UChicago News

Angela Olinto named dean of Physical Sciences Division

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 12:00 -0500

Angela V. Olinto, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, has been appointed dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Olinto is a leading scholar in astroparticle physics and cosmology, focusing on understanding the origin of high-energy cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos. Her appointment as dean is effective July 1.

“Angela brings depth of University experience and scholarly expertise to this leadership role, making her an excellent choice as dean,” wrote President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier in announcing her appointment.

Olinto’s research includes important contributions to the physics of quark stars, inflationary theory and cosmic magnetic fields. She currently leads NASA sub-orbital and space missions to discover the origins of high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. This includes a NASA-funded balloon mission planned for 2022 that will use an ultra-sensitive telescope to detect cosmic rays and neutrinos coming from deep space.

“I am thrilled and humbled to be appointed to lead this historic and dynamic division, home to visionary scholars who constantly redefine the boundaries of the physical and mathematical sciences. I look forward to collaborating with faculty, students and staff to advance the important work of the division,” Olinto said.

Olinto joined the UChicago faculty in 1996 and served as chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics from 2003 to 2006 and from 2012 to 2017. She is the leader of the POEMMA and EUSO space missions and a member of the Pierre Auger Observatory, which are international projects designed to discover the origin of high-energy cosmic rays. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, was a trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics, and serves on advisory committees for the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Olinto’s awards and honors include the Chaire d'Excellence Award of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche in 2006, the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011, and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring in 2015. Olinto received her undergraduate degree from Pontificia Universidade Catolica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and her doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Olinto succeeds Edward “Rocky” Kolb, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, whose work over the last five years enhanced the division’s historic strengths as a leading center of scientific discovery. Kolb will return to his full-time work on the faculty next month.

The selection of the new dean by Zimmer and Diermeier was informed by the recommendations of an elected faculty committee chaired by Stuart A. Kurtz, professor in the Department of Computer Science.

Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan to join Booth faculty as University Professor

Mon, 21 May 2018 12:10 -0500

Influential economics scholar Sendhil Mullainathan will join the University of Chicago Booth School of Business faculty on July 1, 2018, where he has been appointed University Professor. He currently serves as the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Mullainathan’s research spans broad areas of economics: behavioral, labor, public economics and corporate finance, and most recently has focused on the intersection of machine learning and public policy. His seminal research includes topics ranging from the impact of poverty on mental bandwidth to showing that higher cigarette taxes make smokers happier.

“Sendhil is a phenomenal scholar, whose work has had great impact in a variety of fields,” said Madhav Rajan, dean of Chicago Booth and the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Accounting. “Sendhil’s history of collaboration across disciplines will strengthen ties among Booth’s research areas and deepen the school’s connections to the rest of the University.”

University Professors are selected for internationally recognized eminence in their fields as well as for their potential for high impact across the University. Mullainathan will become the 22nd person to hold a University Professorship, and the ninth active faculty member holding that title.

After completing his PhD in economics at Harvard in 1998, Mullainathan taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2004, when he moved to Harvard, where he is a professor of economics and affiliate of Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“The University of Chicago has a grand tradition of defining new disciplines: the phrase ‘Chicago School of’ has its own resonance in many academic fields,” Mullainathan said.

“Today a new discipline is emerging at the intersection of human and machine intelligence. Algorithms are now capable of amazing feats, and fully harnessing their capacities requires integrating them equally with marvelous aspects of human cognition,” he added. “I’m excited to join Booth and be part of a team that will hopefully define another ‘Chicago School’ in this emerging discipline.”

Mullainathan has published more than 50 journal articles, including 14 papers in top economics journals. He recently co-authored Scarcity: Why Having too Little Means so Much and writes regularly for The New York Times. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation.

In 2012, Mullainathan was designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum; was labeled a “Top 100 Thinker” by Foreign Policy Magazine, and named to the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired Magazine.

He helped co-found the non-profit organization ideas42, which applies behavioral science to positively change lives; and co-founded Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development. Mullainathan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Nipam Patel appointed director of the Marine Biological Laboratory

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 11:30 -0500

Nipam Patel, a leading scholar in modern evolutionary and developmental biology, has been appointed director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, an affiliate of the University of Chicago. In addition, Patel will be appointed as a faculty member at the University of Chicago.

Patel currently holds the William V. Power Endowed Chair in Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is professor and co-chair of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and professor in the Department of Integrative Biology. His appointment is effective Sept. 4.

Patel’s connections to the MBL and the University reach back two decades. For the past 17 years, he has taught the MBL Embryology course, having served as co-director from 2007 to 2011. Patel’s ties to UChicago include serving as a professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy from 1995 to 2003.

Patel studies the evolutionary changes that have brought about the diversity of life seen today. Over the course of his career, he has established a marine crustacean named Parhyale hawaiensis as a genetic model for understanding how diverse body plans develop and evolve. Patel’s significant scientific contributions complement a core focus of the MBL: discoveries emerging from the study of novel marine organisms, including research in comparative evolution and genomics, regenerative biology, neuroscience and sensory biology.

Prof. Nipam Patel established a marine crustacean, Parhyale hawaiensis, as a model system for studying the evolution and development of diverse body plans. (Image courtesy of Nipam Patel, MBL Embryology course 2017)

“From a pool of extraordinarily accomplished candidates, Nipam distinguished himself as particularly passionate about MBL’s rich history and even more so about its promising future,” said David Fithian, executive vice president of the University of Chicago, MBL trustee and co-chair of the search advisory committee. “He will be a compelling spokesperson for and determined leader of the MBL’s next chapter.”

“It is an incredible honor to have the opportunity to lead the MBL, an institution that has had a remarkable influence on my own career through the teaching and research opportunities it has provided me over almost 20 years,” Patel said. “I am excited to build upon the MBL’s extraordinary history to elevate it to even greater prominence, and to partner with the University of Chicago in this endeavor. I look forward to working with all the dedicated MBL scientists and staff, as well as all those who come to visit and share in the magic of the MBL.”

Patel grew up in El Paso, Texas and received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Princeton University and a PhD in biological sciences from Stanford University. He joined the University of California, Berkeley in 2003, where he has held the Schubert Endowed Chair, and serves as faculty curator at the Essig Museum of Entomology. Patel has served as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Genetics in Shizuoka, Japan. He began his career as a staff associate in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore, Maryland.

Patel is the editor of the journal Development and serves on the editorial boards of eLife, EvoDevo, Developmental Biology, Development Genes and Evolution and Evolution and Development. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served on numerous advisory boards, including the board of directors of the Society for Developmental Biology.

Patel is a member of the MBL Education Committee, which provides strategic planning for more than 20 advanced research training courses and other educational programs at the MBL, including collaborative initiatives with UChicago.

Patel succeeds interim MBL co-directors Melina Hale, the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and in the College, and vice provost for academic initiatives at UChicago; and Neil Shubin, the Robert R. Bensley Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago.

The MBL in Woods Hole, Massachusetts is a leading international center for investigation in the biological and ecological sciences. Founded in 1888, the laboratory convenes scientists from institutions around the world to collaborate in its resident and visiting research centers and to teach in its education division. UChicago and the MBL formed an affiliation in 2013.

The selection of the new director by President Robert J. Zimmer was informed by a search advisory committee, which Fithian co-chaired along with Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, an investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.

Amanda Woodward named dean of the Division of the Social Sciences

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 11:00 -0500

Amanda Woodward, the William S. Gray Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, has been appointed dean of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Woodward, a leading scholar in the social development of infants and young children, has been serving as interim dean of the Division since July 2017. Her appointment as dean of the Division is effective April 4.

“Amanda has provided vital leadership, sustaining the momentum of the Division of the Social Sciences. We are confident that she will be an excellent leader for the Division in the years to come,” wrote President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier in announcing her appointment.

Woodward in her research has pioneered the development of experimental methods to investigate social cognition in infants and young children. Her work has produced fundamental insights into infants’ social understanding and the processes that support conceptual development early in life. Her current research includes investigating the effects of culture and community in shaping children’s social learning strategies and the neural processes involved in early social-cognitive development.

“It is an honor to lead such an extraordinary community of scholars. I look forward to working together in many areas of research and an array of educational endeavors with faculty, students and staff to advance the social sciences at the University,” Woodward said.

Woodward has been a member of the University faculty since 1993. She was a founding member of the Center for Early Childhood Research and has served as director of the Infant Learning and Development Laboratory as well as chair of the Department of Psychology and deputy dean of faculty affairs for the Division.

Woodward was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. Her research has been recognized by such awards as the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research, the American Psychological Association Boyd McCandless Award for an Early Career Contribution to Developmental Psychology and the John Merck Scholars Award. Woodward received her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and her doctoral degree from Stanford University.

Woodward succeeds David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, History, and Romance Languages, who serves as executive vice provost at the University.

The selection of the new dean by Zimmer and Diermeier was informed by the recommendations of an elected faculty committee chaired by Kenneth Pomeranz, University Professor in the Department of History and the College.

New professorship honors Core curriculum

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 07:44 -0600

As part of the College’s commitment to general education, excellence in teaching and intellectual development through the Core curriculum, the College has established the Christian W. Mackauer Professorship in the College and in the Division of Social Sciences, supported by a $3.5 million dollar donation by Glenn Swogger Jr, AB‘57, chairman of the Redbud Foundation. John D. Kelly, professor of anthropology, has been named the inaugural Christian W. Mackauer Professor.

The new chair is named for Mackauer, who taught history in the College from the 1940s until his death in 1970. Mackauer was an architect and legendary teacher of the College’s History of Western Civilization Sequence, who powerfully articulated the mission of general education and its connections and tensions with more specialized knowledge. Mackauer declared that "students must comprehend the complexity and even arbitrariness of received ideas in order to understand their own possible roles in modern society.” Today, the College’s emphasis on general education for first- and second-year students with a strong foundation in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural and mathematical sciences continues that principle, resulting in enriching and rigorous courses of study that allow College students to pursue advanced studies in their third- and fourth years with multiple dimensions of general knowledge.

“Historically, the University was dedicated to the rigorous study of liberal arts for undergraduates from its very beginnings in the 1890s,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College. “But it was not until the decades after 1930 that the College developed a Core curriculum for first- and second-year students, insisting that a rigorous introduction to broad, general knowledge was a necessary complement to and preparation for the more specialized knowledge of the Departments and the Schools. The Mackauer Professorship honors our unique mission to instill a common vocabulary and intellectual foundation among our students while also teaching them to rigorously analyze data, break down arguments and construct their own ideas from many approaches.”

