https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/index.php

UC Irvine School of Social Sciences, University of, Irvine, CA (2026)

10/19/2026

On October 13, researchers from the University of California and leaders from local non-profits, community organizations, and city and state government convened at the University of California, Irvine and online for the first of three Policy Innovation Days to share expertise and insights on municipal chatbots. Funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Engineering+Society Institute on AI at UC Irvine (ProperAI) and enabled by the Alliance for Local Leaders International (ALLIES), the campus and community collaborative is working to better understand and measure how interactions with AI-enabled tools on city and government websites help or hinder residents and their overall civic engagement.

“Our goal is really to bridge the divide between policy makers and the research community so that we can better understand the usefulness and impact of these tools,” said Bill Maurer, UC Irvine social sciences dean and professor of anthropology and law, in his welcoming remarks. “There are clusters of us working on these questions while municipalities are simultaneously rolling out AI to their constituents, so it’s a great opportunity to bring people together to share what’s working and what needs work.”

As the project’s principal investigator, he helped create the interdisciplinary group that’s spearheading the effort. Joining him are UC Irvine colleagues Athina Markopoulou, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of ProperAI, Jackie Ku, ’26 political science Ph.D., and Olivia Figueira, ’26 computer science Ph.D.; and ALLIES’ Ben Polsky, ethics and technology practitioner fellow at Stanford and director of AI and technology programs, and Trevaughn Latimer, director of strategy and operations. They received a $30,000 SSRC grant in June to host the three-day series and develop evaluation tools and democratic engagement indicators for municipal chatbots, while research by the Ph.D. students has been supported by ProperAI to inform these convenings.

More at our link in profile.

The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine CITRIS Long Beach City UC Davis Washington University in St. Louis Northeastern University

10/15/2026

Our next grad spotlight features Derek Tran, economics M.S. ’21, Ph.D. ’24. When Derek started graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, he expected to become a professor. Instead, his career has taken him from publishing academic research to working for Amazon – one of the world’s largest private employers of Ph.D. economists – to Upstart, a fast-growing AI-powered lending company. Along the way, he discovered something he hadn’t expected: an economics Ph.D. can take you almost anywhere.

“Eighty percent of what I use day-to-day in a job like this comes from the knowledge gained from the Ph.D. program, whether it’s causal, Bayesian or structural economics,” says Derek. “Personally, I think economics is the best degree to get. You could argue for computer science or AI, but econ gives you an understanding of the world you can’t get anywhere else.”

Learn more about his experience at our link in profile.

University of California UCI Alumni UC Irvine Graduate Division Upstart Amazon.com

10/14/2026

There’s no place like home. For Jennifer dos Santos, the memorable movie line is a fitting description of a career coming full circle. On October 1, dos Santos began her tenure as the new assistant dean of the School of Social Sciences, stepping into the school’s top staff leadership role after serving for the summer in an interim capacity. The appointment marks a particularly meaningful milestone for the Anteater alumna who found her professional footing in social sciences more than a decade ago.

“The opportunity to be back in social sciences feels like a homecoming,” she says. “Many of the people I got to know in my previous roles are still here, along with the strong sense of community that I loved being a part of. I’m excited to reconnect, get to know the many new members who’ve since joined the school, listen and learn from them, and continue finding ways to bring people together around our shared mission.”

Building community is a hallmark of the people-centric leadership style dos Santos has honed over her nearly two-decade career at UCI. That journey has taken her to five departments spanning four different schools, including African American studies and English in humanities; economics and anthropology in social sciences; and math in physical sciences before she landed the assistant dean position in social ecology. Along the way, dos Santos developed a deep understanding of university operations and the complexities of supporting academic units, while finding that the most rewarding part of understanding and refining administrative puzzles and processes was getting to know and work alongside the people behind them.

