Dear Colleagues:
Dear Colleagues:
Welcome to UCI. It is my pleasure to introduce you to a campus of great achievements. In its short history UCI has emerged as a major research university with many innovative academic programs. As part of the largest public university system acclaimed throughout the world for its teaching, research, and public service excellence, UCI is that rarely found mixture of youth and experience, wisdom and innovation. Those qualities are serving us well as we head into a new century and a new era of achievement for UCI.
In 1994 we set the goal to be ranked among the top 50 universities in the country by the year 2000. To my great pleasure, 20 of our 24 ranked Ph.D. programs placed well within the top 50. And the 1995 awarding of two Nobel Prizes to founding faculty members in Physics and Chemistry has never before happened at a public university. These achievements have propelled us inexorably toward the top 30.
The reason is clear. This campus has managed to achieve a remarkable excellence among our scientific, humanistic, and cultural treasures. Virtually every school is distinguished for its faculty and its achievements.
How have we arrived at such an enviable position for a campus barely three decades old? It stems from the foresight of UCI's founders. They recruited talented young faculty who advanced the educational goals of this growing university. In so doing, our faculty have become national leaders by shaping new ideas and revolutionizing our knowledge of the world. Following this tradition, we continue to recruit young promising faculty who complement the wisdom and experience of our prominent researchers and teachers.
In this edition of the General Catalogue, we honor not only our Nobel Laureates, but also the recipients of the 1995-96 UCI Academic Senate Distinguished Faculty Awards.They are featured below.
So what does this mean to those of you who commit to a UCI education? It means the commitment to excellence I mentioned earlier. UCI attracts some of the brightest students in the country, who come to us full of potential. We are committed to a quality undergraduate experience and offer our students every opportunity to fulfill the goals they have set for themselves.
Our students are succeeding because the university has made education--the growth and dissemination of knowledge--the center of our universe. In choosing UCI you have begun an educational journey toward the global society of the twenty-first century. I look forward to the exciting, rewarding moments ahead as we make that journey together.
Sincerely yours,
Laurel L. Wilkening
Chancellor
UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physics
The 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Frederick Reines "for the detection of the neutrino," a feat that Reines achieved in the mid-1950s together with his Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory colleague, Clyde Cowan. The neutrino had been postulated by Wolfgang Pauli, over 20 years earlier, as a means of preserving fundamental conservation laws in radioactive decays of nuclei, in particular, the conservation of energy and angular momentum. Enrico Fermi suggested the name "neutrino" (i.e., "little neutral one"), to distinguish it from the neutron, and formulated a successful theory of weak nuclear processes with the neutrino as a central participant. The neutrino was postulated to have no electric charge and no (or very little) mass, and was predicted to be able to penetrate vast distances through matter without undergoing collisions. This made the prospect of actually detecting the elusive particle much too remote for most physicists to contemplate.
There the matter stood until Reines and Cowan, starting at a nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington, and later moving to the new Savannah River Plant reactor in South Carolina, performed their definitive and ground-breaking experimental detection. In addition to resolving and clarifying the highly unsatisfactory status of a fundamental particle which was needed for the consistency of theory, but which was virtually unobservable, this feat also demonstrated the possibility and practicality of doing "neutrino physics," thus opening the door to the use of neutrinos as a sensitive probe of elementary particles.
Indeed, a few years after the seminal work of Reines and Cowan, physicists began to use neutrinos regularly to investigate the weak interactions, the structure of protons and neutrons and the properties of their constituent quarks. These investigations have used accelerator-produced neutrinos, as well as the reactor and cosmic ray neutrinos which Reines continued successfully to use.
Following the first detection, Reines' extraordinarily productive career became firmly identified with neutrino physics, as he proceeded to devote the major part of his research to the understanding of the neutrino's properties and its interactions. His studies produced many fundamental findings and "firsts," including the first detection of neutrinos from a supernova, which occurred in 1987, confirming the central role played by neutrinos in stellar processes. The latter observation is considered to have signaled the birth of a new field, "neutrino astronomy."
Reines received his undergraduate degree (M.E.) in engineering (1939) and his M.S. degree in mathematical physics (1941) at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics (1944) at New York University. Even before completing the writing of his dissertation, he was recruited as a staff member in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project. About a year after he arrived he became a group leader in the Theoretical Division and, later, the director of Operation Greenhouse, which consisted of experiments on Eniwetok atoll. In 1958 he was a delegate to the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva. He left Los Alamos in 1959 to become Professor and Head of the Department of Physics of the Case Institute of Technology, where he formed his "Neutrino Group." In 1966 he came to UCI as the first Dean of Physical Sciences, bringing his Neutrino Group with him.
