On behalf of the entire UCI community, I am delighted to welcome you to the Irvine campus.
On behalf of the entire UCI community, I am delighted to welcome you to the Irvine campus.
As you become more familiar with UCI, I think you'll begin to understand the pride we have in this university, which is now regarded as one of the top 10 public universities in the country. In fact, many of our programs and faculty have achieved standing with the best private universities.
To you as students, that means UCI can match the enthusiasm and expectations you bring to your education by introducing you to a new world of intellectual experience. We provide you with chances to question, discuss, disagree, and discover--unique opportunities that are bound to shape your future. Those opportunities, along with the people you will encounter at UCI, contribute to an atmosphere that is both challenging and supportive.
You'll learn alongside some of the brightest students on any university campus. UCI students compete successfully for the most coveted scholarships and postgraduate fellowships. Their competitive edge comes from being at a research university where, even as undergraduates, students may participate in the intense creativity of the research process.
The UCI faculty who will be your teachers and mentors are some of the nation's foremost scholars, respected for their ability to engage students in the excitement of learning, as well as for their research. Among the faculty who helped to build this campus are two Nobel Laureates, F. Sherwood Rowland in Chemistry and the late Frederick Reines in Physics. Many UCI faculty are also members of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and other distinguished professional organizations.
As UCI's reputation for excellence in the sciences and medicine has grown over the years, so has our strength in virtually every other discipline, from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, to technology and management. But increasingly, society and the workplace demand knowledge that crosses traditional boundaries. So we have developed innovative--often one-of-a-kind--programs that combine studies such as art and technology, medicine and business, ecology and the social sciences. In addition, our campus is noted for using information technology to its best advantage, preparing students for the roles they must fill in the new century.
UCI has flourished within the Orange County community, which is one of the fastest growing in the country, both economically and in its wide spectrum of cultural and intellectual offerings. The University's partnerships with the community create outstanding opportunities for 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 facet of society.
Where activities outside the classroom are concerned, one of my goals is to work with students to steadily improve upon the already good quality of life at UCI. A new fully equipped student recreation facility will open in 1999. And we are constantly augmenting the many cultural and athletic events available to students.
Whether you are a graduate or undergraduate student, UCI is the ideal place to pursue the course you have in mind for your future, or to change that course should you decide to explore other avenues for achieving your individual goals.
We welcome the unique talents and experience that each of you will bring to our campus, and I look forward to sharing the next few years in your lifetime pursuit of learning.
Sincerely,
Ralph J. Cicerone
Chancellor
Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Distinguished University Service Award, 1998
Professor Emeritus of Pathology
My award in the broad area of distinguished service covers quite a span of activities over my many years at the University of California that include research, leadership, professional service, and citations for outstanding teaching. However, at this particular time the award had to be focused primarily on my love affair and interest and activities in the democratic parliamentary process, organizations, and group leadership. I believe that component of my involvement may be of considerable interest to the type of student who might be UCI-bound.
Our campus and faculty have an abiding interest in nurturing an atmosphere of responsible shared and self-governance, political representation, due process, and rules of order. The academic community at UCI is especially cordial for students who believe that united group activities through democratic means is a part of the learning process and will prepare them for more effective future responsibilities in our society.
UCI is attractive to the young mind because of the governance activities of the campus' student organization, the Associated Students of UCI (ASUCI). It functions independently but in parallel with the faculty Academic Senate.
The Senate invites the student body's nominations of student representatives as members of Senate committees, and the ASUCI president attends Senate meetings. The agenda of the Senate has a standing place for the ASUCI president to address that faculty body and to present student petitions. By those processes, students and professors come to understand each other's opinions and needs which mold them together as a part of the total family of this world-class university.
Students choosing to come to UCI will find it very special indeed. Those who think they might wish to embrace the exhilaration of a role in the political representative processes should come prepared with backgrounds of such high school courses as drama, public speaking, logic, debate, and constitutional history.
As a rapidly growing, youthful, and beautiful campus with boundless opportunities for students to develop ability in the democratic process, together with its enormous scholarly resources, UCI provides an outstanding university experience. Give it a try.
