Six UC Irvine professors - including four from social sciences - elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Six University of California, Irvine professors, including four from the School of Social Sciences and one each from engineering and education, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This newest class of inductees includes 252 leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research and science.
George Marcus, David Snow, Etel Solingen and James Weatherall – all from social sciences – and Kyriacos Athanasiou, engineering, and Jacquelynne Eccles, education, join 40 other current and former UC Irvine scholars as academy members.
“I am pleased to congratulate these six UC Irvine faculty members on their election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences,” said Hal Stern, UC Irvine provost and executive vice chancellor. “Their election reflects the depth and breadth of UC Irvine’s academic excellence across a range of disciplines, including education, engineering and social sciences.”
Each honoree has shaped their field through groundbreaking research, teaching and intellectual leadership:
- Kyriacos Athanasiou, Distinguished Professor of biomedical engineering, specializes in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. His pioneering research advances cartilage repair, biomaterials development and translational biomedical innovations. He is widely recognized for originating functional tissue-engineering approaches that produce clinically relevant cartilage replacements, helping bridge laboratory discoveries and real-world medical treatments. Among other achievements, he is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.
- Jacquelynne Eccles, Distinguished Professor of education, is one of the leading developmental psychologists of her generation. Through her research on motivation, gender differences and educational development, Eccles examines how social factors influence achievement, identity and life outcomes. She developed expectancy-value theory, a widely used framework explaining how beliefs and values shape academic and career choices. Among many honors, Eccles is a member of the National Academy of Education.
- George Marcus, Distinguished Professor of anthropology, is a leading figure in contemporary ethnography. He established the Center for Ethnography at UC Irvine and pioneered multi-sited research methods, advancing interdisciplinary approaches to studying global cultural dynamics. The founding editor of Cultural Anthropology, his work reshaped anthropological practice by encouraging researchers to follow cultural phenomena across locations, redefining how globalization is studied.
- David Snow, Distinguished Professor emeritus of sociology, is renowned for research on social movements, collective action and framing processes to help shape the understanding of protest dynamics, identity formation and mechanisms of social change. He co-developed the concept of “framing” in social movements, showing how activists construct meaning to mobilize support and influence public discourse. He has also been a leading scholar of homelessness, advancing the understanding of the adaptive, subsistence behaviors of the unhoused. Foremost among his scholarly awards is the American Sociological Association’s 2025 W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the association’s highest honor.
- Etel Solingen, Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace Studies and Distinguished Professor of political science, is recognized as a leading voice on the reciprocal influence between international political economy and international security. She provided the first systematic analysis connecting the global economy and nuclear weapons’ proliferation. The National Academy of Sciences’ Estes award recognized her original contribution to unravelling the puzzle of why some states acquired nuclear weapons while others renounced them. Her pioneering work on regional orders helped establish the field of comparative regionalism. Over the last decade, her research examined the role of global value chains in geopolitics, geoeconomics and EU–China relations.
- James Weatherall, Chancellor’s Professor and chair of logic and philosophy of science, specializes in the philosophy of physics. He focuses on space-time theory, general relativity, and concepts underlying scientific explanation and theory development. He has contributed important analyses to clarify the structure of space-time theories and resolve conceptual puzzles in general relativity and the philosophy of modern physics.
With their induction, the School of Social Sciences now counts 15 faculty members in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences - representing one-third of UC Irvine’s total – alongside four National Academy of Sciences members, one National Academy of Education member, and eight American Association for the Advancement of Science fellows.
“With these well-deserved elections, across four of our departments, the School of Social Sciences now can boast members of the American and National Academies in seven of our nine departments - the exceptions being the two newest, so, just give us time,” says Bill Maurer, UC Irvine social sciences dean and professor of anthropology and law. “In all seriousness, however, it is indeed a privilege to celebrate the achievements of the faculty members being recognized with an honor that is almost as old as the republic itself. It also elevates their important work, on topics as diverse as global supply chains and international security; social processes, social framing, and poverty; ethnographic method and the anthropological study of elites; and the philosophy of physics, mathematics and quantum field theory. The range is absolutely breathtaking, and reflects the school's, and the university's, excellence across multiple fields and elevation as one of the top research universities in the country. I offer my heartfelt congratulations to these inductees.”
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, founded in 1780, is one of the U.S.’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening luminaries from the academic, business and government sectors to confront challenges facing the nation and the world. The first members elected to the academy included George Washington, who said in his first annual message to Congress in 1790, “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
The induction ceremony will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October.
-adapted from original drafts by JP Clark and Tom Vasich, UC Irvine
-pictured: UC Irvine’s David Snow, Jacquelynne Eccles and Jim Weatherall (top, from
left) and George Marcus, Etel Solingen and Kyriacos Athanasiou (bottom, from left)
have been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. UC Irvine.