Reines' distinguished career has been recognized by his peers. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and has won the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, the Michelson-Morley Award, the Franklin Medal, the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize, and the National Medal of Science, in addition to a host of other awards, prizes, and distinguished lectureships.
Bren Research Professor of Chemistry and Earth System Science
F. Sherwood Rowland was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone. Rowland shares the prize with former UCI colleague Mario Molina, who is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Paul Crutzen, a professor at the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry in Germany and an adjunct professor at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Nobel Committee praised the three researchers for "contributing to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences."
Rowland and Molina published a landmark report in 1974 that described the threat to the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases used in aerosol spray cans, refrigerators, and plastic foams. In the late 1970s their work led to a ban on the use of CFCs in aerosol cans in the United States, Canada, and Scandinavia.
In 1987 the United Nations created an international protocol on the protection of the ozone layer. Under the most recent tightening of the protocol, the most dangerous ozone-destroying gases have been totally banned from 1996 forward. The ozone layer should gradually begin to heal after the turn of the century, but the healing process will require most of the twenty-first century.
Rowland received his B.A. degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1948, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1951 and 1952, respectively, under the direction of Willard Libby. His work at this time involved carbon-dating.
In 1964 Rowland came to UCI as the first Chair of the Department of Chemistry. His work here began in the area of chemical reaction kinetics, and he is now involved in many studies concerned with the concentrations of trace gases in the upper atmosphere.
Rowland's investigation of the impact of methane gas on the atmosphere has shown that the atmospheric concentrations have been increasing steadily at about one percent per year since 1978. The excess release of methane is contributing to the "greenhouse effect," the gradual warming of the earth's surface.
Rowland is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society. From 1982 to 1984 he served on a White House committee to evaluate the problem of acid rain. Rowland's many awards include the prestigious Japan Prize in Environmental Science and Technology received in 1989. In 1992 he served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and since 1994 he has been the Foreign Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences.
Assistant Professor of History
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 199596
I teach and study in the culture of early modern Europe (15001750), especially in the history of science, during the period when conceptions of the cosmos, nature, and scientific method were undergoing radical changes (often called the "Scientific Revolution," spanning roughly from Copernicus to Newton, say 15431687). In my research I focus on understanding the inner coherence of the traditional system of thought which was ultimately overthrown in the seventeenth century, but which thrived for over 2,000 years. Grounded in ancient texts like those of Aristotle and Pliny, this traditional natural philosophy provided explanations of the natural world that "worked" across many centuries and were transmitted for generations with subtle variations and adaptations. Why, then, fairly suddenly, did radically new conceptions of nature and scientific method emerge--those which ultimately led to important modern developments? This question has fascinated historians since the emergence of the discipline of the history of science early in this century. I try to approach it from a new angle, by looking at the survival and reactions of the "losing" side, in which, inevitably, all the proponents for modern science and their audiences were initially trained.
These research interests shape my teaching at all levels. In using mostly primary sources as reading assignments, I encourage students to set aside their modern assumptions (about science, or politics, or the past) in order to take seriously the often quite different categories and presuppositions that prevailed at a particular time and place. As in my research, I emphasize in my courses the role of unexpected consequences in shaping historical developments in order to shed the notion that historical developments were inevitable, as they sometimes seem from the vantage point of the present day. Above all, I try to share my enthusiasm for analyzing all kinds of historical sources, from rare printed books to old
scientific instruments, from manuscripts in the archives to works of art, for what they tell us, each in different ways, about how the world made sense to Europeans of the early modern period.
Professor Blair, a UCI faculty member since 1993, has recently accepted a position at Harvard University.
Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences
Former Dean of Undergraduate Studies
Director of the Farm School
Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Distinguished University Service Award, 1995
Creative activity and its cross-links with teaching are resonant themes for me. At UCI I have been a professor and administrator, but on the side I've led another, wholly unexpected life: directing an experimental elementary school in the University for over 25 years. The philosophy that animates the school grew out of reflection strongly shaped by studying, teaching, and working in research universities, most notably this one.
