WELCOME TO UCI

Celebrating 40 years of innovation, the University of California, Irvine combines the strengths of a major research university with the bounty of an incomparable Southern California location. Since its opening in fall 1965, UCI has become internationally recognized for efforts that are improving lives through research and discovery, fostering excellence in scholarship and teaching, and engaging and enriching the community.

As one of the top-ranked public universities in the nation for both undergraduate and graduate education, UCI attracts greater numbers of high-achieving students each year, many of whom remain in the local area as part of a talent-rich workforce. UCI's academic preparation programs are raising the level of achievement for the area's K-12 students, and vibrant campus life has made UCI a cultural magnet, drawing the community to its arts, lectures, and intercollegiate athletic events, as well as its vast library collections.

UCI's research innovations are a powerful generator of fundamental knowledge and of economic growth and jobs in the region, contributing to one of the highest standards of living in the nation. University faculty and students cooperate with industry to create some of society's most important medical advances, new communications technologies, new businesses, cleaner air and water, and safer, more efficient transportation systems.

UCI Medical Center is now rated one of the nation's best hospitals in several specialty areas, and a new university hospital to be completed in 2009 will further transform health care in the region with state-of-the-art medical technologies and the expertise of physicians, researchers, and health care professionals who are among the best in their fields.

As UCI's fortieth year begins, the campus community bids farewell to Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone as he leaves to become President of the National Academy of Sciences. During Chancellor Cicerone's 16 years at UCI--as founder of the Department of Earth System Science, Dean of the School of Physical Sciences, and, for the last seven years, as Chancellor--the campus has made great strides in its capacity to benefit students and the lives of people in Orange County and beyond through education, community involvement, research innovations, and contributions to economic growth.

With the goal of becoming a flagship UC campus and one of the nation's very best universities, UCI has embarked on a strategic-planning process that will ensure the campus continues to inspire excellence as it fulfills its research, teaching, and public service missions in the decades ahead.

UCI ACADEMIC SENATE DISTINGUISHED FACULTY

SUE PIPER DUCKLES
Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Distinguished University Service Award, 2004-05
Associate Dean for Faculty Development, School of Medicine, and Professor of Pharmacology

Sue Piper Duckles was born and educated in Oakland, California. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from UC Berkeley in 1968 and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from UC San Francisco in 1973. After postdoctoral studies at UCLA, she was appointed Assistant Professor in Residence in 1976. In 1979 she joined the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Arizona, subsequently moving to UCI in 1985 where she joined the Department of Pharmacology. Since 1968 she has been married to Lawrence Duckles. They have two sons, Ian and Galen. In 2004 Ian Duckles received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCI. Galen Duckles teaches and coaches water polo and track at University High School in Irvine.

Professor Duckles' research interests focus on the unique properties of the cerebral circulation. She is currently investigating the effects of estrogen and testosterone on the function of the cerebral circulation. Her work demonstrates that the vasodilator function of the endothelium is enhanced after estrogen exposure, but suppressed by testosterone. Chronic estrogen treatment increases the vasodilator function of cerebrovascular endothelium, via both genomic and non-genomic actions, effects that are mediated by the alpha form of the estrogen receptor. Estrogen and testosterone also affect the vascular inflammatory response with important implications in cerebrovascular disease, such as stroke. When animals are pre-treated with estrogen, the vascular inflammatory response is sharply suppressed. In contrast, prior treatment with testosterone augments this response. Similarly, in a rodent stroke model, the increase in vascular cyclooxyenase-2 is markedly suppressed in estrogen-treated animals. All of these actions of gonadal steroids on the cerebral circulation may contribute to the well-known gender differences in incidence and severity of stroke.

Professor Duckles also devotes considerable time to service and administrative activities. She has chaired and been a member of numerous committees and task forces at all levels, and from 1990 to 1992 served as Chair of the UCI Academic Senate. From 1993 to the present she has served as Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the School of Medicine where she has developed innovative programs to support the career development of junior faculty, including Strategic Planning sessions to assist beginning faculty to set and revise short- and long-term goals. Many of the programs she developed were subsequently incorporated into the UCI National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE Program, where they have contributed to the recruitment, promotion, and retention of women faculty across the campus. Professor Duckles served as equity advisor for the NSF program in its first two years at UCI.

Professor Duckles has also been an active leader at both the national and international levels. She served as President of the Western Pharmacology Society, President of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), and as a member of the Board of Directors and Vice President for Science Policy for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). In 2000 she became founding Chair of the Editorial Board for a new ASPET publication, Molecular Interventions. Professor Duckles currently serves as Secretary-General of the International Union of Pharmacology.

