• Assistant Professor Michael Méndez is named to the 2022 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows.
• Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Loftus receives her eighth honorary degree (No. 8 comes from Australian National University), is named among Research.com’s 1,000 top female scientists in the world and makes the Highly Cited Researchers list for 2022.
• Distinguished Professor Julian Thayer also lands on the Highly Cited Researchers list for 2022.
• The Master of Advanced Study in criminology, law & society is named the nation’s best online criminal justice master’s program by U.S. News & World Report for the third year in a row.
• The University of California, Irvine ranks 14th (up from 19th) for the best psychology program among the nation’s public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report’s graduate school rankings.
• The Western Society of Criminology bestows its Paul Tappan Award on Dean Jon Gould for his outstanding contributions to the field of criminology.
• Professor Jessica Borelli receives two American Psychological Association awards for her distinguished contributions to family and citizen psychology.
• Distinguished Professor Valerie Jenness wins the Peterson-Krivo Mentoring Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Crime, Law and Deviance and its Section on the Sociology of Law.
• The Association for Psychological Science bestows its Rising Star designation on Assistant Professor Oliver Sng.
• Associate Professor Kristine Molina is awarded the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education’s 2022 University Faculty Award. 
• Assistant Professor Kate Ryan Kuhlman receives the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Early Stage Investigator Award.
• Distinguished Professor Roxane Cohen Silver is named the 2022-23 recipient of UCI's Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research. 
• For their extensive research on collective trauma, Silver and Professor Alison Holman receive the 2022 Innovation Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
• Assistant Professor Tony Cheng wins the 2022 Joan Petersilia Outstanding Article Award his “Social Problems” piece on police and community relations.
• Emeritus Professor James Diego Vigil wins the 2022 Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

RIVETING RESEARCH

• Distinguished Professor Valerie Jenness launches a survey aimed at improving relations between police and the LGBTQ community.
• Professor Richard Matthew and his team are working on several projects involving climate change, including climate-driven migration.
• Professor Linda Levine studies people’s memories of political events.
• Students in Nicole Iturriaga’s “Crimes of the State” class make compelling videos on social media to raise awareness of myriad issues involving human rights.
• Distinguished Professor Roxane Cohen Silver is gauging the effect that the reporting of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has on Americans' mental health.
• Assistant Professor Amanda Geller studies police, race and inequalities.
• Crime goes down and surrounding property values go up, according to research by the Livable Cities Lab on the effects of affordable housing in Orange County.
• Professor Sarah Pressman and doctoral students Cameron Wiley and Kennedy Blevins examine the role that race plays in developing health interventions.
• Using a high resolution platform to assess hazards every 10 feet, researchers develop flood modeling that reveals heightened risk and disparities in Los Angeles.
• Professor Ilona Yim, who was one of millions of German children sent to homes where they suffered physical and psychological abuse, partners with the Verschickungskinder (German for sent-away children), a survivors’ initiative to raise awareness, and serves as one of the lead researchers.

COMMUNITY SERVICE

• The School launches its Climate and Urban Sustainability Program with this goal: solving environmental challenges.
• Students graduate from a pair of innovative programs — Road to Reentry and Young Adult Court — ready to reenter society.
• The Livable Cities Lab studies affordable housing, public safety and social enterprise innovations to improve city life. 
• UCI’s PrisonPandemic project collects and is sharing on its website more than 1,300 stories of the prison experience during the pandemic.
• Associate Professors Sora Han and Douglas Houston helm recruiting efforts, elevating the Black community.
• The National Registry of Exonerations – a collaboration of three universities that is housed in the Newkirk Center for Science & Society in the School of Social Ecology – this year surpasses 3,200 wrongful convictions documented in the online archive of all known exonerations in the U.S. since 1989. Together they form one overpowering story of injustice. 

ACCOMPLISHED ALUMNUS

• Alumnus Maurice Sanchez becomes the first person of color to be appointed an associate justice on the Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division 3.