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 1998-99
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
I cannot remember, ever, desiring to be anything but a mathematician. My first exposure to real mathematics happened when I was introduced to the two famous ancient Greek theorems: Euclid's theorem for the existence of an infinite number of prime numbers and Pythagoras' theorem on the "irrationality" of the square root of 2. Both exemplify the simple complexity and abstract beauty of pure mathematics. Each is as fresh and relevant today as it was when first discovered, more than 2,000 years ago.
The public doesn't need to be convinced that there is something important in mathematics. One knows that Newton developed calculus to explain the movement and interaction of heavenly bodies and that the computer revolution owes its birth to mathematics. From bridge building to chaos, from navigation to astronomy, from the theory of relativity to Wall Street, mathematics is the basis for formulating and understanding their principles.
I find mathematics continuously fascinating and challenging without end, because it combines logic and intuition, generality and individuality, analysis and construction. The discovery of new proofs is for me invigorating and most intriguing. My own field of research is classical mathematical analysis which is considered to be pure mathematics. I am concerned with the study of the structure and new features of various models of nonlinear partial differential equations, in connection with more complex problems of differential geometry and their physical applications. My work is rather abstract. Yet, I get a great thrill in proving a new theorem and quite a satisfaction to see its application to areas such as population dynamics, diffusion through biological membranes, and possibly the spread of malignant cells.
Teaching is a wonderful means for expressing my passion for mathematics. I strive to expose my students to the beauty of mathematical reasoning, and it is truly satisfying and fulfilling to see them smile when they finally understand a difficult abstract concept. I want my students to learn and use the mathematics I teach them. But my most important goal is to teach them to think independently and develop their own original ideas in their profession and everyday life. I find UCI students very bright, knowledgeable, and eager to learn. It is very gratifying to see our freshmen grow and become well-educated people, equipped to handle the challenges they will meet as professionals and members of our society.
Being in an excellent mathematics department and having the chance to interact with accomplished scientists in other fields, makes my research and teaching an even more stimulating and rewarding endeavor.
As a mathematician and professor I strive to add new knowledge to my profession and I hope that my research has a value which differs only in degree, but not in kind, from the creations of the great scientists and artists who have contributed to the welfare of our society.
KRISTEN M. DAY
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 1998-99
Assistant Professor of Social Ecology
My research and teaching in environment-design research examine how people shape and are shaped by the places we inhabit. I was first attracted to this field because of its potential to enhance people's well-being by improving the design and management of homes, work places, schools, parks, and even cities.
Students intuitively appreciate how the physical environment may help reduce fear of crime, enhance job performance, and so on. Thus, my ambition as a teacher is to expand students' interest while providing the conceptual frameworks and research skills to investigate these complex interrelationships. I try to teach students to understand issues from a "social ecological" perspective, by considering problems at multiple levels--individual, organizational, community, societal--and through multiple disciplinary lenses. For example, during a class on aging and environments, I share with students my own research on designing environments for people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. In discussing how nursing home design impacts people with dementia, I am able to illustrate how the experience of the environment is also shaped by the family unit, by regulatory codes, and by cultural norms. This approach helps students to see that design is important, but it does not act in isolation.
Environment-design research is a profession that few students will practice full time, yet its findings are relevant to most fields. I try to convince students to consider the role of the physical environment in a wide range of issues, by connecting class discussions and readings to the "real world." For example, a class on crime prevention and design may feature a guest lecture by a former police officer, now a national expert in "defensible space." Or I may include an article from the Wall Street Journal on skylights and consumer shopping, for a discussion on the relationship between light and mood. I look for opportunities for students to examine firsthand the issues raised in class. Thus, classes have included trips to downtown Los Angeles, Leisure World, and Habitat for Humanity homes. I also try to plan assignments in which students apply what they are learning to problems in local communities. My students may find themselves researching and designing parks, or developing design guidelines for downtown historic districts. Such projects bring out the best in students, who are motivated by the opportunity to exercise what they are learning. The students' enthusiasm, commitment, and creativity have won new friends for the School of Social Ecology and for UCI. Class exercises also generate opportunities for new research. It is these experiences that make teaching such a joy.
