News

Awards

Val Jenness Awarded ASA Sociology of Law Section Prize for Best Article of 2007 and Pacific Sociological Association 2008 Distinguished Practice Award.

Elizabeth Loftus will be lecturing at the Cosmo Caixa Museum of Science in Madrid, Spain during the week of December 10th.

Elizabeth Loftus was elected "Humanist Laureate" by the International Academy of Humanism in 2007. Past Laureates include Sir Karl Popper and Carl Sagan. Current Laureates include E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins and several Nobel Prize winners.

Cheryl Maxson has been elected Vice-President of the American Society of Criminology. Cheryl will begin her service by joining the ASC Executive Board in November.

Joan Petersilia Chaired Governor Schwarzenegger's Strikeforce on Prison and Parole Reform

Professor Joan Petersilia will receive one of UCI's Distinguished Alumni Awards at the Lauds and Laurels Awards Ceremony on May 8. Joan received her Ph.D. from our School and UCI in 1990 and has become one of the world's most highly respected scholars in the field of criminology. Professor Petersilia's excellence in research, teaching, and public service (including her valuable service to the Governor's Office during Fall Quarter as his top advisor on correctional reform) brings great credit to Social Ecology and to UCI.

Henry Pontell was selected as a 2008 Fulbright Scholar. During the 2008 winter and spring quarters he will be a visiting professor at the University of Macau, where he will continue his research on economic crime in Southeast Asia and the burgeoning gambling industry in Macau.

Judge Tam Nomoto Schumann who has been a continuing lecturer in CLS for many years, has been voted President Elect of the American Judges Association. The American Judges Association is the largest association of trial court judges in the United States and Canada and represents more than 2400 judges from all levels of jurisdiction.

Bill Thompson has been appointed by California State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez as his representative to California's new Crime Laboratory Review Task Force. The 17-member Task Force is charged with reviewing California's crime laboratory system and recommending ways to improve it. It will report it's findings to the state legilature by July 1, 2009. In December, he will present a 2 hour workshop on forensic DNA evidence as part of a conference sponsored by the Innocence Project New Zealand at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Diego Vigil has been awarded the Robert Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology for his work on the urban youth and youth gangs. On November 15th, he was a panelist (with Jeff Carr, the new L.A. gang czar, and Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney) at the California Endowment for the Humanities. The panel topic was: Reclaiming Youth: How Los Angeles can Become a Model for Gang Violence Prevention. His latest book, The Projects: Gang and Non-Gang Families in East Los Angeles is just out and an example of his applied anthropological contributions to urban poverty research.

Recent News

UCI mentioned: Despite the wave of violence, George Tita, a criminologist with the University of California, Irvine, said racially motivated gang killings are an exception. Latinos and blacks are far more likely to be murdered by one of their own. "You don't see these major black-brown wars, either within the context of gangs or outside the context of gangs,"Tita said.

Please click here for the full article.