FROM THE CHANCELLOR
Welcome to the University of California, Irvine. As a UC student, you have access to resources that extend not only across our campus, but throughout our state and beyond. This Catalogue will serve as an invaluable guide in helping you maximize your UC Irvine experience.
UCI combines the strengths of a major research university with the bounty of an incomparable Southern California location. Over four remarkable decades, we have 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.
UCI is among the fastest-growing campuses in the UC system. Increasingly a first-choice campus for students, UCI ranks among the top U.S. universities in the number of under-graduate applications and continues to admit freshmen with highly competitive academic profiles. Orange County's second-largest employer, UCI generates an annual economic impact on the county of $3.3 billion.
UCI is a center for quality education that honors classic instruction while incorporating the best new scholarship. U.S. News & World Report consistently ranks UCI among the nation's best universities. Achievements in the sciences, arts, humanities, medicine, and management also have garnered numerous national rankings for UCI's schools, departments, and programs. Three UCI researchers have won Nobel Prizes—most recently Irwin A. Rose, in chemistry, in 2004.
UCI reaches beyond the classroom and laboratory to help solve societal issues and support human development. In the health sciences, UCI is noted for its research on cancer, the neurosciences, and the genetic underpinnings of disease. UCI Medical Center, Orange County's only university hospital, is building a new world-class facility that, upon completion in 2009, will house the latest technologies and strengthen UCI's ability to provide specialized medical and surgical treatments to the region's citizens.
A major intellectual and cultural center, UCI offers numerous public activities and events. Recent speakers include Nobel Peace Prize winners His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi, and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai. The Claire Trevor School of the Arts and the School of Humanities produce engaging and entertaining cultural programs, while UCI's Anteater athletics teams participate in exciting competition, seeking to add to their nearly two dozen national championships.
UCI is benefiting the community and the world in countless ways through its scholarly, scientific, creative, and economic contributions. On its way to becoming one of the nation's very best universities—public or private—UCI has embarked on a strategic plan that will ensure the campus continues to inspire excellence as it fulfills its research, teaching, and public service missions in the decades ahead.
I encourage you to optimize your time here by taking advantage of UCI's many resources and the outstanding community that surrounds us. I look forward to seeing you on campus and to being a part of this very important time in your life.
Sincerely,
Michael
V. Drake, M.D.
Chancellor
UCI ACADEMIC
SENATE DISTINGUISHED FACULTY
BERNARD N. GROFMAN
Distinguished Faculty Award for Research, 2005-06
Professor of Political Science and Economics
I have an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, but I am certainly not a mathematician even though I use mathematics in most of what I do. (As an undergraduate I really majored in student government and contract bridge.) I have a Ph.D. in political science and most of my publications are in political science journals, but I count myself more of a social scientist than a political scientist. I was actually hired at UCI in a slot meant for a sociologist, and I am a Professor of Political Science and Social Psychology even though I have never taken a course in either sociology or psychology. I also now have a courtesy appointment in Economics even though I got a D in the one economics course I ever took. (In fairness, however, during most of the quarter I took that course I was actually in D.C. going over old records to trace the decades long connections between the National Student Association (NSA), on whose national board I then served, and the CIA—part of a story that made the front page of the New York Times six days running.)
As part of a long involvement, first with student government at the University of Chicago and then with the National Student Association, I became a professional parliamentarian (i.e., an expert in Robert's Rules of Order) at a relatively young age. At one NSA conference, when I was 26, I was referred to as the "aging dean of student parliamentarians.") That student politics background has led me to a long-standing interest in processes of group decision-making. The research domain in which I have probably made the greatest impact is the study of elections and representation (especially patterns of minority voting and of party competition), in part because I have testified as an expert witness in about a dozen states on issues related to redistricting, and my research has, arguably, influenced the U.S. Supreme Court. But I got into expert witness consulting largely by accident. My former college roommate had political connections and recommended me to an attorney who was looking for an expert witness in a redistricting case in Colorado.
I am sometimes viewed as a "rational choice" modeler, which is translated as someone who assumes that we can make sense of the world in terms of choices made by intelligent and informed actors who seek to optimize their utility, but I reject that label. I prefer to bill myself as a "reasonable choice" modeler—someone who recognizes that people tend do things for reasons, but not always reasons that they fully understand. I am, like my colleague, A Wuffle, a member of the California (drive-in) Church of the Incorrigibly Eclectic.
