Wind and solar energy, necessary as they are to reversing climate change, won’t be enough for society to completely wean itself from fossil fuels. Something else is needed for particularly energy-intensive sectors such as heavy duty trucking and to replace ubiquitous natural gas appliances.

Enter hydrogen.

Clean hydrogen fuel will be a crucial part of the renewable energy mix going forward, according to Jack Brouwer, a UCI professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and the director of both the National Fuel Cell Research Center and the Advanced Power and Energy Program. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, Brouwer discusses the unique advantages of hydrogen and why he believes it will soon be cheaper than gasoline.

It takes gumption to run for political office — especially when you’re just 24 years old. But that’s exactly what UCI PhD student Dylan Green did last year when he registered his candidacy for Irvine City Council and then took on the challenge of campaigning during the pandemic.

Green earned his bachelor's degree at UCI and is now studying the origin of the universe in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, using machine learning on images to filter out pixels corrupted by cosmic rays. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, he discusses what he learned about running for office and why he thinks more scientists and young people should get involved in politics.

Few elements of society suffered as much as live music and theater productions when COVID-19 struck. At the UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts, a whole season’s worth of scheduled productions went out the window as performers and professors adapted to an online-only reality. But while in-person performances are impossible, the need for the arts is greater than ever to provide a salve for the crisis.

In this episode of the UCI Podcast, Dean Stephen Barker discusses how the School of the Arts answered the pandemic, and why the arts have such power to heal.

Clean air standards, water pollution rules and public lands protections have all been scaled back under the Trump administration, which aggressively attacked the administrative state. Under the Biden administration, environmentalists hope to reverse the tide by reviving regulations.

But rolling back the rollbacks won’t be easy. Though the Biden administration may be able to quickly implement executive orders and ramp up environmental enforcement, changes to regulations must go through extensive review processes — that could take years to complete.

Alex Camacho is a Chancellor’s professor of law at UCI and the Faculty Director of the Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources at the UCI Law School, and he studies environmental regulations. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, Professor Camacho discusses how regulations are made and unmade, and the ways the Biden administration can advance its environmental agenda.

COVID-19’s disastrous impacts are obvious: a quarter million deaths in the U.S., millions of jobs lost and a financial downturn that prompted a $2 trillion economic stimulus. These impacts are front and center in the public consciousness, especially as people mourn lost loved ones and worry about how lost wages threaten their ability to pay rent.

But what about two, three or four decades down the line? What will be the long-lasting effects of the pandemic on individuals’ health and finances — and the economy as a whole?

Vellore Arthi, an assistant professor of economics at UCI, has examined the long-term health and economic consequences of previous pandemics and financial crises, including the Black Death of the 14th century, the 1918 influenza pandemic and the Great Depression of the 1930s. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, Arthi discusses what these previous pandemics and downturns can teach us about today’s crisis — and how we can prevent the worst results.

Burnout and stress have been on the rise among medical students for years, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only made things worse. Helping their fellow medical students cope inspired UCI's Ajay Nair Sharma and Daniel Azzam to publish Diary of a Med Student, a book that collects stories from 100+ students from over 50 medical schools across the country. Some are heart-wrenching, some uplifting, and some good for a chuckle, but all stories paint a picture of what life is like in medical school today.

Learn more about the book, and read an excerpt: https://news.uci.edu/2020/12/01/alleviating-med-school-angst.

Dr. José Mayorga has witnessed firsthand the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on different communities in Orange County. As executive director of the Family Health Center, a federally qualified health center that is part of UCI Health, he serves the low-income and Latinx patients who have been disproportionately exposed to the virus.

“These workers are people who are working in food industries, such as fast food places, housekeeping, janitorial services. So they have no choice,” Mayorga says on this episode of the UCI Podcast. “They have to come into work. And, you know, on top of that, they're getting exposed. There’s no ability for them to socially distance in some of these workspaces.”

Virus cases are surging, and local leaders continue to face choices about how to respond. Dr. Mayorga urges decision-makers to consider these most vulnerable communities as they formulate plans and policies.

“This pandemic is impacting every aspect of our community, and it will eventually impact them as well,” Dr. Mayorga says.

A wave of Democratic victories in Orange County during the 2018 midterm election — including four Congressional seats that flipped from red to blue — convinced many that Republicans’ days here were numbered. But this year, the trend reversed, and Republicans reclaimed two of those seats.

Demographic changes in the last few decades have resulted in a political reorienting in Orange County, according to Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, DeSipio talks about how the mixed results of the last few years demonstrate Orange County’s purple identity — and the reasons behind it. He also discusses national voting trends this year among Latino voters, and offers some predictions for how President-elect Joe Biden will address social justice issues such as immigration.

Andrew Noymer is an associate professor of public health at UCI, and he’s an expert on public health responses to pandemics like COVID-19 and their long-term consequences. In this special UCI Podcast, he discusses what we’ve learned over the last eight months of the pandemic and what we can expect next with the novel coronavirus. For instance, we need to be prepared for a harsh winter with a surge of infections. Also, he talks about the impact a vaccine can make for having the general population reach herd immunity levels, and our realistic future living with a virus that won’t be going away anytime soon. And don’t forget, wearing a face covering works.

With a student resident population of 7,000 for Fall Quarter, UCI embarked on an ambitious combined effort to help slow the spread of coronavirus on campus: weekly asymptomatic testing for resident students, and a contact tracing program unique to the UCI community. Dr. Albert Chang, the Medical Director of the UCI Student Health Center; and David Souleles, the Director of UCI’s COVID-19 Response Team, together join the UCI Podcast to discuss these two programs and how the two initiatives work together to prevent the spread of COVID-19.