On behalf of the entire UCI community, welcome to the Irvine campus.
On behalf of the entire UCI community, welcome to the Irvine campus.
It's the beginning of a new century and a new world of intellectual opportunity for you as students. You've arrived at UCI as the University is embarking on a period of expansion, both in size and academic programs. We anticipate a steady rise in enrollments over the next decade as the State's college-age population increases. At the same time, UCI's reputation for innovation and high academic standards is attracting more of the nation's brightest students and faculty. UCI students compete successfully for the most coveted scholarships and fellowships. Their competitive edge comes from being at a research university where involvement in the intense creativity of the research process often begins during the undergraduate years.
UCI now is regarded as one of the top public universities in the country. And many of our programs have achieved standing with those of the best private universities. Our strong faculty are the key. Two of UCI's founding faculty have received Nobel Prizes. Many others have attained worldwide recognition for their research, while gaining equal respect on campus for their ability to engage students in the excitement of learning. Faculty also are responsible for UCI's strengths in virtually every discipline from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, to technology and management.
Increasingly, society and the workplace demand knowledge that crosses traditional boundaries. So we have developed programs that combine studies such as art and technology, medicine and engineering, ecology and the social sciences, business and computer sciences, all designed to prepare students for roles as citizens and scholars in the new century.
UCI's partnerships with the fast-growing Orange County community also create incomparable opportunities for our students. They include work experience in a dynamic international marketplace, learning as you serve the community through the campus' outreach and public service groups, or simply benefiting from the advice of UCI alumni and leaders from every area of society.
Whether you are a graduate or undergraduate student, UCI offers a place to pursue whatever course you have in mind for your future, or to change that course should you decide to explore other educational goals. I look forward to seeing you on campus, and to sharing these next few years in your lifetime of learning.
Sincerely,
Ralph J. Cicerone
Chancellor
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Teaching, 1999-2000
Professor of Philosophy
The foundational text of Western philosophy is the Platonic corpus, which presents its readers with a curious anomaly. The author of this text is Plato, but the text consists of dialogues, in which the main interlocutor is most often Socrates, who was Plato's teacher and who himself wrote nothing. So the question arises: when we read a dialogue of Plato, whose views are we being presented with? More specifically, do those views belong to Socrates, and Plato is just reporting on them; or is it rather that the views are Plato's, and Socrates is a mere spokesperson for them?
Scholars have debated this question for centuries, and the consensus is that the answer varies for different dialogues: early on, Plato was largely reporting conversations he had heard; later, he was making up conversations and using the figure of Socrates to expound his own philosophy. There is a lot of good sense to this reading, but there is also a problem with it: if we follow it too strictly, we tend to forget that the original question was ever there and we no longer pay attention to the crucial fact that, at the beginning of our philosophical reflection, we encounter this two-headed monster, this Socrates/Plato so hard to parse out, this difficulty in attributing credit. And we should not forget any of that, because it is telling us something of great significance.
It tells us that philosophy is best thought of not as the private possession of an individual but as the evolving product of a communal activity; hence that when philosophy "happens" it may be hard to say who made it happen. Have you ever had a really meaningful conversation with a group of friends, where important matters of life and death suddenly appeared in a new light, and at the end everyone felt as if they understood things better, as if they were more attuned with themselves? And did you try, after having that experience, to make some specific member of the group the author of it? Wouldn't you have thought that anyone who did that would be doing an injustice to the event, because it was the whole group together that generated the experience?
I believe that philosophy is best done in conversation. Not casual conversation, by any means, but rather a passionate and informed one--where the interlocutors care enough about the subject to want to go as deep as possible into it, for as long as it takes. In a university, teaching offers a wonderful opportunity to develop this kind of conversation: teaching at all levels, because even in the most introductory courses the students, if they are passionate enough and seriously want to become informed, often end up asking the most important questions--those which scholars might consider too basic to worry about. That is why I just don't know where my teaching ends and my "research" begins: some of my best ideas I had in the classroom, and even when I am not there ideas always arise in an imaginary conversation with someone I am trying to relate to--with a companion in the common search for truth. I consider myself fortunate to have so many bright and engaged young people around me, with whom to conduct this search.
Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Distinguished University Service Award, 1999
Professor Emeritus of Criminology, Law and Society
In referring to career development among faculty members in major research universities such as the University of California, Irvine, the expression "publish or perish" is occasionally used. While there are obvious disparaging implications in that usage, the expression does summarize, though crudely, the basic reason why education at a major research university is so persistently sought by the most promising graduates of secondary schools.
UCI and the other research universities are, in short, the hubs of creative activity in the United States; reflective of that condition, the University of California is often referred to as the research arm of the State. The leaders in that creative activity are of course the professors in their capacities as the leading investigators of research projects. Such projects may result in breaking the genetic code for susceptibility to a certain disease, providing a new understanding of Shakespeare and his plays, discovering a planet resembling Earth in a distant galaxy, or developing the concept of a new approach to urban transit. Indeed, hardly a day passes without appearance in the national media of an important new discovery at a university in the biological sciences, the social sciences, the physical sciences, medicine, or the humanities. One consequence of that level of activity is the award of many honors to faculty members, as was the case in the award of the Nobel Prize to two physical scientists at UCI.
Returning to the opening comment, it is expected that faculty members at places like UCI will perform creatively, and publish the results of that creativity. If not, they will not make the grade--and thus perish in an academic sense. The gain for students attending those universities is that they learn from, and interact with, the most innovative, creative minds in the world, and have the opportunities to work with them on their research projects.
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 1999-2000
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
My research and teaching activities at UCI are inexorably intertwined creating an environment that is rewarding on both personal and professional levels. My teaching techniques are, in many ways, motivated by my experiences as a student and observations I have made during my research endeavors. As an undergraduate I endured many days of lecture after lecture, yet was met with the frank realization that there was no way in which I could absorb all of the material presented. When I entered medical school, I was quickly placed in a similar environment--lecture after lecture. However, there was much discussion at the time of a learning technique called Problem-based Learning (PBL). The explosion of biological, pharmacological, and medical knowledge provided the motivation for medical schools to consider PLB techniques--the "formal" education a medical student receives will be essentially obsolete in a decade. Thus, perhaps the most important skill for physicians to have is the ability to search out information and solve a problem on their own. This is the essence of PBL--a student learns in the context of solving problems and thus gains a factual database of knowledge along the way.
I use PBL to varying degrees in my courses; the best example is in my "Heat and Mass Transfer" course when I have the students break into teams of four and design a heat exchanger just like a practicing chemical engineer might. The caveat is that I never lecture in class on this topic. This is, at first, very scary for the students, but then exciting and stimulating as they began their journey of self-directed learning. As this process has evolved over the last four years, I have come to appreciate that this project is exactly what I do in my research endeavors. I become interested in a problem and invariably I have never had a lecture on this material, or more importantly, if I did I cannot remember any of the material. Thus, I constantly find myself searching for information until I can adequately understand the new problem.
I believe now that a combination of didactic lectures with PBL techniques is perhaps the most effective way to learn. My greatest challenge now in teaching is to develop PBL techniques in larger classroom settings where small groups are difficult to manage.
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 1999-2000
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and Political Science
My research and teaching focus on the role of race in American society. Generally speaking, I am interested in understanding and explaining how racial categories have been used to institute and perpetuate political, economic, and social inequalities from before the founding of the nation to the present. I also study how subordinated racial groups have sought empowerment via social movements.
Teaching about race at the undergraduate level is both difficult and exciting. It is difficult because race is one of those topics that we all think we know something about. Thus students often come into the classroom with fixed, received opinions on race. They also feel quite a personal investment in these beliefs: their identity and sense of place in the world are in part derived from them. Teaching about race is exciting for the same reasons. It is precisely because students feel so strongly about race and think that they "know" it that they experience new ways of looking at race with exhilaration.
My aim in all of my teaching is to help students to see things in a new light and to rethink what they thought they knew. They can then take their newly developed faculty of critical thinking and apply it to other areas of learning and life. In my view, undergraduate education is meant not only to prepare students for careers but to stimulate them to think about their lives and the world around them.