Recently, drawing on ideas from the thousands of mystery stories I've read over the years, I've been writing papers that see their task as "puzzle solving," i.e., trying to explain some concrete and specific set of events that seems mysterious based on existing theories. Mysteries can be seen as generally falling into three categories: "whodunits," "howdunits," and "whydunits." In a whodunit the central issue is simply pinning down who committed the crime (i.e., in the social science context, identifying critical explanatory factors). In howdunits, the emphasis is on exactly how the deed was pulled off (i.e., in the social science context, identifying specific mechanisms rather than mere correlations). In whydunits, we are interested in probing the psychology of the criminal (i.e., explaining motivation). Recognizing that mysteries come in several forms avoids some rather sterile debates in the social sciences about what it means to make sense of the world.
WILSON HO
Distinguished Faculty Award for Research, 2005-06
Donald Bren Professor of Physics and Astronomy and of Chemistry
My early childhood was spent in Changhwa, a city near the middle of Taiwan, where I received my primary school education. Both my parents were middle school teachers. I remember that I had a great deal of freedom roaming the countryside around our home and developed a keen interest in vegetable gardening, growing fruit trees, and raising chickens. It was also a period when I developed my mathematics foundation. My parents believed that there were more opportunities abroad for their four children. In 1965, when I reached the age of 12, my family moved to Rokko, a suburb of Kobe, Japan. Two years later, my family immigrated to San Francisco, California, to join my grandmother and two aunts.
In 1971, I attended the California Institute of Technology, gravitated toward chemistry, and received a B.S. degree in 1975. Since I had published 11 papers under the guidance of Professor Henry Weinberg and had taken a sufficient number of courses, it was decided that I should also be given a M.S. degree. I was able to find time to participate in intercollegiate sports: track, cross-country, and swimming. I also remember with fond memories the experiences of carrying out research each summer with different professors: Aron Kuppermann, Wilse Robinson, William Goddard, and Henry Weinberg. Surface science was a rapidly emerging field at that time and jumping on this opportunity, I went to the University of Pennsylvania to carry out Ph.D. work under the guidance of Professors Ward Plummer and Robert Schrieffer and experienced snow for the first time. During this period, I learned to appreciate instrumentation design and fabrication and became fully ingrained with the belief that advancement in science follows from the development of new techniques. My entire career has been guided by this belief and assurance that something good will come from having an experimental capability that no one else has. In 1979, I received my Ph.D. degree in physics and joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a member of the technical staff. Being single in the New Jersey suburb and away from academic institutions for the first time, the longing for campus life soon grabbed me by full force. Attracted by the natural beauty of Ithaca, New York, I accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Physics at Cornell University in 1980. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 1985 and Professor in 1991. My group and I continued to develop new instrumentation aimed to follow changes in chemistry by monitoring molecules in real time. In the last 10 years, our efforts have shifted to the building of scanning tunneling microscopes to see and probe individual atoms and molecules on solid surfaces. The natural beauty of Ithaca did not come without a price; my wife did not like anything that fell from the sky, such as rain, snow, and sleet, of which Ithaca had plenty.
In 2000, through the effort of Professor Douglas Mills and others, we returned to sunny California and joined the young and dynamic UC Irvine campus and became fully integrated into the cultural diversity of the student body and the city. After spending 20 years at a private university, I was attracted in part to UC Irvine because it is a public institution with students coming from different ethnic backgrounds. My group and I are currently combining the two very powerful instruments, femtosecond lasers and scanning tunneling microscopes, in the hope of entering new regimes of measurement and to tread in new waters. We continue to be amazed by the instruments we have designed and built, the ability to see and touch individual atoms and molecules, and the excitement of accidental discoveries and unexpected results in this rapidly growing field of nanoscience. Ultimately, we would like to understand and control how atoms and molecules combine to form more complex systems. The majority of my time has been invested in the education and training of graduate students and postdocs, and I continue to learn from them.