In the late 1960s I was a very junior professor, and although I had long been fascinated by the act of learning, UCI was the first place I taught. Among other things I taught mathematics. The experience was immensely rewarding but unsettling. I thought of math as beautiful, richly ordered, and fun. Most of my students in those required courses appeared to think of it, at least at first, as arbitrary, impenetrable, incoherent and dull; some of them found it scary. A few students happily explored the distribution of a sample statistic, for example, pushing and pulling at it to see how it worked, but they were regarded as having a peculiar knack. There was no shame in not having it; that was just the luck of the genetic draw.
Or did the attitude of the others toward math have to do with the way they had been educated? Their reports of their pre-college math study matched what I found when I started visiting elementary and high schools and reading texts of that era: my students had been spending most of their time memorizing calculation recipes and learning to run them more or, often, less well. But that wasn't at all what the kind of people who had discovered the math did. Mathematicians look for and find patterns in formal objects, extend them, seek counter-examples, figure out why the patterns work, and then, finally, publish a conventionally constrained account of one way that they work. The last is the public part, but the rest is what they do. Almost none of my undergraduate students seemed to have had much experience with that. There was an odd disjunction between what practitioners did and what we asked students to do, a disjunction that was deeper and odder the more you looked at it. It was as though we had plucked the fruit "mathematics" for use in schools, peeled it, and fed students the rind instead of the flesh.
Much the same thing seemed to be true in other areas. What working historians did, for example, or scientists, was rarely much like what schoolchildren did, so it wasn't surprising that undergraduates found it hard to think that way when asked. Again, it was as though we had discovered what it was that delighted practitioners, that drew them to their discipline--and in fact kept it a discipline, a thing that people were willing to spend their lives in, over generations--and having found these sources of delight in practice, we threw them away and taught the residue.
So we and the times and UCI being young, and there being some farmhouses available on the edge of the campus, some of us made a school to redress these wrongs. We wanted a school where children would learn to do what finders and makers do, not just master more or less badly and mechanically some scattered things they have worked out. The students would ideally acquire some of the skills and habits of mind of mathematicians and historians and writers and scientists and artists--even learn to do what good thinkers do when they are thinking well, independent of a particular practice; and they would learn to find matter of interest in and around themselves, and to develop and sustain those interests, as creators of new art and knowledge must do. These were not the only aims of the School, called the Farm School, but they were central.
We are older now, but the School, and children, and the promise that comes from being in a university, where people explore as a deep part of their lives, are all still there.
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Presidential Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, 1995 (Faculty-member recipient)
I'm a scholar of the Renaissance (1300-1600), a period of "discovery"--not so much the invention of new things as the uncovering of old ones, in particular, the great poems, statues, and philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome. In some cases, this process of "dis-covering" involved the actual excavation of statues, manuscripts, or buildings from centuries of medieval debris and neglect. Yet much of Renaissance discovery entailed not the actual retrieval of lost works so much as a change in perception toward extant ones. Renaissance "discovery" entailed a new respect and appetite for objects from a past era, a pagan rather than Christian culture in which the human mind, the human body, and the natural world were seen as objects of beauty, intrinsic worth, and potential knowledge.
It is not enough to teach my students about this historic moment of discovery; I also need to produce the act and attitude of discovery in them. My students need to experience the same combination of historical awe and creative passion for a past world that led Renaissance poets, humanists, and artists to struggle to understand classical antiquity, and to reconstruct it in the landscapes and libraries of their present reality. I need to communicate the vitality of the classical heritage as a living body of stories, images, and paradigms that continue to inform the present, from the Shakespeare allusions that still enliven the dialogue of movies and television shows, to the humanist ideal of equality under law embodied in the United States Constitution, to the troubling complicity between classic civic virtues and imperialism that links the ancient world to contemporary politics.
As a lecturer in the Humanities Core Course, I introduce students to classics of Western civilization in relation to an urgent contemporary issue or theme. In this way, freshmen can "discover" the continued impact of these master works on the texture of the world in which they live. In my more advanced undergraduate classes, students encounter classical and Renaissance works in their historical unfolding, so that they can "discover" how traditions come into being--not only the Western tradition, but global and local ones as well. I try to lead my honors thesis students and graduate students to make their own discoveries about the past by tracing new connections between disparate works. At all levels, I ask my students to discover discovery--to encounter, understand, and reproduce the many acts of cultural restoration and revision that make up the dramas great and small that we call "the humanities."
