Professor James Bullock named fellow of the American Physical Society

Today, the American Physical Society announced that Professor James Bullock of the UC Irvine Department of Physics & Astronomy will become an APS Fellow. It’s an honor that, each year, goes to less than one half of one percent of all APS members, and it recognizes work – be it original research, instruction or the application of physics to science and technology – deemed to be field-defining. Bullock, who’s also the dean of the UCI School of Physical Sciences, studies, among many other things, why galaxies like our own Milky Way have the shapes they do. It’s work that sees he and his lab strive to model how gravity from dark matter – matter that physicists believe comprises most of the matter in the universe, but which nobody’s ever directly detected before – governs galaxy shapes. “It feels great to be recognized along with a group of scientists who I admire greatly,” said Bullock. “It’s also a significant amount of work for my colleagues and mentors who wrote letters nominating and supporting me for the award. For these people, time is a precious resource, and knowing that they spent it on my behalf means as much as the formal recognition from the society itself.” It’s an honor Bullock doesn’t think could’ve happened without the support of his colleagues, including his graduate students and collaborators like Joel Primack at UC Santa Cruz, David Weinberg at the Ohio State University,  Kathryn Johnston at Columbia University, Manoj Kaplinghat at UCI, Risa Wechsler at Stanford University and Mike Boylan-Kolchin at the University of Texas at Austin.