JONATHAN LEE FENG
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 2004-05
Associate Professor of Physics

I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but spent most of my childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an undergraduate at Harvard I started in mathematics. Halfway through, however, I became more fascinated by the power of advanced mathematics to describe the universe than by the advanced mathematics itself. When a prominent math professor warned me that "mathematicians spend most of their life working by themselves, so you better not mind that," I switched to physics.

Upon graduation I went to Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar to study cosmology under Stephen Hawking. When I got there, however, I found that I was not the only one with that idea, and Hawking typically picked his students based on performance in the Cambridge exams. I spent the next two years studying a wide variety of topics for these exams, traveling in Europe, and playing trumpet in orchestras and brass ensembles at the rate of a concert a week. Ironically, when Hawking finally called me in to offer me a position, I had my heart set on returning to the U.S. and instead headed to Stanford to get a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics.

I now study topics that combine my early interests in cosmology and particle physics. These fields might appear to be completely different, with one concerned with the universe as a whole, and the other concerned with its smallest building blocks. We live at a remarkable time, however. In recent years, our most powerful telescopes have weighed the universe and determined that the known particles make up only five percent of its mass, providing the strongest evidence to date for new particles. At the same time, our most powerful microscopes, in the form of giant particle colliders, now recreate conditions that existed in the universe just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, providing a window on the early history of the universe. Studies of the universe at the largest- and smallest-length scales are therefore now intimately connected. In collaboration with other faculty, postdocs, and graduate students, I am investigating a number of subjects that exploit this synergy, including dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions.

SVETLANA JITOMIRSKAYA
Distinguished Mid-Career Award for Research, 2004-05
Professor of Mathematics

Professor Jitomirskaya's biography is available via the UCI Academic Senate's Web site at http://www.senate.uci.edu/.

DAVID P. KIRKBY
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 2004-05
Associate Professor of Physics

I was born in Cambridge, England, and spent my first eight years moving around England with brief stints in Mexico and Iran. I then moved to Toronto, Canada, and quickly lost my British accent. I stayed in Toronto through my undergraduate degree, in math and physics, where I had my first taste of research and got hooked on the broad array of challenges that experimental particle physics offers. Earlier, I had been torn between careers in music and physics.

I moved to Caltech for graduate school, but only spent two years in Pasadena before moving to the European Particle Physics Lab (CERN), near Geneva, Switzerland. Fortunately, that was enough time to meet my future wife, Anne, a fellow graduate student. We both spent the next four years at CERN, collaborating with about 500 other physicists to analyze the debris from collisions of electrons and positrons (anti-electrons) accelerated to almost the speed of light, using a detector about the size of a house packed with custom-built sensors and electronics. Large collaborations and apparatus are one of the hallmarks of my field.

After getting married, starting a family, and completing my Ph.D. in Europe, I returned to California as a postdoc at Stanford University to work on a similar particle physics project, called BABAR, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The ultimate goal of BABAR is to shed new light on one of the least understood aspects of particle physics: Why does the universe contain more matter than antimatter today?

I came to UCI three years ago, continuing my work on BABAR, and got my first real taste of teaching. Like many assistant professors, I found this to be a humbling but invigorating experience. In my second year at UCI, I was fortunate to have the opportunity of finally combining my interests in music and physics in creating a new course for non-science majors that covers the physical foundations of the production (by musical instruments), transport (via sound waves), and perception (through the electromechanics of the ear and brain) of musical sound.

DONALD G. SAARI
Distinguished Faculty Award for Research, 2004-05
Director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences and UCI Distinguished Professor of Economics and Mathematics

I grew up in the beautiful Upper Peninsula of Michigan. To see where, find the part of Michigan that is above Wisconsin; my hometown is on the thumb sticking into the frigid waters of Lake Superior. By its location, you can appreciate why in the midst of winter, where we could have 400 inches of snowfall, people would bundle up and drive south to warm up in, say, Green Bay or Minneapolis. Reflecting the advantages of the region, much of my youth was spent skiing, camping, scouting, sailing, acting in class plays, involved in athletics, exploring abandoned mines; i.e., a great time! As an undergraduate at Michigan Technological University I had a triple major--social life, campus politics, and athletics, but with a strong minor in mathematics. While I always had high grades, it took graduate school (Purdue) to totally turn me on to academics--so much so that I would fall in love with whatever mathematics topic I happened to be studying at the moment; well, until the next term when I discovered still another topic! So, for me, being an academic was, and is, like being a kid in a candy store. I finally settled on dynamics where my thesis analyzed the collision orbits of the Newtonian N-body problem. The best thing I ever did in life happened in graduate school: I met, fell in love, and married Lillian (Kalinen), another Finnish-American. We have two married daughters, Katri and Anneli, and five grandchildren.