HANS S. KEIRSTEAD
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 2005-06
Associate Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology
I received my Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. My Ph.D. thesis concerned the invention of a novel method for regenerating damaged spinal cords, and formed the basis of several worldwide patents as well as the formation of a company in 1999 to bring this treatment toward clinical trials. This work constituted the first demonstration of functional regeneration of the injured adult spinal cord, and for my achievements I received the Cameron Award for the outstanding Ph.D. thesis in Canada. I then moved to Cambridge, England, where I conducted four years of postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge furthering my studies of spinal cord injury and beginning studies of multiple sclerosis. I was awarded Canadian and British fellowships to support this work. I received the distinct honor of election to two senior academic posts, Fellow of the Governing Body of Downing College, and Senate Member of the University of Cambridge, and was the youngest member to be elected to those positions. In 2000, I was honored to accept an appointment as Assistant Professor in the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at UC Irvine. The Reeve-Irvine Research Center, founded by the late Christopher Reeve and philanthropist Joan Irvine Smith, is a leading center for spinal cord injury research. I direct a large team investigating the cellular biology and treatment of spinal cord trauma, research that also has significance for multiple sclerosis and other diseases of the nervous system. In order to bring my treatments to clinical trials, I have founded or partnered with biotechnology companies to fund and conduct pre-clinical and clinical development. In 2005 I was promoted to Associate Professor.
The focus of my laboratory is the development of strategies to limit degeneration and enhance regeneration after spinal cord injury. My laboratory is investigating strategies to reduce or eliminate the enlargement of spinal cord injury sites that normally occurs after injury. My laboratory has developed an injection-based therapy that significantly decreases tissue loss if administered soon after injury. Human reagents necessary for clinical trials have been generated, and a clinical trial using this approach began in mid-2005.
My laboratory also investigates cell transplantation therapies for spinal cord injury and was the first lab in North America to garner human embryonic stem cells for trauma research. My team was the first in the world to develop a means to direct human embryonic stem cells to become a high-purity clinically useful cell population. We then demonstrated that transplantation of this cell population restored lost function, including the ability of coordinated walking, to acutely spinal cord injured rats. This work is the basis of a therapy that is currently being developed for clinical trials, which are scheduled to begin in mid-2006. My laboratory is generating other cell populations that may benefit chronic spinal cord injury and is also researching means to eliminate the glial scar that forms after spinal cord injury and in multiple sclerosis.
FRANK LAFERLA
Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research, 2005-06
UCI Chancellor's Fellow and Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior
I was born and raised in Philadelphia, an ethnically diverse city, although I grew up in South Philly, which at that time was predominantly comprised of Italian-Americans. The immigrant roots ran deep there and consisted of many first-generation individuals, like me. Both of my parents were born in a small town in Sicily and emigrated to the U.S.A. in the early 1960s. Like many immigrant families, my parents hoped that I would become a physician, and indeed that was my career goal when I entered St. Joseph's University as a biology major back in 1981. It wasn't until after I completed my second year that a unique opportunity presented itself: I was offered a paid summer position as a technician at one of the research labs at St. Joe's. It was there that I was exposed to the new world of experimental science and decided that I wanted to be a biomedical researcher.
After graduating from St. Joe's in 1985, I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in microbiology at the University of Minnesota and studied the molecular mechanisms underlying replication of negative-strand RNA viruses. After graduating from Minnesota in 1990, I commenced my postdoctoral training at the American Red Cross Laboratories in Rockville, MD. I initially planned to study the pathogenesis of HIV using genetically modified mice, but instead was attracted to a new field: Alzheimer's disease and neuroscience. Ironically, my laboratory is now devoted exclusively to neuroscience research, despite having received little to no formal education in neuroscience.
My lab's efforts focus on understanding Alzheimer's disease, the most common age-related neurodegenerative disorder. Alzheimer's disease poses a significant medical and economic burden on our society as roughly five million Americans suffer from this insidious disorder. Moreover, it is estimated that five percent of individuals over age 70 and about 33 percent of those over age 85 are afflicted. As health care advances have helped to extend human lives and as age is the most significant risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, more and more individuals are developing this disorder. The clinical symptoms include memory loss, personality changes, disorientation, and poor judgment. The Alzheimer's patient eventually succumbs after a protracted battle that sometimes can last 10 or more years. Presently, there is no cure and the existing treatment options offer minor and short-lived benefits.
