Representing Mexico, the team won the Outstanding Delegation Award, and one of the members, senior Matt (McKenzie) Anthony, won an Outstanding Delegate Award.

The conference took place from March 29 to April 2 at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan.

The CSUSM students were joined by six students from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., creating a joint delegation of 23.  

This marked the first NMUN conference for CSUSM since 2016. The Model United Nations program on campus has been revived by Roni Kay O’Dell, an assistant professor of environmental politics in the political science and global affairs department. O’Dell is the main academic adviser for the Model UN and has advised award-winning Model UN teams for 12 years, including at previous university positions.

“I’m so proud and impressed with the dedication of the students to learn from this experience and to expand their professional skills beyond the classroom and into their future academic, career and other professional development opportunities,” O’Dell said. “The students prepare for months, learning about the country they will represent and practicing and learning negotiation and diplomacy skills. They then put it into practice at the conference, and they always learn a great deal that they apply to expanding their skills and abilities.

“The whole Model UN experience makes an invaluable impression on the students and gives them the opportunity for social mobility and the experience to apply to professional development. We are so grateful for all the help and support across the CSUSM campus to everyone who made the team’s experience at NMUN a success.”

The NMUN conference gives students the opportunity to practice negotiation, speaking and writing skills with more than 3,000 peers from universities across the world. Students are assigned to different committees as they train for and prepare for the conference. They each learn about the history, politics, economy and foreign policy of the country they will represent.

As delegates representing Mexico, the CSUSM students worked in committees with dozens of their peers. They started by giving speeches and simulating the work of delegates at the UN who must bring policy recommendations on the issues to the committee. They then worked with each other (some of the committees have several hundred students) to debate, negotiate and write resolutions that specify how governments can cooperate to solve common security and human rights problems.

Anthony, a criminology and justice studies major, won an award for his outstanding work in the General Assembly second committee on negotiation and diplomacy. He shared the award with Elisabeth Gallagher, a team member from Seton Hill.

“I think the most important aspect of the experience wasn't only the friendships made but the building and strengthening of diplomatic skills that can be used in our future careers and our daily lives as an excellent way to build a strong social framework of friends and colleagues,” Anthony said.  

In addition to Anthony, the CSUSM team included the following students (with positions and UN committees at the conference as well as academic major):

• Jessica Aguilar, Economic and Social Council, first-year political science major
• Miguel Andres Dumani Garaicoa, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, third-year political science major
• Tatum Basco, General Assembly Second Committee, second-year political science major
• Lucia Elia, General Assembly Second Committee, first-year political science major
• Joseph Gominiak, General Assembly Third Committee, second-year history major
• Amira Helmy, Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, fourth-year political science major
• Andrea Fernanda Hernández Corral, General Assembly Third Committee, third-year political science major
• Armany Mendoza Lopez, High Commissioner for Refugees, fourth-year political science major
• Zeenia Najmi, Environmental Assembly, graduating economics major
• Ava Nolen, Human Rights Council, fourth-year political science and global studies double major
• Diana Ortega, Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), graduating political science major
• Monserrat Perez-Manzo, Committee on Narcotic Drugs, first-year political science and criminology double major
• Melanie Reyna; High Commissioner for Refugees, second-year political science major
• Baylee Robinson, Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, third-year political science major
• Ashleigh Skarshaug, head delegate and Environmental Assembly, third-year political science and criminology double major
• Kelly Vu, Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), second-year biology major

More information about CSUSM’s Model UN program can be found at its webpage.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Ragland served as class president at El Camino High in Oceanside as a senior and a junior, and he also was selected by his history teacher to attend an American government seminar in Washington, D.C. At CSUSM, not only did he major in political science, but one of the ways he connected with the administration was through chats about politics with Bill Stacy, the university’s first president.

And when Ragland chose to attend the University of Texas School of Law, it was with political – not legal – aspirations in mind. Austin, after all, is the home of the presidential library and museum of Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ragland had devoured multiple biographies of LBJ as a student.

Two developments changed his life course, and are the reason why today Ragland is one of the foremost attorneys in San Diego – as well as one of CSUSM’s most decorated alumni. The first was the Monica Lewinsky scandal that roiled the nation in the late ’90s and caused Ragland to grow disillusioned about politics as a noble calling.

“It all just seemed really dumb, to be quite honest,” he said.

