Four professors elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Irvine, Calif., April 28, 2022 — A quartet of professors at the University of California, Irvine, has been elected as members by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The 242^nd class of AAAS inductees includes 261 extraordinary people from around the world, recognized for their accomplishments and leadership in academia, the arts, industry, public policy and research.

“This is an outstanding recognition of the accomplishments of these four faculty members,” said Hal Stern, UCI provost and executive vice chancellor. “The range of disciplines covered demonstrates the high level of scholarship across our campus.”

UCI’s inductees into the class of ’22 are:

Jeffrey Barrett is a Chancellor’s Professor of logic and philosophy of science. Much of Barrett’s research has concerned the quantum measurement problem and the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics more generally. His research has also involved using evolutionary game theory to model basic features of empirical and mathematical inquiry. Barrett is a founding member of UCI’s LPS department.

Adriana Darielle Mejía Briscoe, known for her work on the evolution of vision in butterflies, is a professor of ecology & evolutionary biology whose discoveries have been featured on television and in museums around the globe. Her lab uses butterflies to examine how natural selection affects photoreceptor proteins in the eye and how it may impact evolutionary changes in color vision and wing coloration. Briscoe also uses modeling and field experiments to examine how color vision impacts butterfly behavior in the context of mimicry and species recognition. In 2021, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Other honors include a Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science.

Efi Foufoula-Georgiou is a Distinguished Professor of civil & environmental engineering. Her area of research is hydrology and geomorphology, with special interest in scaling theories, multiscale dynamics and space-time modeling of precipitation and landforms. Foufoula-Georgiou has served as director of the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics and is a presidential appointee to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. Her honors include the John Dalton Medal of the European Geophysical Society, fellow of the American Meteorological Society and American Geophysical Union, and elected member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Virginia Trimble is a professor of physics & astronomy whose early research measured the masses of white dwarfs, calculated the details and evolution of stars with unusual chemical compositions and studied the orbits of close binaries. She became a well-known expert on the history of physics, astronomy and scientometrics, which is the study of how science is done, or should be. She has a publication list exceeding 900 items and is the longest-standing active member of UCI’s Department of Physics & Astronomy.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, founded in 1780, is one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening elected members from the academic, business and government sectors to respond to challenges facing the nation and the world.

The 2022 inductees join a distinguished roster of previously elected members, including Benjamin Franklin (elected in 1781), Alexander Hamilton (1791), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Charles Darwin (1874), Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), Martin Luther King Jr. (1966), Stephen Jay Hawking (1984), Condoleezza Rice (1997), John Legend (2017), James Fallows (2019), Joan Baez (2020) and Sanjay Gupta (2021). 

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit www.uci.edu.

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