FROM THE CHANCELLOR

Welcome to the University of California, Irvine. As a UC student, you have access to resources that extend across our campus, throughout our state, and beyond. This catalogue will serve as an invaluable guide to enhancing 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 attracts record numbers of undergraduate applications each year and admits freshmen with highly competitive academic profiles. We enrolled our first undergraduates in public health and nursing science last year, and are continuing to expand our educational role in these and other fields critical to California's health and prosperity. This year, we hired renowned constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as the inaugural dean for our new law school, which welcomes its first class in fall 2009.

UCI is a center for quality education and is consistently ranked among the nation's best universities. Achievements in the sciences, arts, humanities, medicine, and management have garnered top 50 national rankings for more than 40 academic 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. We are a hub for stem cell research, a trailblazer in understanding global warming, and a leader in the fight against breast cancer. Our nationally ranked medical center in Orange serves as Orange County's only Level I trauma center, and we are currently building a new state-of-the-art university hospital that will further strengthen medical care for the region's citizens.

A major intellectual and cultural center, UCI offers numerous public activities and events. The Chancellor's Distinguished Fellows Series brings renowned speakers to campus, including Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author; William Julius Wilson, expert on race relations in America; and Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland. The Claire Trevor School of the Arts and the School of Humanities produce engaging and entertaining cultural programs, while UCI's Anteater athletes have won over two dozen national championships.

UCI is benefiting the community and the world in countless ways through its scholarly, scientific, creative, and economic contributions. Orange County's second-largest employer, UCI generates an annual economic impact on the county of $3.7 billion. We recently implemented 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.

These accomplishments depend on our commitment to a set of core values: respect, intellectual curiosity, commitment, integrity, empathy, appreciation, and fun. These values allow people to transcend limitations and create something greater than themselves. I am proud that—at UCI—we live these values every day.

I encourage you to take advantage of all that UCI has to offer. 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

Alison Brysk

Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research, 2007-08

Professor of Political Science

My interest in human rights began before I was born, when my father arrived in this country as a refugee in 1941. I grew up all over the United States, and my family's constant moves planted a comparative curiosity that served me well in the study of international affairs. That education began when I did my first overseas stint on a kibbutz in Israel before college, and continued as I studied abroad in Asia junior year, did dissertation research in Argentina in 1988, took my first sabbatical in Ecuador in 1995, and in 2006 combined three month-long research trips to Japan, the Netherlands, and South Africa. In a more formal sense, I studied political and moral philosophy at Pomona College (1977-81). After several years working with social movements, I returned to graduate study at Stanford University, determined to understand how political power shaped the possibilities for liberation in the developing world. I received my Ph.D. in 1990, three weeks before the birth of my eldest daughter—and my research is ultimately inspired by the search for a better world for my children.*

Kristen Day

Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Service, 2007-08

Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design

My research interests and values today were formed, in part, by growing up in a neighborhood that sat between tremendous wealth and grinding poverty. Just down the street was the white and wealthy city of Grosse Pointe, with its magnificent homes, high-achieving schools, and privilege in many forms. Directly adjacent was the poor, mostly black city of Detroit, with its reputation for crime, failing economy, and extreme racial segregation. My family—sequestered in religious schools and an unremarkable neighborhood—inhabited a space outside of both of these worlds. As a young person, our outside status allowed me to see these two worlds more critically. My sense of being outside these two worlds changed, over time, to an interest in making a difference in cities. As a student and then a professor, my research focuses especially on questions of diversity and social justice, tied to the built environment. Here at UC Irvine, we are also surrounded by major disparities in income and opportunity. As the founder and Executive Director of UCI's Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC), I have worked to harness the resources of the University to help address these disparities.*

Thorsten Ritz

Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 2007-08

Acting Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy

I was born and raised near Frankfurt, Germany. My father is German and my mother was Korean, hence, my accent and looks do not match. From early on, I was attracted by the fundamental and quantitative aspects of the sciences, in particular, by mathematics. After winning the state math competition in eighth grade, I taught myself calculus from textbooks. Finding this much harder than I cared for as a teenager saved me from becoming a math geek and diverted my desire for learning to other subjects like languages and playing guitar. Although I found math and chemistry most interesting in high school, friends and teachers helped me to realize that physics at the university level would be a better match for my interests. They were right, and the first semesters at the Goethe University in Frankfurt were truly exciting. Concepts and approaches that I could barely grasp at the beginning of each semester had become familiar and clear by the end of them. After three semesters, I could look back on some of the highlights of physics, such as quantum mechanics and general relativity.*

Hung Fan

Daniel G. Aldrich, Jr. Distinguished University Service Award, 2007-08

Director of the Cancer Research Institute, Associate Director of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry

I was born in Beijing, China, in 1947, and my family moved to West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1949 where my father (a physicist who had trained in the U.S. in the 1930s) took a faculty position at Purdue University. After graduation from high school, I majored in physics at Purdue, but worked in biology labs as a student. After graduation in 1967, I entered the graduate program in biology at MIT where I did my Ph.D. thesis on the molecular biology of mammalian cells (graduating in 1971).*

Mahtab Jafari

Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 2007-08

Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences

I was born in Tehran, where my mother was a professor at the University of Tehran. Watching my mother's interaction with her students, and how much she enjoyed teaching, sparked an interest in teaching in me at a very young age. My family moved to France and I graduated from high school with a baccalaureate in biology from Lycee Masena in Nice, learning French along with the course material. I have always been fascinated with all fields of science, but after taking chemistry and reading about pharmaceuticals in high school, I decided to pursue a degree in pharmaceutical sciences with immediate applications to human health. I learned that this field is more properly called "Clinical Pharmacy." *

Anthony A. James

Distinguished Faculty Award for Research, 2007-08

UCI Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics

I am from a large family (five brothers and four sisters), and can remember my mother, a librarian, taking us to the local branch to get books to read. In retrospect, I think she was very clever. Instead of buying toys, she could get something new for us every two weeks and it didn't cost a thing! My father, a mathematician, moved his family west to chase Sputnik in the booming space industry of the late fifties. Someone asked me as an eight-year old what I wanted to be, and I blurted out "scientist!" While my approaches were unsophisticated, I enjoyed seeing new things.*

Michael B. Dennin

Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching, 2007-08

Professor of Physics and Astronomy

I started my academic career deciding between three different majors: history, mathematics, and physics. Some interesting turning points were learning the number of pages involved in a history senior thesis and being told by a mathematics professor that the proof I turned in was done the way a physicist would do it. In the end, I earned my A.B. in Physics from Princeton University. While at Princeton, I had the opportunity to work on the largest and smallest scales of the physical world. I was an undergraduate researcher with the experimental particle physics group (the smallest), and I did my senior thesis on inflationary models of the early universe (the largest). After graduating in 1988, I went on to graduate school at UC Santa Barbara with the intent to study quantum gravity (the smallest and largest combined). During my first year at Santa Barbara, I was seduced into the lab of Guenter Ahlers and David Cannell, where I became enamored with the physics of things that fit on a tabletop. I have been doing "tabletop" physics ever since.*

*Continued online at http://www.senate.uci.edu/senateweb/default2.asp?active_page_id=80