On Sunday evening, the show won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Scripted Variety Series—its ninth win in a row—and as senior writer on the show, Vali took home his eighth Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series, a dynastic run of critical success that he calls “humbling.” The show, which each week takes an irreverent deep dive into a broad range of issues like net neutrality, televangelism, and predatory lending, also earned Vali a prestigious Peabody Award in 2018. Fordham Magazine spoke with the 2010 Fordham College at Rose Hill grad about the role comedy plays in tackling big issues, why Oliver is so good at what he does, and, naturally, the thrills of ice climbing.     

What are some of the big differences you encountered going from a print/digital publication to working on a weekly TV show?
I think the biggest thing is that here, there’s such a heavy research element to the show. Obviously we did research at The Onion, and we wanted things to be accurate in the world of the stories, but we weren’t really consulting experts from Harvard about anything.

To give you a rundown of how we make a story, a topic is pitched and the research team will compile a document that can be 100 pages, like “I’ve talked to people at Boeing, I’ve talked to people who are experts in aviation at various universities.” And meanwhile, the footage department will compile documentaries and news reports, all sorts of footage, as well as funny clips that we could potentially use. Most stories here are a four- or five- or six-week process.

Another element I’m really interested in is that you’re writing for a specific person—a specific voice—in John Oliver. How did you get used to writing things for his particular delivery?
It was its own bit of a learning curve. But then once you know where the boundaries are and what works and what doesn’t, you can just have fun.

To John’s credit, I think he does a great job of adopting elements of our comedic voices as writers. So there are definitely jokes where he’s obviously speaking as himself, but I am injecting my comedic sensibility in there as well, and he is manifesting that. It’s a cool two-way street where we’re writing for his voice, but he is also giving us the freedom to write in our own voices and he will find his own way to perform it.

How would you describe what makes something funny coming from him?
He has a humongous comedic range, which is why I think he’s able to manifest different writers’ voices. I always write long runs with him being obsessive over weird things, where he’ll zero in on some weird esoteric thing that is only tangentially related to the topic of the show and talk about it for six minutes—where he’ll be really into weightlifting or really into horses or really into aquatic life. Those are always really fun for me. I feel like it gives us the opportunity as writers to obsess over those topics.

While it’s not necessarily focused on electoral politics, Last Week Tonight is certainly a political comedy show in some ways. What do you see as the societal role of that style of comedy?
I think everyone falls on a different spot on that map of making people laugh versus taking a more activist approach towards what you’re writing. The kind of comedy and satire that I find to be the most effective is when you’re talking about something that’s a really difficult issue, but you’re finding a moment of catharsis that everyone can collectively feel.

I don’t know if we’re going to change anyone’s mind on anything. I’m guessing that most of the people who watch this show are probably more politically aligned with us than not. But I do think if you can make them think about something in a way that they hadn’t before, that’s a success. And if you can do that while making them laugh and entertaining them—that’s what I strive to do.

One thing that I think is smart about the show is that there are often built-in calls to action—and some of those are really funny calls to action that speak to the absurdity of a situation.
Totally. And I think we like highlighting things that are maybe on the more boring side or technical side of politics—something as technical as gerrymandering or zoning. It’s cool to put a magnifying glass on things that can go under the radar but that are actually really important.

Between seasons, I’m sure there’s a lot of work being done, but presumably you have at least a little bit of a break there. How do you spend that time?
Yeah, we usually get about seven or eight weeks between seasons. It’s really nice to have a break to decompress and work on my own personal writing. And I also really like ice climbing, so I go to western Colorado and ice climb for a few weeks, which is always fun.

Oh wow, ice climbing?!
Yeah, I started getting into it around 2019. I tried it for the first time and I started getting super into it. There’s a place in southwestern Colorado called Ouray that actually has an ice climbing park. It’s a gorge that they water and they actually make ice on it. I’ve been going there for a few weeks every year for the last few years. Just getting to play in this ice wonderland for a few weeks is a nice way to decompress after the season, and then I feel like I’m rebalanced and ready to go for the new one.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

That’s what three Fordham students—in two different labs—just spent their summer doing. Working with their professors, they aimed to illuminate various aspects of the replisome, the internal complex that drives the replication of bacteria’s DNA. Their findings could eventually help create innovative antibiotics that target resistant bacteria—a global problem they all cited when applying to the University for their funded summer research.

