Educated Response to Giving

The event: The presentation of the UCI Medal, UC Irvine’s equivalent of an honorary doctoral degree, to Al and Tricia Nichols, Robert and Margaret Sprague, and Norman Rostoker on Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Irvine. Proceeds of $250,000 from the benefit--sponsored by the UCI Foundation--will go toward university scholarships.

Dinner show: Eight hundred guests watched foundation chairman Thomas Tierney introduce former medal winners--including Donald Bren, Jean Aldrich, Joan Irvine Smith, Arnold Beckman and Richard Sim--before they dined on medallions of beef at tables covered in gold damask.

Following dessert--warm apple tart with caramel sauce--guests settled back to hear theater arts students perform excerpts from “Oklahoma!” and “Carmen.”

Quote: “Awarding the medal has become our proudest tradition,” Tierney said. “The University of California [system] doesn’t give honorary degrees. So UCI began the practice in 1984 of bestowing a medal that symbolizes the deeply felt esteem in which we hold its recipients.”

Under the spotlight: Introducing the medalists was “a privilege,” UCI Chancellor Ralph Cicerone told the crowd, adding that the chance to salute them “with the kind of pomp and circumstance they deserve was an extra pleasure.”

Highlights of the honorees’ contributions to the university:

* Al and Tricia Nichols have established the Nichols term chair in clinical neuroscience to further research in brain aging and dementia. They have also established a chair in the humanities and the public sphere to help educate the community about humanistic inquiry.

* Rostoker, a professor emeritus of physics at the university, was honored for his dedication to graduate education and his innovative research in the area of physics.

* Robert and Margaret Sprague have pledged $5 million to begin construction of the second facility at the Irvine Biomedical Research Center, where researchers explore genetic links to cancer. They have also made contributions to the Brain Imaging Center and the university’s child development program.

Also on the guest list: Pat Beckman; Ann Sim; Brigitte Bren; Carol Cicerone; Kenneth and Lydia Wang Himes; Chuck and Twyla Martin; Irvine Mayor Christina L. Shea; Marilyn and Tom Sutton; Elizabeth Tierney; Bob and Peggy Goldwater

Clay; Larry Williams; Mary Roosevelt; Laura

and David Dukes; Mary Ellen and David O. Carter; and Jack and Suzanne Peltason.

Information: UCI Foundation, (949) 824-6922.