John Flanagan, a professor of optometry, ophthalmology and vision science, will begin his five-year term as the eighth dean of the UC Berkeley School of Optometry in June 2014.

Flanagan, who serves on the faculties at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto in Canada, will succeed Dennis Levi, the longest-serving dean on campus.

“He’ll be a big loss for us, but for him and for Berkeley, it’s a great thing,” said Paul Murphy, director of the School of Optometry and Vision Science at the University of Waterloo. “He’ll bring with him a good broad understanding of optometry, ophthalmology and vision science … He’s a big guy in optometry.”

Flanagan received his training in the United Kingdom, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in optometry and vision sciences in 1980 and his doctorate in 1985 from Aston University.

His decision to apply for dean of UC Berkeley’s optometry school came naturally, Flanagan said.

“Berkeley is really the No. 1 school of optometry in the world,” he said. “Being a dean at Berkeley is the top job in optometry.”

Levi, a professor of optometry and vision science and neuroscience, highlighted Flanagan’s experience as a practicing clinician and his special interest in researching glaucoma, a common degenerative disease that leads to damage in the optic nerve.

“He is one of those rare individuals who is able to cross the divide between clinical practice and research, and he brings an entirely new area of research to the school — one that is very central to the profession,” Levi said in an email.

Flanagan has authored more than 140 peer-reviewed publications. He spent most of his career researching mechanisms that instigate glaucoma, financed by continuous research funding for more than 25 years from multiple research foundations.

Although Flanagan has also received a variety of awards for his research, he said he was especially proud of the 2011 Institute of Medical Science Mel Silverman Mentorship Award from the University of Toronto for his supervision of graduate students.

Flanagan also said he recognizes the legacy that Levi will leave behind.

“Dennis Levi has a huge reputation in optometry and is really a gentle giant in so many ways,” Flanagan said. “If I can do half of what he’s done, I’ll probably be considered a good dean.”

Levi became the seventh dean of the school in 2001 and will retire from the position on June 30, 2014.

Although Levi will step down as dean, he will remain at UC Berkeley as a professor of optometry and vision science.

“I’ve always heard that being a professor at Berkeley is a great gig, and I’m looking forward to giving that a try, and especially to spend more time in my lab,” Levi said in the email.

Somin Park covers academics and administration. Contact her at sominpark@dailycal.org.

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Michael Ball/Staff

Maps showing where meat is slaughtered in Maryland, where barley for brewing beer is grown and where taco trucks travel in Oakland, among others, will soon be combined into a crowd-sourced, crowd-funded atlas, thanks to a UC Berkeley lecturer.

Darin Jensen, co-editor of “Food: An Atlas” and a cartographer and lecturer in the UC Berkeley department of geography, described the atlas as a project in “guerrilla cartography and publishing.” In June, he released a call for food-related maps to a cartographic society and has included about 70 of the 90 submissions received in the book, which is scheduled to be published Nov. 15.

“To me, when I did it, it was just my quirky little, ‘Let’s try this crazy experiment,’” Jensen said. “And it was received really well.”

The atlas will include food-related maps in five different categories, including food production, food distribution, food security, cuisine and conceptual maps. The book will also feature a separate children’s section with maps curated from the book “Mission: Explore Food” by the Geography Collective, a group of geography activists, teachers, therapists, academics and artists.

Charles Levkoe, a doctoral candidate and researcher at the University of Toronto, submitted a map to show how Canadian food networks, which include farmers market associations, community gardeners and food policy councils, are working together to change the food system. He teamed up with a designer to create a one-page visual representation of the network.

“It’s not just saying this is where this is, and this is where that is — it’s a conceptual map, which is why I thought this project was so interesting,” Levkoe said. “We’re trying to get across this idea of what this food movement looks like spatially.”

To pay for the project, Jensen and his team launched a Kickstarter campaign that allows anyone to donate and support the project. During its run, which lasted 21 days from Oct. 2 to 23, the campaign raised $29,569 from 747 donors — nearly $10,000 more than the original goal, according to the Kickstarter page. The extra money raised will allow about an additional 1,600 books to be printed, up from the original target of 1,100 books.

“That’s guerrilla publishing because we didn’t wait for a publisher to pick up the book,” Jensen said. “We didn’t pitch the book to anybody. We’re just creating one. And the only obstacle between creating a book and getting a book into the hands of people is printing the book, which is expensive.”

To attract donations, the project team gave rewards to donors who pledged certain amounts.

Neal Parish, a land use and real estate attorney in Oakland, said he gave $500 to the project partly because that amount was the original trigger point for a reward that included a bus tour of Oakland taco trucks.

While the final price has yet to be determined, Jensen said the book will most probably sell for less than $25. His team plans on donating the funds raised from book sales to a food-related nonprofit organization.

Contact Mitchell Handler at mhandler@dailycal.org.

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Wealthy individuals are more likely to engage in unethical behavior, a new study from UC Berkeley and University of Toronto researchers suggests.

