FROM THE CHANCELLOR

Welcome to the Irvine campus and to a new world of intellectual opportunity for you as a student. You've arrived as the University is expanding both in size and academic programs. Enrollments are rising as the State's college-age population increases during this decade. 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 is regarded as one of the finest 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 growing 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 they 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

UCI ACADEMIC SENATE DISTINGUISHED FACULTY

SHARON B. BLOCK
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 2002-03
Assistant Professor of History

My high school history teacher told us that secret commissions ran the world, that oppressed peoples could not handle freedom, and that large-scale political movements were all rich men's conspiracies. Though I have long since rejected his political ideology, this teacher single-handedly turned me into a historian. He showed me that history was less about memorization and more about the thrill of discovery. Historical events didn't live in textbooks, they lived in the mind of the historian. He gave me the heady power to rewrite history.

In my first year at the University of Pennsylvania, I decided to undertake a four-year combined M.A./B.A. in history. I admit I have trouble embracing anything halfway: I completed the major in my sophomore year, and then fulfilled my science requirement with a course on the "History of the Dinosaurs." I spent a year at Oxford University so I could learn about early modern England as background for my specialization in colonial America. Five years later, I received my Ph.D. from Princeton University. From there, I spent two years as a National Endowment for the Humanities postdoc at the Institute of Early American History in Williamsburg, Virginia, and another two years as an assistant professor at the University of Iowa before heading to the sunnier climate here at UC Irvine.

Were I not an academic, I sometimes think I'd like to be a detective (yes, I read too many mystery novels). I love the thrill of the chase, despite the trips to obscure archives and the eyestrain from illegible documents. When I find the piece of evidence that solves an intellectual puzzle, I'm dancing for days. Being a historian is, however, also learning to live with ambiguities. My specialization, the history of sexuality, regularly leaves me with more questions than answers.

My current research focuses on sexual coercion in colonial America. By distinguishing the crime of rape from the coercion of sex, I show that men coerced sex far more often than scattered rape prosecutions suggest. Social and economic power underwrote sexual power, both in the act itself and in a community's reaction to that act. Early Americans reinforced existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies by viewing rape as a transgressive social intercourse. In opposition to modern notions that patriarchy is a cause of rape, for early Americans, a properly ordered patriarchy was the solution to rape.

As a feminist, I am particularly interested in analyzing the historical (and ongoing) oppression of women. I want my students to see the ways that power has been historically used against various groups, and I hope that the skills they gain in my class reverberate long after they've forgotten the details of eighteenth-century history. I teach out of the belief that history matters in the present and for the future. Sometimes we can see uncomfortable truths in the distant past that we are loath to recognize in our own society. Once students learn to identify historical power dynamics, they may be more likely to make connections to social and institutional inequities in the present.

My high school history teacher probably would not be impressed with the kind of history I do. I'm interested less in political rule and more in the ways that cultural ideologies related to structural forms. Regardless, I am humbled by the legacy he left me, and try to show future generations that their perspective matters: they can shape the histories that have yet to be written.

PENELOPE MADDY
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Research, 2002-03
UCI Chancellor's Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and of Mathematics

My interest in mathematics was first peaked by the word problems of high school algebra; I was impressed that definite answers could be squeezed out of such silly-sounding partial information by the simple trick of writing down a few equations. But I was truly amazed when I learned, in a National Science Foundation summer program, that solid mathematical proofs could be given for the likes of 2+2=4! The final straw was the realization that the same fundamental assumptions or axioms that made those elementary proofs possible were enough to prove every known theorem of mathematics, but that they were not enough to prove or disprove a simple statement about sets of points in space called the "Continuum Hypothesis." The CH has to be either true or false, or so it seemed, but the most powerful tools of mathematics couldn't give us an answer!

I was soon off to UC Berkeley, where a group of fine mathematicians was actively engaged in the search for new axioms that might settle the CH. It was a heady time for all of us in the logic group there, but I soon found myself asking questions in class that were not regarded as properly mathematical: e.g., that's a beautiful theorem, but what's the motivation behind the new axiom from which it's derived? What justification do we have for adding it to our list of fundamental assumptions?