Kelly teaches regularly in the Civilizations Sequence as well as Self, Culture and Society. His scholarship has focused on rituals throughout history, semiotic and military technologies and colonialism and capitalism. His research explores the impact of these topics in both India and Fiji. He also is the author of more than 30 articles, edited volumes and numerous lectures, and has written several influential books.

In addition, Kelly has successfully trained several generations of graduate students from a variety of departments in the practice of effective undergraduate teaching.

Faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 16:23 -0600

Seventeen faculty members received named professorships or were appointed distinguished service professors. Michael Foote, Sydney Hans, Heinrich Jaeger and Carole Ober received distinguished service professorships; Daniel Arber, Christopher Berry, Mark Courtney, Fred M. Donner, Steven Durlauf, Dwight N. Hopkins, Bana Jabri, John D. Kelly, Howard Nusbaum, Louis H. Philipson, James T. Robinson, Stuart Rowan and Chad Syverson received named professorships.

Biological Sciences Division

Daniel A. Arber has been named the first Donald West and Mary Elizabeth King Professor in the Department of Pathology.

Arber, chair of the Department of Pathology at the University and an authority on the diagnosis, classification and molecular genetics of blood cancers, came from Stanford University, where he was the Ronald F. Dorfman Professor in Pathology, vice chair for clinical services and medical director of anatomic pathology and clinical laboratory services.

Arber’s research focuses on molecular genetics and immunophenotypic changes in blood cancers. He was a major contributor to the 2016 World Health Organization classification of tumors of hematopoietic and lymphoid tissues, and was the lead author of the WHO classification of myeloid neoplasms and acute leukemias. He is currently president of the Society for Hematopathology (2016-2018), and he recently co-chaired a group of leading hematopathologists and hematologists who developed joint College of American Pathology/American Society of Hematology guidelines for the initial workup for acute leukemia, a five-year project that was published in 2017. He is also on the board of directors of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology.

Arber is the author of more than 300 publications, book sections and chapters. He has co-edited several textbooks in the field, including Hematopathology and two editions of Wintrobe’s Clinical Hematology, and was a co-author of the textbooks Illustrated Pathology of the Bone Marrow and Atlas of Peripheral Blood: The primary diagnostic tool. He has been honored with multiple teaching awards from Stanford School of Medicine and the Department of Pathology.

Bana Jabri has been named the Sarah and Harold Lincoln Thompson Professor in the Department of Medicine and the College.

Jabri, vice chair for research in the Department of Medicine and director of research at the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center, is a gastroenterologist and an expert in human immunology. She has followed a career interest in celiac disease, autoimmune disorders and inflammatory bowel disease. She is an elected member of the prestigious Association of American Physicians, and received multiple awards including the William K. Warren, Jr. Prize for Excellence in Celiac Disease Research in 2009, the Lloyd Mayer Prize in Mucosal Immunology in 2017 and the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education.

Jabri has extensive experience in intestinal mucosal immunology. More recently, she has demonstrated a role for viral infections in loss of oral tolerance and celiac disease, and been developing mouse models that mimic key aspects of immune dysregulation found in patients with inflammatory intestinal disorders and autoimmune diseases.

Jabri completed her medical and PhD training at the Université Paris VII and the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She is co-director of the Digestive Diseases Research Core Center at UChicago, responsible for the scientific direction, administration, and efficient usage of the facilities and resources of the Integrated Translational Core.

Carole Ober has been named the Blum-Riese Distinguished Service Professor in Human Genetics and the College.

Ober is chair of the Department of Human Genetics. Her research focuses on the genetics of complex human phenotypes, with particular emphasis on traits related to reproduction and asthma susceptibility.

A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ober is principal investigator of a March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center and co-chair of the EVE Consortium on Asthma Genetics. She has received many awards for her research contributions in the areas of fertility and asthma, including the J. Christian Herr Award for Excellence in Basic or Applied Research in Reproductive Immunology (1986), the American Society of Reproductive Medicine Distinguished Scientist Award (2003), the Northwestern Obstetrics and Gynecological Society Award (2005), the Charles Reed Lectureship (2004) and the John E. Salvaggio Memorial Lectureship (2016) from the American Association of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology, and the March of Dimes Jonas Salk Health Leadership Award for Research (2017).

Her research on understanding the role of genes and gene-environment interactions on reproductive outcomes and asthma susceptibility has resulted in more than 200 publications. A 2016 New England Journal of Medicine study by Ober and colleagues on “Innate Immunity and Asthma Risk in Amish and Hutterite Farm Children” was honored by the Clinical Research Forum, a national organization of senior researchers, as the best clinical research paper of the year.

Louis H. Philipson has been named the first holder of the James C. Tyree Professorship of Diabetes Research and Care in the Department of Medicine.

Philipson, director of the University of Chicago Medicine Kovler Diabetes Center, is an authority on diabetes. He is the founding director of the Kovler Diabetes Center, president of the Chicago Community Leadership Board and national President-elect for Science and Medicine of the American Diabetes Association. He and his colleagues have discovered insulin gene mutations that cause neonatal diabetes, and he has helped make UChicago Medicine the national leader in the study of monogenic diabetes. He also directs research in preventing and treating Type 1 diabetes.

Philipson completed his PhD and medical training at the University of Chicago, and is a graduate of Harvard College. He was recently named a recipient of the 2018 Order of Lincoln Award, which honors public service for the betterment of humanity in Illinois and is considered to be the state’s highest civilian honor.

The College

Fred M. Donner has been named the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the College and the Humanities Division.

Donner, a professor of Near Eastern History in the Oriental Institute and Department of Near Eastern Language and Civilizations, has focused his scholarship on the origins of Islam, tribal and nomadic society, early Islamic history, Arabic-Islamic Historiography and Islamic law. Donner has served as the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Language and Civilizations, and is the author of several influential books and more than 50 articles.

Donner was appointed in 2012 a life member of the Scientific Committee of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts “Beït al-Hikma.” He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 2012 and president of Middle East Medievalists from 1992-1994. Donner was a Marta Sutton Weeks fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2014-2015 and held the NEH Professorship at the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan in 2001. Donner is a recipient of a 1994 Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a 2007-2008 Guggenheim Fellowship.

John D. Kelly, PhD’88, has been named the inaugural Christian W. Mackauer Professor in the College and the Division of the Social Sciences.

Kelly’s professional scholarship has focused on rituals throughout history, semiotic and military technologies, and colonialism and capitalism. His research explores the impact of these topics in both India and Fiji. In addition to over 30 articles, edited volumes and numerous lectures, Kelly has written several influential books, including The American Game: Capitalism, Decolonization, World Domination, and Baseball (Paradigm Press, 2006), Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (University of Chicago, 1992).

Kelly has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Anthropology since 1994. He served as master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division from 2002-2005, and currently serves as core chair for the Self, Culture and Society sequence in the College.

Division of the Physical Sciences

Michael Foote has been named the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences and the College.

Foote is a paleobiologist who documents large-scale patterns in the history of life, such as why some environments foster more species than others, or how widely a species is spread affects its extinction risk. His research covers biogeography, evolutionary paleoecology and macroevolution.

Foote co-authored the third edition of the highly influential Principles of Paleontology. He is a fellow of the Paleontological Society and received its Charles Schuchert award in 2000. After serving for nine years as the chair of the Geophysical Sciences department, he is currently the deputy dean for academic affairs in the Division of the Physical Sciences.

Heinrich Jaeger has been named the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics and the College.

The main theme of Jaeger’s research is the investigation of materials under conditions far from equilibrium. Such conditions give rise to a wealth of complex phenomena, and insights gained can be used to design new classes of smart materials. A focus of Jaeger’s work are granular materials, which are large aggregates of particles in far-from-equilibrium configurations, that exhibit properties intermediate between those of ordinary solids and liquids. His group’s projects explore how controlling this behavior provides a path to stress-adaptive materials for high-efficiency energy absorption, to soft robotic systems that can change shape or compliance, and to new forms of architectural structures that are fully recyclable. On the nanoscale, Jaeger’s research investigates the self-assembly of particles into ultrathin membranes that function as nano-sieves with tunable pore size.

He has been a UChicago faculty member since 1991, directing the UChicago Materials Research Center from 2001-2006 and the James Franck Institute from 2007-2010. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Social Sciences Division

Howard Nusbaum has been named the Stella M. Rowley Professor in the Department of Psychology and the College.

Nusbaum is internationally recognized for his multi-disciplinary studies of the nature of wisdom and the cognitive and neural mechanisms that mediate communication and thinking. Nusbaum’s past research has investigated the effects of sleep on learning, adaptive processes in language learning and the neural mechanisms of speech communication. His current research investigates how experience can increase wisdom and produce changes in insight and economic decisions, and examines the role of sleep in cognitive creativity and abstraction.

Nusbaum is the director of the Center for Practical Wisdom and a member of the executive committee of the new Computational Social Science program, which he played an instrumental role in creating. From 1997-2010, he served as the chair of the Department of Psychology. He has also served as co-director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and as a steering committee member of the Neuroscience Institute. In 2012, Nusbaum was honored with the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and he received the Future Faculty Mentorship Award in 2007. He has just completed a two-year term as the division director for Division of Social, Behavioral and Economics Sciences at the National Science Foundation.

Booth School of Business

Chad Syverson has been named the Eli B. and Harriet B. Williams Professor of Economics.

Syverson’s research focuses on the interactions of firm structure, market structure, and productivity. His background as a mechanical engineer spurred his research interest in productivity—how things are put together, what can go wrong and what factors influence a company’s operating success.

He has written dozens of scholarly articles and is the coauthor, along with his colleagues Profs. Austan Goolsbee and Steve Levitt, of an intermediate-level textbook, Microeconomics. He serves as an editor of RAND Journal of Economics, is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has served on multiple National Academies committees. He has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 2001 and joined Chicago Booth in 2008. He earned two bachelor’s degrees in 1996 from the University of North Dakota–one in economics and one in mechanical engineering. He earned his PhD in economics in 2001 from the University of Maryland.

Divinity School

Dwight N. Hopkins has been named the Alexander Campbell Professor in the Divinity School and the College.