To better study Alzheimer's disease, my lab introduced three human disease-causing genes into mice. Hence, the mice, which we refer to as the 3xTg-AD mice, are genetically modified and express the human protein products of these three genes (PS1, APP, and tau). The 3xTg-AD mice develop the two key neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease: amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. In addition, the 3xTg-AD mice also develop an age-related memory loss that is induced by the buildup of the plaque protein. We have found that clearing the amyloid plaques with immunotherapy suffices to reduce the early tangle burden, suggesting that the sooner an Alzheimer's patient receives treatment, the higher the probability for success. The 3xTg-AD mice have been extensively used to study the effects of various pharmaceutical agents throughout the world, in both academic and commercial enterprises.
ROGER D. MCWILLIAMS
Daniel G. Aldrich, Jr. Distinguished University Service Award, 2005-06
Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Daniel G. Aldrich, Jr. influenced me from UC Irvine's earliest days. As a boy, I watched bulldozing for the new campus. UC Irvine's broad vision of service was seen early—I heard the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphony play in Crawford Hall basketball arena. Later, as a transfer student, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from UC Irvine (1975). During these times some undergraduates really wanted to demonstrate against an establishment authority. Popular "Chancellor Dan" proved an impossible target since he supported free speech issues while persuasively keeping students aimed toward educational excellence. The students' biggest anti-establishment event may have been a mini-marathon "streaking." Even though Chancellor Dan was an avid athlete, he neither attended nor obstructed this event.
Before finishing my Princeton astrophysics Ph.D. (1980), I joined Irvine's Physics and Astronomy faculty (with an amusing caveat: I would be fired if the Ph.D. was not finished within one year). Thesis work on experimental plasma physics about transferring electromagnetic wave momentum to electrons had found substantial interest. That interest lasted enough years to be part of the citation for election to Fellow in the American Physical Society. My research has emphases on ion transport in quiet or turbulent plasmas, and laser development including ion, diode, and chemical oxygen iodine lasers. Most known matter in the universe, such as stars, is plasma (ionized matter). It has industrial uses from microelectronics production to lasers. Plasma is fascinating as fundamental science and practical for society. My most important experiments were done for a U.S. Supreme Court case and published in court records; John Roberts, now Chief Justice, served variously as coauthor or referee on these publications. Also, my lab alumni picnics attest to research importance for careers.
Having the pleasure of knowing all of Irvine's Chancellors, it is especially meaningful to be rewarded for characteristics deliberately copied from Chancellor Aldrich. Recognizing universities exist largely to serve others through education, I have helped produce entities raising educational value in permanently satisfying ways for students, faculty, and staff. The combined environment of research, teaching, and service has been especially invigorating and deeply rewarding over my career.
I have served as founding Director of the Campuswide Honors Program (CHP) since inception nearly 20 years ago. Almost 3,000 of Irvine's finest undergraduates, from all majors, have come to Irvine because of this program, receiving the excellent education the faculty provides in and out of the honors program. CHP also has encouraged and nurtured upper-division honors programs for every major on campus. Within Physics and Astronomy I run the senior project and thesis program which every student completes, and the departmental honors program.
Some years back, I founded the Undergraduate Research Symposium. For its first years it was run within the CHP program with the idea of making it open to every student later on, as now occurs. After getting the symposium going, I proposed and obtained permanent State funding to found the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). I housed UROP initially within the CHP operation and then separated the programs as UROP developed the ability to be independent. Another program associated with CHP is the merit-based Scholarship Opportunities Program for all students, developed and directed by Dr. Audrey DeVore, now peeled off from CHP as well. In all these service activities, widespread enthusiasm and real work provided by people from every element of the campus has produced results from resources crossing every institutional boundary. Chancellor Aldrich's spirit of serving through promoting educational endeavors addressing public need and engaging the University community happily continues to motivate many UC Irvine people.
DIANE K. O'DOWD
Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching, 2005-06
Professor of Developmental and Cell Biology and of Anatomy and Neurobiology
I have had the privilege of living, training, and/or working at a university my whole life. I was born in Connecticut where my family lived on the campus of Wesleyan University. We moved shortly thereafter to Michigan, again living on campus at the newly established Oakland University. I grew up there during the tumultuous 60s and early 70s, surrounded and stimulated by campus life.