The second was his introduction to moot court, a law school staple that simulates the experience of arguing a case at the appellate, rather than trial, level. During his second year, as a visiting student at the University of San Diego’s law school, he won first place in a big moot court competition and was named best oralist to boot.

Ragland had caught the bug. Goodbye, politics. Hello, law.

About 25 years later, he’s in a position to combine the skills he first honed in moot court with the leadership he would have employed as a politician, and that he displayed as president of Associated Students, Inc., during the 1995-96 school year. Ragland last year was appointed senior assistant attorney general, overseeing the Appeals, Writs and Trials section of the Criminal Law Division of the California Attorney General’s Office in San Diego. The office covers six counties in Southern California, and he supervises about 70 lawyers who essentially act as prosecutors for the state.  

“There’s a leadership component that is a much bigger part of the job because I’m leading the entire section in San Diego rather than one team,” said Ragland, who was a supervising deputy attorney general for nine years before his promotion in February 2022. “That’s something that I've enjoyed a lot. It harkens back to my days as ASI president at Cal State San Marcos. A lot of those skills you just carry with you. The big part is having good relationships with people and making sure each person in the office feels valued, appreciated, respected and supported.”

One of Ragland’s longtime colleagues describes a “subtle but profound cultural shift” that has occurred in the 20 months since he rose to his new post.

“He has energized and motivated the attorneys and created an environment where everyone can thrive,” said Melissa Mandel, one of the 10 supervising deputy attorney generals under Ragland’s direction. “I would describe his style as holistic, inclusive and integrated. … Charles is a great leader, and I am proud and honored to work for him.”

Ragland acknowledges that leadership is something that always has come naturally to him. Born on Camp Pendleton as the son of a Marine, he grew up in Oceanside and became the first person in his family to attend college.

He started at CSUSM in the fall of 1994 when the university still only accepted transfer students (he came over from MiraCosta College). Like most classmates of the era, he assumed that his experience would be a two-year sprint to graduation with little in the way of campus activity. But he discovered fraternity life during his first year, and that proved to be a smooth segue into student government.

Through multiple social circles – rival fraternities, political science classes and ASI – Ragland became friends with George Marquez, who also went on to become a lawyer and is now the district attorney for Imperial County.

“Charles was someone who was very focused and had tremendous talent,” Marquez said. “I knew he was going to be successful back then because I observed him become a successful leader as the president of ASI. He was naturally intelligent and hard-working. I am not at all surprised by his success, and I expect more.”

As the head of the student body during a formative year for the still-young university, Ragland was at the forefront of some foundational accomplishments. Seeking to improve student life at what was widely regarded as a commuter school, he and his fellow leaders introduced intramural sports. They also brought back the student newspaper (which had folded before he became president) and initiated the funding that precipitated the building of the Center for Children and Families years later.

“We were doing really big things to establish the university because it was so new,” Ragland said. “It was all exciting and important stuff.”

After graduating from CSUSM, Ragland moved on to law school in Austin, where he excelled. He returned to San Diego, passed the bar exam and set about achieving his goal of working in the attorney general’s office, where he had served as a law clerk the previous summer. A hiring freeze delayed his ambition before he was hired in March 2001. He has never left.

On his way to becoming a supervisor, Ragland mostly did trial and appellate work for the state, and a highlight from that era was his lead prosecution in Operation Gangland, a gang case that involved an investigation with multiple federal and state agencies and ultimately netted the convictions of 31 members of a gang conspiracy. For his work on that case, which took three years, he received an award as the state’s top prosecutor for 2008 from then-Attorney General (and twice former California governor) Jerry Brown. (That same year, Ragland married his wife, Christy; the couple has four adult children and lives in San Diego.)

As his career has progressed, Ragland has shifted to overseeing cases – making sure his attorneys have the support they need – rather than handling them directly. The appeal of his profession, however, remains the same.

“The thing I like the most about the work I do, and it’s been this way since I started back in 2001, is that the mission in our office is to see that justice is done in a case,” he said. “Waking up where your job is in the Department of Justice, it’s a rewarding feeling. You know that you’re doing something good.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

She is an associate editor and member of the inaugural board of csuglobal, which was launched last month by the Global Studies Institute of Cal State Long Beach. Csugobal is an open-access, interdisciplinary academic journal and current affairs ’zine that’s “designed to explore the increasingly global role of the state of California by drawing on the rich intellectual resources of the faculty, staff and students across the system while offering a platform for public engagement and debate.”

