Special screening of award-winning LA Times documentary OUT OF PLAIN SIGHT

Join the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences and the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital (DCEFF) for a special screening and Q&A discussion of the award-winning documentary film, Out of Plain Sight.

"Haunting, enraging, and a vital addition to environmental storytelling."

-- Scott Z. Burns, producer of An Inconvenient Truth

From the Los Angeles Times and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Rosanna Xia, Out of Plain Sight is a cinematic exposé of an environmental disaster lurking just off the coast of Southern California.
Not far from Catalina Island, aboard one of the most-advanced research ships in the world, David Valentine discovered a corroded barrel on the seafloor that gave him chills. The full environmental horror sharpens into greater clarity once he calls Xia, who pieces together a shocking revelation: In the years after World War II, as many as half a million barrels of toxic waste had been quietly dumped into the ocean – and the consequences continue to haunt the world today.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia (director, producer) will moderate a post-screening discussion with the following scientists featured in the film:

Dr. David Valentine (UC Santa Barbara)

Dr. Alissa Deming (Pacific Marine Mammal Center)

Dr. Eunha Hoh (San Diego State University)

Dr. Lihini Aluwihare (Scripps Institution of Oceanography)

Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for her reporting on sea level rise, and her celebrated book, California Against the Sea, received the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, a gold medal from the California Book Awards, and a Great Reads from Great Places citation from the Library of Congress, among other honors. She has been praised for her investigative reporting and narrative storytelling, and her work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. Her most recent project, the feature documentary Out of Plain Sight, is a cinematic expansion of one of Xia’s most haunting environmental exposés.

David Valentine is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, where he holds the Norris Presidential Endowed Chair. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Microbiology. His research program spans the ocean and laboratory and focuses on how chemicals and microbes interact in nature. He has led more than a dozen oceanographic expeditions and dove more than 2 dozen times in the submersible Alvin.

Alissa Deming is Vice President of Conservation Medicine and Science at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, California. She is a marine mammal veterinarian with expertise in comparative oncology and virology. Her research has established California sea lions as a model for understanding the interactions between environmental contaminants, infectious diseases, and cancer biology. Sea lions off the California coast have the highest occurrence of cancer in any wildlife species, and Dr. Deming's work has connected high burdens of legacy contaminants and a cancer-causing virus, to be the cause of this cancer hotspot. Deming’s applied work underscores the role of marine mammals as a sentinel species. By integrating research and clinical medicine, these animals can serve as windows into ocean health during their time in the rehabilitation hospital. In addition to her cancer research, Dr. Deming leads multidisciplinary investigations into the impacts of harmful algal blooms, infectious diseases, fisheries interactions, and marine mammal unusual mortality events related to climate change. She collaborates widely with academic partners, NGO’s, as well as state and federal partners to inform conservation policy, management, and community awareness

Eunha Hoh is a Professor of Environmental Health at San Diego State University’s School of Public Health. She is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on emerging environmental contaminants and their impacts on human and ecosystem health. She earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Indiana University, where she studied the fate of organohalogen contaminants in the atmosphere, including the discovery of novel flame retardants in the Great Lakes region. Dr. Hoh has developed innovative non-targeted analytical methods that have led to the identification of numerous previously unrecognized pollutants, including, for the first time, more than 45 DDT-related chemicals in wildlife from the Southern California Bight. She has served as a Principal Investigator on major Oceans and Human Health research projects and contributes to advisory bodies including the California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program, the California Ocean Protection Council’s Science Advisory Team, and the federal Ocean Research Advisory Panel. Her current research focuses on ocean and human health, thirdhand smoke exposure, tobacco product waste, and microplastic pollution.

Lihini Aluwihare is a Professor in Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry at the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). She is a chemical oceanographer who studies the cycling of organic matter in the oceans using light isotope tools and chemical characterization methods. Currently, her research program is focused on developing new analytical approaches to read the messages encoded in molecules that maintain microbial life, facilitate ecosystem interactions, and contribute to long-term carbon and nutrient storage in aquatic environments. She is also interested in the distribution and cycling of anthropogenic compounds in coastal environments, particularly as a potential tracer of organic matter cycling and trophic connections. Her career in academia has been guided by a need to build a community of scholars that adequately represents the interests and experiences of the broader population. Aluwihare received a B.S. in chemistry and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography. Aluwihare arrived at SIO in 2000 and has remained there since. Aluwihare recently completed service on the NAS Decadal Survey of Ocean Sciences committee, which released its report in February 2025.

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