At age 18, I enrolled at Stanford University, intent on becoming a physician. However, during my freshman year I discovered that while medicine was interesting, neuroscience research was exciting. I had the opportunity to interact closely with several neuroscience faculty at Stanford, all of whom encouraged me to pursue a career in academics. I received my B.S. in 1979 and being a lover of sun and surf, as well as neuroscience, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at UCSD. It was there I began the studies that I continue today focusing on understanding the mechanisms that regulate communication between cells in our central nervous system. In 1985, I got my Ph.D. and married Martin Smith, also a neurobiologist, who was doing his postdoctoral fellowship in the adjacent lab. We returned to Stanford in 1986 for postdoctoral training and our son was born two years later. We came to UC Irvine as assistant professors in 1989, our daughter was born in 1991, and we have been here ever since, working in adjacent labs, and having the wonderful opportunity to raise our family on the UCI campus.
In my lab we study the activity of living neurons in the brains of both flies and mice. Current experiments are focused on using a mutant approach to gain insight into the mechanisms involved in regulating activity in central circuits that process information during learning and that mediate responses to nicotine. I have always had close interactions with a small number of students directly involved in my research, and I try to impart to them the excitement that I was exposed to as an undergraduate.
However, the majority of my undergraduate teaching has been in large lectures, typical of introductory classes taught at research universities. As my children began approaching the age of university students, I started to think more deeply about how we were training these students. I realized that traditional didactic lecturing focuses on transmission of facts, akin to an "information dump." With access to large volumes of information, literally at their fingertips, the challenge is to teach today's students to learn the critical thinking skills that will be necessary to evaluate and interpret information they receive. With this goal in mind, last year I undertook the challenge, along with three outstanding assistant professors, to completely redesign our first-quarter introductory biology course. We had the extraordinary opportunity to work with a large number of students at a critical juncture in their lives, the transition between high school and college. Using a variety of interactive learning strategies we have strived to impart a conceptual understanding of basic molecular and cellular biology and how they relate to the broader issues of human health, in an environment that promotes critical thinking, problem solving, and communication with faculty and peers.
AMELIA C. REGAN
Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Service, 2005-06
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Civil Engineering
I grew up in suburban Philadelphia and was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. I studied systems engineering and developed an early interest in the transportation industries. I worked for UPS as an industrial engineering intern while an undergraduate; after graduation, I took a job as a research analyst with the Association of American Railroads in Washington, D.C. I returned to UPS a year later, joining their then new Operations Research Group. While I worked for UPS developing computer-based large-scale routing and scheduling systems, I earned an M.S. in applied mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. After several years at UPS, I returned to graduate school to study civil (transportation systems) engineering at the University of Texas. After earning M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees, I had the good fortune to join the Transportation Group at the Institute of Transportation Studies here at UCI. I have faculty appointments in Computer Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering and am currently serving as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education for the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences.
My research interests have to do with large-scale network optimization. Much of that work has had freight transportation systems (trucking, rail, air cargo, maritime, and intermodal) as its focus. I also have strong interests in general networks, data mining applied to large-scale traffic data, and environmental and economic impacts of freight transportation systems.
I got interested in outreach early in my UCI career and have had the good fortune to participate in many programs involving local teachers. I also teach in the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) program for academically talented high school students.
ADAM P. SUMMERS
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 2005-06
Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
I was raised in New York City and the north woods of Canada. At Swarthmore College I earned degrees in mathematics and engineering, but was not interested in pursuing either as a career. While teaching scuba in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef I met my first professional biologists. I returned to New York to get a master's degree in biology at New York University then went to the University of Massachusetts for a Ph.D. From the beginning of my research career I attempted to capitalize on my previous training as an engineer to understand the evolution of the mechanical systems of animals.
At UC Berkeley I was a Miller Research Fellow working with David and Marvalee Wake on the mechanics of salamander walking and the jaws of a particularly unusual group of limbless amphibians called caecilians. While at UCB I was approached by Pixar Studios to help them with the movie Finding Nemo. I spent three years advising on animal movements and biological aspects of the film and was delighted when the hard work of the Pixar folks was so well received at the box office.
I came to UCI four years ago and taught my first lecture course—a 400-student survey of human physiology. It was an intimidating experience, but with the mentorship of the other comparative physiology faculty I found that I enjoyed the large audience. With Professor Tim Bradley I designed a new, writing-intensive course in comparative physiology in which students start with an extinct animal and design the physiological systems that allowed it to function. I also enjoy sharing my enthusiasm for the field of biomechanics with a monthly column that appears in Natural History Magazine. My fortieth column was published in June of 2005.