Lillian and I moved to New Haven for my postdoctoral position in the Yale University Astronomy Department. A year later I joined the Mathematics Department at Northwestern University where I served as department chair and became the first Pancoe Professor of Mathematics. Much of my early research (that continues) centered on dynamical issues such as the evolution of the universe. This raises a question: how does a "physical scientist" become a "social scientist"? In my case, by teaching and chatting with bright graduate and undergraduate students from economics where I discovered and became fascinated by the challenges of economics and the social sciences. Motivated by many conversations with students and faculty from the social sciences, my research shifted to emphasize dynamics, such as the "Invisible Hand" story, and to modify dynamical concepts to address concerns from the social and behavioral sciences. Professor Duncan Luce invited me to spend a term at UCI where he started recruiting me. I became intrigued by the innovative, high-powered research being done here at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences and the School of Social Sciences, so after three decades at NU, in July 2000, Lillian and I moved to UCI.

I am the Chief Editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society and on editorial boards of several journals on analysis, dynamics, economics, and decision analysis. I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, the past chair of the U.S. National Committee of Mathematics, chair of the U.S. delegation to the 2002 general assembly of the International Mathematical Union, and a member of several National Research Council committees. My honorary doctorates come from Purdue, Université de Caen, and Michigan Technological University. I am particularly proud of receiving over 10 awards for teaching, being honored (twice at Northwestern) by students as a "Most Influential Professor," and my 20-year service as "Santa Claus" for departmental Christmas parties.

GEORGE E. TITA
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 2004-05
Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society

I grew up in the shadows of a steel mill in a small town in Western Pennsylvania and attended the University of Pittsburgh. As a student of Soviet history and Eastern European Studies, I learned from professors who genuinely cared about extracting their students' best efforts. I am most indebted to William Chase and the late Robert G. Colodny who opened my eyes to critical thinking, inspired me to challenge conventional wisdom, and awoke my intellectual curiosity. I dedicate a significant amount of credit for making me worthy of this award to my earliest mentors.

After graduation I headed to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. My goal was to work in the area of U.S.-Soviet relations, but I was struggling with learning the Russian language. I left school and spent several years living in D.C. and working in various blue- and white-collar jobs. I witnessed and experienced the social and economic struggles of many inner-city inhabitants. Then it occurred to me: I didn't need to help repair U.S.-Soviet relations--I needed to help repair our urban centers.

I entered Carnegie Mellon University H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management to pursue an M.S. in economic development and policy, hoping to become a program director or policy analyst dealing with issues of urban decline. However, after conducting real social science research with the faculty, I realized that in order to make lasting impacts on such urban maladies as concentrated poverty, unemployment, and crime, one must first understand the root causes of such problems. Under the expert tutelage of Jacqueline Cohen and Alfred Blumstein, I conducted an ecological study of gangs and their impact on levels of crime in local communities and received rigorous methodological training and a greater appreciation for asking appropriate questions and designing defensible research designs.

Prior to joining UCI, I spent two years at the RAND Corporation directing a National Institute of Justice-funded gun-violence reduction program in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Currently, I am working with a team from RAND, Harvard, Northeastern University, and UC Davis along with representatives from local, state, and federal agencies to devise interventions to disrupt L.A.'s illegal gun markets. In addition to various professional societies, I am a member of the National Consortium on Violence Research, a center funded by the National Science Foundation to advance basic scientific knowledge about the causes and factors contributing to interpersonal violence.

Because of the profound impact that conducting real social science research had on me, I demand that my students move beyond classroom learning at every opportunity. In my Geographic Information Systems course, students join work teams and conduct analysis for a local client. I also enjoy sponsoring undergraduates in directed studies courses. There is no shortage of talented undergraduates at UCI. The "problem" for academics wanting to engage them is that competition for their talents is fierce. Many students who pursue a professional or business graduate degree do so without being exposed to the the full breadth of research activities that consume much of an academic's life. While it remains unclear whether any of my undergraduate research assistants will eventually pursue a graduate degree in the social sciences, I only hope that their exposure to conducting research and analyzing the social world will engage their intellectual curiosity and inspire them, in the same way that my mentors engaged and inspired me.