Magazine

Tom Hayashi and Peggy Woelke, his neighbor and caregiver, visit the clinic for his annual evaluation

Testing the powers of recall

Forgetting where you parked your car, the name of someone you just met or a new phone number is a sign of the normal changes to short-term memory that most healthy adults experience as they age. Becoming lost on the way to the grocery store, not recognizing someone familiar or forgetting what a phone does, […]

Susan Turner

Just the facts

Susan Turner’s office at UC Irvine looks as cheerful as a kindergarten classroom, with a bright mural of butterflies painted by her mother and a vase filled with flowers crafted from beads. Her surroundings belie the often grim task at hand: researching crime and punishment. As director of UCI’s Center for Evidence-Based Corrections and a criminology, law […]

Roger McWilliams

Time traveler

UC Irvine physics & astronomy professor Roger McWilliams often appears to have stepped out of a time machine — from the past. He rides to work on a reproduction vintage bicycle with a wide leather seat and big chrome handlebars. When he does drive a car, it’s a 60-year-old Jaguar that he fixes himself with […]

Dr. Rita Mehta

Targeting tumors

In 2003, oncologist Dr. Rita Mehta had “the kind of moment everyone lives for” — everyone, that is, who’s working to find a cure for cancer. Mehta, a health sciences associate professor of medicine at the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, was one of the first researchers to use chemotherapy combined with the drug trastuzumab (trade name […]

Aileen Wiglesworth

Uncovering elder abuse

Physical abuse of the elderly has long been difficult to prove because of older people’s propensity to bruise easily and their sometimes-dubious powers of recall, giving perpetrators a handy defense. But thanks to studies by UC Irvine’s Program in Geriatrics, that’s changing. The research has identified bruises most likely caused by abuse and established that […]

Researcher collecting tide samples

Toxic tides

Sunny Jiang, a UC Irvine researcher studying pollution in Orange County’s coastal waters, recently got a graphic look at how swimming and surfing in the ocean can make people sick. She and a team of graduate students charted incidents of poor water quality at Southern California beaches over a 10-year period and the number of […]

UCI professor William Cooper and his students count and catalog plastic trash

Trashing the ocean

On a clear spring day at Crystal Cove State Park, UC Irvine professor William Cooper and undergraduate Tova Handelman sift though a mound of seaweed and sand, oblivious to the curious stares of beachgoers. They’re too busy studying trash. “Look at all this plastic!” says Cooper, picking out a pellet no bigger than a grain […]

Jasmine Fang

Keen on kindness

Last summer, UC Irvine senior Jasmine Fang traveled to the rural Dominican Republic province of Elías Piña to build latrines for residents and teach public hygiene. She learned something too: the value of community. Evenings and weekends, families would gather to play basketball, jump rope or just socialize. Says Fang: “People in the Dominican Republic […]

Alumnus Chris Canfield

Game boy

UC Irvine alumnus Chris Canfield designs computer games like “Guitar Hero II” and “Rock Band” for millions of players who want to unleash their inner rock star. To those who once acted out their rock ‘n’ roll fantasies by shredding on a tennis racket or singing into a showerhead, the games are the greatest invention […]

Hub of healing

What excites Nan Luke about the new Sue and Bill Gross Hall: A CIRM Institute at UC Irvine isn’t the spacious clinic or pristine laboratories, offices and meeting rooms. It’s the interaction that will take place there between patients like herself and researchers. Both are driving the effort to see if and how stem cells […]