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni UCI School of Social Ecology School of Humanities at UC Irvine UCI School of Physical Sciences UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts

10/13/2026

Over the last few decades, the number of competitive congressional races has declined dramatically. Yet candidates and officeholders dial for more and more dollars each election, and they do so earlier and earlier in the campaign cycle.

Why is fundraising so important in American elections today?

In our latest installment of the UCI Experts On series, Danielle Thomsen, UC Irvine professor of political science and author of The Money Signal: How Fundraising Matters in American Politics (University of Chicago Press) shows that money isn’t just a resource - it’s a signal.

“Candidates who raise more early money are seen as more viable. That perception shapes the race long before and well after the election. The money signal matters for whether competitors drop out or stay in the race, if donors give later on, how much journalists pay attention, and whether candidates receive desirable committee assignments in office,” she says. “This creates a feedback loop where early fundraising success leads to more visibility, more support, and ultimately, more political power.”

But this has consequences, too.

“Donors have an outsized influence in elections by shaping who runs for and is elected to office,” she says. “Candidates who are unable to attract a strong early fundraising haul are unable to gain traction and are all but counted out, which perpetuates the Congress of multimillionaires we have today.”

Understanding this “money signal” helps us rethink why money matters so much in American politics, and it opens the door to conversations about how we might create a more equitable political system.

Watch, listen and read at our link in profile.

University of California University of California, Irvine UCI Department of Political Science

10/12/2026

Next up in our grad spotlight series is Jiaxuan Li. She chose to attend UC Irvine because she saw a rare intellectual culture. "The department really fosters an atmosphere of intellectual conversation,” she says. “Everyone is so interested in research and so willing to share their expertise and interests."

Jiaxuan earned her Ph.D. in language science from UC Irvine in March after spending the last five years studying what happens when the brain encounters moments of confusion. Her dissertation examined what are called “hallucinations” in language comprehension, or moments when people mentally fix errors in a sentence without even noticing.

“Our brains are so good at predicting what is plausible,” Jiaxuan says. “Sometimes they give a good-enough answer rather than a perfect answer because this is more efficient.”

This, she argues, is not a flaw but a feature of human cognition. Our brains rely on shortcuts, or what scientists call heuristics, to process language quickly and efficiently. She used EEG recordings, which measure electrical activity in the brain, along with computer modeling to study how the brain responds to language. Rather than simply tracking when people mentally correct errors, Jiaxuan wanted to better understand the hidden cognitive processes that make those corrections possible.

The same questions that guided Jiaxuan’s dissertation are now shaping her work in artificial intelligence. After graduating from UC Irvine, Jiaxuan is bringing those ideas into industry with jobs at Amazon and Apple.

Learn how at our link in profile.

Of her UCI experience, she adds: “I benefited enormously from my time at UCI because it gave me the confidence to take on new challenges. As long as you’re asking meaningful questions and using the best tools available to answer them, you can feel confident that you’re doing good science.”

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni UC Irvine Graduate Division

10/09/2026

Congratulations to James Owen Weatherall, University of California, Irvine Chancellor’s Professor and department chair of logic & philosophy of science, who has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society! Nominated by his peers through the society’s Forum on History & Philosophy of Physics, Weatherall is recognized for his “substantial contributions to the foundations of classical field theories and the philosophy of physics; distinguished mentorship, leadership, and service to the discipline; and conveying physics to broad public audiences through acclaimed books.”

Read more about his work at our link in profile, and congrats again, Jim!

University of California American Physical Society UC Irvine Graduate Division UCI Alumni

10/08/2026

Next up in our grad spotlight series: Leah Ruppanner sociology M.A. ’06, Ph.D. ’09. An internationally renowned sociologist and UC Irvine alum, Leah wants to help people to understand, measure and manage the emotional thinking that’s zapping their energy. She’s turned years of research on gender, work and family into a practical guide for the exhausted and overwhelmed – and readers are eating it up. Her first book for general audiences, Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More (Penguin Random House) has been internationally distributed, and is now being translated into Spanish.

