University of San Diego Magazine - Fall 2025

LUKE FINNEY Engineering

Julia Sciallo, senior psychology major in the College of Arts and Sciences, said her longtime passion for wellness and her desire to help others find health-related resources on campus, led her to apply. She noticed that many of her peers didn’t know where to go for certain wellness resources — and she was hoping to find a solution for that. “I kind of viewed the role as being the face of wellness on campus and being someone my peers can come to talk with, and hopefully, feel comfortable around when it comes to their well-being,” said Sciallo. “I feel like being a part of this student program allows me to show up for my community in a meaningful way.” Luke Finney, a senior industrial and systems engineering student in the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering, has a passion for holistic wellness, and was already working on the university fitness operations team before joining the ambassador program. “Everything we’re doing is for the students,” said Finney. “We can direct students to the different (wellness) opportunities we have to offer. I think it’s super cool and a big honor to be a part of it,” he added. Just before the spring semester was over, the student wellness ambassadors met to write their team’s constitution, discussing what they wanted their student-forward program to look like. They decided to create committees to cover every aspect of wellness on campus and to connect ambassadors with areas they’re already passionate about, like nutrition and physical fitness. The group is also hoping to connect with as many student organizations as possible to spread the word about the health and wellness opportunities available to students and the larger Torero community. “We’ve talked about partnering with sports teams and with different clubs on campus, like the Alcalá Club. We want to make sure we are celebrating cultural events like mental health months,” Jezycki said. “We want to host at least two events each month focused on different aspects of wellness. We want to speak to classes. We want to do everything we can to make wellness normalized on campus,” she added.

One of Sciallo’s main priorities for the program is to help fellow students understand the importance of developing an everyday wellness toolkit. These tools are vital today — especially given new reports, like one from the American Council on Education, which found that 65% of college students shared they needed help in the past year for emotional or mental health issues. “These wellness resources are not something you tap into when life gets difficult and it’s finals season and you’re feeling really stressed,” said Sciallo. “They’re something you can tap into even when things are going well and life is good. I think it’s important that students know that they’re not weak for tapping into these resources, but rather, pretty brave.” Finney says he thinks building a community that values and promotes wellness will be a big focus in the months and years to come. “You want to build a community, and I’m super honored to be part of this team that can be that reference point,” said Finney. Sciallo and Finney shared that one common struggle they’ve noticed among their peers is dealing with the stress that comes while balancing schoolwork, a job, clubs and social time. That same report from the American Council on Education also discovered that 76% of college students reported they had experienced a moderate or high level of stress within the last month, when the survey was conducted. It’s a pain point the wellness ambassadors will keep in mind while planning out their programming for the year. “I think it’s really empowering because we know what the struggle is like,” Jezycki said. “We can relate best to each other. We can be a point of reference, a point of contact, a trusted person whom our peers can come to and say, ‘Hey, I’m really struggling with my mental health. How can I find help?’” Having students on the ground connecting with their peers, learning what they need in wellness resources and listening to their struggles allows the student wellness ambassadors to hit the ground running in the next year and provide wellness-centered programming — built by students, for students.

AT THE EDGE OF IT ALL

A Professor’s Research into Understanding How Our Memories Form As our bodies move through time and space, how do our minds? For Jena Hales, PhD, the answer to that question lies in our memories. There are forms of what some might call “muscle memory,” such as learning to ride a bike, that become subconscious. But there are also experiential memories that we can consciously recall in our minds. Our memories — imprinted with a kind of metadata about where and when we experienced them — inform everything we do. When we make decisions in the present, those memories guide the actions we take. Similarly, they give us the power to plan ahead by imaging future scenarios and preparing for them. The research is a lifelong passion of Hales, and gives us a more fundamental understanding of how we interact with and navigate our world. “Basic research is so critical for us to be able to understand how our brain is working,” she said. “It’s what we’re doing all the time, and yet there is still so much

“We know that all of our past memories, when we recall some sort of event from our past — they are all grounded in space and time. We can come up with where we were when something was occurring, we have some type of general time stamp of when it happened.” — Jena Hales, PhD MAPPING MEMORY In this episode of At the Edge of It All , Jena Hales, PhD, associate professor and program director of Neuroscience, Cognition and Behavior at the University of San Diego’s College of Arts and Sciences, discusses her work which explores how our memories are anchored in both space and time. Hales takes us through the science behind what makes memory such a defining part of who we are and how this research intersects with conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.

about the brain that isn’t understood.” If you’re wondering how these insights could impact our daily lives, consider

KALEENA JEZYCKI Nursing

this: If memories guide all of our decision-making, what happens if the ability to recall them is disrupted? Knowing how our brains store and access memories, Hales says, is key to figuring out ways to slow or prevent

diseases that disrupt this process, such as Alzheimer’s.

At the Edge of It All is a University of San Diego podcast where USD experts speak on topics and stories that impact you and the broader community.

Hales hopes her research can help contribute to the treatment of some of the world’s most debilitating memory-related disorders.

JULIA SCIALLO Psychology

Download episodes wherever you get your podcasts or visit sandiego.edu/at-the-edge .

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