Four Physical Sciences professors to be honored at virtual Academic Senate ceremony

One’s researching how to get astronauts back to Earth if humans voyage to Mars one day, and another’s researching probability theory. One steered the university into the online learning realm long before the pandemic hit — something that made UCI uniquely prepared to teach its students from afar when coronavirus enveloped the globe, while yet another served in the Vietnam War and then spent his career researching how humans pollute the air while also grappling with emotional fallout from the U.S. public response to the war. These four are professors Huolin Xin and Phillip Collins of the Department of Physics & Astronomy, Don Blake of the Department of Chemistry and Roman Vershynin of the Department of Mathematics, each of whom received awards last year from the UCI Academic Senate for their work; respectively, they won the Distinguished Early-Career Faculty Award for Research, the Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research, the Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching, and the Academic Senate Better World Award, and, come February 10, they’ll be honored at the Academic Senate 2020-2021 Distinguished Faculty Virtual Awards Ceremony. The ceremony’s at 5 p.m. PDT, and you can RSVP for it until February 3 here.