Living the Dream: UCI

Here we talk about system impacted people and getting them registered to vote and exercise their rights to participate in the democratic process in the United States.

This was an interview with Dr. Peter Kropp who works for the English department, the Film and Digital Media Department, and the Informatics Department at UCI. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the use of models and simulations to predict our collective futures and to train the people to use valuable equipment effectively.

I was extremely fortunate have the opportunity to interview one of very few researchers who works in Language Acquisition at UCI, and I cannot begin to express how fascinating this field is.

Young-Suk Grace Kim, Ed.D., is a professor at University of California, Irvine. She received her Ed.D. at Harvard University in Human Development and Psychology with a concentration on Language and Literacy, and a minor concentration on Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education. She holds Master’s degrees in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) as well as in Human Development and Culture. She was a former classroom teacher at the primary and secondary schools, and community college in San Francisco, California. She was an associate director at the Florida Center for Reading Research and a faculty member at the Florida State University.
Professor Kim’s primary research areas include development in language, cognition, and literacy acquisition and instruction across languages and writing systems, including dyslexia and dysgraphia. Her work includes reading comprehension, reading fluency, listening comprehension, academic language, higher order cognitive skills, written composition for English-speaking children, Dual Language Learners, English learners, and children learning to read other languages (Korean, Spanish, Chinese). She examines how various factors co-develop and interact each other. Her research has been supported by the Institute of Education Science, U. S. Department of Education, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Dr. Kim received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by President Barack Obama; and the Developing Scholar Award and University Teaching Award. She currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Educational Psychology, and editorial board for several journals including Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of School Psychology, School Psychology Review, Educational Researcher, and AERA Open.

Dr Carol Connor is the Chancellor's Professor at UCI's School of Education and her research focuses on examining the links between children’s language, cognitive, social-emotional, and literacy and mathematics development from preschool through the elementary grades. Understanding these links may illuminate reasons for the perplexing difficulties children who are atypical and diverse learners have developing basic and advanced reading, writing, and math skills. Most recently, her research interests have focused on children’s learning in the classroom – from preschool through fifth grade – with particular focus on reading comprehension and mathematics, children living in poverty, and how technology might improve the instruction they receive. This line of research is revealing how the effectiveness of specific instructional activities depends on the language, self-regulation, and reading or math skills children bring with them to school; these child-by-instruction interaction effects are evident as early as preschool and continue at least through third grade for a number of child language, literacy, and math outcomes.

Dr. Piomelli was trained in neuroscience and pharmacology. Research in his lab is focused on the function of lipid-derived messengers, with particular emphasis on the endogenous cannabinoids anandamide and 2-arachidonoylglycerol. Current research efforts converge on three areas: formation and deactivation of anandamide and 2-arachidonylglycerol; physiological roles of the endogenous cannabinoid system; development of therapeutic agents that target anandamide and 2-arachidonylglycerol metabolism.

Aaron Bornstein, cognitive sciences assistant professor at UC Irvine, studies human memory and the ways memory guides decisions.

Aaron Bornstein, cognitive sciences assistant professor at UC Irvine, studies human memory and the ways memory guides decisions. Whether subconsciously or consciously, when a new situation is encountered, memory helps us to generalize from past experiences to make sense of our current environment, he says. No two people have the exact same experienced memories - not even identical twins raised together - so studying how memory influences behavior can help us understand why behaviors change so dramatically from person to person. He’s interested in further studying how memory impacts economic decisions, impulsivity, disorders of choice such as addiction, as well as everyday choices about what to buy, eat, or how to interpret the world around us.

His research on the topic has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in Nature Communications; Nature Neuroscience; Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience; PLoS Computational Biology; the European Journal of Neuroscience; and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Dr Bolzendahl is an associate professor in the department of sociology at UCI. Dr Bolzendahl's ongoing work focuses on better understanding the institutionalization of gender within political organizations and legislative institutions, with a recent publication in Gender & Society and a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume with colleagues Amy Alexander and Farida Jalalzai. Her book Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment across the Globe (2018; Palgrave) brings together an international group of scholars and is the first theoretical treatment of the diverse, multi-level, international issues at the center of measuring women’s political empowerment.