6 UC Irvine professors are elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Irvine, Calif., April 22, 2026 - Six University of California, Irvine professors - representing areas as diverse as biomedical engineering, social sciences and education - have been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This newest class of inductees includes 252 leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research and science.

Kyriacos Athanasiou, Jacquelynne Eccles, George Marcus, David Snow, Etel Solingen and James Weatherall join 40 other current and former UC Irvine scholars as academy members.

"I am pleased to congratulate these six UC Irvine faculty members on their election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences," said Hal Stern, UC Irvine provost and executive vice chancellor. "Their election reflects the depth and breadth of UC Irvine's academic excellence across a range of disciplines, including education, engineering and social sciences."

Here are brief bios of the six new academy members:

• Athanasiou is a Distinguished Professor of biomedical engineering who specializes in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. His pioneering research advances cartilage repair, biomaterials development and translational biomedical innovations. He is widely recognized for originating functional tissue-engineering approaches that produce clinically relevant cartilage replacements, helping bridge laboratory discoveries and real-world medical treatments. Among other achievements, he is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.
• Eccles is a Distinguished Professor of education and one of the leading developmental psychologists of her generation. Through her research on motivation, gender differences and educational development, Eccles examines how social factors influence achievement, identity and life outcomes. She developed expectancy-value theory, a widely used framework explaining how beliefs and values shape academic and career choices. Among many honors, Eccles is a member of the National Academy of Education.
• Marcus is a Distinguished Professor of anthropology and a leading figure in contemporary ethnography. He established the Center for Ethnography at UC Irvine and pioneered multi-sited research methods, advancing interdisciplinary approaches to studying global cultural dynamics. His work reshaped anthropological practice by encouraging researchers to follow cultural phenomena across locations, redefining how globalization is studied.
• Snow is a professor emeritus of sociology and renowned for research on social movements, collective action and framing processes to help shape the understanding of protest dynamics, identity formation and mechanisms of social change. He co-developed the concept of "framing" in social movements, showing how activists construct meaning to mobilize support and influence public discourse. He has also been a leading scholar of homelessness, advancing the understanding of the adaptive, subsistence behaviors of the unhoused. Foremost among his scholarly awards is the American Sociological Association's 2025 W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the association's highest honor.
• Solingen is a Distinguished Professor of political science and is recognized as a leading voice on the reciprocal influence between international political economy and international security. She provided the first systematic analysis connecting the global economy and nuclear weapons' proliferation. The National Academy of Sciences' Estes award recognized her original contribution to unravelling the puzzle of why some states acquired nuclear weapons while others renounced them. Her pioneering work on regional orders helped establish the field of comparative regionalism. Over the last decade, her research examined the role of global value chains in geopolitics, geoeconomics and EU-China relations.
• Weatherall is a Chancellor's Professor of logic and philosophy of science who specializes in the philosophy of physics. He focuses on space-time theory, general relativity, and concepts underlying scientific explanation and theory development. He has contributed important analyses to clarify the structure of space-time theories and resolve conceptual puzzles in general relativity and the philosophy of modern physics.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, founded in 1780, is one of the U.S.'s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening luminaries from the academic, business and government sectors to confront challenges facing the nation and the world. The first members elected to the academy included George Washington, who said in his first annual message to Congress in 1790, "Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."

The induction ceremony will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation's top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UC Irvine has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It's located in one of the world's safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County's second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UC Irvine, visit www.uci.edu.

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus studio with a Comrex IP audio codec to interview UC Irvine faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UC Irvine news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at https://news.uci.edu/media-resources.