Research

Doctoral candidate in marketing at The Paul Merage School of Business studies how consumers select over-the-counter drugs.

UC Irvine psychologist Karen Rook can trace her interest in how loneliness affects the elderly to her childhood, when she saw a much-loved, once-robust grandmother decline markedly after losing her husband. Unable to manage the family farm on her own, her grandmother moved into an apartment. After breaking her hip in a fall, she ended […]

Amid the riot of books, papers, student exams, posters and paraphernalia in John Dombrink’s office at UC Irvine, one thing stands out: little yellow sticky notes he’s tacked onto a row of file drawers labeled “sin.” Dombrink — who once considered the priesthood before finding his true calling — specializes in sin. The professor of criminology, […]

With his rosy cheeks and booming laugh, Michael Clegg is often told he resembles Santa Claus, and he logs almost as many miles. The UC Irvine ecology & evolutionary biology professor also is foreign secretary for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which means he’s on the road as much as he’s at home in Irvine. […]

Psychologist Salvatore R. Maddi remembers when one of his graduate students at the University of Chicago showed him an article in Family Circle that warned, “Stress can kill you, so you need to stay away from it.” That was a popular theory in the 1970s, but Maddi was skeptical. He’d already done studies indicating that stress could […]

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 […]