“Personally, I think economics is the best degree to get. You could argue for computer science or AI, but econ gives you an understanding of the world you can’t get anywhere else.”

Along the way, he discovered something he hadn’t expected: an economics Ph.D. can take you anywhere. “Eighty percent of what I use day-to-day in a job like this comes from the knowledge gained from the Ph.D. program, whether it’s causal, Bayesian or structural economics,” says Derek.

Instead, his career has taken him from publishing academic research to working for Amazon – one of the world’s largest private employers of Ph.D. economists – to Upstart, a fast-growing AI-powered lending company.

Over the last few decades, the number of competitive congressional races has declined dramatically. Yet candidates and officeholders dial for more and more dollars each election, and they do so earlier and earlier in the campaign cycle. Why is fundraising so important in American elections today?

Of her UCI experience, she adds: “I benefited enormously from my time at UCI because it gave me the confidence to take on new challenges. As long as you’re asking meaningful questions and using the best tools available to answer them, you can feel confident that you’re doing good science.”

The same questions that guided Jiaxuan’s dissertation are now shaping her work in artificial intelligence. After graduating from @ucirvine.bsky.social, Jiaxuan is bringing those ideas into industry with jobs at Amazon and Apple.

Rather than simply tracking when people mentally correct errors, Jiaxuan wanted to better understand the hidden cognitive processes that make those corrections possible.

Our brains rely on shortcuts, or what scientists call heuristics, to process language quickly and efficiently. She used EEG recordings, which measure electrical activity in the brain, along with computer modeling to study how the brain responds to language.

in a sentence without even noticing. “Our brains are so good at predicting what is plausible,” Jiaxuan says. “Sometimes they give a good-enough answer rather than a perfect answer because this is more efficient.” This, she argues, is not a flaw but a feature of human cognition.

Jiaxuan earned her Ph.D. in language science after spending the last five years studying what happens when the brain encounters moments of confusion. Her dissertation examined what are called “hallucinations” in language comprehension, or moments when people mentally fix errors ...

Next up in our grad spotlight series is Jiaxuan Li. She chose UC Irvine because she saw a rare intellectual culture. "The department really fosters an atmosphere of intellectual conversation,” she says. “Everyone is so interested in research and so willing to share their expertise and interests."

distinguished mentorship, leadership, and service to the discipline; and conveying physics to broad public audiences through acclaimed books.” Congrats again, Jim!

Nominated by his peers through the society’s Forum on History & Philosophy of Physics, Weatherall is recognized for his “substantial contributions to the foundations of classical field theories and the philosophy of physics; ...

She traces many elements of her successful international career as a scholar, author and podcaster back to her time as a graduate student at UC Irvine, where she earned her master’s in demography and population studies in 2006 and her doctorate in sociology in 2009. ...

As a professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and founding director of The Future of Work Lab and the Gender Equity Initiative, Leah studies “gender at the intersection of everything,” including technology, politics, the workplace and homelife. ...