Our California Portfolio

The largest population of ASU alumni outside of Arizona live in California. Alumni chapters located throughout the most populated metropolitan areas in the state keep Sun Devils connected to their alma mater through many networking opportunities and events. ASU began establishing Leadership Councils in California (Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego), comprised of C-suite level alums, who help advance the ASU charter as well as offer opportunities for alumni engagement and employment, and student recruitment.

With more than 170 alumni chapters worldwide, you can stay connected to ASU, no matter where you are! Each regional chapter is run by alumni volunteers with the assistance of the ASU Alumni Association. ASU Alumni Chapters host game watching parties, networking mixers, community volunteer projects and scholarship fundraising to show their Maroon & Gold spirit. If you are looking to take advantage of opportunities to get together, meet alumni, network, rekindle old friendships and, most importantly, promote our alma mater and have fun, reach out to your local ASU Alumni Chapter to learn more. There are four chapters in California – Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and Northern California Chapter.

Los Angeles chapter 

Northern California chapter

Orange County chapter

San Diego chapter

ASU Alumni Chapters throughout California host “Sun Devil Send-Offs” each summer to meet and welcome incoming families and students to ASU. Somewhere between a pep rally and a maroon-and-gold lovefest, send-offs help ease the transition to college, whether you’re an incoming freshman, international student or transfer.

ASU Prep Digital is ASU’s kindergarten through twelfth grade platform of assets that serves both individual learners, as well as schools with high-quality, engaging, rigorous learning journeys and technical infrastructure to support schools in the transition to blended, hybrid and online learning. In California, ASU Prep Digital has responded to the health crisis with large scale support for LA County school districts that are seeking to collaboratively create resilient learning continuity plans. ASU Prep Digital is now serving 23,000 California students taking over 310,000 course enrollments. The LA County districts leveraging the innovation of ASU are: Pasadena Unified, Bellflower, El Segundo, Wiseburn, Inner City Ed Foundation, Inglewood. ASU Prep Digital also trained 300 teachers through a train the trainer model at the Arch Diocese of LA to upskill classroom teachers to be digital teachers.

Competition extends beyond Sun Devil Stadium for Sun Devil Athletics through sporting events throughout California. ASU teams compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level as part of the Pac-12 Conference, along with UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley and Stanford University. Sun Devil Athletics is comprised of two dozen men and women’s sports and more than 650 student-athletes who compete with their California counterparts in Arizona and California.

NOTE: In response to COVID-19 concerns to protect the health of our athletes and communities, athletic competitions are currently running on modified schedules as listed below. Please check back for further updates.

ASU Academic Alliances works with California community colleges to facilitate solutions for student success and achieve partnership outcomes. The Universal Articulation partnership model continually strives to create strategies and make technological advancements to support students on their college journey towards completing their bachelor's degree.

Our work with California community colleges gives students access to ASU's transfer tools to help create a seamless transition to ASU. Academic alignment, partner support, and a streamlined transfer experience are services delivered to assist California students and the staff and faculty that support them.

ASU has partnered with all 116 California community colleges to deliver over 400 articulated guided pathways into ASU on campus and online degrees. The California community colleges MyPath2ASU™ transfer experience helps students be successful in their education journey. Learn more about our pathway solutions for California community colleges.

ASU has become a California community college students' top out-of-state choice because of its reputation as a convenient, high-quality option for higher education. Learn more about ASU Academic Alliances partnerships.

As part of our Charter, ASU assumes responsibility for the economic well-being of the communities we serve. To that extent, we’ve joined local business councils in an effort to advance workforce development and education policy. Through those agencies we partner with local business leaders who share in our values and believe in our mission to advance research and discovery of public value.

Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation

Los Angeles County Business Federation

Central City Association of Los Angeles

Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce

ASU’s Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions has partnered with Heart of Los Angeles, a non-profit organization empowering underserved youth to strengthen their communities through free programs in academics, arts and athletics. With a shared vision for public service and community solutions, Watts College strives to build a pathway to college for HOLA students. 

SummerUP program scholarships
Commencing in 2020, Watts College will sponsor four HOLA students per year (sophomores, juniors or seniors) with scholarships to attend “SummerUP,” a camp where students are mentored on college-readiness and participate in classroom learning. Students stay in the dorms at ASU’s idyllic West campus. During the day, they participate in a Watts College curriculum, and in the evening, they learn about becoming more competitive college applicants, writing personal statements, using metacognition to succeed in high school and beyond, and learning to thrive at ASU and Barrett, the Honors College.