Professor of History
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Teaching, 1996
When I tell people I am a historian, I sometimes get a bewildered response: "How can you stand it? So many names and dates." Many students come to the University with the same impression. They expect to be confronted with long lists of facts to memorize and reassemble on exams. It is my job to convince them that historical analysis is a process of discovery. Names and dates are of course important, but they are only the starting point. How do historians create their accounts of past events? How do their own views of the current world affect their vision of the past? How can students learn to evaluate this material critically and construct their own interpretations of historical events? These are the questions I try to raise in my classes.
In order to give students a sense of the creative process involved in historical analysis, I make extensive use of written and visual primary source materials. Because I specialize in Russian history, a field that is unfamiliar to most of my students, I believe it is especially important to present sources generated from within Russian society. When investigating the changes Nikita Khrushchev implemented in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, for example, I show students a broad range of materials. We examine documents generated by the Communist Party together with memoirs, films, and popular literature. Armed with this information, I ask students to come to their own conclusions about how significantly Khrushchev's reforms altered the Soviet system.
My training as a Russian and Soviet historian makes me particularly sensitive to the centrality of primary source materials in the process of historical discovery. Before the demise of the Soviet Union, unpublished materials held in archives were tightly controlled by the government. Foreign scholars were denied access to whole sets of documents and sometimes even denied visas to study in the Soviet Union. Beginning with Gorbachev's reforms in the late 1980s, archives and restricted libraries began to open to the public. Scholars now have a chance to evaluate a wide range of materials and to address questions that were once only the subject of speculation. This unprecedented access to new sources has allowed historians to reexamine old debates and pursue entirely new areas of inquiry. As a result of these changes, my area of research is experiencing a wonderful burst of creative energy. I hope I can transmit this sense of excitement and discovery to the students in my classes.
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 1995-96
We currently are experiencing a radical change in our daily lives, thanks to the availability of efficient, low-cost information and communication technology. These technological advances promise to significantly enhance the quality of communication, health care,education, and entertainment, and improve the utilization of our natural resources. As a faculty member of Electrical and Computer Engineering, I have been involved in several research projects in information and networking technology. The research problems my students and I address find a common theme in the technological challenge of constructing an integrated architecture in which computers and communication networks are components of an intelligent information infrastructure.
Since I joined the UCI faculty, my research program has taken a new and accelerated path, partly because of the concentration of high-tech industries surrounding our campus. Many of these industries are searching for efficient solutions to new sets of technical issues and they offer a rich source of research problems. Although my research focuses on fundamental concepts and theories, the resulting new insight permits rapid short-term solutions to practical problems, including those of interest to industry. The exciting new role of the "information engineer" in solving real-world problems often finds its way into my lectures because I believe understanding how to apply ideas is as important as the ideas themselves for a good engineering education. Speaking of practical applications, local industries offer plentiful employment opportunities for our students following graduation!
In the past several years at UCI, I have had some exciting moments of discovery. These moments were special to me not only because they constituted milestones in my research career, but also because they advanced UCI's goal of establishing itself as a premier research institution.
I feel fortunate to be able to involve many bright undergraduate and graduate students in my research program. Some of my discoveries would not have been possible without their contributions. With the increasingly widespread use of information and communication technology, these collaborative projects are particularly exciting because they have potential impact on all walks of life. A great number of my former students have remained in close contact with me since they graduated, and I find hearing about their progress and success most satisfying.
In today's environment of rapid technological changes, we also face new challenges in educating our future engineers. It has always been my conviction that we should emphasize in our classrooms the engineering principles and theoretical foundations. On the other hand, I see an increasing need to inform our students of the latest advances in technology and how they can be applied. Our curriculum has evolved to address the challenge of balancing theory with practice and, based on my discussions with former students, our graduates have been well served by this approach.
At UCI we have some of the newest and finest computing facilities and library resources. Our faculty are involved in leading research while remaining committed to high standards of excellence in education. Consequently, our students are well prepared for meeting the future demand in the coming era of information technology. UCI is a university in which we take pride and which offers a stimulating environment for those eager to experience and share the excitement of discovery.
Associate Professor of Politics and Society
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 1995-96
Over my years at UCI, I have encountered a special openness on the part of students to learn about the phenomenon of international cooperation. That openness allowed me to develop a dedicated space in our curriculum for the study of international cooperation. On the one hand, understanding cooperation among states requires deepening our knowledge of global political and economic processes as well as of remote regions and cultures. On the other hand, our daily individual experiences are a rich source of ideas that can help us untangle the makeup of cooperative behavior. The ability to link the two levels, the global and the more parochial or personal, offers a particularly rewarding learning context.