By midway through graduate school, my halting transition from mathematics to philosophy was complete. My project for years was to give sense to the pursuit of an answer to the CH by defending a version of realism: there is an objective world of mathematical objects in which mathematical claims are either true or false, regardless of whether or not we are able to tell which. Eventually, I found myself unable to maintain my faith in one of the widely accepted philosophical arguments that underpinned this realism--the idea that mathematical objects must exist because of the nature of their role in applications--and I began to develop an alternative approach I now call "naturalism." Work in this area has led me into wider issues in philosophy of science and philosophy of logic. While we still have no answer to the CH, I imagine I have a better idea of what an answer would look like, and I keep a fond amateur's eye on exciting new developments in the mathematics.

LARRY E. OVERMAN
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Research, 2002-03
UCI Distinguished Professor of Chemistry

Larry Overman was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1943 and raised in Hammond, Indiana. He obtained a B.A. degree from Earlham College in 1965 and completed his doctoral dissertation in 1969 with Professor Howard W. Whitlock,Jr. at the University of Wisconsin. After a NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Ronald Breslow at Columbia University, he joined the faculty at UC Irvine in 1971 and served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry from 1990-93.

Professor Overman's research interests center on the invention of new reactions and strategies in organic synthesis and the total synthesis of natural products and their congeners. Early in his career, Professor Overman invented a broadly useful method for preparing allylic nitrogen compounds from readily available allylic alcohols. Professor Overman and his co-workers have developed a suite of cyclization reactions that create new heterocyclic and carbocyclic rings while controlling stereochemistry to an exceptional degree. One of these, the aza-Cope-Mannich rearrangement, has served as the cornerstone of total syntheses of more than a dozen alkaloids, highlighted by the first asymmetric total synthesis of strychnine. Professor Overman pioneered in the use of intramolecular insertion reactions of organopalladium intermediates for assembling complex polycyclic molecules, particularly those containing congested quaternary carbon centers. Using synthesis strategies developed largely in his laboratory, Professor Overman's group has completed total syntheses of more than 80 structurally complex natural products.

Professor Overman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the recipient of numerous scientific awards and special lectureships. Additionally, he is Editor-in-Chief of Organic Reactions, is a member of several editorial consulting and advisory boards, and is a member of the board of directors and scientific advisory board for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. At UC Irvine he has received the School of Physical Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award and the Alumni Association Distinguished Research Award.

MARK P. PETRACCA
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Teaching, 2002-03
Associate Professor of Political Science

Politics matters. Political culture, philosophy, and ideas, the design of political institutions, and the nature of civic engagement have consequences for the opportunities and constraints we face throughout life. This is particularly so in a democratic regime where individual choice is most extensive, but where individuals are also fundamentally responsible for the survival and prosperity of a regime type which aspires to optimize liberty balanced delicately against human desires for equality.

As a political scientist I aspire to conduct research relevant to the nature of democracy; as a teacher I try to inspire students to think critically about and engage in that democratic experiment; and as a citizen I attempt to model an active life of civic engagement worthy of emulation.

Growing up in Quincy, Massachusetts, I certainly didn't appreciate any of this, perhaps with one small exception--political talk mattered to my father. My father was a musician as his father had been. My father never attended high school, but he loved to talk about politics--alas with me--at the dinner table and at any other time he could command my attention, which was anytime he commanded. As the eldest of four boys, I absorbed the brunt of my father's compulsive and highly critical view of the political world. So long as I kept my father tied down in argument, my three younger brothers and my devoted mother were exempt from engagement. With all this "at-home" training, I seemed destined to become a lawyer. Thankfully, my mentors at Cornell and the University of Chicago helped me choose another path.

Yet for a long time, through the intellectual excitement of graduate school and then as a teacher at Chicago, Amherst College, and UCI, something seemed to be missing from my newfound commitment to academic scholarship. Professional political science was too apolitical and not particularly relevant to much that was consequential about politics or democratic governance. Writings about politics seemed as removed from the reality of consequence as had all the boyhood talks with my father about politics sitting at the kitchen table. I discovered at least a partial answer to this critique--in the form of a dual revelation--after spending a semester teaching at Beijing University in the People's Republic of China. Thanks to a library inherited from Yanjing University, I had surprising access to virtually all the books that served to found and motivate the development of political science and I had the time to read them. The foundations of political science had been highly relevant to the living experiment of self-governance, and key scholars in the emerging discipline were directly involved in political life. Additionally, I was deeply inspired by my Chinese students who were studying politics and political science because they thought it would help them help China to democratize. Upon returning to UCI from Beida I made a commitment as a scholar, teacher, and citizen to matter more to the prospects of democracy and democratization. This is a commitment solidified by the subsequent deaths of many students I had taught at Beida during the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. They died as part of an historic struggle for ideas, opportunities, and responsibilities I had been fortunate enough to take for granted.