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Research, 1999-2000
UCI Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Sciences and Biological Sciences
In college, at the University of Michigan, I wanted to be a scientist, but I didn't know which branch of science, so I majored in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and biology. Then I did a brief stint in biophysics before discovering physiological psychology and, at last, perceptual and cognitive psychology. I received my Ph.D. from Harvard in 1959 for a thesis on short-term memory. My goal then, as now, was to apply the quantitative and theoretical methods of the hard sciences to the analysis of cognitive processes.
My research has dealt with problems in short-term memory, attention, and perception. Motion perception is a recent example. In the 1950s, Werner Reichardt, studying insect vision, formulated the first plausible computational theory of motion perception. In the 1980s, Jan van Santen and I were able to modify this theory for human vision, and to show that it made extremely accurate predictions of human performance. The advantage of a computational theory is that one can derive predictions of when it is expected to fail. Charlie Chubb and I used computers to create stimuli that would be completely ambiguous to a Reichardt computation but in which humans easily perceived motion correctly. We formulated a theory of a "second-order" motion system that could extract these kinds of motion. Subsequently, because the theory was computational, Zhong-Lin Lu and I were able to generate motion stimuli that humans perceived correctly but for which both the Reichardt (now called first-order) and second-order computations failed, implying a third-order motion system. By testing human observers with computer-generated stimuli, we and others have been able to characterize each of these three motion systems. The same methods have enabled neurologists to identify brain areas critical for the perception of first- and second-order motion; the brain areas associated with third-order motion have yet to be identified.
I discovered early that collaborative research is the most fun, and my current research continues these themes in vision and attention with student, postdoctoral, and faculty colleagues.
The UCI Human Information Processing Laboratory, where these projects are carried out, offers computer facilities for almost any project in perception or cognition. Students learn about cognitive science and also acquire facility with computer systems, with complex, modern experimental techniques, and with methods of modeling and formal theory construction to develop the diverse technical skills they need to work at the forefront of knowledge.
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 1999-2000
Associate Professor of Sociology
When UCI was founded in the 1960s, the world was a very different place from the one we are living in now. The world's population was only 60 percent of its current size, and of those who were alive at that time, close to 40 percent were living under one form or another of the socialist or communist political and economic systems. The world 35 years ago was also filled with turbulent revolutions and far-reaching social changes. The United States, for instance, was witnessing a civil rights movement to end racial inequality at home, and at the same time, a costly war in Vietnam aimed to contain communism abroad. Socialist countries, from Czechoslovakia to China, were also looking for ways to deal with the political and economic problems that surfaced under socialism. Student demonstrations and Red Guards filled the streets from Prague to Beijing.
At the turn of the new century, the world is 40 percent larger (in the number of people) and the socialist planned economic system has by and large become a part of the twentieth century history. But the world is no less interesting to live in than in the 1960s, when UCI was born. Rapid expansion of the world's population, mostly in economically poor countries, raises a large number of issues, from resource utilization and distribution, new waves of international migration and urbanization, to environmental degradation and global warming. As the world population grows, the world itself also becomes more compact, as we are compelled to be in closer contact with one another. This compactness is made even more apparent with the arrival of the Internet.
The world is nevertheless still very divided. The end of the Cold War has not resulted in only peace and prosperity as some had hoped. New economic crises have occurred, and ethnic cleansing wars and hatred have been waged. The transition away from socialism in places like Russia has led to extreme poverty, rampant crime, and even shortening of human lives at the national level. Inequalities in living conditions and in economic and political power, both internationally and nationally, have not narrowed. On the contrary, there are signs to show that they are on the rise.
To be a student or a professor gives one the opportunity to learn and to understand the world we are living in. And UC Irvine is especially an increasingly attractive place to conduct such learning. UCI not only has a ethnically diverse student body who contribute their own experiences to the learning process on a day-to-day basis, but has also made significant investments recently in expanding the international component of the curriculum. In the past three years alone, UCI has added an undergraduate major in International Studies and a minor in Asian Studies, and has established a Center for Asian Studies, as well as an M. A. program in Demographic and Social Analysis, to name only a few of the new international components that I am personally involved with. UCI is therefore quickly becoming a major institution for those who want to learn about this larger, more compact, and at the same time, more divided new world.
