2 UC Irvine Scientists Get $1-Million Grant
Longtime UC Irvine benefactor Joan Irvine Smith and her mother are giving a grant of $1 million to aid the research programs of the university’s two top atmospheric scientists.
The award to atmospheric chemist and ozone expert F. Sherwood Rowland and geophysicist Ralph J. Cicerone will be used to bring top postdoctoral researchers to their programs.
The grant from the Joan Irvine Smith and Athalie R. Clarke Foundation also will help UCI bring the world’s preeminent atmospheric scholars to the campus as visiting professors, creating a cross-fertilization effect that can help build international scientific agreement on atmospheric problems, Rowland said Monday.
“This kind of interaction is clearly what we need for working on global environmental problems, especially atmospheric ones,” said Rowland, who with a fellow researcher first discovered in 1974 that man-made chemicals were destroying the Earth’s protective ozone layer.
Rowland and his group of about 15 researchers at UC Irvine are involved in an $8-million Natinal Aeronautics and Space Administration project to sample the Earth’s atmosphere for trace gases. Cicerone is chairman of the university’s geosciences department.
Smith, a multimillionaire who won more than $250 million in a fierce legal battle with the Irvine Co., formerly owned by her family, said Monday that the grant is intended to focus greater attention on solving environmental problems.
“Visiting scientists frequently play key advisory roles with their country’s leaders and are critical to the formation of current and future environmental policies,” she said. “And because global atmospheric chemistry is such a young field, we want to encourage gifted young scientists to pursue advanced studies in this area so that human resource levels will match the needs and scale of the problem.”
The donation is one of 18 contributions of $1 million or more to the 27-year-old university. The largest was $8.5 million for the College of Medicine in 1988 from the estate of the late Edna Brophy. The Arnold O. and Mabel Beckman Foundation gave $6.2 million to the university Beckman Laser Institute.
