Muslim town of Arak, located in the heart of Iran.  She was only 15 when the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah government in 1978.  Fearing the repercussions of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s new regime, Oldak’s parents sent her to Israel in the hopes that a new country would provide greater opportunities. 

The year of adjustment was one of the hardest in Oldak’s life. Separated from family, learning a new language and adjusting to life in an Israeli boarding school, she found unexpected solace, she says, in math and science.

“I couldn’t speak the language, but I excelled at math.  And I loved chemistry,” she recalls. 

Pursuing a career in research and academics gave Oldak a sense of consistency that was missing from her life as a youth in Israel.  “University life,” she says, “just felt safe to me.  It felt secure.”

In 1992, Oldak and her husband—an engineer of Mexican Jewish heritage—decided to move their young family to Los Angeles.  The city, she says, shared her family’s multicultural heritage: “Here you had the Iranian culture, you had the Mexican culture, and you had the Jewish culture.  You had everything.”

It was midway through her career at CCMB that Oldak says she finally found a sense of place.  “I realized what I could learn here and what I could contribute.  I was lucky to be in a group with Dr. Hal Slavkin where there was really good support.  And then I knew that I would not move on,” she says.

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