A constructive theologian, Hopkins works in the areas of contemporary models of theology, various forms of liberation theologies (especially black and other third-world manifestations), and East-West cross-cultural comparisons. He is interested in multidisciplinary approaches to the academic study of religious thought, especially cultural, political, economic and interpretive methods.

He is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Sankofa Institute for African American Pastoral Leadership (editor), Black Theology – Essays on Gender Perspectives and Black Theology – Essays on Global Perspectives. He was recently awarded the honorary recognition of Professor Extraordinarious in the Department of Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. He has been a visiting faculty member at numerous institutions including Renmin (People’s) University, Chung Chi College Divinity School, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

James T. Robinson has been named the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of Judaism, Islamic Studies, and the History of Religions in the Divinity School and the College.

Robinson’s research focuses on medieval Jewish intellectual history, philosophy and biblical exegesis in the Islamic world and Christian Europe. His main interests lie in the literary and social dimensions of philosophy, and the relation between philosophy and religion. He has taught more than 25 different courses during his time at UChicago and was awarded, in 2017, a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring.

Robinson is the author of four books: Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes, The Book of the Soul of Man; Asceticism, Eschatology, Opposition to Philosophy: The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Salmon b. Yeroham on Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Yefet b. ‘Eli the Karaite on the Book of Joshua, and Sefer Nefesh ha-Adam: Perush Qohelet li-Shemuel ben Yehudah ibn Tibbon. He is also the editor of The Cultures of Maimonideanism: New Approaches to the History of Jewish Thought.

Harris School

Christopher Berry has been named the William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor in the Harris School and the College.

Berry is a scholar of American politics whose research agenda includes state and local politics and finance and congressional budgetary politics. His recent work on distributive politics challenges the theoretical paradigm that has dominated political science’s understanding of congressional politics for decades. He is known for an award-winning book, Imperfect Union: Representation and Taxation in Multilevel Governments, as well as other works on political control of administrative agencies, women and politics, and the implementation of state court rulings.

Berry is director of the Center for Municipal Finance and co-director of the Harris School’s M.S. in Computational Science and Public Policy.

Berry is involved in the execution of the undergraduate public policy program in the College, serving as the chair of the Curriculum Committee at the College, as well as teaching one of the core courses for the major.

Steven Durlauf has been named the Steans Family Professor in Educational Policy.

Durlauf’s research spans economic theory, econometrics and applied economics. He has helped pioneer the integration of sociological ideas into economic models and the use of statistical mechanics methods to study aggregate behavior when social influences are present. His research has had an impact on scholarship in policy areas including poverty, inequality and economic growth. He has also made contributions to the theory of policy evaluation.

Durlauf’s administrative contributions to the University predate his move to the Harris School. As he has served as co-director of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group since 2012. He is now also serving as associate director of the Center for Economics of Human Development. Prior to joining Harris, Durlauf was the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow of the Econometric Society, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Institute for Molecular Engineering

Stuart Rowan has been named the Barry L. MacLean Professor for Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise.

Rowan is an acclaimed soft materials chemist and engineer exploring the design and synthesis of new polymeric materials with a focus on the use of dynamic/reversible chemistry to access stimuli-responsive/adaptive polymeric materials, that includes self-healing as well as actuating polymers. His group also works on investigating the potential of nanocellulose to access more environmentally friendly materials and developing new synthetic methods for the construction of complex polymeric architectures. In addition to his appointment in the Institute for Molecular Engineering he has joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry at UChicago and the Division of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at Argonne National Laboratories.

He has recently been named the new editor-in-chief of the American Chemical Society’s ACS Macro Letters and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry as well as a fellow of the American Chemical Society’s POLY division. He has published over 140 scientific papers and reviews. He is a prior recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award for promising young faculty and more recently received the Morley Medal (ACS) in 2013, and the Herman Mark Scholar Award (ACS) in 2015. Before joining UChicago in 2016, he was the Kent H. Smith Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University.

School of Social Service Administration

Mark Courtney has been named the Samuel Deutsch Professor in the School of Social Service Administration.

Courtney’s fields of special interest are child welfare policy and services, the connection between child welfare services and other institutions serving marginalized populations, and the professionalization of social work. His current work includes studies of the adult functioning of former foster children, experimental evaluation of independent living services for foster youth, and the influence of juvenile courts on the operation of the child welfare system.

Courtney is an affiliated scholar of Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, where he served as director from 2001 to 2006. He is the author of the 2007 report Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth, a study that led to changes in federal law. In October 2008, the U.S. Congress passed an act permitting states to continue care for foster children until age 21 and receive federal assistance. Courtney testified in Congressional hearings about the value of the change and pointed to results of the Midwest study.

He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, a fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research, and has received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work and Research and the Peter W. Forsythe Award for Leadership in Public Child Welfare from the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators. Since 2016, he has served as editor of SSA’s scholarly publication Social Service Review.

Sydney L. Hans has been named the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration.

Hans’ research seeks to understand how biological and social factors interact in contributing to risk and resilience in human development. She studies how experiences in early life, particularly the relationship between mother and infant, influence development at later ages. She has conducted studies focusing on the development of young children whose parents use illicit substances, suffer from major mental disorders, have experienced traumatic events, and/or live in conditions of extreme poverty.

Hans is particularly interested in using research to develop interventions and public policy that will benefit infants, young children and their families. She is currently working in Chicago and smaller urban areas in Illinois with home visiting programs in which community doulas provide services to teenage mothers. These programs work to improve maternal and infant health and to build mothers' efficacy and pride in parenting. She is also working with the Ounce of Prevention Fund to evaluate their Educare program, which gives children high-quality learning experiences from shortly after birth to age five.

Hans currently serves as SSA Deputy Dean for Research and Faculty Development as well as director of SSA’s Family Support Training Program. She also is a faculty member in the Department of Comparative Human Development and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Psychology. Hans previously held an academic appointment in the Department of Psychiatry for more than 25 years.

Dieter Roelstraete appointed curator of Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 12:45 -0600

Dieter Roelstraete, an internationally renowned curator of contemporary art, has been named the next curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

In his new role, effective November 10, Roelstraete will oversee all aspects of the Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions Gallery, working with the University arts community as well as with arts organizations in the city of Chicago and around the world.

Roelstraete joins the Neubauer Collegium after serving on the curatorial team that organized documenta 14, the international art exhibition that ran this past spring and summer in Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. Widely hailed as a significant statement about the relevance and aesthetic concerns of the contemporary art world, the show brought together work by 160 artists at more than 80 sites.

The move is a return to Chicago for Roelstraete. Prior to his work with documenta 14, he served as the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 2012 to 2015. During his time there, Roelstraete organized and co-organized a number of highly regarded shows, including The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2015); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now (2015), which told the story of a radical group of jazz artists from the South Side of Chicago; and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016), a retrospective of the acclaimed Chicago-based artist that traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. From 2003 to 2011 Roelstraete was a curator at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, where he organized large-scale group exhibitions as well as monographic shows.

“Dieter is one of the most creative and thoughtful curators at work today,” said Jonathan Lear, the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium. “His work exemplifies how artistic expression and humanistic research can meld together and support each other. I am looking forward to working with him, and I am eager to see how he’ll make use of the freedom our gallery affords.”

One of the Neubauer Collegium’s three key initiatives, alongside faculty-led collaborative research projects and a global visiting fellows program, the gallery presents both historical and contemporary art in support of the Neubauer Collegium’s mission to explore novel approaches to complex human questions. In its first two years of operation, the gallery has hosted 11 idea-driven exhibitions that reflect the productive interplay between visual arts practice and scholarly inquiry. Several shows have been curated as part of a campus-wide set of related exhibitions.

“After spending three years working on what is effectively the largest art exhibition in the world—a hugely complex and impossibly expansive affair—I am excited to start working in a much more concentrated, in-depth fashion. Curating in a beautiful, humanly sized space at the University of Chicago will both allow and require that,” Roelstraete said. “I am a long-standing advocate for the idea of art as a form of research and knowledge production, and I cannot think of a more welcoming home to further develop these intuitions in concert with the great minds that people the wilds of Hyde Park.”

In addition to joining the Neubauer Collegium, Roelstraete will co-teach a course this winter with acclaimed artist Assoc. Prof. William Pope.L. as Mellon Collaborative Fellow in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. The course, titled “Art and Knowledge,” will extend their documenta 14 collaboration (also supported by the Gray Center) to explore the different types of knowledge art can produce. Roelstraete will pursue further teaching within the Department of Art History in the Humanities Division starting in the 2018-2019 academic year.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled by Dieter’s appointment. He joins an extraordinary group of internationally known curators working across the arts institutions at the University of Chicago,” said Alison Gass, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art. “This hire will benefit UChicago Arts and further advance the University’s commitment to arts scholarship and practice and curatorial excellence.”

The exhibitions program at the Neubauer Collegium will continue to play a vital role in advancing UChicago Arts’ commitment to visual arts exhibition, alongside colleagues at the Arts and Public Life’s Arts Incubator, Booth School of Business’ Contemporary Art Collection, the University Library’s Special Collections Research Center, Logan Center Exhibitions, the Oriental Institute, the Renaissance Society and the Smart Museum of Art.

Roelstraete succeeds Jacob Proctor, the Neubauer Collegium’s inaugural curator, who is pursuing international opportunities from his new home base in New York City. “The gallery as it stands today is very much a reflection of Jacob’s extraordinary talent and vision,” Lear said. “He has given us a remarkable foundation on which Dieter can build.”

The Neubauer Collegium’s current exhibition, Terence Gower’s Havana Case Study, runs through Jan. 26. Roelstraete is conducting research for his first exhibition as curator, tentatively scheduled to open next spring.

Nigel Lockyer appointed to second term as director of Fermilab

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 09:45 -0500

Nigel Lockyer has been reappointed as the director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. During his first four years as leader of the world-renowned laboratory he helped enhance its international scientific leadership, including the launch of a pioneering international particle physics project hosted by Fermilab.

Lockyer’s second five-year term, which begins Sept. 3, 2018, comes as Fermilab begins building its flagship project that will send neutrino particles underground from Illinois to South Dakota to unlock new insights into the origins of the universe. The lab is also a leader in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, while serving as the home of groundbreaking experiments conducted by scientists from around the world.

