James Bullock

James Bullock
Dean, School of Physical Sciences
Professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy
164 Rowland Hall
University of California Irvine Irvine, CA 92697
(949) 824-6022
bullock@uci.edu

As a profoundly curious member of the scientific community, I’ve dedicated the past 15+ years of my career at University of California, Irvine to conducting fundamental research and educating scholars to make a positive impact. As Dean of the School of Physical Sciences, I have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of some of science’s greatest pioneers and attempt to emulate their accomplishments, including the discovery that CFCs deplete the ozone layer, which later led to the Montreal Protocol. It’s pivotal findings such as this, made at UCI, that inspire me to hypothesize, experiment and share my passion with others to uncover unknowns and enact change that will produce long-term effects.

As a young but tremendously talented university with forward-thinking leadership and nationally recognized innovations, UC Irvine is the ideal campus for world-class scientific research and education. My mission as Dean is to help students and faculty in the School of Physical Sciences develop breakthrough solutions and transformative insights to the most existential and exciting challenges of our time, including climate change, quantum science, health care and advancing humanity through a deeper understanding of the world around us. Some of our most recent achievements include launching the Eddelman Quantum Institute, a global model of scientific collaboration that will discover new quantum science phenomena, educate the next generation of quantum scientists, and will power the next technological revolution; and the establishment of the multidisciplinary initiative UCI Solutions that Scale, which strives to provide multi-faceted climate change and energy solutions. I hope to continue to find ways to foster enthusiasm, abilities and potential of our entire school community.

Outside of my work as an administrator and educator, I have conducted in-depth research that examines how galaxies and their constituent dark matter halos have formed and evolved over billions of years of cosmic time. My interest in this field encouraged me to spend six years as the Founding Director of the Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution, a multi-campus research program that enables a focused effort to unlock the mysteries of galaxy formation. To date, this is the largest institute of its kind in the world.