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October 2014

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Fall 2014 welcome from Bill Maurer, social sciences dean

Dear social sciences students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends,

Greetings, and welcome back from summer break! There is a lot of exciting news and many important milestones to share as we look forward to a fantastic fall. It has been a terrific year for social sciences at UC Irvine. Our students, alumni, staff and faculty set new standards for academic excellence, community engagement and world-shaping contributions to society. And our school continued its tradition of ensuring access to higher education to our diverse and growing student body.

There is always some hyperbole to beginning of the year messages. But when I start to list the accomplishments of the past 12 months, I think you'll see why I am thrilled to be serving such amazing individuals and leading a team making a difference at home and abroad. Our Mock Trial team, for the second consecutive year, started their fall season ranked #1 in the nation over more than six hundred college teams. The program earned a third place finish at last year's nationals, behind only Princeton and UCLA. Our international studies program was ranked one of the top programs in the nation by NerdScholar. Our alumnus, Geoffrey Pyatt (political science, '85), was appointed to be the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine - just as crisis erupted. Jackie Lacey (psychology '79) was the first woman and the first African American to be named district attorney of Los Angeles County. Social sciences alumni Nadia Bermudez (political science '98) and Rebecca Kanter (political science '00) received prestigious service awards from the San Diego County Bar Association.

Our faculty won a remarkable number of prestigious grants, fellowships and honors for their research and teaching. You can see a more complete list online - but given the sheer number, I am sure I've left some out. In all, our faculty won at least 15 awards for their research, teaching, community service and mentoring work. And the total estimated lifetime award amounts of new grants for ongoing research awarded last year is over $5.4 million.

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Welcome back, anteaters!

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New faculty bring diverse expertise and experience to social sciences

Interests span financial risk, behavioral economics, culture, race and politics, conflict management, biodiversity, and international migration

The School of Social Sciences is happy to welcome nine new faculty to its fall 2014 lineup. With research interests ranging from behavioral economics to international organizations and conflict management, their scholarly contributions will further expand the diversity and interdisciplinary research strengths for which the School of Social Sciences is known.

Learn more about the school’s new faculty below and come welcome them in person at the annual Social Sciences Welcome Reception on Monday, October 13 from 3:30-5:00 p.m. in Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Room 1321.


John Duffy
Professor, Economics

John Duffy comes to UCI from the University of Pittsburgh where he was an economics professor and director of the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory. His research uses mathematical models, laboratory experiments and computer simulations to better understand how individuals act strategically, use information, form expectations, make intertemporal economic decisions and solve coordination problems. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in the leading economics journals including the American Economic Review and the Review of Economic Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA. He will join UCI's cutting-edge team of experimental and behavioral economists using Irvine's new state-of-the-art Experimental Social Science Lab (ESSL), working to understand issues ranging from adaptive learning to dynamic asset pricing.

Eric Swanson
Professor, Economics

Eric Swanson comes to Irvine from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco where he was a senior research advisor and senior economist. An expert in risk, financial markets, monetary policy and macroeconomics, including recent research on China's monetary policy, his work has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Financial Times, among other venues. Swanson received his B.A. in mathematics from Williams College in 1992, an M.S. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1994, and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford in 1998. From 1998 to 2005, he worked as an economist on the research staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, DC. He has also served as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and University of Michigan. His recent research has focused on macroeconomic models of risk premia in financial markets, risk aversion in macroeconomic models, and measuring the severity of the zero bound constraint on monetary policy.

Eleana Kim
Associate Professor, Anthropology

Eleana Kim received her Ph.D. in anthropology from NYU in 2007. She was an associate professor in anthropology and the graduate program in visual and cultural studies at the University Rochester before joining the faculty at UC Irvine. She has received fellowships from the ACLS, SSRC, Fulbright Commission, and the Korea Foundation. Her research interests center around questions of nature and culture and the biological and the social in the production of personhood, social relations, and moral values. Her first book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, focused on identity, globalization, and the political economy of kinship. Her second book project, Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, analyzes the transformation of the most heavily militarized border in the world into a space internationally recognized as a haven for biodiversity.

Sylvia Nam
Assistant Professor, Anthropology

Sylvia Nam received her Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley with a designated emphasis in global metropolitan studies. She was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside from 2012 to 2014. Her research focuses on urbanism under transition. Specifically, she studies how the post-conflict city of Phnom Penh is being remade through inter-Asian flows of capital and logics of speculation. Her broader interests include global urbanism, the political economy of development, and transnational expertise.

Rocío Rosales
Assistant Professor, Sociology

Rocío Rosales completed her Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA in 2012. Prior to joining the UC Irvine faculty, she was a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego in the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. Her research focuses on international migration, informal economies and ethnic/immigrant enclaves. She has published findings on these topics in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Michael Tesler
Assistant Professor, Political Science

Michael Tesler is a scholar of race and ethnic politics, political attitudes and behaviors, and research methodology. He received his Ph.D. in political science from UCLA in 2011 and has served for the past three years as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. His research analyzes the partisan and policy consequences of racial evaluations of President Obama and the policies of the Obama administration. While still a graduate student, he co-authored Obama's Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America with UCLA's David Sears (2010, University of Chicago Press). The book was recognized by Choice as the Outstanding Academic Title of 2011..

Davin Phoenix
Assistant Professor, Political Science

Davin Phoenix earned his Ph.D. in 2014 from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His research interests include race and motivation to participate in politics, local descriptive representation, and mobilization of marginalized groups. He will be teaching courses on public opinion, political behavior and minority and local politics. Davin is a recipient of an American Political Science Foundation Minority Fellowship, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Heidi Hardt
Assistant Professor, Political Science

Heidi Hardt received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, her master's degree in European studies from the London School of Economics and her undergraduate degrees in international relations and journalism from the University of Southern California. She has published widely on international organizations and conflict management and has expertise in European, Transatlantic and African politics. Her most recent book is Time to React: The Efficiency of International Organizations in Crisis Response (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has carried out research and taught in the US, Canada and Europe. In the spring of 2015, she will be based in Florence, Italy conducting research on NATO in her role as the 2014-2015 Fulbright-Schuman European Union Institute Chair.