“For decades, scientists working at Fermilab have made major discoveries that have greatly illuminated the nature of matter and the universe. Under Nigel’s outstanding leadership, Fermilab is not only continuing many of its important ongoing projects, but has embarked upon a new ambitious research agenda for the coming years that will enable further profound discoveries,” said Robert J. Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago and chair of the board of directors of Fermi Research Alliance, LLC.

The Fermi Research Alliance, which was formed in 2006, is a joint partnership of UChicago and the Universities Research Association, Inc. Together they manage Fermilab under a contract with the Department of Energy. Fermilab’s operations include a powerful complex of particle accelerators and sophisticated experiments to study the nature of matter, energy, space and time, with more than 4,500 scientists from 50 countries using the research facilities annually.

“On behalf of the Universities Research Association, Nigel has been an extraordinary leader, and we join the University of Chicago in enthusiastically supporting this reappointment,” said Lou Anna K. Simon, chair of the Universities Research Association and vice chair of Fermi Research Alliance, LLC.

During his first term, Lockyer positioned Fermilab as a world leader in research of neutrinos, spearheading the successful launch of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility with locations in Illinois and South Dakota. The facility will house the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a massive research project that brings together more than 1,000 scientists from 31 countries in a quest to understand the hard-to-detect particles and usher in a new era of international particle physics research.

“DOE is committed to supporting world-leading science at its national laboratories,” said Steve Binkley, acting director of the DOE Office of Science. “LBNF/DUNE exemplifies America’s strong partnerships with the international community in pioneering scientific discoveries.”

Lockyer has forged new international partnerships dedicated to advancing experiments at the laboratory, while retaining Fermilab’s leadership in the Large Hadron Collider and Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN. Fermilab has contributed major components for the collider’s accelerator and Compact Muon Solenoid experiment upgrades.

As Fermilab director, Lockyer has continued Fermilab’s trailblazing program in particle astrophysics that seeks to understand the nature of dark energy and discover particles of dark matter. He has led efforts to revitalize the laboratory’s infrastructure, accelerated the laboratory’s efforts to translate scientific discoveries to applications for society and kicked off new initiatives such as Fermilab’s participation in the Chicago Quantum Exchange.

Lockyer earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from York University and a doctorate in physics from the Ohio State University. He served for more than two decades as a physics faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania.

Before arriving at Fermilab, Lockyer was director of Canada’s TRIUMF laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia. He is the 2006 recipient of the American Physical Society’s Panofsky Prize for his leading research on the bottom quark.

Faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 12:00 -0500

Twenty-four faculty members received named professorships or were appointed distinguished service professors. Steven Davis, Daniel Diermeier, Angela V. Olinto and Canice Prendergast received distinguished service professorships; and Zeresenay Alemseged, Bariş Ata, Katherine Baicker, Joy Bergelson, Michael Bourdaghs, John M. Cunningham, Thomas F. Gajewski, Mikhail Golosov, Rex Haydon, Jeffrey Hubbell, Emir Kamenica, Stefan Nagel, Madhav Rajan, Wilhelm Schlag, Sonali M. Smith, Nir Uriel, Christopher Woods, Ben Zhao, Haitao Zheng and Laurie Zoloth received named professorships.

Biological Sciences Division

Zeresenay “Zeray” Alemseged has been named the Donald N. Pritzker Professor in Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the College.

A noted paleoanthropologist, Alemseged studies the origin of early human ancestors and the environmental factors that influenced their evolution. He established and led the Dikika Research Project, in which Alemseged made several breakthrough findings, including the discovery of the almost-complete fossilized remains of “Selam,” a 3.3-million-year-old child of the species Australopithecus afarensis. Now known as “the world’s oldest child,” it is the most complete skeleton of a human ancestor discovered to date and represents a major advancement in the understanding of human and pre-human evolution.

Alemseged is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the co-founder and president of the East African Association of Paleontologists and Paleoanthropologists. He was a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute and recently the Irvine Chair and senior curator of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences.

Joy Bergelson has been named the James D. Watson Professor in Ecology and Evolution and the College.

Bergelson’s work focuses on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the community of bacteria that inhabit it, with particular interest in understanding how the ecology of these interactions shapes evolutionary change. Her studies combine molecular evolutionary research with functional genomics under natural field conditions to test models of host-pathogen co-evolution. Along with colleagues she also has pioneered the development of Arabidopsis thaliana as a system for genome-wide mapping studies, which culminated in the Arabidopsis 1001 project. She received the 2017 BSD Distinguished Investigator award for this body of work.

The chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolution, Bergelson is a member of three UChicago committees, and has served on dozens of other departmental, divisional and university committees, National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Agriculture panels, international advisory boards and journal editorial boards. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served as chair of the AAAS Biology section.

John M. Cunningham has been named the George M. Eisenberg Professor in Pediatrics and the College.

Cunningham is an internationally known expert in the treatment and research of childhood cancers and blood diseases. He has particular expertise in treating leukemia, immunodeficiencies, sickle cell disease and thalassemia. He is a recognized leader in the field of pediatric stem cell transplantation and has developed novel uses for this life-saving treatment. Cunningham studies the transcriptional mechanisms operative in hematopoiesis and leukemia, and the development of clinical trials for the treatment of leukemia and genetic diseases.

Cunningham's research has received support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the American Society of Hematology; and other prominent scientific organizations. He is a member of the scientific council of the American Cancer Society and a member of the editorial board of The Oncologist.

Thomas F. Gajewski has been named the first AbbVie Foundation Professor of Cancer Immunotherapy in Pathology.

Gajewski’s team members study ways to overcome a tumor’s ability to elude the immune system, with a focus on drugs that help the immune system, especially T cells, gain access to tumor sites. They have discovered genetic clues that correlate with response versus resistance, enabling them to identify new therapies to overcome resistance and expand efficacy. They also discovered that certain components of the gut microbiota—microbes that live in a patient’s digestive tract—could stimulate the immune system to attack tumor cells. They are now refining this approach and analyzing a large cohort of human samples.

Earlier this year, Gajewski received an outstanding investigator award from the National Institutes of Health for productivity in cancer research. Gajewski is an editor for Cancer Research and the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer and past president of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer.

Rex Haydon has been named the Simon and Kalt Families Professor in Orthopaedic Surgery.

An orthopedic surgeon and physician-scientist, Haydon specializes in the comprehensive treatment of tumors in bone or soft tissue. He works closely with patients hoping to avoid limb amputation as well as those who need reconstructive surgery on their upper and lower extremities. Haydon’s research focuses on advancing the treatment of musculoskeletal tumors. He’s the author of more than 120 articles and book chapters and has accepted career development awards from both the Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Beyond his work in the University of Chicago’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine, Haydon is also the associate director of the University of Chicago Medicine Molecular Oncology Laboratory.

Sonali M. Smith has been selected as the first Elwood V. Jensen Professor in Medicine.

The director of the lymphoma program, Smith is an expert on lymphoma treatment and has made outstanding contributions to the field through clinical care, education and clinical research. She studies new agents and combinations in the management of both treatment-naïve and relapsed/refractory lymphomas. She is currently studying the role of stem cell transplantation for patients with high-risk follicular lymphoma.

Smith is vice chair of the Southwest Oncology Group Lymphoma Committee, where she oversees clinical trial development and mentors faculty. She chairs the American Society of Oncology's Women in Oncology Subcommittee and is the incoming chair of ASCO’s Continuous Professional Development Committee. She is co-editor of ASH’s Hematology and co-chair of the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research Lymphoma Working Group. Smith serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Oncology and Cancer. She is an elected fellow of Pritzker’s Academy of Distinguished Medical Educators and a senior faculty scholar in the Bucksbaum Institute. She has more than 140 publications and lectures extensively to peers and patients nationally and internationally.

Nir Uriel has been named the Louis Block Professor in Medicine.

Uriel, who is director of the Heart Failure, Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support program, is a leader in the field of heart failure, mechanical circulatory support and heart transplantation. He specializes in caring for patients who require mechanical circulatory support, including ventricular assist devices. Uriel's research focuses on advanced heart failure physiology, heart transplant and mechanical circulatory support. Uriel specialized and reported physiological changes and developed treatment algorithms for patients supported with Mechanical Circulatory Support that are being used worldwide. These findings were published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology.

Uriel has a strong interest in high-risk transplant populations, including HIV-positive patients and patients who have received mediastinal radiation due to tumors or prior transplants. He has improved treatment protocols and patient care for these high-risk groups.

Division of the Humanities

Michael Bourdaghs has been named the Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College.

Bourdaghs is a scholar of modern Japanese literature, culture and intellectual history, as well as popular music and literary and critical theory in Japan. He is also a prolific translator, including most recently Kojin Karatani's The Structure of World History: From Modes< of Production to Modes of Exchange.

Bourdaghs is the author of The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism, and Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Pre-History of J-Pop. He is currently completing a book on the works of Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki.

Division of the Physical Sciences

Angela V. Olinto has been named the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics and the College.

Olinto works on astroparticle physics and cosmology. She has made important contributions to the physics of quark stars, inflationary theory, cosmic magnetic fields and astroparticle physics. She currently leads NASA sub-orbital and space missions to discover the origins of the highest-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos.

Olinto is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, and has received the Chaire d’Excellence Award of the French Agence Nationale de Recherche, the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring, among other awards. She serves as chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University.

Wilhelm Schlag has been named the Homer J. Livingston Professor in Mathematics and the College.

Schlag is the author of more than 80 scholarly papers and five books, and his research focuses on linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, operator and spectral theory, and harmonic and classical analysis, among other subjects.

Schlag serves on the editorial boards of numerous publications, including Communications in Mathematical Physics, Communications in Partial Differential Equations, Geometric and Functional Analysis and Journal of Spectral Theory, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He was an invited speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians in Korea, and a plenary speaker at the 2012 International Congress of Mathematical Physics in Denmark.

Ben Zhao has been named the Neubauer Professor in Computer Science and the College.

Zhao’s research covers a range of topics including large-distributed networks and systems, HCI, security and privacy, and wireless and mobile systems, mostly from a data-driven perspective. Zhao is an ACM distinguished scientist and a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, MIT Tech Review’s TR-35 Award and IEEE Internet Technical Committee’s Early Career Award.

Zhao joined the University in July from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he served as a professor of computer science. He co-directs the Systems, Algorithms, Networking and Data Lab, which is relocating to UChicago.

Haitao “Heather” Zheng has been named the Neubauer Professor in Computer Science and the College.

