[2] His father and uncle owned Mountain Dairies, a retail/wholesale distributor that served many of the hotels and camps that populated Catskill region of New York.
[6] According to Block, “The center raised the national visibility of the University in biological and medical research, and gave us reputational leverage in the U.S. as well as in Europe and Japan...
[11] He has been widely criticized for the 2022 suspension of highly awarded professor of ecology Priyanga Amarasekare without documentation, viewed as retaliation for her calls for reform of a culture of discrimination at UCLA.
[12] In his inaugural address at UCLA, Block shared that his top priorities are to advance academic excellence, financial stability, diversity and civic engagement.
[14] Under Block's leadership, UCLA has seen an increase in student diversity on campus thanks to innovative efforts to recruit in diverse communities, and in 2015, UCLA reached pre-California Proposition 209 levels, enrolling 279 African American freshmen, on par with the African American share of California public high school graduates.
[23] To address reductions in state funding and advance his priorities, Block is leading the largest fundraising campaign by a public university, aiming to raise $4.2 billion to support student scholarships and fellowships, research projects and new construction on campus in honor of UCLA's centennial in 2019.
[26] On May 1, violent clashes were reported on the UCLA campus in which groups of counter-demonstrators supporting Israel attacked pro-Palestinian protesters.
The clashes began shortly after Block declared that the pro-Palestinian encampment was "unlawful" and students who remained would face disciplinary action.
[58] Ultimately, opponents of Block failed to force him to resign, as neither censure nor a vote of no confidence passed in the UCLA Academic Senate on May 16, 2024.
In 1984, Block's students conducted a continuous 74-hour intracellular recording in constant darkness that demonstrated that basal retinal neurons (BRN) in the Bulla eye exhibit clear circadian rhythms.
This research was expanded several years later by a breakthrough study published in Science in which Stephan Michel and others working in Block's laboratory demonstrated that circadian rhythms in BRN membrane conductance could persist spontaneously in isolated BRNs.
BRNs in isolation demonstrated the same patterns shown in Block's previous work in which membrane conductance decreased at dawn and increased at dusk.
Block and colleagues hypothesized that ion movement across cell membranes plays a role in the generation of circadian rhythms.
Block has also studied the effect that aging has on the circadian system, collaborating with other leading chronobiologists including Michael Menaker.
In 2006, Block observed that jetlag significantly increased the death rate in older mice, which highlights the medical importance of understanding the aging process of the circadian system.