Arizona Educator to Fill UCI Social Ecology Chair

After a 2 1/2-year search, an Arizona educator has been chosen to fill the first chair at UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, officials announced Thursday.

Helen Ingram, a professor at the University of Arizona, has been named to the Drew, Chace and Erin Warmington chair in the Social Ecology of Peace and International Cooperation.

Ingram, who directs the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, will bring her knowledge of international issues to UCI. Ingram’s work has focused on how nations maintain their environments and set policies with other nations to share natural resources.

“I’m a Westerner, and always have been interested in the environment,” said the 57-year-old Ingram, a native of Colorado Springs, Colo. “This is the right place” to be. Daniel Stokols, dean of the social ecology school, said Ingram is a renowned in her field as a researcher and educator.

“She got everyone here excited because she’s so well-regarded in both international relations and environmental management,” Stokols said. “The environment--and developing policies for managing it--is a vehicle for nations to work together and also to reduce conflict nationally.”

Ingram will be appointed to the UCI post on July 1 but will be on leave without pay until July 1, 1996, to complete current research. The chair was established in 1989 with a $300,000 donation from developer Robert Warmington of Newport Beach and his wife, Lori, and named after the couple’s three children. The search for a faculty member to fill the chair began in 1992.

Stokols said Ingram will teach undergraduate students and serve as a mentor for graduate students in social ecology--an interdisciplinary field that encompasses criminology, environmental issues, psychology and social behavior. She will also teach in UCI’s separate Global Peace and Conflict Studies program.

Environmental management addresses policy disputes involving rivers, oceans, the atmosphere and other natural features. For example, students might examine how water runoff from Arizona into Mexico carries pollution across international boundaries, the depletion of ocean life and its effect on fishing-dependent nations, or the effect of ozone depletion on public health.

Ingram’s focus fits a growing academic dimension of UCI’s social ecology program, which is awaiting UC system approval to offer new master’s and doctoral degrees in environmental health science and policy, Stokols said.

Ingram has written seven books and is researching how environmental resources are managed along the border of the United States and Mexico, a central concern in the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Ingram earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Oberlin College and received a doctorate in public law and government from Columbia University.