Zheng’s research focuses on mobile computing, wireless networking, and online and mobile data analysis. Her current research includes developing novel mmWave networking and imaging systems, crowdsourcing enabled spectrum monitoring and enforcement, as well as data-driven networking and systems design. Zheng led the Nautilus project on open spectrum systems at Microsoft Research Asia and worked on radio resource allocation for broadband wireless networks at Bell-Labs.

Zheng joined UChicago in July from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was a professor in the Department of Computer Science and co-directed the Systems, Algorithms, Networking and Data Lab, which is relocating to UChicago. She was selected in 2005 by MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35. She received the Google Faculty Research Award in 2012, 2014 and 2016 and is an IEEE Fellow.

Division of the Social Sciences

Mikhail Golosov has been named the Homer J. Livingston Professor in Economics and the College.

Golosov joined UChicago in July from Princeton University, where he was a professor of economics. He has also held positions at Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Golosov’s research focus includes macroeconomics, public finance and political economy.

He is an associate editor of Econometrica and the Review of Economic Studies. Golosov has been awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation CAREER Grant. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a distinguished CESifo affiliate.

Chicago Booth School of Business

Bariş Ata has been named the Chookaszian Family Professor of Operations Management.

Ata takes a problem-driven approach to bridge the theory and practice of operations management. He has used stochastic models to study delivery of health care services, sustainable operations, management of manufacturing and service operations, and revenue management. His current research interests also include operational issues in the criminal justice system and the logistical challenges in the last-mile delivery problems in Africa.

Ata serves as the editor for the Stochastic Models and Simulation Department of Management Science. He has served as an associate editor for Mathematics of Operations Research, Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Stochastic Systems. Prior to joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 2013, Ata was a faculty member at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Steven Davis has been named the William H. Abbott Distinguished Service Professor of International Business and Economics.

Davis studies business dynamics, employment, labor market institutions, economic fluctuations, public policy and other topics. He is known for his influential work using longitudinal data on firms and establishments to explore job creation and destruction dynamics and their relationship to economic performance.

Davis is also a co-creator of the Economic Policy Uncertainty Indices and the DHI Hiring Indicators, and he co-organizes the Asian Monetary Policy Forum, held annually in Singapore. He is a former editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics and an elected fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, senior academic fellow with the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research, adviser to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, and visiting scholar and consultant, respectively, with the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Chicago. In 2013, he received the Addington Prize in Measurement, awarded by the Fraser Institute for Public Policy.

Emir Kamenica has been named the Richard O. Ryan Professor of Economics.

Kamenica studies an eclectic set of topics in microeconomics with a focus on theoretical work on the design of informational environments.

His work has been published widely, including articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Kamenica is a recipient of the 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and is an editor of the Journal of Political Economy.

Stefan Nagel has been named the Fama Family Professor of Finance.

Nagel’s research focuses on asset pricing, investor behavior and risk taking of financial intermediaries. His most recent work explores the role of personal experiences in shaping expectations about the macroeconomy and financial market returns, novel approaches for measurement of bank tail risk exposures, and the application of machine learning techniques to understand the risk and return of investment strategies in the stock market.

Nagel is executive editor of the Journal of Finance, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Centre of Economic Policy Research. Before joining Chicago Booth in 2017, Nagel taught at the University of Michigan, Stanford University and Harvard University.

Canice Prendergast has been named the W. Allen Wallis Distinguished Service Professor of Economics.

Prendergast is a microeconomist who studies the economics of organizations, including compensation practices of firms and social influences of trade within firms. His recent research involves designing and implementing an efficient market system for allocating food to food banks across the United States.

He is the author of “The Motivation and Bias of Bureaucrats,” published in the American Economics Review in 2007 and "The Tenuous Trade-Off Between Risk and Incentives," which appeared in the Journal of Political Economy in 2002. Prendergast’s work also appears in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The RAND Journal, The Economic Journal, Journal of Labor Economics and European Economic Review. He has worked as the editor of the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Labor Economics. In addition to being the Booth Faculty Fellow from 2011 to 2014, he is the recipient of two National Science Foundation Awards, is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economics and has been a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Madhav Rajan has been named the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Accounting.

The dean of Chicago Booth, Rajan was most recently senior associate dean at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he held the Robert K. Jaedicke Chair in Accounting. Rajan’s primary research interest is the economics-based analysis of management accounting issues, especially as they relate to the choice of internal control and performance systems in firms.

He has served as editor of The Accounting Review and is co-author of Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis, the leading cost accounting textbook used around the world. Before joining Stanford in 2001, Rajan held faculty positions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2000, Rajan won the David W. Hauck Award, Wharton’s highest undergraduate teaching award. Earlier this year, he received the Robert T. Davis Award for lifetime achievement and service, the highest faculty recognition awarded by Stanford GSB. Rajan held a visiting professorship at Chicago Booth in 2007-08.

Divinity School

Laurie Zoloth has been named the Margaret E. Burton Professor in the Divinity School.

The dean of the Divinity School, Zoloth is a leader in the field of religious studies with a particular focus on bioethics and Jewish studies. Her scholarship includes the ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, and how science and medicine are taught. She is a founding board member of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning, and has been the president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. Before joining UChicago, Zoloth served as a Charles McCormick Deering Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, holding appointments in the Department of Religious Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and in the Feinberg School of Medicine.

Zoloth is the author of Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice and co-editor of five books, including Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics and& Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought.

Harris School of Public Policy

Katherine Baicker has been named the Emmett Dedmon Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy.

Baicker, who will begin serving as dean of Harris Public Policy on Aug. 15, is a leading scholar in the economic analysis of health policy. Her research focuses on the effectiveness and value of public and private health insurance. Her scholarship spans Medicaid, health insurance finance, health care quality and the effect of health system reforms.

Baicker arrives at UChicago from Harvard University where she serves as the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Social Insurance and serves as a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an affiliate of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Baicker has served as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Daniel Diermeier has been named the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and in the College.

Diermeier was appointed provost of UChicago in 2016. Previously, he served as dean of Harris Public Policy, where he was the Emmett Dedmon Professor of Public Administration. His teaching and research focus on formal political theory, political institutions, the interaction of business and politics, as well as crisis and reputation management. He has published two books and more than 100 research articles in academic journals, mostly in the fields of political science, economics and management, but also in other areas ranging from linguistics, sociology and psychology to computer science and applied mathematics.

Diermeier is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. Prior to joining UChicago, he taught at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, most recently as IBM Professor of Regulation and Practice in the Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences and director of the Ford Motor Company Center of Global Citizenship.

Institute for Molecular Engineering

Jeffrey Hubbell has been named the inaugural Eugene Bell Professor of Tissue Engineering.

Hubbell’s research focuses on tissue engineering, including designing materials to guide processes of morphogenesis through engineering of extracellular matrix molecules and growth factors, to create implants that are drug-like in their function. He and his team are also developing molecular- and materials-engineering approaches in immunotherapy, including focusing vaccination on infectious disease and cancer.

Earlier this year, Hubbell received the Society for Biomaterials' Founders Award, the highest honor bestowed by the society. Hubbell has co-founded five companies, three of which are based on or related to research he directs at his UChicago laboratory. The companies include ClostraBio, a startup that is developing treatments for food allergies, Kuros Biosciences, which develops growth factor engineering and biomaterials technology for surgical sealants and tissue repair agents, and QGel, which develops biomaterials matrices for cell culture in drug discovery.

Oriental Institute

Christopher Woods has been named the John A. Wilson Professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the College.

Woods began serving as director of the Oriental Institute on July 1. His research and writings focus on Sumerian language as well as early Mesopotamian religion, literature, mathematics and administration. Woods serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.

His publications include The Grammar of Perspective: The Sumerian Conjugation Prefixes as a System of Voice and the forthcoming Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon 18. Woods is editor of Visible Language: The Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond.

Jeffrey Hubbell named inaugural Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:00 -0500

Prof. Jeffrey Hubbell, a biomaterials scientist and entrepreneur, has been named the inaugural Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering at the University of Chicago.

The Bell Professorship was created to promote innovative work at UChicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. Hubbell was serving as the Barry L. MacLean Professor of Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise at the University.

“Jeff Hubbell is a pioneering researcher and early entrepreneur in the field of tissue engineering,” said Matthew Tirrell, the Pritzker Director of IME and deputy laboratory director for science at Argonne National Laboratory. “His 2005 paper on synthetic microenvironments for tissue engineering has been cited thousands of times, and he has trained dozens of other leaders in the field in his laboratory. This year, the Society for Biomaterials endowed him with their highest honor, the Founders Award.”

The Bell Professorship, which is supported by a $3.5 million donation from the Millicent and Eugene Bell Foundation, was created to foster scholarship on tissue engineering at MBL and IME, where scientists are focused on exploring innovative technology at the molecular scale, with the potential for societal impact in areas including health care, computing, energy and the environment. The gift was made in memory of Eugene Bell, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the MBL scientific community, who founded the field of tissue engineering through efforts to generate replacement tissue for treating severe burns and other injuries.

“It is a tremendous honor to follow in the footsteps of Eugene Bell, who through application of discoveries in cell biology and innovations in biomaterials science launched the field of tissue engineering with his work on engineered skin and blood vessels,” Hubbell said.

Hubbell joined UChicago in 2014 after serving as the Merck-Serono Chair in Drug Delivery at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he also was founding director of the Institute of Bioengineering. He has served on the faculty of the University of Texas and California Institute of Technology.

In his new appointment, Hubbell will continue to be based at IME. He will direct a research project at the MBL’s Eugene Bell Center for Regenerative Biology and Tissue Engineering and hold a faculty appointment there.

"We are incredibly excited that Jeff will be joining us on a more regular basis,” said David Mark Welch, interim director of MBL Division of Research. “He has already started several collaborative projects that leverage his expertise in tissue engineering with the unique marine models available at the MBL.”

In his research in tissue engineering, Hubbell designs materials to guide processes of morphogenesis through engineering of extracellular matrix molecules and growth factors, to create implants that are drug-like in their function. He and his team are also developing molecular- and materials-engineering approaches in immunotherapy, including focusing vaccination on infectious disease and cancer.