I variously study the nature of democracy. How does it operate? How can presumed democratic systems be improved? What existing institutional mechanisms of democratic practice and discourse are essential to it? I am particularly interested in the distribution of political power in the United States and the implications of this distribution for democratic governance. In so doing I hope to honor my many mentors, in particular Theodore J. Lowi, Benjamin Page, Ira Katznelson, David Easton, David J. Greenstone, Frances Zemans, James Danziger, and William Schonfeld; pay appropriate tribute to all that my former students have taught me; motivate to active citizenship my current students; thank those who hold me in high regard; and make political inquiry and public life much more than kitchen-table sophistry.

JANICE GUDDE PLASTINO
Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Distinguished University Service Award, 2002-03
Professor of Dance

The University of California requires professors to teach, conduct research and creative activity, and perform service. Service is expected to be within the university including work within the department, school, university campus and senate, and the 10-campus University of California system. Most professors also give their time, energy, and expertise to various public, private, and nonprofit organizations and to professional groups that specifically relate to their field including editorial boards, conference planning and participation, and journal editorships. I have given to all these area, but my most rewarding service has been to the University of California.

Service has provided me the opportunity to meet professors, staff, and students outside my field of dance who have become lifelong friends and colleagues. Perhaps more than any other positive experience derived from service, I have learned so much about aspects of academia outside the performance, creation, and production of the art of the dance. I have been able to use this knowledge to help administer my department and advise students and colleagues.

Service cannot take time from the most important requirements of a professorship which are research, creative activity, and teaching. I could never teach the range of subjects nor could I do the kind of research I do in Dance Science without my contacts outside my department. Many of my research collaborators were recommended, or I met through service commitments, since all of my research colleagues are outside the field of dance. I am fortunate to be able to create and teach dance and to be able to conduct research. The university has provided an environment that makes all these activities possible.

I am grateful for this award and the recognition from the University of California, Irvine Senate.

LESLIE M. THOMPSON
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 2002-03
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and of Biological Chemistry

As a young child, the innermost workings of a cell held the utmost fascination for me. A microscope and books kept me company many a cold, snowy Wisconsin day. That fascination matured into a keen desire to combine biological research with the study of disease after my family moved to Mexico during my high school years and after spending time in a remote African village during college. I truly found a melding of all these interests and passions as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of John Wasmuth of UCI, where I began the journey of working with talented colleagues and collaborators around the world who together strived to identify the Huntington's disease (HD) gene. HD is a devastating neurodegenerative disease characterized by a triad of symptoms including a movement disorder, cognitive impairment, and psychiatric symptoms. There is currently no treatment or cure for this devastating disease that strikes individuals in the prime of life (typically mid-30s) at a time when they have typically had children who now have a 50 percent chance of carrying on this legacy. My role in this research involved identification of potential HD genes, one of which we later showed can carry mutations that cause achondroplasia, the most common genetic form of short-limbed dwarfism. The HD gene was cloned in 1993 by this group.

Following the untimely death of Professor Wasmuth, I stayed at UCI and continued this work, first as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and currently as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. Through long-term collaborations with individuals on campus (in particular Professors Larry Marsh and Ralph Bradshaw), and with knowledge of the genetic mutations that underlie these disorders, our research has focused on how these mutations cause disease and the possible therapeutic approaches we can develop.

It has been an exciting year in our HD research. We have found that certain cancer chemotherapeutic agents, called HDAC inhibitors, as well as compounds that suppress "inclusion formation" (clumps of protein that accumulate in the brains of diseased HD patients), hold promise as possible therapeutics. This has only been possible through the intellectual talent and hard work of scientists in my laboratory (Joan Steffan, Barbara Apostol, Natalia Slepko, and Simona Raffioni) and scientists in Larry Marsh's lab.

As I was trained in biochemistry for my Ph.D., an important and enjoyable aspect of my UCI experience has been as a teacher and basic science advisor for the medical students. In teaching as in research, my commitment has been to applying basic biological knowledge to identification, understanding, and treatment of diseases that compromise an individual's quality of life.