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Research, 1998-99
Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
I was fortunate that my parents encouraged greatly my sense of awe and curiosity about the world around me. I was even more fortunate to have gone to college and into academic life for they have permitted me to continue being inspired by Nature and to work (or is it play?) at uncovering more of Nature's secrets. I am particularly enthralled about discovering how everything came to be the way it is, and how powerful is the recognition that the laws of Nature do not change. It is this recognition which allows us to demand reproducibility of one's experiments.
My present work is discovering the history of the human influenza virus. This has entailed several discoveries. The first was that the virus was evolving a million times faster than mammals evolve and the second was that the virus' genealogy is strange, having only a single main branch with all the other lineages dying out in a few years. Why should that be? It appears that the virus is trying to beat the human immune system. When the virus infects us, we make antibodies to fight the virus. But that depends upon the antibody's recognizing the virus and killing it. But if the virus gets a face-lift, a mutation that changes the way it looks, the old antibody doesn't recognize the newly transformed virus.
We have lately discovered a dozen and a half positions in the structure of the influenza virus that are being pushed to change much more than the others. We believe that these are positions that provide the face-lifts that enable the virus to escape (temporarily) the immune system's antibodies. Moreover, by examining new mutant strains for changes in these positions, we have been able to predict which strains were the more likely sources for future epidemics. This is exciting in the first instance because evolutionists study largely the past. No one has ever been able to pick the winners in an evolutionary race before. It is exciting in the second place because it may lead to more effective influenza vaccines.
Places like the University of California, Irvine, which encourage such intellectual pursuits, are excellent places for such scientific accomplishments. There is reciprocal exchange of the joy of such discoveries among professors and students alike, to the great enrichment of us all.
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Teaching, 1998-99
Senior Associate Dean of the College of Medicine and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology
As Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, I teach medical students, residents, and fellows. My research is focused on gynecologic cancer, currently on early diagnosis and prevention of cervical cancer. Research stimulates awareness of the range of possibilities for treatment and prevention of malignancies. My talks with medical students always include an angle on prevention. I emphasize in my teaching that I expect our students to modify the environment for the betterment of society, rather than passively adapt to it. I have had the pleasure of working with both undergraduate and medical students in my research. I find it a joy and a privilege to shepherd students from hard-core basic research to clinical research and finally to the art and practice of medicine.
As Senior Associate Dean for Educational Affairs, I have devoted my energy to development of the educational program for medical students. Medical education must take place within the dynamic context of the health care delivery system and new technology. We built a new Student Training Center and have implemented several new curricular initiatives to keep pace with these changes. In the Training Center we teach and assess clinical skills in an environment that simulates an actual ambulatory clinical setting. The use of standardized patients (trained actors) allows students to gain hands-on experience in a controlled setting with taking histories, conducting physical examinations, and developing treatment plans. Standardized patients are also used in structured examinations to assess clinical competence. The Patient-Doctor courses emphasize the interpersonal skills needed to develop an effective patient/doctor relationship. Medical economics courses and a new combined M.D./M.B.A. program prepare our students to be cost-effective practitioners and leaders of their destiny within the economic realities of medical practice today. Our medical informatics curriculum provides students with the skills they will need to become lifelong learners and to practice evidence-based medicine. I believe the process in education is as important as the content. We are reducing lecture hours in favor of problem-based learning, small group discussions, independent study, and computer simulations.
Seeing our educational program move up through the ranks and receive recognition as one of the leading medical education programs in the country gives me a great deal of satisfaction. This progress has been well-documented through external measures such as our students' performance on the United States Medical Licensure Examinations and acceptance into top residency programs throughout the country. The development of new methods for the training and assessment of medical students has been an integral part of this process. I believe that the UCI College of Medicine provides the most up-to-date and sensible education matching the needs of patients and physicians for the twenty-first century. We also meet an important obligation to provide physicians for the State of California. Seventy-eight percent of our students remain in California--one-third in Orange County.
I have always considered it a privilege to have the opportunity to work in an intellectually stimulating environment such as UCI that allows me to pursue my teaching, research, and patient care in an atmosphere of mutual benefit to myself, the institution, and the community.
