UC Irvine Calit2 Faculty Achieve Distinction
By Anna Lynn Spitzer
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Irvine, Calif., July 30, 2007 – Eight UC Irvine professors affiliated with Calit2 hold the title of Chancellor’s Professor or Distinguished Professor, designations reserved for the most influential faculty on campus.
The Chancellor’s Professor title is bestowed on faculty members who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement is extraordinarily high. Chancellor’s Professors comprise a maximum of 3 percent of the faculty.
Calit2-affiliated faculty who have achieved this honor at UCI are Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, Masanobu Shinozuka and Soroosh Sorooshian.
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Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, professor of chemistry, researches atmospheric reactions, particularly those between gases and particles and/or thin water films on surfaces such as buildings and vegetation. In addition, her group studies photochemistry at the water-air interface and its impact on secondary organic aerosols. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences last year.
Masanobu Shinozuka, professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering, and a renowned expert in earthquake and structural engineering, focuses on multidisciplinary aspects of infrastructure system problems. He also has an interest in advanced technologies such as remote sensing and geographic information systems for disaster assessment and mitigation. His recent research focuses on the perceived rise in risk of global warming-related hazards such as floods, hurricanes and droughts due to a potential increase in their frequency and intensity. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
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Soroosh Sorooshian, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Earth system science, is interested in water resources engineering, hydrometeorology and hydroclimate modeling. The mathematical modeling tools developed by Sorooshian and his research team are used by hydrologic services worldwide for flood forecasting. His team is also develops advanced computer models for the measurement of precipitation through satellite remote-sensing. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.
Distinguished Professors
The Distinguished Professor designation is reserved for 2 percent of the faculty who have achieved the very highest levels of scholarship over the course of their careers. Calit2-affiliated professors Pierre Baldi, Nikil Dutt, Michael Goodrich, Marc Madou and Shaul Mukamel have attained this distinction at UCI.
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Pierre Baldi is a professor in the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics. In addition to bioinformatics, Baldi is interested in computational biology probabilistic modeling and machine learning. His group addresses biological problems and mines large data sets produced by massive data acquisition technologies, such as genome sequencing, high-throughput drug screening, and DNA microarrays. Current projects include the prediction of protein secondary and tertiary structure, the study of DNA structure in relation to several biological processes, and the analysis of gene expression data.
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Nikil Dutt, a computer science professor, researches embedded systems and computer-aided design, with a specific focus on the exploration, evaluation and design of domain-specific embedded systems in software and hardware.
His group has developed a novel architectural description language that facilitates rapid exploration of programmable embedded systems, as well as automatic generation of software toolkits that support embedded systems development. He is an ACM SIGDA distinguished lecturer, and editor-in-chief of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems.
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Michael Goodrich, a computer sciences professor, works on high-performance algorithms and data structures for solving large-scale problems of information assurance, security, the Internet, information visualization and geometric computing. He has designed efficient algorithms for sorting a collection of items on a multi-processor computer, for searching data in distributed networks, for tracing distributed denial-of-service attacks back to their sources, and for authenticating and validating data on the Internet. He is a senior member of the IEEE, ACM-SIGDA and ACM-SIGBED advisory boards.
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Marc Madou is a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor. He and his group research and fabricate micro- and nano-machines with chemical and biological applications, including recently, a compact disc to conduct medical tests. Madou is also conducting experiments with a “smart pill” – an implantable device that senses the patient’s need for a certain drug and delivers the right amount of medicine at a given time. He is also building fractal-like carbon electrodes for improved electrochemical devices such as fuel cells, batteries and biosensors. He is the author of “Fundamentals of Microfabrication,” a highly regarded volume in microscale research.
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Shaul Mukamel, a chemistry professor, designs new ways to use cutting-edge ultrafast lasers to probe biological molecules and semiconductor nanoparticles. He is a top researcher in the field of nonlinear laser spectroscopy, devising novel techniques for using sequences of laser pulses to probe and understand the structure and fundamental activities in complex molecules such as proteins, DNA and dendrimers. He is working on the application of the attosecond X-ray, which blasts a laser pulse lasting one-quintillionth of a second. These pulses are quick enough to allow researchers for the first time to freeze images of hyperfast electrons and nuclear motions in molecules and other materials.
Mukamel is a Fulbright Hayes Fellow, a Dr. Chaim Weizmann Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.