The inaugural board consists of 17 people representing 13 CSU campuses as well as the Chancellor’s Office.

“Being a part of this venture means a lot to me,” She said. “It is always exciting to meet with people who share similar passions and vision for a global CSU. Our board is also highly interdisciplinary, with members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, from social sciences, humanities, science, engineering, etc.” 

She’s interdisciplinary research examines changing dynamics of economic development, social protection and development cooperation among emerging global South countries in the Asia Pacific, such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

She is one of the editors of the peer-reviewed csuglobaljournal under the theme Networks of Economy and Trade. For the first issue, she wrote an article titled “Economic Globalization and Local Transformations in California.”

She was invited to join the board last fall after attending a conference and leading a workshop on simulations in the political science/international relations classroom. Her primary responsibilities are putting together for calls for submissions; soliciting, reviewing and screening initial submissions; and recruiting for the peer review process. She also helps facilitate communication between csuglobal and CSUSM.

The launch of csuglobal was co-led by Richard Marcus, founding director of the Global Studies Institute, and Alison Holmes, the publication's editor-in-chief, supported by Cal Poly Humboldt.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

One moment, it will be someone from his native Turkey posting footage from an abrupt funeral that wasn’t supposed to happen. The next, it will be a person transmitting a digital cry for help to assist in finding a family member or friend who’s lost in the rubble of a collapsed building.

“It’s terrifying,” Turanli said. “And it’s nonstop.”

Turanli, a second-year political science major at Cal State San Marcos, has been watching from afar in horror as grim dispatches come in from Turkey and Syria, where a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on Monday has killed more than 20,000 people and caused catastrophic destruction throughout the region.

As soon as he learned about the earthquake, he reached out to his parents and other family members in Istanbul, who were not directly affected since the epicenter was hundreds of miles away. Then he began thinking about ways that he could aid the country where he was born and raised.

“It's a very unstable region,” he said. “The people who live in these villages, they don't have any place to go. A lot of private companies and business owners are doing their part; horse track owners are opening their tracks for people to sleep in.

“There's a lot of help coming in. But there's always need for more.”

Turanli is one of two Turkish students currently enrolled at CSUSM (the other is Necmiye Yildirim, a graduate student in kinesiology). His family moved from Turkey to Maryland when he was a junior in high school after his mother, a molecular biology professor, took a sabbatical at the National Institutes of Health.

Around the same time that Turanli enrolled at CSUSM in 2021, his parents returned to Istanbul with his younger sister, who’s now 9. His mother heads the molecular biology department at a private college there, and his father is a civil engineer who’s working a job in Romania. Turanli’s younger brother attends college in Florida.

Though his family escaped danger, Turanli said friends of friends died in the earthquake and that the cousin of his local martial arts coach lost nearly his entire family, leaving behind only a 6-year-old.

“It’s just horrible,” Turanli said. “It’s not even a situation where money or shelter can help. This kid doesn’t have parents anymore.”

The unfolding disaster, Turanli said, calls to mind some of the frightening lessons he has learned in political science classes that touch on global crises.

“After a big earthquake like this, an economic crisis is normal,” he said. “But we already have an economic crisis in Turkey, and now an earthquake has happened. I don’t know what will come of this. I don’t know if the government will be able to pull the country out of it.”

Turanli is asking members of the CSUSM community to make a donation to the International Rescue Committee, which has more than a thousand staff on the ground in Turkey and Syria.

“Five dollars is 100 Turkish lira, and that can buy a little kid shoes and a jacket, or food for at least four days,” he said. “In a situation like this, even the smallest donation counts.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Caldwell’s favorite game was “SimCity,” which, as the name suggests, is a simulation in which users can create and manage their own bustling metropolis. In terms of graphics and sheer entertainment value, it was hardly, say, “Super Mario Bros.” But for Caldwell, it was completely engrossing, as befitted the son of two civil servants – his mother a city planner, his father a public housing administrator.  

“He would sit there and play that game forever,” said Stella Caldwell, Erik’s mother. 

After designing his city, Caldwell would print it out on sheets of paper and staple the pages together to form a giant map. He would ask his mom to critique his creation and she would offer her professional opinion, often adding a gentle admonition to stop wasting so much paper and printer ink. 

Thirty years later, Caldwell still counts “SimCity” among his favorite games. The difference now is that while he builds imaginary cities in the virtual world, he also helps build a real one in the actual world. 

