University Of California Irvine Foundation

UCI Gavin Herbert Eye Institute is Orange County’s premier eye-care provider, offering state-of-the-art ophthalmic services, ranging from routine ophthalmic evaluations to complex medical management and surgical care. Our faculty of internationally recognized physicians, surgeons and scientists provide highly specialized training to future ophthalmologists, access to leading-edge clinical trials as well as sight-saving treatments and therapies for virtually any eye disorder.

Since 2015, the UCI Eye Mobile for Children has helped carry out this mission by providing life-changing optometric services for underserved children in Orange County while simultaneously building relationships with the community. The Eye Mobile for Children helps to ensure tha all children have the vision necessary to be successful in school and reach their full potential. Our goal is to ensure that all the approximately 100,000 preschool-age children in Orange County can see clearly.

The UCI Eye Mobile for Children is essential to overcoming the barriers to much-needed eye care services for the underserved children of Orange County. Recognizing the access barriers to receiving eye care, we provide all services free-of-charge, onsite at the schools, and in multiple languages. Racial and socioeconomic inequities in access to care are also evident across a variety of measures and studies. The economic cost of children’s vision disorders is significant, amounting to $10 billion annually in the United States. Families shoulder 45 percent of these costs—not including the value associated with a diminished quality of life.

The UCI Eye Mobile for Children, a 33-foot state-of-the-art pediatric mobile eye clinic, travels to public schools, Head Starts and community centers to care for children in underserved communities who lack access to comprehensive vision care. The Eye Mobile ensures that all children, regardless of their economic status, have the best vision to succeed in school. We provide vision screenings, comprehensive eye exams, prescription glasses, and education at no cost to families or schools.

The UCI Eye Mobile enables us to improve the quality of life for the tens of thousands of preschool-age children in Orange County who risk being left behind without proper vision care. Early vision screening is a crucial health initiative that helps to enable young children to grow and succeed. With our help, these children will have a significantly heightened chance to realize their full potential in school and life. Thanks to our interventions, many of these children are seeing clearly for the first time, and their lives are changing.

Preschool years are an important time for vision development in children because eye-brain connections are solidified during the first six years of life. Many preschool-age children will already manifest suboptimal visual acuity, and as many as one in four school-age children have a symptomatic vision disorder that may affect learning. Children with uncorrected blurry vision may experience impaired social development, learning difficulties in school, and permanent vision loss in the visual cortex, if a clear 20/20 image is not provided in early childhood. Thus, early detection and treatment of visual impairment and eye diseases is of paramount importance for our children.

Orange County

At University of California, Irvine School of Law, we pride ourselves on an innovative and comprehensive curriculum, a commitment to public service, a culture of excellence, and a vibrant community of extraordinary students, world-renowned faculty, engaged alumni, and dynamic administrators.

We’re proud of our holistic approach to legal education, which produces students who are confident, creative, and ready for the practice of law in a wide variety of settings. The National Jurist gave us an A+ grade of Best Law Schools for Practical Training. Our robust clinical program, featuring more than a dozen clinics, is ranked No. 5 in the latest edition of the U.S. News & World Report ranking of Best Law Schools. We are the only ABA-accredited law school in the nation that both requires and offers an in-house clinical opportunity to every student, which helps prepare them for employment at law firms, public interest and government agencies, major corporations, and federal and state judicial clerkships.

We strongly encourage our students to engage in pro bono work. Since opening our doors in 2009, more than 90 percent of our students have contributed more than 170,000 hours of pro bono work, and we rank No. 3 in the country among all law schools in community service hours per student.

Our faculty have been lauded for their interdisciplinary impact, ranking No. 5 in the nation in a recent study. They are integral to the thriving intellectual community at UC Irvine Law and are accessible and committed to students’ growth and success. Our student to faculty ratio is among the lowest in the nation.

We want our students to flourish and to enjoy their experience in law school. Thanks to our students’ strong relationships with their peers; a welcoming and supportive faculty, administrative team, legal community and alumni base; and an unparalleled location in the heart of Orange County (ten minutes to the beach!), our students have ample opportunities to thrive.

I’m deeply honored to serve as dean and to work alongside such wonderful students and colleagues. I encourage you to further understand what makes UC Irvine Law an exciting, special, and preeminent law school.

Austen Parrish, Dean and Chancellor's Professor of Law
University of California, Irvine School of Law

"If you had to pick one law school at this time in this nation to support it would be UCI Law: a public institution that has been extremely highly-ranked within a ten year span, and has the dedication to public interest, social responsibility, and social justice."

Richard K. Bridgford, Founding partner of Bridgford, Gleason & Artinian and Chair of the Dean's Board of Visitors for University of California, Irvine School of Law.