“It is a very major public health issue,” said one of the students, Sinwoo Hong, noting the “discovery void” within the field of antibiotics that has prompted broad concern.

An Evolving Public Health Threat

Nearly 5 million deaths annually are related to bacteria that have evolved to thwart existing antibiotics, a problem mainly driven by the antibiotics’ misuse and overuse, according to the World Health Organization. The need for new approaches has scientists looking beyond current antibiotics, many of which are designed to disrupt the formation of proteins or the cell wall in an individual bacterium.

One less-explored area? The interplay of proteins that kicks into gear when bacteria replicate their DNA, which “in general is not a major target for current antibiotics,” said Nicholas Sawyer, Ph.D., assistant professor in the chemistry and biochemistry department and research mentor for one of the students.

Hong, a senior biological sciences major on the pre-med track, learned about the problem of antibiotic resistance in one of her classes and was intrigued by the tools available in on-campus labs for examining bacteria. This summer, with a grant from Fordham College at Rose Hill’s summer research program, she worked with Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., assistant professor in the chemistry and biochemistry department, on a multiyear project focused on the replisome in Bacillus subtilis, or B. subtilis, a bacterium related to a number of human pathogens.

Moving the Science Forward

Using fluorescence microscopy in a lab at the Rose Hill campus, Hong studied various parts of the replisome and pinpointed the impact of amino acid mutations on bacterial DNA replication.

Another student working with Thrall on B. subtilis in the summer research program, sophomore chemistry major Katrin Klassen, took a different approach—in a project supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, she focused on a protein involved in a replication process that often produces DNA mutations, one way that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria emerge.

Thrall and Sawyer are incorporating the work by Hong and another student, Ashley Clemente, into a paper on the synthesis of new DNA, the focus of Thrall’s lab for the past few years. “We’re kind of taking the basic science approach of just learning how this molecular machine functions, and then that may reveal some key interactions that can be specifically targeted,” said Thrall.

She noted another often-cited solution to antibiotic resistance—“we need to use antibiotics judiciously, not for routine use in agriculture or using them to treat viruses.”

In Sawyer’s lab, Clemente, a junior chemistry major whose summer research was supported by Fordham’s Clare Booth Luce program for women in the sciences, experimented with peptides that could inhibit one of the key interactions in the replisome of E. coli. She’s driven by a love for putting chemistry concepts into practice—“When you actually see it in action, it’s truly amazing,” she said.

Serving the Greater Good

Over the summer, Klassen and the other students grew as scientists—“I would not be able to do everything that I’m able to do now without this dedicated time to work on a lot of different experiments,” she said.

Hong particularly enjoyed seeing her work adding to that of past Fordham student researchers. “Seeing all those data compiled and then just looking at the results in the end, it’s very rewarding.”

Clemente drew inspiration from her research’s possible impact. “I love seeing how chemistry can actually be applied,” she said, “and how it can actually help people, and how it can be used for the greater good.”

How tiny? They’re measured in nanometers, which is one-billionth of a meter. Like the width of a marble compared to the width of the Earth.

By going that small, Koenigsmann and his students have innovated in the areas of biomedical sensors and sustainable energy technology. Now his lab has a new project: scrubbing the air clean of viruses like the one that causes COVID-19.

Preventing Cases of COVID-19

Koenigsmann sees a way to improve on a type of indoor air purifier—activated by ultraviolet light—that destroys particles of coronavirus and other viruses but can also create tiny amounts of toxic byproducts under certain conditions.

Such devices have been around for decades, and were used in hospitals to remove tuberculosis from the air, “so it’s a proven technology,” said Koenigsmann, an associate professor in the chemistry department. “It’s just [that] as it becomes scaled up and more broadly used, and in environments where the air is not tested as regularly, that’s where you can run into problems.”

He and his team are working on new technology that could break down viruses without releasing toxins, which could lead to new types of purifiers that destroy viruses on a greater scale. On a recent summer day, in a lab at the Rose Hill campus, they were getting ready to run experiments using ductwork and a filter containing new types of nanoparticles.

The lab also includes a high-temperature reaction chamber and other tech for making the nanoparticles themselves—indispensable because they’re so small.

Surface Appeal

Koenigsmann, an associate professor in the chemistry department, has long been fascinated with “being able to tune fundamental physical properties” of a substance by changing its size or other aspects.

