Three Engineering Faculty Named Highly Cited Researchers
Dec. 5, 2025 - UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor Amir AghaKouchak, and Distinguished Professors Xiaoqing Pan and A. Lee Swindlehurst have been named Highly Cited Researchers by the Clarivate Web of Science. The award honors professors who have published papers that rank in the top 1% by citation in their field, demonstrating significant influence and leadership in their field. They are among 13 UCI researchers awarded this year.
AghaKouchak is a Chancellor's Professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the UCI Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS). His interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of hydrology, climatology, statistics and remote sensing, with a focus on climate extremes, natural hazards and their impacts on society. He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher for six consecutive years.
He is the author or coauthor of more than 280 papers in journals such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Reviews of Geophysics and Nature Climate Change, and his work has received more than 40,000 citations. AghaKouchak is a California licensed Professional Civil Engineer and has received several honors, including the AGU Macelwane Medal, EGU Plinius Medal, ASCE Huber Prize, ASCE Norman Medal, AGU Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award, and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) Early Career Scientist Award.
Xiaoqing Pan is the Henry Samueli Endowed Chair in Engineering and Distinguished Professor of materials science and engineering, and physics and astronomy. He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher for six consecutive years. He’s a prominent materials scientist and electron microscopy expert known for his pioneering development and applications of novel transmission electron microscopy (TEM) methods for probing the atomic scale structure, properties and dynamic behaviors of materials. His work has led to the discoveries of new materials and novel functionalities.
He has published over 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers in high impact journals such as Nature, Science, and Nature Materials and his work been cited over 35,000 times. Pan has received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award and the Chinese NSF’s Outstanding Young Investigator Award. He is an elected fellow of the American Ceramic Society, American Physical Society, Microscopy Society of America, and the Materials Research Society. In addition, he is the inaugural director of the Irvine Materials Research Institute (IMRI) and founding director of the Center for Complex Active Materials (CCAM – an NSF MRSEC).
Swindlehurst is the Nicolaos G. and Sue Curtis Alexopoulos Presidential Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. His research focuses on the application of detection and estimation theory to problems in wireless communications and signal processing, including multi-antenna arrays (MIMO), beamforming/precoding, direction-of-arrival estimation, integrated sensing and communications, channel estimation and equalization, space-time adaptive processing for radar, clutter modeling and mitigation, and interference/jammer cancellation.
Swindlehurst is a fellow of the IEEE, a form Hans Fischer Senior Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Technical University of Munich, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). He has received numerous awards including the 2000 IEEE W. R. G. Baker Prize Paper Award; 2006 IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize in the Field of Communication Theory; the 2006, 2010 and 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Best Paper Awards; 2017 IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award; 2024 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society; and the 2022 Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
