The UC Irvine Podcast

In February of 1978, the University of California, Irvine named Linda Dempsay as its director of athletics – the first woman ever to lead an NCAA Division I athletic program. At the time, she was only 39 years old. Now Dempsay is 84 years old. Host Cara Capuano met Dempsay during a session of Rams Training Camp on campus and talked her into sharing her experiences with the UCI Podcast. In this epi...

Tiffany López joined the Claire Trevor School of the Arts on July 1, and she has spent the past whirlwind four months learning about her school and developing a new vision for it. And she’s now on the UCI Podcast to tell us about it … and much more – like the importance of the arts in higher education, the need for diversity, and why it’s necessary to invest into arts and music education for econo...

The Latinx Resource Center opened in late 2019, and quickly moved to virtual because of the pandemic, so not many were familiar with one of UCI's newest centers. With UCI as a Hispanic-Serving Institution for five years, with a steady growth in UCI's Latino student population over the past decade – not to mention throughout the state of California – the time was right to dedicate a center where st...

Program director Dr. Charles Vega and 2016graduate Dr. Michelle Crespo join the UCI Podcast to talk about the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community’s vast influence on improving healthcare in California and on UC Irvine's status as an Hispanic-Serving Institution.

In 1992, the University of California Regents formally approved UCI's School of Social Ecology - the first of its kind in the U.S. But what, exactly, is social ecology? To answer that question, we welcome Jon B. Gould, Dean of the School of Social Ecology, to the UCI Podcast. Gould breaks down what is being done in his school’s three departments, how their groups collaborate on programs to solve s...

James Bullock, dean of UCI's School of Physical Sciences, was one of the earliest proponents of a multidisciplinary initiative called Solutions That Scale. The project was created to bring researchers from nearly every academic unit on campus together to come up with ways to mitigate the effects of climate change. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, Dean Bullock discusses the origin of Solutions T...

With the inflation up and the GNP and stock prices down, UCI economist Eric Swanson explains that there’s nothing yet to fear … at least for now.

On June 23, 2022, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Title IX. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, Cara Capuano talks to the co-authors of the first biography of longtime Congresswoman and Title IX pioneer Patsy Mink - UCI professor Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn “Wendy” Mink, Patsy’s daughter and only child. They discuss the book’s unique structure, the inspiration for Title IX, the challenges...

In honor of Juneteenth, the UCI Podcast is bringing back a June 2020 podcast with Jessica Millward, an associate professor of African American studies and history at UCI. Here, Millward discusses this important day in the context of the thousands of Black Lives Matter rallies across the world protesting the police murder of George Floyd.

Jonathan Alexander says he has been “privileged to be a writing teacher for a very long time.” He always tells his students to be honest and frank - and found the process of writing his latest book with that advice in mind liberating. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, the Chancellor’s Professor of English and informatics talks with Cara Capuano about the genre of creative nonfiction and the role...

How does nursing intersect with philosophy? What are some of the tools in a philosopher’s toolbox that would serve a nurse? What changes can be made to the language of health care to make it more understandable for a larger audience? These are some of the questions Cara Capuano asks of Mark Lazenby and Tyrus Miller, deans of two schools with disciplines very attuned to people – nursing and humanit...

With recent announcements of Native Americans eligible to have their UC tuition waived beginning this fall and adding Native Hawaiians to the heritage month that historically honored Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, we checked in with Assistant Professor Na'puti in the Department of Global and International Studies to help break down these massive identify groups and their cultures. Broadcas...

Professor Iryna Zenyuk, associate director of UCI's National Fuel Cell Research Center, was born in Ukraine and lived there until age 15. As an academic, she felt duty bound to help her fellow Ukrainian researchers when Russia invaded her home country earlier this year. Through the Ukraine Relief Fund she helped launch at UCI, Zenyuk is raising money to help Ukrainian academics come to the United...

UCI Law professor David Kaye discusses Musk's controversial buyout of the social media giant and the human rights issues related to online speech.

Eric Rignot, UCI professor of Earth system science, recently concluded a six-year, NASA-funded project to study the impact of warming ocean water on Greenland's land ice. The Oceans Melting Greenland, or OMG, mission resulted in much more precise knowledge about the dynamics of rapid ice sheet deterioration in Greenland and other polar regions.

In this episode of the UCI Podcast, UCI’s director of intercollegiate athletics Paula Smith talks sports with Cara Capuano, and among the topics they discuss: Title IX, a groundbreaking federal civil rights law passed on June 23, 1972, that prohibits gender discrimination in educational programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. Approaching its 50-year anniversary, the histori...

When people are getting together with loved ones over the holidays, how do they prepare themselves for interacting with a relative who has dementia resulting from Alzheimer's disease or another neurological condition? In this episode of the UCI Podcast, Frank LaFerla, Chancellor's Professor and dean of the School of Biological Sciences, has some advice to share with people coping with this situati...

Magnus Egerstedt, dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, has a new book out. Titled "Robot Ecology: Constraint-Based Design for Long-Duration Autonomy," the book explores the field of slow-moving robots. Used for tasks in agriculture and environmental and climate monitoring, these robots are specially designed to withstand long deployments without...

Tom Andriola, vice chancellor for information, technology and data at the University of California, Irvine joins UCI Podcast correspondent Sheri Ledbetter to discuss new ways of thinking about all the data we have access to and how "collaboratories" can help us put data to work.

Science and policy are frequently disconnected. Though scientists urged policymakers at the COP 26 climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland to drastically reduce emission of carbon dioxide, the pledges that resulted won’t do enough to stave off the most dire effects of climate change. And that’s just the latest example. But a UCI professor is seeking to bring science into the policymaking process throug...

With a bird's eye view of the UCI student body, enrollment management is in the unique position to see into the future. This ability to identify trends enables the division - which includes undergraduate admissions, financial aid and scholarships, registrar, and enrollment management analytics - to engage with campus partners and create the environment that best meets the needs of our students and...

The cleanup of the oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach earlier this month is essentially complete, but responsibility for the spill of up to 131,000 gallons has yet to be assigned. In the coming months, and possibly years, it will be the legal system that determines liability — and damages. Michael Robinson-Dorn, a clinical professor of law, co-associate dean for experiential education at...

As COVID-19 patients are isolated in hospital rooms trying to stay alive, nurses are the ones serving every role, from caretaker to chaplain to stand-in loved one. And when those patients die, nurses take that pain of loss upon themselves. The trauma is heaping up. But it doesn’t have to be this way, says Candace Burton, an associate professor of nursing at UCI who is conducting a study about nurs...

Latino people from all 50 states shape American culture and politics, but despite their diversity, they are too often viewed as belonging to a single category. That diversity appears across the U.S.: In New Mexico, where hispanos have deep connections to Spanish culture; in South Texas, where some Mexican-Americans express disdain for the country just a few miles south; in Miami, where cubanos dif...

Launched last year in response to the killing of George Floyd, UCI's Black Thriving Initiative is a whole university response aimed at mobilizing the whole university to promote Black student success, degree completion and advancement in academic programs, with a goal of making UCI a first choice for Black students. As part of the UCI Black Thriving Initiative, the program has continued to priorit...