Caldwell, a 2004 graduate of Cal State San Marcos, is deputy chief operating officer for the City of San Diego’s Smart and Sustainable Communities branch. In that role, he oversees four departments – development services, economic development, planning and sustainability – that combine to enrich San Diego’s communities, engage its citizens, and improve service delivery by leveraging “smart cities” technology. 

“For people like me who play ‘SimCity,’ that’s essentially what this job is, building out San Diego,” Caldwell said. “What excites me about the job is that I think about what the city will look like in the future – what the streets will look like, what mobility will look like, where people will live, where people will work, how we’re going to combat climate change, how we’re going to adapt to the changes in the environment that have already taken place. 

“Not to denigrate my fellow directors and deputy COOs, but I think it’s the coolest job at the City of San Diego – thinking about what is coming next and planning for that.” 

Last year, Caldwell was a featured speaker at the Internet of Things World conference in Santa Clara, where he talked about San Diego’s position on the cutting edge of smart city innovation. Under his leadership, the city developed a smartphone app called Get It Done, which allows residents to report problems like potholes using the phone’s camera and location positioning, and utilize a host of other city services. Coming soon is the functionality to report the misuse of electric scooters, which Caldwell acknowledges that half the population loves and half loathes. 

San Diego is working toward the installation of 4,200 Internet of Things (the term refers to the vast number of “things” that are connected to the internet so they can share data with other things) nodes, outfitting streetlights from Rancho Bernardo to the Mexican border with cameras, microphones and other sensors to help the city understand how residents and visitors are moving through its spaces. Caldwell calls it the largest urban deployment of IoT in North America. 

And the city is installing devices on its vehicles, including police cars and trash trucks, to collect information related to road conditions or how the vehicles may be operating in an urban environment.  

It’s all part of a comprehensive strategy to make the city more immediately aware of and responsive to its residents’ needs – more like Amazon than the outdated model of slow-moving government bureaucracy.  

“I think cities are embracing the same technology that companies have embraced for a long time,” Caldwell said. “Cities are really behind the curve when it comes to thinking about the Internet of Things. We have infrastructure, whether it’s streetlights or traffic signals or the roads themselves, that is omnipresent in all parts of our community. So how do we deploy sensors that help us better run the business in ways that people expect us to?”

Born in Rockford, Ill., outside of Chicago, Caldwell moved to San Diego at age 16 when his father accepted a job with the San Diego Housing Authority. His mother described him as a deeply curious and inquisitive child, and his parents’ careers rubbed off on him in ways beyond his “SimCity” obsession. While attending Torrey Pines High School, he became fascinated with the inner workings of the federal government and policy-making at the national and international level, to the extent that he would come home from school and watch C-SPAN.

“That should have been nerd alert number one,” he joked.

After flirting with a return to Illinois for college, he chose CSUSM when his dad spotted an advertisement for the nascent university in a local newspaper. He started out as a history major before switching to political science, and history professor Alyssa Sepinwall remembers him as an outstanding student whose classmates once pushed for him to receive a higher grade on a group project about Karl Marx because he had organized them and done most of the work.

During his senior year, he secured an internship – which turned into a full-time position – as a legislative assistant to San Diego County Supervisor Greg Cox. Thus began a series of government jobs, including as a policy aide to former San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, that not only reinforced his parents’ influence on him but also reshuffled his professional priorities. Once aspiring to go to law school and run for elected office, he determined along the way that he’s a better fit behind the scenes, on the operational side.

“I think most people run for office because they have a desire to change their community, change the world,” Caldwell said. “What I discovered was that there are opportunities to do that elsewhere in government as well.”

In 2013, Caldwell left government – for good, he thought – to form his own consulting business and pursue an MBA at San Diego State, and he later worked for an early-stage clean technology company. But he was lured back to the civil sector when a former colleague dangled what Caldwell considered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to start and build up his own department as San Diego’s first director of economic development.

That colleague, David Graham, has since moved north to become chief innovation officer for the City of Carlsbad – opening a vacancy as deputy COO that Caldwell filled – but he has continued to follow Caldwell’s work with great admiration.

“The future of our cities and the future of our planet is tied into the work that Erik is doing,” said Graham, mentioning not only innovation but also Caldwell’s direction of San Diego’s planning and development and its aggressive climate action plan. “Simply put, Erik is making this planet a better place to live.”

Just as he learned as the mayor of “SimCity.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306