In addition, students at UCI, whether they come from Orange County or from overseas, bring in a diverse baggage of experiences of particular value to the understanding of international (and interpersonal) cooperation. This diversity, in turn, provides both students and professors with a privileged environment in which different and innovative approaches can be formulated and tested. The classroom thus functions as both a virtual laboratory on the more elusive global dimensions, and on the more concrete local expressions, of cooperation. To put it simply, diversity at UCI drives intellectual progress in the study of international cooperation. And such progress results from interactions in the classroom as well as in the more individualized--but often cooperative--research activities of students and professors.
A further contribution to the study of international cooperation at UCI is the result of an interdisciplinary interest in the topic. To begin with, all the social sciences converge in their concern with the political, economic, psychological, and sociological dimensions of cooperation. Moreover, students majoring in physical and biological sciences have shown to be no less challenged to explore this subject matter. In the first place, they do sense the evident links between the global and local. They also quickly realize that, whatever their field of inquiry, an international cooperative dimension is at play, be it in the realm of environmental, health, or any other technical field.
The basic idea is to create an intellectually stimulating learning environment that plants the seeds for a lifelong interest in cooperation at all levels. Students are not passive recipients in this endeavor, but, instead, contribute to the development of a common enterprise at UCI and beyond.
Professor of Biological Chemistry, Pediatrics, and Psychiatry, 1977-1995
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Research
Since I have been old enough to read, mystery stories have captured most of my free time and imagination. Although it may sound very nonacademic, my favorites have been books by Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's chronicles of one of my idols, Sherlock Holmes. Both authors scattered a few clues throughout their stories, each of which taken by itself, meant very little. However, someone who had the insight to connect the relevant clues and eliminate the irrelevant information always got the brass ring. When I began to decide what I wanted to do for a living in my adult life, I knew it had to involve solving mysteries. As a graduate student in genetics I realized that, for me, the ultimate mysteries involved understanding the intricacies of how seemingly insignificant differences in the hereditary material, DNA, could explain the enormous variations among people. In particular, I was struck by the fact that minor differences in almost any one of the 100,000 genes we all have in all our cells could be the difference between a happy, healthy person and a person with a horrible, debilitating genetic disease. What could be a greater mystery to solve than to find the one change in three billion "bits" of DNA that is the difference between health and horrible, agonizing death? It is not only a fascinating detective story and a complex puzzle but, once you have solved the mystery for any given genetic disease, you might well have provided the critical piece of information that will enable other scientists or physicians to cure the disease.
Since coming to UCI more than 18 years ago, I have spent most of my professional life searching for genes that cause different genetic disorders. As is often the case in science, the first 14 or 15 years of my work involved laying the basic groundwork that I thought was necessary to solve the mysteries of several genetic disorders. Fortunately, the groundwork has paid off in a big way over the past three years; my laboratory and the Human Genome Center that I direct have been involved in identifying the genes and the exact mutations that cause six different genetic diseases, including the genes responsible for an inherited form of colon cancer, a gene that causes the most common form of dwarfism, a gene that is responsible for the most common genetic cause of infant death, and the gene responsible for a severe neurological disorder, Huntington disease. Throughout this work, graduate students, postdoctoral scientists, and undergraduate students have played key roles in each of these discoveries. In fact, without the students, the work could never have been done. As exciting as these discoveries are to me, the students in my laboratory are even more excited when they realize that work they did led directly to solving the extraordinary mystery that is any genetic disorder.
No one can imagine what it is like to be the first person in the world to see the exact DNA sequence mutation that causes a genetic disease. It's like being the first person to walk on the moon, except that finding the DNA sequence change that causes a genetic disorder is much more important in terms of the future of humankind than walking on any other celestial body. I am very proud that so many students working with me have experienced the feelings of joy, awe, and ecstasy that come with being the first to visualize the basic cause of a genetic disease that scientists and physicians have been trying to understand for decades or centuries.
Professor Wasmuth, one of the world's most prominent genetic researchers, passed away on December 29, 1995. He also was Director of UCI's National Center for Human Genome Research, the sixteenth such site selected by the National Institutes of Health. In his memory, the Wasmuth Family and UCI have established the John J. Wasmuth Fellowship Fund. For information about this fund, contact the UCI Foundation at (714) 824-6535.
