James Bullock thinks bigger than most. Growing up in Toledo, Ohio, he wasn’t particularly fascinated by stars. He believes he first noticed the night sky at his grandparents’ North Carolina farm, but he’s not sure. What interests the UC Irvine professor of physics & astronomy is the whole shebang — the entire universe. “A cosmologist […]
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’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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It may have been a rainy winter, but there’s still cause for concern about California’s water supply. Just ask Jay Famiglietti, UC Irvine Earth system science professor and founding director of the new UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling, which aims to help the state tackle its drought-induced water crisis. Famiglietti recently made headlines when he and NASA […]
It’s a lecture UC Irvine neuroscientist James Fallon has delivered around the world, even on the hit TV show “Criminal Minds.” Discussing the biological traits of murderers, Fallon describes how he correctly identified 30 killers out of 70 subjects in a double-blind experiment simply by studying their brain scans. Audiences are fascinated. But a couple years ago, […]