Kai Wehmeier, UCI logic and philosophy of science professor, has been awarded a Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair for 2025-26 by the Franco-American Fulbright Commission and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. The honor includes a one-semester appointment at a French host university awarded to up to two scholars each year in a competition that is open to all disciplines. Funded by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and Fulbright, the program aims to reinforce collaborative research between France and the United States on topics of major significance for the future of both societies.

Wehmeier will be spending September–December 2025 at the Université de Lorraine in Nancy. While there, he’ll conduct research, teach two graduate seminars and deliver lectures open to the general public.

A past fellow of the National Endowment of the Humanities and recipient of the Humboldt Research Award, Wehmeier’s research applies techniques from mathematical and philosophical logic to investigate notions fundamental to contemporary theoretical philosophy and formal semantics, including necessity, identity, and the compositionality of linguistic meaning. His research often draws on insights by Gottlob Frege, the founder of modern logic, to the study of whose work Wehmeier has contributed significantly; his book, Frege: Identity challenges reflection, co-authored with Ulrich Pardey, was just published by Oxford University Press on May 1.

Wehmeier holds a master’s in mathematics from UC Berkeley and a master’s in philosophy from Universität Bochum, Germany, as well as a Ph.D. in mathematical logic from the Universität Münster, Germany. Before joining the UCI faculty in 2002, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Leiden, The Netherlands, and a faculty appointment at Tübingen, Germany. During his more than 20-year tenure at UCI, Wehmeier has also held visiting professorships at the University of Mannheim, Germany, University of Cologne, Germany, and Université Nancy, France.

At UCI, he founded and continues to direct the Center for the Advancement of Logic, its Philosophy, History and Applications, a cross-disciplinary research unit with faculty from the schools of social sciences, physical sciences, ICS, and law. His research has been published internationally in academic journals including the Journal of Philosophical Logic, the Review of Symbolic Logic, the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and Linguistics and Philosophy, among others.