IRVINE : UCI Teachers Elected to Sciences Academy

UC Irvine professors Ralph Cicerone and Walter Fitch have been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, university officials announced Monday.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, UCI’s executive vice chancellor until last summer, also was among the 195 fellows and 21 foreign honorary members elected earlier this month to the international society, according to University of California spokesman Paul West.

Cicerone is a nationally recognized atmospheric chemist with expertise in global warming. He joined UCI in 1989 to head a new geosciences department aimed at establishing the Irvine campus as a leader in atmospheric studies. He was elected last year to the National Academy of Sciences and is a former director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Fitch, chairman of UCI’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, is a distinguished biologist who has made a specialty of studying how fly viruses evolve and mutate. He, too, joined UCI in 1989, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams and other founding fathers of the United States with the express goal of cultivating “every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.”

The academy is based in Cambridge, Mass., but has centers at UCI and the University of Chicago.