STUPENDOUS STUDENTS

• Graduate student Justine Bautista presents her idea to create a mental health self care kit at the MTV Mental Health Youth Action Forum at the White House.
• Ph.D. candidate Kelsey Morgan is fighting human trafficking.
• Fudge Scholar Andrew Norman beats cancer twice and completes his bachelor’s degree.
• Former Long Beach City Council member Jeannine Pearce, who is pursuing her Ph.D., is studying the political ecology of the labor movement and transitioning fossil fuel industries.
• Graduate student Veronica Valencia Gonzalez wins the American Society of Criminology Graduate Student Paper Award and Western Society of Criminology’s 2023 Student Paper Competition for her work on California’s sanctuary policies and Latina immigrant survivors of intimate partner violence.
• Graduate student Carlo Chunga Pizarro, recipient of a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, is focusing his study on mitigation practices in disaster planning.
• Graduate student and Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow Cameron Ross Wiley is studying the connection between psychological phenomena and physiological responses. 
• Graduate student Sara O’Connor wins the Etel Solingen Award for Outstanding Paper in International Relations, which recognizes her work on transitioning states.

GRANTS AND DONATIONS

• Faculty members receive $23.2 million in grants and contracts. The biggest grant — $10 million — is awarded to Professor Elizabeth Cauffman to expand her Orange County Young Adult Court study.
• More than 150 donors contribute a total of $3.6 million to support student scholarships and faculty projects.
• The National Institutes of Health awards nearly $4.7 million over five years to support research teams on a project, designed by associate professor Stephen Schueller, that combines peer support with the use of a digital platform to better serve the mental health needs of Latino patients with limited English proficiency.
• The state of California allocates $1.8 million to expand the University of California, Irvine’s Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees effort, the first in-prison B.A. program in the UC system.
• Arnold Ventures awards two grants totaling $854,956 for a study, led by Dean Jon Gould, of prosecutor office policies and decisions made by prosecutors. 
• With a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers led by Assistant Professor Maura Allaire launch a project to illuminate governance failures that cause inequities in drinking water and public health.

MEDIA DARLINGS

• Our scholars are cited in more than 250 news stories in national publications and media outlets for their expertise on everything from awe to climate change to criminal justice to psychological trauma.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES

• Assistant Professor Nicole Iturriaga’s first book, Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past, highlights how human rights activists have turned to science and technology to keep the memory of state terror alive. 
• In her book, Borderland Circuitry, Assistant Professor Ana Muñiz examines how politicians and law enforcement authorities use unreliable information from field interviews and informants to access and interpret data in a way that casts immigrants and U.S.-born people of color as dangerous.
• Rather than focusing on who commits crime, Professor John R. Hipp examines when and where crime is more likely to occur in The Spatial Scale of Crime: How Physical and Social Distance Drive the Spatial Location of Crime.
• The Sentencing Project senior advisor Marc Mauer calls Death by Prison: The Emergence of Life Without Parole and Perpetual Confinement by Assistant Professor Christopher Seeds, "a groundbreaking analysis."
• It takes an informed village to successfully open a water reclamation, replenishment or desalination project these days, observes The Governance of Water Innovations: To Quench a Thirst by Professor David Feldman, who leads the School of Social Ecology’s Water UCI research center.
• Transforming Criminal Justice: An Evidence-Based Agenda for Reform, a collection of essays edited by Dean Jon Gould and Pamela Metzger, addresses 13 significant issues in justice reform, ranging from a suspect’s first interaction with the police and continuing to gun violence to eliminating false convictions.
• The Routledge Handbook on Environmental Security, edited by Professor Richard Matthew, provides a comprehensive overview of the field of environmental security. 
• In Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures, Emeritus Professor Rodolfo Torres and three of his former students examine the impacts of gentrification on marginalized communities. 
• Faculty members publish more than 100 journal articles on their diverse and fascinating research.