Scientist to Be Named UC Irvine Chancellor

Ralph J. Cicerone, a celebrated UC Irvine scientist who did pioneering research into the phenomenon of global warming and the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer, is expected to be named today as the new chancellor of the Irvine campus, sources close to the selection said.

University of California President Richard C. Atkinson made the selection after a six-month nationwide search with the help of a committee of faculty, staff and other UC officials. He will forward Cicerone’s name to the UC Board of Regents today for official approval.

Cicerone, UCI’s dean of physical sciences since 1994, declined comment late Wednesday, saying he agreed to keep the selection process secret.

“I am not in a position to confirm or deny anything,” he said. “I really do not want to encourage any news coverage.”

He will replace Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening, who has decided to step down to pursue projects outside higher education after leading the campus through a tumultuous period of highs and lows that included twin Nobel prizes and an ugly scandal at a now-defunct fertility clinic.

Cicerone first came to UCI in 1989, when he was recruited from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., to launch UCI’s geosciences department--a first-of-a-kind interdisciplinary center to study the dynamics of air, land and sea.

He was a natural fit to lead such a cross-disciplinary pursuit; trained as both an electrical engineer and physicist, he was also a scientist who had made important contributions to the field of atmospheric chemistry.

It was Cicerone’s work with a University of Michigan scientist that helped lay the groundwork for the discovery by his friend and UCI colleague F. “Sherry” Sherwood Rowland and MIT’s Mario Molina that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used as refrigerants and propellants in spray cans were eating a hole in the protective ozone layer. That discovery won Rowland and Molina the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995.

A year after Cicerone arrived at UCI, the school gave him a lifetime appointment to the Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. endowed chair of geosciences, named after UCI’s founding chancellor. Cicerone replaced Rowland, who relinquished that chair when he was named a Bren Fellow.

Some of Cicerone’s most famous research was released in 1985 when he and three colleagues stunned scientists by declaring that CFCs, methane and other trace gases may someday equal or surpass carbon dioxide as the main greenhouse gas.

Cicerone, born in New Castle, Pa., earned his undergraduate degree at MIT before obtaining a doctoral degree in electrical engineering and physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of the elite National Academy of Sciences and one of the few American scientists to receive a prestigious United Nations award for his research, which seeks to protect the ozone layer.

Cicerone’s wife, Carol, is also a professor at UCI. A respected scholar in the study of human sensory processes, she is a professor of cognitive sciences at the School of Social Sciences. They live in Corona del Mar.

Cicerone’s arrival at UCI bolstered the standing of the UCI physical sciences faculty, already known for such work as Rowland’s ground-breaking research. Their names have frequently been paired in accounts of cutting-edge research. In fact, Rowland called Cicerone from Washington at dawn one morning in 1990 to announce he had received a lifetime appointment to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

Wilkening announced in early September that she would step down by June 30 of this year to explore projects outside higher education and planned to move to Arizona, where she has a home. Appointed in 1993, she has been the third chancellor of the 32-year-old school.

Wilkening presided over a period on campus marked by both great triumph and an ugly scandal. The school basked in international attention in 1995 when Nobel prizes were awarded to two faculty members, Rowland for chemistry and Frederick Reines for physics.

The size and national stature of UCI also grew in recent years.

But Wilkening’s tenure was marred by a widely publicized scandal in which three doctors at a university-run fertility clinic were accused of taking eggs from some women and planting them in others. The scandal spawned numerous lawsuits. Two of the doctors involved in the scandal fled the country. A third was convicted of fraudulently billing insurance companies but was acquitted on charges of tax evasion and conspiracy.

When some questioned Wilkening’s leadership during the fertility scandal’s height in 1995, Cicerone expressed optimism that she would lead the school through the crisis. But he also voiced concern that the scandal could bruise the university and hurt its efforts to recruit new faculty and students.