UC Irvine professors Barbara Finlayson-Pitts and Kenneth L. Pomeranz have been named 2006 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The UCI faculty members are among 175 new fellows and 20 new foreign honorary members elected this year to AAAS. This year's new fellows also include former Presidents George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and Rockefeller University President Sir Paul Nurse, and actor and director Martin Scorsese.
The 226-year-old academy is composed of scholars, scientists, academics and business people. Fellows and foreign honorary members are nominated and elected to the academy by current members.
. Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, professor of chemistry, studies chemical reactions in the lower atmosphere to better understand air pollution in urban and remote areas. She directs AirUCI - Atmospheric Integrated Research Using Chemistry at Interfaces - an effort to better understand how air and water interact in the atmosphere and how those processes affect air quality and global climate change. Finlayson-Pitts has studied the effects of sea salt on urban smog formation and on remote atmospheres, as well as how chemical reactions on the surfaces of buildings and roads affect urban air quality and models of air pollution. Among her achievements, in 2004 she received the American Chemical Society Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology for her work toward understanding how chemical reactions contribute to urban air pollution.
. Kenneth L. Pomeranz is Chancellor's Professor of History. His research focuses on East Asian history and the economy, with a particular interest in the state, society and economy of late Imperial and 20th-century China, as well as comparative studies on labor, environmental change and economic change in Europe and East Asia. His publications include The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, which looks at why sustained industrial growth began in northwestern Europe rather than East Asia, and The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937, which investigates how politics and the environment shape economic change and responses to imperialism in China's Shandong Province. He also has worked on the history of popular religion in China and on patterns of global economic integration.
With this year's announcement, along with Chancellor Emeritus Ralph J. Cicerone, there are 33 AAAS members at UCI. Current UCI faculty members previously elected to AAAS include: Francisco Ayala, Albert Bennett, Roy Britten, Thomas J. Carew, Michael Clegg, William Daughaday, Igor Dzyaloshinskii, David Easton, Walter Fitch, Bernard Grofman, Ping-ti Ho, Wolfgang Iser, Elizabeth Loftus, R. Duncan Luce, Penelope Maddy, David Malament, James McGaugh, Ricardo Miledi, J. Hillis Miller, Masayasu Nomura, Larry Overman, J.W. Peltason, A. Kimball Romney, F. Sherwood Rowland, Donald Saari, Henry Samueli, Brian Skyrms, Colin Slim, George Sperling, Douglas Wallace and Robin Williams.
About the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people." Past academy members include George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The unique structure of the American Academy allows the academy to conduct interdisciplinary studies on international security, social policy, education and the humanities that draw on the range of academic and intellectual disciplines of its members. The current membership includes more than 170 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.
About the University of California, Irvine: The University of California, Irvine is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Founded in 1965, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students and about 1,400 faculty members. The second-largest employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $3.3 billion. For more UCI news, visit www.today.uci.edu.
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