Creating New Knowledge
Across campus, USC faculty and students are developing new ways of learning, thinking, doing, collaborating — all with a forward-looking mindset. Progress begins with a commitment to break new ground, letting go of ideas that constrain our imagination.
Sustainability Across the Curriculum
The concept of sustainability cuts across all disciplines. Faculty from all over campus are developing new courses and modifying their existing syllabi to incorporate sustainability principles, research and applications. Learn more about USC’s Sustainability Across the Curriculum Initiative.
USC’s dramatic expansion of sustainability curriculum
Sustainability education and research at USC
How USC is preparing every student to help protect the planet
USC’s mission is to cultivate engaged human beings who are empowered to have a positive impact on society.
Jill Sohm, Professor of Environmental Studies, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Member of the USC President’s Working Group on Sustainability
Knowledge Leaders
Marine & Oceanic Studies
USC Sea Grant funds marine and coastal research, communicates research results to leaders in government and local communities, and is a leader in integrating current research with new education initiatives to increase science literacy among urban students and to encourage teachers to adopt science education curricula.
Journalism & Justice
Founded in 2022, the Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is USC’s first media studies center that is dedicated to saving, studying and sharing the work of prominent and hidden figures who have been central to Black social justice movements in America.
Advanced Genocide Research
The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research (previously USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research) mission is dedicated to advancing innovative interdisciplinary research on genocide and mass violence, promoting use of the Visual History Archive testimonies in academic research and teaching, and transforming the way we understand the origins, dynamics and consequences of mass violence, as well as the conditions and dimensions of resistance.
Environmental Studies
Founded in 1995 and based on USC’s Los Angeles campus and Catalina Island, the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability educates students, conducts public-facing and policy-facing outreach, and produces solutions-focused research at the intersection of people and the planet.
Equity & Immigration
Through its work, the USC Equity Research Institute promotes forward-looking narratives that support the integration of diverse immigrant and U.S.-born communities, lift up the intersection of racial justice and immigrant rights, and strengthen the base for intersectoral collaborations.
Arts and Social Change
The USC Institute for Theatre & Social Change provides a research and development forum for expressive and interactive dramatic art practices, relative to education, therapy, and social justice, that disrupts oppression and engages communities in meaningful dialogue for social change.
Multiplying Degrees
Ever more intersectional, the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy — which already fuses the arts, technology and the business of innovation — is developing new joint degrees with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the USC Marshall School of Business, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
Filling the Gaps
Some of today’s most pressing problems don’t just lack answers — they lack the entire infrastructure to approach it. USC experts are agile and quick-moving when it comes to convening the types of thinkers and doers who can help.
Experts Who Take Initiative
USC scholars and researchers are often the first to respond to new widespread crises or reinvent something that benefits society — both phenomena that are becoming markers of the modern world. With meaningful responses about diversity, equity and inclusion, action on new health threats and even developing new musical instruments using biotechnology, our community is eager to take on the new and uncharted.
USC-led center gets $4 million to study impact of wildfire smoke, extreme heat on human health
Researchers at the CLIMA Center will study climate-related exposures and gaps in adaptation capacity to understand their combined impacts on health.
Collaborating to turn memory loss into a distant memory
USC Viterbi and the Keck School of Medicine of USC are working on human trials for a revolutionary brain prosthesis to repair and restore lost memories.
Why does AI beat humans at the strategy game Diplomacy?
Researchers at USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute and colleagues find that artificial intelligence’s strategy prowess is key — not communication skills.
Transcendent thinking can increase teens’ sense of purpose
USC researchers’ discovery came in a study of an intergenerational community program.
Using AI, USC researchers pioneer a potential new immunotherapy approach for treating glioblastoma
The team built a machine-learning system to identify genes that can convert brain cancer cells into functioning immune cells.
States with strict abortion policies saw biggest declines in birth control, emergency contraceptive use after ‘Dobbs’
USC study suggests Supreme Court’s abortion decision has had wider ramifications for women’s reproductive health than previously thought.