Jeanett Castellanos
Lecturer with Security of Employment, Social Sciences

Jeanett Castellanos has been teaching for the social sciences undergraduate program since 1999 and she joined the faculty as a lecturer with security of employment over the winter quarter. Her research focuses on the college experience of racial and ethnic minority students and the psychosociocultural factors that affect their retention. Other research interests include Latina/o student coping, spirituality and wellness. She has co-edited two books which address Latina/o student experiences in higher education and has published in numerous national journals including the Journal of College Counseling, Journal of Counseling and Development, Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, Psychological Reports, and Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. Her commitment to minority education, research and service has been highly lauded; in 2007, she received the Samuel M. Turner Minority Education, Nurturing, Training, Organizational advocacy and Research (MENTOR) award from the American Psychological Association and in 2008, she was awarded the Star Vega Distinguished Service Award from the National Latina/o Psychology Association. In 2012, she was one of two recipients of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education's Outstanding Support of Hispanic Issues in Higher Education Award. In 2014, she was named UCI's Lecturer of the Year by the Academic Senate Council on Student Experience, and she also received a UCI Living Our Values award. Castellanos received her bachelor's in psychology and sociology from the University of California, Irvine, and her master's in education counseling and Ph.D. in higher education from Washington State University.

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Are you following IMTFI on Twitter? The Guardian says you should be

News agency ranks the institute's feed among the top 10 for info on financial inclusion

From mobile money to microfinance, savings groups to Bitcoin, The Guardian says these tweeters on financial inclusion cover it all. Among them: UCI's Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. Established in 2008, the institute has received more than $6 million from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support research on money and technology practices among the world's poorest people. To date, IMTFI has supported 123 projects in 41 countries. This includes 160 researchers, more than 70% of whom are from the developing world.

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Motherhood has long-term effect on wages, occupational status, UCI study finds

Professional penalty is lighter in countries with subsidized child care

Are kids a career killer for women? A new study by UC Irvine sociologists concludes that motherhood imposes a long-term professional penalty from which women in the workforce never fully recover. The career costs are less pronounced in countries that allocate more funds to child care. "Researchers have long known that there is a wage differential for motherhood; employed women with children do not make as much money as childless women do," said study co-author Judith Treas, a UCI professor of sociology. "Our research finds that wages are only one of many likely costs associated with motherhood. We show that there's also an occupational status penalty; women with children don't get jobs with the same social standing or prestige as their childless peers, and occupational status doesn't rebound when children grow older and require less attention." Treas, UCI sociology professor Matt Huffman and Anja-Kristin Abendroth of Germany's Bielefeld University used data from 1994 to 2001 collected by the European Community Household Panel, which tracked the occupational and childbirth histories of 13,615 partnered women, ages 18-40, across 13 European countries. The researchers looked at how motherhood affected occupational trajectories, considering not just the contemporaneous impact of a birth but the long-term consequences. They found that the arrival of a first child packed the biggest punch to a woman's career progress, most immediately in lost work hours and job experience.

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UCI-Stanford study finds complex link between income inequality, race

Lighter skin not necessarily correlated to higher household earnings

A new study by UC Irvine and Stanford University sociologists shows that issues of income inequality and race are not as black and white as most people in the U.S. think. "Americans have long [considered] whites as the most privileged, highest income earners and blacks as the least," said Stanley Bailey, UCI associate professor of sociology. However, findings published online Sept. 19 in Demographic Research suggest a more complicated picture of race differences in income. Bailey and co-authors Aliya Saperstein, assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University, and Andrew Penner, UCI associate professor of sociology, report that in 2012, Americans of Asian origin had the highest per capita household income in the U.S., while Latinos and American Indians had the lowest. Whites ranked second-highest, followed by multiracial Americans and African Americans. Results are based on the General Social Survey of more than 3,500 American adults. The 2012 poll was the first to measure both racial self-identification and perceived skin color for a nationally representative sample.

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Ask a leader with Claudia Shambaugh, inquiring minds wanna hear (Podcast)

Victoria Bernal, anthropology professor, is interviewed on KUCI September

UCI anthropologist and ethnologist Victoria Bernal talks about her recently released book, Nation as Network; Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship, based on her both heady and personal research dealing with the eastern African nation of Eritrea.

Listen in...

Life is random

An article by Cailin O'Connor, logic & philosophy of science assistant professor, featured on Slate

Is our behavior determined by genetics, or are we products of our environments? What matters more for the development of living things - internal factors or external ones? Biologists have been hotly debating these questions since shortly after the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Charles Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton was the first to try to understand this interplay between "nature and nurture" (a phrase he coined) by studying the development of twins. But are nature and nurture the whole story? It seems not. Even identical twins brought up in similar environments won't really be identical. They won't have the same fingerprints. They'll have different freckles and moles. Even complex traits such as intelligence and mental illness often vary between identical twins.

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Alumni Networking in New York City

October 15, 2014 | Hurley's Saloon, New York City

Calling all New York Anteaters: Join Bill Maurer, School of Social Sciences dean, and Stephen Barker, Claire Trevor School of the Arts interim dean, for a joint alumni networking event October 15. Take advantage of this unique opportunity to connect with fellow alumni and business professionals from across the East Coast. Join us for an evening of conversation and complimentary beverages and appetizers.

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