“When you’re doomscrolling on TikTok or Instagram, you’re burning through your mental load, and the result is that you feel immobilized,” Leah says. “My concept can help you understand why this is a waste, and how to move toward action.”

As a professor of sociology at The University of Melbourne, Australia, and founding director of The Future of Work Lab and the Gender Equity Initiative, Leah studies “gender at the intersection of everything,” including technology, politics, the workplace and homelife. She traces many elements of her successful international career as a scholar, author and podcaster back to her time as a graduate student at UC Irvine, where she earned her master’s in demography and population studies in 2006 and her doctorate in sociology in 2009.

“It’s really about the people,” she says. “The people I was with at UC Irvine showed me a wider blueprint of pathways that I could take.”

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni UC Irvine Graduate Division Sociology, UC Irvine

10/06/2026

Earning a Ph.D. from the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences creates boundaryless opportunities. From careers in AI and academia to positions in industry giants like Amazon and Apple and leadership roles in NGOs, non-profits and government, our outstanding alumni are truly making their mark. This month, we’re spotlighting successful social scientists from each of our top-ranked graduate programs who are putting their Ph.D.s into meaningful practice around the world. Learn why they chose to become Anteaters and how their time here prepared them to take on what's next. And with the UCI graduate application now open, there’s no better time to discover where a UCI social sciences Ph.D. could take you.⁠
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First up: Tiffany Hwu, cognitive sciences M.S. ’17, Ph.D. ’19. Tiffany has taken her top talents in neurorobotics to Riot Games where she’s part of a cadre of specialized researchers who enhance the player experience in virtual worlds created by the global multiplayer game developer.⁠
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“The role of games throughout human history has been to provide a safe environment where you can test ideas, develop different skills, socialize, explore different worlds and let your imagination run free,” she says. “It’s a playground for testing ideas in artificial intelligence and scientific hypotheses of the body and brain connection.”⁠
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That relationship between the brain and body fueled Tiffany’s graduate research and projects she worked on with Toyota Research Institute, Northrop Grumman and HRL Laboratories during her time at UC Irvine.⁠
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“Something the Ph.D. really helps with is identifying the right questions, coming up with hypotheses and testing them, and reading about and integrating the work from other labs,” she says. “And now, in industry, those principles contribute to a real product that serves millions of people every day—live.”⁠
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Read more at our link in profile about Tiffany’s Ph.D. experience and how it helped prepare her for a career in the gaming industry.

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni UC Irvine Graduate Division

10/01/2026

Generating global health knowledge and policy through Indigenous-led research and practices has been the focus of a three-year, $2.295 million project co-led by Tiara R. Na’puti, UC Irvine global & international studies associate professor. Funded by a Fall 2023 Project Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Canada’s primary federal funding agency for health research, the research team has received an extended award through 2027 to further their work.

“The greatest threats to human health and the health of the planet are the trifecta of biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution,” says Na’puti. “Our project begins with Indigenous Peoples who are addressing this crisis by sustaining knowledge systems and regenerative practices; stewarding biodiversity; and activism that is stopping or delaying greenhouse gas pollution.”

As a co-principal investigator, Na’puti, alongside a multidisciplinary team of Indigenous scholars, will continue examining the value of and protocol for sharing place-based evidence of Indigenous-led projects that aim to improve planetary health.

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California Canadian Institutes of Health Research

09/30/2026

This morning kicked-off our fourth annual LeadHER cohort with an amazing breakfast, welcoming remarks from school and program leadership, and professional networking. Our outstanding community and professional mentors and equally impressive Anteater mentees connected to share insights and knowledge and set the stage for a phenomenal year ahead. Over the next 10 weeks, this high-energy community of leaders, philanthropists, professionals and scholars will continue to come together to explore careers, interests, identities and skills development.

To learn more about the program, visit our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni

UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

10/19/2026

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