The study – which was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal – found that those in higher social classes are more likely to engage in behaviors such as cheating, stealing and lying, due to being “less generous and altruistic” than their counterparts in lower social classes.

“These findings suggest that it is the people who occupy relatively high levels of wealth and rank in society who are more inclined to favor greed and behave unethically, whether that means breaking the law while driving, keeping extra change given to you at a coffee shop, lying to another person in the service of self-interest or even cheating in games,” said Paul Piff, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in psychology and lead author of the study, in an email.

In the first and second of seven separate studies conducted within the overarching study, researchers found that individuals in more expensive vehicles were more likely to cut off other drivers and pedestrians with right of way.

The rest of the studies required participants to report their socio-economic statuses and take surveys about various scenarios in which moral dilemmas appeared. Across the board, results showed that those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to take valued goods from others, lie in negotiations, cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work than their lower class counterparts.

The study suggests that the tendency for wealthy participants to engage in unethical behavior may stem from several factors. Members of the upper class have more privacy and independence in their professions and therefore associate less risk with unethical behavior than others may, according to the study. They also have more resources to handle any possible repercussions of such behavior, the study states.

The findings also suggest that the trend may exist because upper-class individuals view greed in a more positive light than others do.

After being encouraged to think of the positive aspects of greed in the final portion of the study, lower class participants were as likely as their wealthier counterparts to engage in unethical behavior.

“Upper-class individuals, who may be more likely to serve as leaders in their organizations, may … be more likely to have received economics-oriented training and to work in settings that hone self-interest,” the study states. “These factors may promote values among the upper class that justify and even moralize positive beliefs about greed.”

Piff conceded that there are exceptions to the findings, but maintains that the general trend – one that he says may have contributed to the country’s current economic turmoil – remains consistent.

“There are important exceptions to our findings — for instance, the notable philanthropy of super rich individuals like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — but in general, what we find in the lab resonates with patterns observed in timely political events, from scandalous acts of insider trading to the unethical acts committed by financiers in the times leading up to the recent financial meltdown,” Piff said in the email.

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It was the summer of 1965 — well before UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was a professor, a world-renowned physicist or an administrator at top-notch universities in both the United States and in Canada.

In fact, Birgeneau was just a graduate student studying physics at Yale University, wanting to do a little more than stay inside and conduct research in his lab all day.

Fresh out of the University of Toronto, Birgeneau said he was “restless” and was looking for something more socially relevant to incorporate into his life.

Surveying New Haven, Conn., with a friend, Birgeneau found a community center six blocks from campus located next to a housing community built specifically for low-income families. The community center and the neighborhood were entirely African American, despite the fact that they were a stone’s throw away from the nearly all-white university community.

That was where he said his activism and his desire for social change were sparked.

However, it was not until he was introduced to a Freedom Rider while visiting Cape Cod, Mass., that Birgeneau was introduced to the Yale-run outreach program called the Southern Teaching Program Incorporated. The program gave individuals from the university the opportunity to go south and teach in all-black colleges as well as conduct civil rights work.

Packing up his bags, Birgeneau and his wife headed to Columbia, S.C., where he was selected to teach at Benedict College, a Baptist, all-black campus at the time.

“It was not the same as standing out on Sproul Plaza,” he said. “It was very serious in those days. I learned the young people we interacted with literally never had a person-to-person conversation with a white person. Ever. In their lives.”

The South proved to be a politically and racially charged experience for Birgeneau, who witnessed firsthand just how complicated race relations were — not only between African-Americans and whites but within the black community itself.

“It was such a psychological impact, knowing an emergency-room doctor had refused to care for one of the black students from the college because they were American but had allowed the hospital to take care of a woman who was black when they realized she was from the Bahamas,” Birgeneau said.

Following completion of his doctorate at Yale, Birgeneau continued his activism while working as a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories before joining the physics faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975.

It was during that time that he met H. Eugene Stanley, a fellow physicist who was also interested in social change. Eventually they were invited to Moscow to meet with the Russian Academy of Sciences, though Birgeneau and others did not just meet with Russian scientists.

Aware that Russia was keeping Refuseniks — members of the Soviet Jewish community who were denied permission to emigrate abroad by the authorities of the former Soviet Union and other countries that were formerly communist states — from leaving the country, Stanley encouraged his fellow colleagues, including Birgeneau, to conduct a freedom march on the Moscow subway to protest the Refuseniks’ captivity.

“There were literally soldiers with machine guns, and it got incredible attention there because there had not been a protest like this in Moscow before,” Birgeneau said. “It was a singular event in my life. This was something we started that led to liberating these sets of people.”

Today, Birgeneau is the leader of one of the most politically active campuses in the country, and according to associate vice chancellor of public affairs and university communications Claire Holmes, Birgeneau’s background gives him the insight and perspective to address the issues the campus faces today.

“UC Berkeley’s legacy of activism is an essential part of who we are,” she said in an email. “We are fortunate to have a Chancellor who brings personal experience and passion about important world issues.”

Katie Nelson is an assistant news editor.

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