Break a substance down into smaller units, he explains, and suddenly it’s a lot better at reacting with things, since a lot of small particles will have more total surface area than a few large ones.

How much more? If you’re turning something into nanoparticles, one square meter per gram could become hundreds of square meters per gram. “For the same amount of mass, you gain a tremendous amount of surface area,” he said.

And more surface area means more reactions. For instance, a battery made from nanoparticles offers vastly more internal surface area for conducting an electric current. And air purifiers operating on the same principle offer more surface area for reacting with viruses and churning them up.

Filtering Coronavirus

In some of today’s air purifiers, Koenigsmann said, titanium dioxide chews up a virus particle in a chemical reaction that yields carbon dioxide when it runs its course—but formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, or other toxins when it doesn’t.

To address this problem, Koenigsmann and his team are working on new types of nanomaterials that, because of their size and composition, will fully break down virus particles, giving off only carbon dioxide and opening the door to purifiers that are safe to use more widely.

His undergraduate students contribute a lot to the project—“They’ll tell you things that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself,” he said. “I’m actually learning as my students learn.”

The uses for nanotech seem endless, Koenigsmann said. “The ability to tune things like conductivity, color, catalytic activity, just by making the same material one shape or one size versus another [has] so many possible applications,” he said.

Photos by Taylor Ha

Thirty-three cadets officially began their military leadership careers on May 17 at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. At the 94th commissioning ceremony for Fordham’s Army and Navy ROTC program, speakers praised this year’s cadets for all they had accomplished so far while also describing what’s required of those who lead America’s soldiers and sailors.

For one thing, the guest speaker said, there are no days off.

“You are leaders 24/7, 365,” said Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commanding general of the U.S. Army Cyber Command, at the ceremony held at the University Church. “Lead by example. … You should hold yourself to a higher standard, because trust me, soldiers notice everything their leaders do.”

She conferred several other lessons gleaned from her 36-year career: Get to know your troops. Listen to noncommissioned officers; they’ll tell you what you need to hear. When you inevitably make a mistake, “get over it, fast,” and learn from it. Enjoy yourselves, as hard as it may be sometimes, and serve with passion and zest. Set high standards, communicate them clearly, and hold your service members accountable.

“At the end of the day, soldiers want to be part of a winning team, and they want a leader they trust and respect,” Barrett said.

Love-Driven Leadership

She then administered the oath of office to the cadets, who came from several New York-area universities including Fordham, which was to hold its University-wide commencement the next day. Most cadets were bound for the Army, the Army Reserve, and Army National Guard. One was commissioned in the Navy and one in the Marine Corps. One cadet, Miguel Angel-Sandoval, was an Army enlistee who would take part in a Yellow Ribbon ceremony honoring Fordham’s student veterans later that day.

Lt. Col. Paul Tanghe, Ph.D., professor of military science and the officer in charge of the Army ROTC program, noted the diversity of the cadets: they comprised 24 ethnicities and hailed from 11 states as well as countries as far away as South Korea and Senegal. And 40% were multilingual, speaking a total of 13 languages, Tanghe said in his remarks.

He lauded the cadets for demonstrating the love-driven leadership exhorted by two of their recent class dinner speakers, not to mention St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, and legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, FCRH ’37.

“Love-driven leadership is how great officers lead, it’s how the Jesuits educate, it’s why ROTC has the home and the partnership that we have here at Fordham,” Tanghe said.

Cadets received various awards and honors, including the President’s Saber, presented to Brian T. Inguanti, a member of Fordham College at Rose Hill’s Class of 2024 who was headed for the Army Corps of Engineers. The Rev. Joseph M. McShane Award for Excellence in Faculty Support to ROTC was presented to Matthew Butler, PCS ’17, senior director of military and veterans’ services at Fordham.

In her own address, Fordham’s president, Tania Tetlow, noted the essential role played by the cadets’ family members gathered in the University Church.

“You have raised, supported, challenged, inspired these extraordinary men and women graduating here today,” she said. “You have rooted them in service, you imbued them with courage, and so we are so grateful for you this morning.” 

On April 28, the Fordham community celebrated Spring Weekend with a “Color Run” across the Rose Hill campus.

Participants were splashed with colorful nontoxic powder as they ran, walked, jogged, and sprinted pass different checkpoints in the 5k run. The event was sponsored by Fordham’s Achieving Change Together (ACT) and the United Student Government.