James Bullock: Dean of Physical Sciences and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California
As dean, he has helped to launch the UCI Eddelman Quantum Institute, dedicated to the discovery of new quantum science phenomena, enabling the next technological revolution, and educating a diverse quantum workforce for the 21st century.
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Podcast
Overview
00:19- About James Bullock
James Bullock is Dean of Physical Sciences and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. As dean, he has helped to launch the UCI Eddelman Quantum Institute, dedicated to the discovery of new quantum science phenomena, enabling the next technological revolution, and educating a diverse quantum workforce for the 21st century
Bullock also co-founded the UCI campus-wide Solutions that scale initiative, which strives to develop and cultivate transdisciplinary energy and environmental solutions that scale globally in response to climate change.
Outside his work as an academic leader, Bullock leads a research group in cosmology and galaxy formation to understand how galaxies and dark matter have evolved over billions of years of cosmic time. Bullock is a member and former chair of the James Webb Space Telescope User committee and currently serves on the Space Telescope Institute Council, which provides oversight to the operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope.
01:54- What were the inflection points in your life?
As a kid, I was always interested in science and math. I was a big fan of Carl Sagan. The thing that I found really compelling is the cosmos. His viewpoint was very global but also cosmic perspective, really getting out from our own heads in some sense. How do we fit into the universe, these huge questions about why we exist and why we’re here. We are only 100 -200 thousand years old. We live in a universe that’s 13.7 billion years old that’s much larger than anything we could sort of experience day-to-day, and yet we figured out so much and here we are together on this little speck of dust in the solar system, and we’re hanging together and trying to appreciate this wonderful globe that we’re on, so I think even as a child that perspective has always stuck with me.
14:21- What fostered this idea that you have got to be all-in and work together at UCI?
We’ve had a number of activities on campus where we’re trying to bring together folks who care about these issues and this started with a group that we call solutions that scale that started very organically with professors that ran into each other at a coffee cart and said you know we really need to do something big.
Profile
James Bullock is Dean of Physical Sciences and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. As dean, he has helped to launch the UCI Eddelman Quantum Institute, dedicated to the discovery of new quantum science phenomena, enabling the next technological revolution, and educating a diverse quantum workforce for the 21st century.
Bullock also co-founded the UCI campus-wide Solutions that Scale initiative, which strives to develop and cultivate transdisciplinary energy and environmental solutions that scale globally in response to climate change.