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 1998-99
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ruth Benedict, one of the founding figures in American anthropology, remarked in 1934 that the West's blindness to the cultural embeddedness of its own sciences would hinder its understanding of social and cultural diversity, and lead scholars to make unfounded grand claims about the big questions of human existence. "When a student has assembled the vast data for a study of international credits, or of the process of learning, or of narcissism as a factor in psycho-neuroses," she wrote, "it is through and in this body of data that the economist or psychologist or the psychiatrist operates. He does not reckon with the fact of other social arrangements where all the factors, it may be, are differently arranged.... He identifies the local attitudes of the 1930s with Human Nature, the description of them with Economics or Psychology."
My research uses anthropology to question deeply held beliefs about the nature of law and economic processes, and I have found UCI to be an environment where a diversity of methodological and theoretical perspectives helps point up the limits of any one disciplinary approach. My field research in the British Virgin Islands sought to explain why the place attracts so many Caribbean migrants. One reason is the fact that the territory is an offshore financial services center, or tax haven, and has been experiencing an economic boom since the late 1980s. While citizens benefit from good jobs in banks, immigrants come to take on work in the construction and service sector. I became interested in the cultural ramifications of offshore finance, and this has led me to my current research project. In this work, I have been bringing anthropological analyses of cultural forms to bear on the world of finance--an area often assumed to be bereft of cultural content. I am interested in the impact of financial globalization on places like the British Virgin Islands which are so intimately caught up in it. I have been looking at the way Caribbean tax havens market themselves to international investors--"wizarding up" images more reminiscent of the British Empire than they are of Club Med--and asking questions about how those images redound into people's self-perceptions.
Currently, I am looking at alternatives to financial globalization put forth in various quarters. These alternatives seek to rewrite the cultural scripts of finance from the ground up. These include alternative currency movements in the U.S., digital cash or e-cash efforts of banking and computer companies, and Islamic banking in Southeast Asia. I am interested in what happens when people seek to redefine (or undermine) some of the taken-for-granted cultural terms of finance--terms like "money," "property," "capital," "interest," and so forth--that are our "native" categories and that we rarely subject to cultural analysis.
Like Benedict, I use my teaching and research to encourage anthropologists and others to give more serious consideration than they have to the cultural forms of the West as these forms spread around the world and are taken up, resisted, or possibly transcended. The ultimate goal of my research is to demonstrate that law and economics are above all cultural domains that encode whole cosmologies, and that shape and structure the worlds we inhabit and transform.
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 1998-99
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
It is ironic that I became a professor of organic chemistry.
As a student intending to go to medical school, I entered the dreaded "orgo" lecture hall with the same trepidation as other premeds. My worst fears of organic chemistry soon came true. No matter how hard I studied, I could not keep "substitution" and "elimination" reactions separate in my mind. I had no idea how the bromination of alkenes worked. All those reactions and all that memorization was too much for me! The professor kept saying the course was not about memorization, but rather it was about understanding underlying principles and recognizing patterns of reactivity. All I could see were unrelated facts. I braced myself for the worst, and it came: I bungled the first exam that fall. It was going to be a long year.
I decided that I had to focus on the logic of chemistry, not the facts, if I were to survive. It would be impossible to keep memorizing more and more and more reactions. That decision proved to be a turning point not only in that class, but also in my life. As I concentrated harder on the concepts and used the problems in the back of the chapters to reinforce those concepts, I found that I did not need to memorize reactions if I could see the patterns and logic of chemical reactivity. The fundamental concepts in each chapter repeated themselves over and over in various incarnations, yet they remained the same concepts. The material did not become easy, but the challenge became enjoyable, and every day I understood the material a little better. My grades slowly but steadily improved as I made connections between the underlying principles and integrated new principles with older, more familiar ones.
I believe that my struggle with organic chemistry is the primary reason I became a teacher. Organic chemistry did not come naturally to me; I worked at it. I learned to love this challenge the way I had loved other challenges in my life, such as bicycling just a bit faster or learning to play a particularly complex piece of music. As a teacher, I see how intimidating the weighty organic chemistry textbook can be. My challenge now is to help students at UCI navigate their way through this material. I also hope to show them that they can learn to love the challenge.