Hubbell has co-founded five companies, three of which are based on or related to research he directs at his UChicago laboratory. Most recently, Hubbell and Cathy Nagler, the Bunning Food Allergy Professor at UChicago, worked with the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Institute for Translational Medicine to found ClostraBio, a UChicago startup that is developing treatments for food allergies. Other companies include Kuros Biosciences, which develops growth factor engineering and biomaterials technology for surgical sealants and tissue repair agents, and QGel, which develops biomaterials matrices for cell culture in drug discovery.

Christopher Woods appointed director of the Oriental Institute

Wed, 17 May 2017 09:30 -0500

Christopher Woods, a leading scholar of Sumerian language and writing, has been appointed director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Woods will become the 13th director of the Oriental Institute, widely considered the world’s leading interdisciplinary center for research on civilizations of the ancient Near East. Founded in 1919, the institute serves as home to a museum and extensive collection of artifacts and research materials. It sponsors archaeological and survey expeditions across the Near East including Egypt, Turkey and Israel.

Woods will begin his new role on July 1. He succeeds Gil Stein, professor of archaeology at UChicago, who has served as the institute’s director since 2002.

“Chris is an outstanding scholar who also has a deep understanding of the Oriental Institute,” Provost Daniel Diermeier said. “He will advance the institute’s important work and build on the strong leadership that Gil Stein has provided over the last 15 years.”

Woods is an associate professor of Sumerian in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University. His research and writings focus on Sumerian language as well as early Mesopotamian religion, literature, mathematics and administration. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies and oversees the Oriental Institute’s post-doctoral scholars program.

Woods’ publications include The Grammar of Perspective: The Sumerian Conjugation Prefixes as a System of Voice and the forthcoming Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon 18. He is editor of Visible Language: The Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. He led the launch of an interdisciplinary effort to explore early writing, entitled Signs of Writing: The Cultural, Social, and Linguistic Contexts of the World’s First Writing Systems. Sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the project enhanced UChicago’s role as an international center for the study of early writing.

“The opportunity to lead an institute where legends in our field have worked and to build on what Gil has done is one of the greatest honors in the field of Near East studies,” Woods said. “The Oriental Institute is the original interdisciplinary institute at the University, and I look forward to building new partnerships across campus and to developing collaborative projects that reach across fields.”

Prior to joining UChicago, Woods received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University and doctorate in Assyriology from Harvard University, where he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

In his announcement Diermeier highlighted the accomplishments of Stein and thanked him for his service to the institute. Under Stein’s leadership, the institute has expanded its research capabilities, opened up new areas of scholarship, and resumed field research in countries such as Iraq and Israel, where institute scholars had not worked for years. Stein’s initiatives included developing a database to turn the institute’s extensive archives into a searchable digital resource and establishing the public education department for outreach to the University community, elementary and secondary schools, and the public.

Stein will take on the new role of Senior Advisor to the Provost for Cultural Heritage, starting July 1, with the goal of planning and implementing a cross-disciplinary initiative for the preservation of cultural and archaeological heritage for the University.

Anne Walters Robertson named dean of the Division of the Humanities

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 10:30 -0500

Anne Walters Robertson, the Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College, has been appointed dean of the Division of the Humanities. President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier announced the appointment, which will begin April 1, 2017. Robertson has served as interim dean since July 2016.

In announcing the appointment, Zimmer and Diermeier wrote that Robertson has provided “vital leadership and sustained the momentum of the Division of the Humanities. We are confident that Anne will be an excellent leader for the Division of the Humanities in the years to come.”

Robertson joined the University in the Department of Music in 1984. She has held several leadership positions at the University, including serving as deputy provost for research and education and chair of the Music Department, in addition to external leadership roles, including her service as president of the American Musicological Society from 2011 to 2012.

“It has been a privilege working alongside students and faculty in the Division of the Humanities for over 30 years,” Robertson said. “And it is an honor to now serve as its dean and continue the academic advancement of the humanities.”

Robertson’s research is focused on the music of the Middle Ages and the interactions of liturgical and secular music. Her particular concentration is on 15th-century sacred polyphony, the 14th-century French composer Guillaume de Machaut, French medieval liturgical music, ceremony and architecture, and music and mysticism. Her books include The Service-Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages, which earned the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America, and Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in His Musical Works, which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society.

Robertson is the first scholar to win all three awards of the Medieval Academy of America: the Haskins Medal (2006), the John Nicholas Brown Prize (1995) and the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize (1987). In 2008, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2015 became a member of the American Philosophical Society. She holds a PhD from Yale University.

During Robertson’s tenure as interim dean, the College has announced several new curricular initiatives in the Humanities, including the Signature Courses and the Course Cluster initiatives, a new undergraduate major in creative writing and a new Humanities Core sequence exploring poetry.

The selection of the new dean of humanities by Zimmer and Diermeier was informed by an elected faculty search committee, chaired by Bill Brown, the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture.

Laurie Zoloth appointed dean of University of Chicago Divinity School

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 10:00 -0500

Laurie Zoloth, a leader in the field of religious studies with particular scholarly interest in bioethics and Jewish studies, has been appointed dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Zoloth serves as a Charles McCormick Deering Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, holding appointments in the Department of Religious Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and in the Feinberg School of Medicine. President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier announced her appointment as dean, which will begin July 1, 2017.

“The University of Chicago Divinity School has a long history as a leader in the academic study of religion. It has an opportunity not only to expand and deepen this work in the coming years, but to bring this expertise to a much richer, informed, dispassionate public discourse on religion,” Zimmer and Diermeier said. “Laurie’s leadership in the field of religious studies, her scholarship in areas of Judaism and ethics, and her work on evolving issues of science and society make her an excellent choice as dean.”

Zoloth’s research explores religion and ethics, drawing from sources ranging from Biblical and Talmudic texts to postmodern Jewish philosophy, including the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. Her scholarship spans the ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, synthetic biology, social justice in health care, and how science and medicine are taught. As a founding board member of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning, she also researches the practices of interreligious dialogue, exploring how religion plays a role in public discussion and policy.

Zoloth is author of Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice and co-editor of five books, including Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics and Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought.

“The Divinity School is the nation’s leading institution for theological research and education, home to creative, honest and serious scholarship,” Zoloth said. “I look forward to listening, thinking carefully and learning thoughtfully to help shape the future of the Divinity School, furthering it as a site of intellectual leadership in Chicago and around the world.”

Zoloth has been the president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. She was the inaugural director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University and director of graduate studies in religious studies at Northwestern. She is an elected member of the Hastings Center and a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

Her work on bioethics and health care led her to serve on the NASA Advisory Council, the space agency’s highest civilian advisory board; the International Planetary Protection Committee; the National Recombinant DNA Advisory Board, and the executive committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. She served as chair of the first bioethics advisory board at the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute and has testified in front of Congress, the President’s Commission on Bioethics and state legislatures.

Zoloth began her career as a neonatal nurse working in impoverished communities. She said those early years are central to how she views religious studies and bioethics—an approach that brings together theoretical exploration with an understanding of how arguments of theology and moral philosophy can address societal challenges.

Zoloth holds a bachelor’s degree in women studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of the State of New York. She received a master’s degree in Jewish studies and a doctorate in social ethics from the Graduate Theological Union. Zoloth also holds a master’s degree in English from San Francisco State University.

Zoloth served as a professor of ethics and Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University before joining the religious studies and medical school faculty at Northwestern. At Northwestern, she was founding director of the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and founding director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at the Feinberg School of Medicine. Zoloth also served as the president of Northwestern’s Faculty Senate.

Zoloth succeeds Dean Richard A. Rosengarten, associate professor of religion and literature. In a note to the Divinity School community, Zimmer and Diermeier thanked Rosengarten for his demonstrated commitment to the Divinity School.

Zoloth’s appointment follows a national search, informed by a Divinity School faculty committee chaired by Daniel Arnold, associate professor of the philosophy of religions.

The Divinity School was founded in 1892, the year that the first classes were held at UChicago, and it was the first of UChicago's six professional schools. It is internationally recognized for scholarship across many religious traditions and for scholarly and comparative perspectives on religion and public life. The school is known for research that spans disciplines, with many of its faculty members holding joint appointments in other departments or schools.

Katherine Baicker appointed dean at Harris School of Public Policy

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 10:00 -0500

Katherine Baicker, a leading scholar in the economic analysis of health care policy, has been appointed the next dean of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Baicker serves as the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics at Harvard University, holding appointments at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Kennedy School of Government. Her appointment as Harris dean will begin Aug. 15.

“Kate is widely recognized as one of the nation’s most thoughtful and visible leaders on health care policy,” wrote President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier in announcing Baicker’s appointment. They added her “commitment to high academic standards combined with policy impact, her academic and policy leadership experience and achievements, and her belief in the great future potential of Harris” would make her an ideal leader for the public policy school.

Baicker’s experience in policy leadership includes serving as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2005 to 2007, for which she played a leading role in the development of health policy, and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which provides analysis and policy advice to Congress. She has been on the faculty at Harvard since 2007, and served as chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard’s Chan School from 2014 to 2016.

“Bringing rigorous analysis to bear on pressing policy questions is more vital now than ever, and the exceptional scholarship and academic programs of Harris have positioned it as a rising leader in this crucial work,” Baicker said. “I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the enormously talented faculty, staff and students at Harris during this very exciting time for the school.”

Baicker’s research focuses on public and private health insurance, including examining its distribution and effectiveness. Her scholarship spans Medicaid, health insurance finance and the effect of health care reforms, particularly on usage and quality of care. She is one of the principal investigators of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a landmark policy study of the effect of expanding public health insurance on health care use, health outcomes, financial strain and the well-being of low-income adults.

Her research has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2011 and the National Academy of Social Insurance in 2007, and she serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Health Economics, the American Journal of Health Economics and Health Affairs. Baicker is a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an affiliate of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

Before joining Harvard, Baicker was on the faculties of the University of California, Los Angeles and Dartmouth College. She also served as a visiting assistant professor at Harris in 2003. Baicker received a PhD in economics from Harvard and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University.

The appointment comes as Harris is building upon numerous recent successes, including the appointment of prominent new faculty members such as University Professor James Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies; and distinguished senior fellows such as Arne Duncan, former U.S. Secretary of Education. In 2015, the University launched The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts and The Pearson Global Forum, both housed at Harris, with Robinson serving as the inaugural faculty director of The Pearson Institute. The initiative was established with a landmark $100 million gift to the University from The Thomas L. Pearson and The Pearson Family Members Foundation.

