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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ragtime — that bright, toe-tapping piano music that flourished in bars, brothels and parlor rooms in the early 1900s — has found an unlikely promoter and practitioner at UC Irvine: a young civil engineering student named Jared DiBartolomeo. DiBartolomeo belongs to a generation that worships technology, was raised on rap and is addicted to keyboards […]
“Do not say anything against rhyme! It is a mighty goddess indeed, the deity of very secret and very ancient coincidences, and one must never let the fires on its altars burn out.” — Rainer Maria Rilke They are small in number, the writers who have come to UC Irvine to study poetry through the master’s-level Programs […]
It took scarcely 35 seconds Jan. 12 for a magnitude 7.0 earthquake to cripple Haiti, flattening its capital and killing more than 200,000 people, but it will take many years for the island nation to recover. While devastating quakes have since struck in Chile, Japan and elsewhere, Haiti’s situation is unique. Desperately poor before the […]