newspage-events

Irvine, Calif., March 23, 2020 – East Antarctica’s Denman Glacier has retreated 5 kilometers, nearly 3 miles, in the past 22 years, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are concerned that the shape of the ground surface beneath the ice sheet could make it even more susceptible to climate-driven collapse.

Rebecca Riley remembers feeling drawn to the stars since she was less than three years old, when she — and this is her first memory — would go outside with her grandparents in Clay County, Alabama and lay on a blanket and watch the night sky.

Irvine, Calif., March 18, 2020 – During the exceptionally warm Arctic summer of 2019, Greenland lost 600 billion tons of ice, enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters in two months. On the opposite pole, Antarctica continued to lose mass in the Amundsen Sea Embayment and Antarctic Peninsula but saw some relief in the form of increased snowfall in Queen Maud Land, in the eastern part of the continent.

California’s strict environmental regulations have long concerned some farmers, who say that restrictions around things such as water use are at odds with the agricultural industry. The state’s air pollution standards, though, which are among the strictest in the country, are a boon to farmers: The reductions in ground ozone resulted in $600 million worth of increased crop production annually.

Paata Ivanisvili, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, wants to know how to answer seemingly unanswerable questions. That’s why he applied for — and was just awarded — an NSF CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation.

Come July 1, Stephanie Sallum will become a new assistant professor of astronomy in the Physics and Astronomy Department. She comes to UCI from her postdoctoral position at UC Santa Cruz with plans to capture, along with a team of other researchers, direct images of exoplanets that are still forming around distant stars.

There are some problems in the field of mathematics that have been around for a long time, and which no one has ever been able to solve. One of the them, proposed in 1900 in Paris at the International Congress of Mathematicians by mathematician David Hilbert, is one that Department of Mathematics Assistant Professor Jesse Wolfson wants to solve.

In February, Virginia Trimble, an astronomer in the UCI Department of Physics and Astronomy, became a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). This is the first time in its 121-year history that the AAS has given fellowships of any kind to its members, and, through its Legacy Fellows, the society is shining a light on members who sculpted astronomy into the field it is today.

The Simons Foundation awards fellowships to mathematicians and theoretical physicists with remarkable bodies of work.

In physical sciences, we celebrate #InternationalWomensDay and #WomensHistoryMonth. Here are a few inspirational women with pioneering research in our school:

On February 19, Professors Eric Rignot, Timothy Tait and Jenny Yang all received 2019-2020 Distinguished Faculty Awards from the UCI Academic Senate during an evening ceremony at the Newkirk Alumni Center. The professors swept the Senates’ research awards categories; Professor Rignot received the Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research, while Professors Yang and Tait received the Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research and the Distinguished Early-Career Faculty Award for…

In February, Virginia Trimble, an astronomer in the UCI Department of Physics and Astronomy, became a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). This is the first time in its 121-year history that the AAS has given fellowships of any kind to its members, and, through its Legacy Fellows, the society is shining a light on members who sculpted astronomy into the field it is today.