Five faculty members tell us what they see transpiring in their fields -- health, climate, law, tech and the economy -- over the next 12 months.

We're a quarter of the way through the new century, and our times have never felt so complex, contradictory and uncertain -- if not genuinely weird. We wondered: what lies in wait in the sure-to-be-fraught year ahead? We asked five UCLA experts to tell us what they foresee in 2025.

Epidemiologist Robert Kim-Farley M.P.H. '75, professor-in-residence at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, predicts a sharp learning curve for the new health administration in Washington, along with fresh (and possibly controversial) thinking on vaccines and additives in food. "I am concerned about bird flu as it continues to spread among the animal population, but feel we are more aware of such threats than before COVID-19," he says. "We could be on the cusp of a whole new range of treatments, from HIV to malaria, that have come out of the mRNA platforms created to deal with COVID. While there are setbacks -- vaping replacing smoking, for instance -- the rise of anti-obesity drugs and the creation of a more robust global market in drug manufacturing, and more freedom to both export and import cheaper pharmacy staples, are positive signs for 2025."

The Climate Crisis

UCLA climatologist Daniel Swain says there was one issue on scientific minds at the recent American Geophysical Union meeting: 2024 was maybe the second-hottest year on record. Why? Was it just the inevitable accumulation of greenhouse gases, or was it also because so many nations have now banned aerosols, which were actually cooling the planet? It's a big question for 2025, he says: "Should we geoengineer fixes, such as deploying fleets of aircraft distributing soot into the atmosphere as a coolant, similar to the effect of volcanic eruptions? Or could the unforeseen side effects be catastrophic on a global scale?" Swain, who also holds an appointment within University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, says political will to tackle these issues has collapsed, concluding: "To understate it, 2025 is going to be turbulent across the globe."

Law

There was a lot of hand-wringing during the recent presidential election about our democracy and how safe it is from being not only attacked, but vanquished. So how serious is the threat? Professor Jon Michaels of the UCLA School of Law, who issued his own stark warning about all of this in his October 2024 book Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy, remains concerned about a wholesale onslaught on the nation's judicial system, similar to recent events in Israel, Poland and Hungary. "Our presidential system could make it easier [than in those places] to undermine legal and bureaucratic protections that have already been weakened in recent years," he says. He's especially worried that the nation's 735 immigration judges will be overwhelmed by mass deportations, prompting violence and tit-for-tat responses as the traditional system of legal checks and balances unravels. "I see a very dark 2025 -- but I hope, in the long term, balance will return," he says. "Right now, I can only hope."

Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies, predicts we will end 2025 in the same myopic way we're starting it: peering into the fog generated by artificial intelligence, and trying to work out the true intentions of Big Tech. "We don't really know what their endgame is, apart from becoming the new elite," he says. "So far, governments have not proven up to the task of ensuring we are protected." At the same time, he says, there are potential revolutions in FDA trials of devices that will close the gap between the human body and AI, of which Elon Musk's Neuralink is only one. Srinivasan hopes 2025 will bring crackdowns on data hacks, especially against companies that hold our genetic information -- before the sale of our most intimate data becomes all too commonplace.

Clement Bohr, an economist at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, feels that while we are entering a period of great uncertainty, California will stand strong. "We don't know which tariffs are likely to affect trade, but China seems to be the most likely target of the new administration, which will drive up prices on a whole range of goods," he says. He notes that there are signs that both individuals and importers are getting in ahead of any tariffs, ordering consumer durables early rather than just in time for delivery. Furthermore, a mass deportation of immigrants, greater than those in the 1930s and 1950s, will greatly affect agriculture and construction, but we will probably not feel that in food prices and higher housing costs until '26 or '27.

"This is a deeply unpredictable time, comparable to the early days of COVID-19," Bohl says. "But one thing is clear: Economically, the United States is outperforming the rest of the world, including Europe and China, and the powerhouse behind that is information and data services in California. We in California are driving the world economy."