Baicker’s appointment follows an international search, informed by a faculty committee co-chaired by Harris faculty members Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, the Sydney Stein Professor, and Prof. Dan Black.

In their message announcing Baicker’s appointment, Zimmer and Diermeier thanked Kerwin Charles, the Edwin and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, who is serving as interim dean of Harris for the 2016-2017 academic year. They noted his work on recruiting leading faculty to Harris and improving alumni engagement and diversity and inclusion. Diermeier served as dean of Harris before being appointed provost last year.

John W. Boyer appointed to sixth term as dean of the College

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 10:00 -0500

John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, has been appointed to a sixth term as dean of the College, continuing an unprecedented 25-year tenure that has brought historic advances for UChicago’s undergraduate program.

Boyer’s term has been characterized by extensive increases in resources for undergraduates, including a transformation of career development and internship opportunities; the development of a comprehensive study abroad program; significant gains in admissions, diversity and student achievement; and a dramatic increase in financial aid.

“The success of the College is an essential part of the entire University’s strength, and John’s tireless efforts on behalf of the College have been essential to the remarkable undergraduate program we see today,” wrote President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier in a message announcing the reappointment. “We are extremely fortunate that John will continue to provide leadership that reflects deep understanding of the College’s history and the highest ambitions for its future.”

“It is an extraordinary honor to be the dean of the College,” said Boyer, the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History and the College. “This is a remarkable community of highly motivated people who are extremely talented, and it is a pleasure to teach and to work with them.”

Boyer became the longest-serving dean of the College in the University’s history in 2002, when he was appointed to his third consecutive term. Among the many successes of his tenure, he is especially proud of improvements such as the construction of three major residence facilities in the last 15 years, the reinvention of the College houses and halls as central components of collegiate life, the strengthening of existing general-education courses and the creation of new programs in the Core, and the development of study abroad programs into a signature strength of the College.

Enhancements to admissions and student financial aid are among the most important developments of the last decade, Boyer said. The College has experienced extraordinary increases in its application and yield rates, and has significantly improved student retention. He has seen students benefit enormously from the Odyssey Scholarship Program, established in 2007 with a $100 million gift from an anonymous donor nicknamed “Homer,” followed by a $100 million expansion in 2016, launched with a $50 million gift and challenge from Harriet Heyman, AM’72, and her husband, Sir Michael Moritz. That has enabled a comprehensive approach to student support, which Boyer considers one of the best need-based aid structures for students from families with limited financial means.

“I myself came out of a working-class family,” Boyer said. “My father was a truck driver and an electrician, and my mother was a secretary in a steel mill. I have a significant personal commitment to helping people from modest circumstances gain access to and succeed at the University—not just to get in, but to flourish and to succeed.”

Combining liberal education and career development

Another key investment for Boyer has been in the growth of career development programs for undergraduate students, including the Jeff Metcalf Internship Program, which began in what Boyer describes as “a very modest way” in 1997. “The first year we started the Metcalf program, we had eight internships. This year we’ll have over 2,000,” Boyer said.

The College has also worked with Career Advancement to develop UChicago Careers In, a set of pre-professional training programs designed for students interested in areas such as business, education, entrepreneurship, health, journalism, arts and media, law, public policy and public service, and the STEM fields. The expansion of career opportunities complements the College’s rigorous emphasis on liberal arts, Boyer believes, creating a strong preparation for life after college.

“We now have a career office that’s more extensive and ambitious than most of our peers, and it represents a tremendously valuable investment in our students,” said Boyer.

Boyer’s fifth term, now nearing completion, has seen a number of important academic milestones for the College. It included the introduction of new undergraduate major programs in molecular engineering, computational and applied mathematics, neuroscience, and the development of a creative writing major that will begin next year—the first degree program in creative writing in the history of the University.

One of the College’s enduring strengths is the Core curriculum, which Boyer sees as central to maintaining a common intellectual vocabulary, even as upper-level students gain more academic choices in their specializations. He notes that a large proportion of the College’s science and social science majors take humanities courses beyond the Core requirements. “I think this comes back to our quality of student body—not only their academic talent, but the capaciousness of their understanding of what true learning is. So as long as the faculty is committed to designing and teaching the Core well, there will always be a Core.”

Describing his goals for the next five years, Boyer said he will continue working to develop student life and campus housing, including trying to increase the capacity of campus housing beyond the current 55 percent of all College students. He also hopes that the faculty will give serious thought to rethinking the boundary between undergraduate and graduate study, noting that many seniors are now taking courses at the graduate level. Another priority is a greater integration of field research into more of the College’s programs to give students more exposure to “the work of the world,” citing the Public Policy Practicum and Chicago Studies program’s Calumet Quarter, which provides field experience to environmental studies students, as two examples.

An historian who has written frequently on the history of the University, Boyer completed his book, The University of Chicago: A History in 2015, to coincide with the 125th anniversary of the University’s founding. He is currently working on his new book, Austria 1867-1983, which is part of the Oxford History of Modern Europe series. Boyer, who describes himself as a political and social historian, studies people who tried both to maintain and to change institutions, and he has a particular interest in the Habsburg Empire.

“I’ve probably learned more about how to administer a complex institution from writing about the empire than I have from writing about the University,” Boyer joked. “A university is a huge community of ambitious people who often don’t agree with each other. The job of a dean or department chair, or even a president or provost, is not to modulate discontent but to make it add up to something productive, transformational and forward-looking. I have enormous respect for those Habsburg civil servants who were able to keep the place running and prosperous for centuries.”

Madhav Rajan appointed dean of University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 09:30 -0600

Madhav Rajan, former senior associate dean at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he holds the Robert K. Jaedicke Chair in Accounting, has been appointed the next dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier announced the appointment, which will begin July 1, 2017.

Rajan served as senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Stanford GSB from 2010 to 2016. That role included leadership of Stanford’s MBA program, with oversight of admissions, curriculum, the student experience and career management. He launched new joint-degree programs with Stanford’s engineering school and rolled out initiatives for tighter integration with the rest of the university.

“We sought the most outstanding candidate whose values, ambition and abilities fully comport with the distinctiveness of Chicago Booth as one of methodological rigor in its research and education, and through that commitment one of high impact on the world,” Zimmer and Diermeier wrote in announcing the appointment. “We are confident that Madhav will be an outstanding leader for Chicago Booth in the coming years.”

“The values I have in research and education are deeply valued at Chicago Booth,” Rajan said. “People come here to do rigorous, empirically based research and analysis, which provides the basis for a transformative student experience and an extremely effective MBA curriculum. We have an exciting opportunity to take Booth’s deep strengths and leverage them here and around the world. I am thrilled to have the chance to be dean at what is unquestionably the greatest academic business school.”

Rajan’s primary research interest is the economics-based analysis of management accounting issues, especially as they relate to the choice of internal control and performance systems in firms. He served as editor of The Accounting Review from 2002 to 2008 and is co-author of Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis, the leading cost accounting textbook used around the world.

In 2000, Rajan won the David W. Hauck Award, the highest undergraduate teaching award at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. This April he will receive the Robert T. Davis Award for lifetime service and achievement, the highest faculty recognition awarded by the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Rajan completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Madras, India. He holds a PhD and two master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. Before going to Stanford in 2001, Rajan held faculty positions at the Wharton School. He held a visiting professorship at Chicago Booth in 2007-08.

Rajan succeeds former Dean Sunil Kumar, who was named provost of Johns Hopkins University in July 2016. His appointment follows a national search, informed by a Booth faculty committee chaired by Reid Hastie, the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at Booth.

In a note to the Chicago Booth community, Zimmer and Diermeier thanked Douglas Skinner, the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting, who served as interim dean. They noted his vital leadership on the Francis and Rose Yuen Center in Hong Kong, which is scheduled to open in 2018.

Arne Duncan appointed distinguished senior fellow at Harris School of Public Policy

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 11:00 -0600

Arne Duncan, who served as U.S. Secretary of Education and chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, has joined the University of Chicago as a distinguished senior fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Duncan will participate in seminars, conferences and student-led initiatives at Harris Public Policy, bringing to the University his significant experience in education policy. His longstanding dedication to students and their families adds an important voice to work across the University to improve education through research, engagement with education practice and policy, and helping to train the next generation of education leaders.

“The University of Chicago is committed to bringing together scholars and practitioners to confront the challenges faced by educators in Chicago and cities around the world,” President Robert J. Zimmer said. “Arne Duncan, with his wealth of experience, brings important insights into the nation’s educational challenges, with a perspective informed by his understanding of Chicago’s South Side.”

Duncan also will serve as special advisor to the dean of Harris, helping to design, organize and host two events a year at the public policy school. In addition, he will provide advice to the dean in areas of public policy related to his expertise. The three-year appointment as a distinguished senior fellow took effect Jan. 1.

“The University of Chicago and Harris are internationally recognized leaders in education and outcomes-focused research, which are passion points for me,” Duncan said. “I am pleased to join the UChicago community, with its outstanding reputation for debate and inquiry—it certainly played an important role in shaping my education as a child.”

Duncan has deep ties to Chicago and the University. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and his father, Starkey Duncan Jr., was a professor of psychology at the University. His mother, Sue Duncan, founded an after-school tutoring program on the South Side, which Arne Duncan credited with helping to inspire his career in education.

Before being appointed Secretary of Education in 2008, Duncan served for more than seven years as chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools.

Duncan stepped down as education secretary at the end of 2015. He serves as managing partner of Emerson Collective, leading a comprehensive effort to develop job skills and opportunities for young people in Chicago.

The appointment of Duncan complements the University’s ongoing work in education-related research areas across campus. These efforts include the work of the Urban Education Institute, Urban Labs, the Thirty Million Words Initiative and many more.

At Harris, scholars have focused since the school’s founding on improving the lives of children and their educational achievements, including the multiple factors that can affect a child’s educational outcomes, from parenting interventions and access to sanitation to student loan debt and early childhood programs.

“Education policy has been an area of longstanding interest to Harris. The breadth and importance of his various activities in this policy sphere ensure that Arne’s addition to our community will help make Harris a preeminent place in the world for engagement with the various issues that make education at once among the most important and the most challenging of all policy areas,” said Kerwin Charles, interim dean at Harris and the Edwin and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor.

Luis Bettencourt named inaugural director of Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 10:00 -0600

Luis M. Bettencourt, a leading researcher in urban science and complex systems, has been appointed the inaugural Pritzker Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago.