Campus visits
Watts College will host HOLA’s Southwest Airlines pre-alumni cohort at the ASU downtown Phoenix campus annually in the spring for an overnight campus visit to get a taste of college life and learn about applying to college. Additional visits could be arranged for HOLA students interested in visual or performance art at ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

The NASA Infiniscope project was developed by the Center for Education Through eXploration in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration as a virtual platform to connect teachers and students with the cutting edge of space exploration. The education portal promotes learning by connecting classrooms to digital simulations, virtual field trips and feedback from experts at NASA.

In an effort to educate more STEM learners across the country, in summer 2019, ASU partnered with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Local District East to offer educators free access to Infiniscope’s online materials and lesson plans for its more than 100,000 students, who mostly come from urban Hispanic and African-American communities.

ASU and The Rise Fund, a global impact investing fund managed by TPG, collaborated to launch InStride, a public benefit company designed to achieve significant social impact through partnerships with employers to provide education opportunities for employees. ASU’s successful relationships with innovative companies such as Starbucks and Uber, served as the catalyst for the new enterprise. Based in Los Angeles, InStride works with partners to design and deliver strategic enterprise education programs for their employers to earn career-boosting degrees, credentials and skills in collaboration with ASU and other leading universities.

ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) regularly teams up with the leading experts at NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, collaborating on cutting edge projects for the next era of space exploration. Through SESE’s interdisciplinary work, ASU, NASA and JPL and have launched a variety of joint missions, including: 

Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) is located on NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter and is responsible for capturing the first global image map of the Martian planet and was used in deciding where to send Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. 

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) launched in August 2005 to study the planet’s history of water and is equipped with three ASU instruments: Mars Color Imager (MARCI), Context Camera (CTX) and Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Rover Curiosity is equipped with ASU’s Mast Camera instrument which has helped NASA document the Red Planet through color imaging since August 2012, when the rover landed in the Gale Crater.

ASU’s Mastcam-Z is mounted on NASA's Mars 2020 Rover Perseverance, which is traveling through space and scheduled to arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021. The camera will be used to snap 3D pictures and video, while the rover collects samples at Jezero Crater, a region of Mars where the ancient environment may have been favorable for microbial life.

Upcoming Launches:

August 2022
ASU’s multispectral imager will be used in a first-of-its-kind NASA mission to the metal asteroid Psyche, which is orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. During the Psyche Mission, which will be managed and operated by JPL, the cameras will snap high-resolution images of the asteroid’s geological, compositional and topographical properties. The spacecraft is set to arrive at the asteroid in January 2026. 

SkySong Innovations works with ASU researchers and student entrepreneurs to protect and commercialize the intellectual property they create. The ASU California Center in Santa Monica is the SoCal hub for Skysong Innovation’s entrepreneurial activities, providing access to ASU intellectual property and start ups and facilitating important connections with the investment community.

The Milken Institute ranks ASU #6 in tech transfer among universities without a medical school. ASU is also in the top 10 list of U.S. Patents Issued by the National Academy of Inventors and IP Owners Association.

Southern California’s innovation ecosystem has welcomed SkySong Innovations. In 2018, ASU became the only non-local university member of the Allicance for SoCal Innovations. Other partners include the Los Angeles Venture Association, LA Biocom,  StartEngine, Amplify LA, Tech Coast Angels and the Founder Institute.

SkySong Innovations has helped launch more than 160 new spinout companies from ASU, which together have attracted almost a billion dollars in investments.

SkySong Innovation Startups in California include:

• SMALLLab Learning
• Indie Financials LLC
• Charlot Biosciences, Inc. 
• Studio Biotheraputics, Inc.
• Recognition Analytix, LLC
• Sapphire Biotech
• AcureX

Founded in Los Angeles in 2003, Zócalo Public Square is an ASU Knowledge Enterprise. Zócalo Public Square connects people to ideas and to each other by examining essential questions in an accessible, broad-minded, and democratic spirit. At a time when our country’s public sphere and our global digital conversation have become ever more polarized and segregated, Zócalo seeks to create a welcoming intellectual space and engage a new and diverse generation in the public square. We pursue our mission by convening events and by publishing ideas journalism.