Under Bettencourt’s leadership, the Mansueto Institute, which launched last year with the support of a $35 million gift from alumni Joe and Rika Mansueto, will enhance the University’s strengths in urban scholarship and education and accelerate work across campus on the processes that drive and shape cities. It was founded to foster innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship, develop new educational programs, and provide leadership on the local, national and international levels to meet the challenges that cities face.

“The University of Chicago is in an exceptional position to increase understanding and develop effective practices around the most complex questions facing cities,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “Luis’s intellectual leadership will help build the Mansueto Institute into a hub for the University’s rich array of urban research, education and impact.”

The Mansueto Institute will work closely with urban-focused efforts across campus in the divisions and schools as well as entities such as UChicago Urban Labs, which develops and tests evidence-based urban policy; the Office of Civic Engagement, which collaborates with community partners in Chicago and beyond; and the Global Engagement Office, which works through University centers in China, Europe and India.

“Luis is incredibly curious and can convene people from across the sciences in ways that produce new and innovative understandings of cities and urbanization,” said Kathleen Cagney, professor of sociology and chair of the selection committee. “He thinks carefully about the fundamental principles of urban scholarship and how they can be applied in different contexts, particularly in cities across the globe.”

Bettencourt, whose appointment is effective July 1, 2017, also will be a professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution and the College. He comes to the University from the Santa Fe Institute, a leading multidisciplinary research and education institute, where he is a professor of complex systems.

In his research, Bettencourt uses the growing availability of data worldwide on topics ranging from transportation to housing to understand cities in quantitative and predictive ways. He is dedicated to creating new urban theory to explain how cities thrive and the challenges they face, based on the integration of ideas from urban disciplines such as geography, economics and sociology with methodologies from the natural and computational sciences. He also focuses on understanding the role of innovation and technological change as a driver of economic growth and human development in cities, across the world and throughout history. One of his most influential research projects has helped explain the systematic association between the size of urban areas and higher rates of economic productivity and innovation, as well as higher costs of living and violent crime.

“The Mansueto Institute provides a truly novel opportunity to bring together researchers from an array of fields to understand not just the fundamentals of cities—in terms of concept and data—but also how such fundamentals can lead to new, innovative solutions to improve the lives and opportunities of their residents,” Bettencourt said. “The University of Chicago’s longstanding dedication to urban scholarship, and the sciences more broadly, provides an unmatched foundation for the institute.”

Bettencourt will lead the Mansueto Institute in supporting innovative urban research projects while providing rigorous training for the next generation of urban scholars and practitioners. His role will include making the institute a destination on campus for students, scholars and policymakers, with data and analytic tools that can be accessed virtually by researchers from around the world.

The Mansueto Institute will play a key role in the University’s comprehensive and integrative efforts to bridge urban scholarship, practice and engagement—an institutional commitment known as UChicago Urban.

Bettencourt holds a doctorate in theoretical physics from Imperial College London and held postdoctoral positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Heidelberg and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served on the 2015 President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology working group on technology and the future of cities, and was a Kavli Fellow for the National Academy of Sciences’ Frontiers in Science Symposium. His work has received extensive coverage in the media, including The New York Times, Scientific American, Wired and New Scientist.

Bridget Le Loup Collier appointed interim associate provost, overseeing Title IX compliance

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 16:05 -0600

Bridget Le Loup Collier has been appointed to serve as interim associate provost and director of the Office for Equal Opportunity Programs, with duties including oversight of Title IX compliance.

Collier will take on the new position on Jan. 24, when current Title IX Coordinator Sarah Wake will depart for a new role as associate general counsel at Northwestern University.

As dean of students and senior director of student engagement at the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, Collier has overseen the support of diverse student enrollments and enhanced the experience of students through coordination of support services and staff development. Her duties included ensuring the school’s compliance with state and federal requirements including Title IX and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Provost Daniel Diermeier said Collier will provide leadership on issues of sexual misconduct and equal opportunity as the University begins a national search for a permanent associate provost.

“In recent years the University has made important strides in advancing our ongoing commitment to addressing issues related to sexual misconduct,” Diermeier said. “Bridget brings over 16 years of higher education administrative experience in program improvement, crisis response and student development. I am grateful that she has agreed to help continue our progress on these issues.”

Before joining UChicago in May of 2015, Collier served as chief of staff to the president and Title IX coordinator at Roosevelt University, managing compliance at an institution with more than 5,000 students. She is the founder and chair of the Chicagoland Title IX Consortium, an organization of 35 higher education institutions that seeks to enhance knowledge, understanding and application of Title IX policies and resources to advance gender parity and reduce sexual misconduct.

“The purpose of this role is to uphold the University’s standards of excellence so all members of our community can reach their full potential in an environment free of discrimination, sexual misconduct or harassment,” Collier said. “Sarah Wake has brought people together around these issues in a community-driven way, and I will strive to continue that effective approach.”

Collier holds a master’s of education in counseling and student affairs from Northern Arizona University and a doctorate in education and higher education administration from the University of Southern California. In her interim role, she has responsibility for coordinating University-wide compliance with UChicago’s Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, and Sexual Misconduct, with oversight of investigations performed under that policy, including Title IX investigations. She also will oversee the University’s compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and will serve as equal opportunity coordinator and affirmative action officer, coordinating outreach to veterans and individuals with disabilities.

Diermeier thanked Wake for her leadership as Title IX coordinator, noting that she was “instrumental in strengthening University policy and leading a number of compliance improvements.” Among many advances during her tenure, the office has formed a student advisory board for sexual misconduct and has worked closely with advocacy groups and other stakeholders. Under Wake’s guidance the office also implemented mandatory sexual misconduct training for the entire UChicago community.

Selwyn Rogers to head UChicago Medicine's adult trauma center

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 12:00 -0600

Selwyn O. Rogers, a top surgeon and public health expert with 16 years of trauma care experience, will lead the University of Chicago Medicine’s development of the South Side’s only Level 1 adult trauma center, scheduled to open in 2018. He joined the organization on Jan. 5.

As chief of the Section for Trauma & Acute Care Surgery and founding director of the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center, Rogers will build an interdisciplinary team of specialists to treat patients who suffer injury from life-threatening events such as car crashes, serious falls and gun violence. He and his team will work with leaders in the city’s trauma network and at other hospitals to expand trauma care on the South Side.

“Dr. Rogers is highly qualified for this role,” said Kenneth S. Polonsky, executive vice president for medical affairs at the University of Chicago. “He will provide leadership that will ensure clinical excellence and growth for the Medical Center, as well as operational leadership for trauma services.”

Rogers comes to Chicago from the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he had been vice president and chief medical officer since 2014. Prior to that, he served as chair for the Department of Surgery and surgeon-in-chief at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia from 2012 to 2014 and as division chief of Trauma, Burn and Surgical Critical Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston from 2005 to 2012. He also served as associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School from 2008 to 2012.

His clinical and research interests have focused on the health care needs of underserved populations. While at Harvard, Rogers helped to launch the Center for Surgery and Public Health, whose mission is to understand the nature, quality and utilization of surgical care nationally and internationally. He has published numerous articles relating to health disparities and the impact of race and ethnicity on surgical outcomes.

To allow him to continue in this area, Rogers also has been appointed executive vice president for community health engagement. In this capacity he will oversee the Urban Health Initiative, which is the primary civic and community engagement arm of UChicago Medicine. Rogers and his team will help to foster programs for and leverage resources of the Medical Center and University to improve the health and well-being of neighboring communities.

Rogers’ appointment underscores the University’s work in addressing the public health challenges of the South Side. His role will complement efforts in UChicago Urban, the University’s commitment to understand urban issues and create a positive impact for Chicago and other cities worldwide.

“In this position, Dr. Rogers will collaborate with faculty across the University and members of the community to help develop a multidisciplinary approach to trauma care and health disparities that will help us better understand and address the social factors that affect victims of violence and underserved populations,” said Derek Douglas, vice president for civic engagement. “This will bring together resources of the Medical Center, University and community to develop novel approaches to achieving better outcomes for victims of trauma.”

‘Opportunity of a lifetime’

UChicago Medicine launched a national search for a trauma director after state regulators unanimously approved expansion plans in May 2016. The proposal, dubbed Get CARE, sought to increase community access to emergency, trauma and specialty care. The state’s approval allowed UChicago Medicine to move forward with plans to relocate and expand its adult emergency department, provide adult trauma care, and build a facility dedicated to cancer care and treatment. Under the plan, 188 inpatient beds also will be restored to support this growth.

“Dr. Rogers will lead the clinical direction of this new section within our department,” said Jeffrey Matthews, chairman of the Department of Surgery, who led the national search. “His most important priority in the coming months is the preparation and successful launch of the adult trauma program.”

The new emergency department is projected to treat an additional 25,000 patient visits a year by 2021. (The medical center handled about 59,300 adult ER visits in fiscal 2016.) About 2,000 adult trauma patients are expected in the first 12 months of trauma center designation. The number of physicians and staff needed to provide Level 1 trauma care will be determined in the weeks ahead. UChicago Medicine has begun taking steps to be designated a Level 1 adult trauma center in Illinois.

Rogers holds degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, as well as a master’s degree in public health from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

“Joining UChicago Medicine is truly an opportunity of a lifetime,” Rogers said. “I look forward to working in Chicago’s South Side to help meet the clinical needs of patients while working to understand and help address the broader challenges that go beyond our hospital walls.”

Timeline of UChicago Medicine’s emergency department/trauma plans

December 2015: UChicago Medicine announces plans to open Level 1 adult trauma center at its Hyde Park campus.
February 2016: Application filed with state to increase access to emergency, trauma and specialty care.
May 2016: State regulators approve application; construction of relocated and bigger adult emergency department begins.
September 2016: Groundbreaking ceremony held for new adult emergency department, which will house four trauma bays.
January 2017: Dr. Selwyn Rogers takes helm as director of UChicago Medicine Trauma Center.
January 2018: New adult emergency department scheduled to open.
Spring 2018: Level 1 adult trauma care to begin.

James L. Skinner appointed director of Water Research Initiative at IME

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 10:00 -0600

Renowned theoretical chemist James L. Skinner has been appointed to the Crown Family Professorship and named director of the Water Research Initiative at the Institute for Molecular Engineering. His five-year term will begin Jan. 1, 2017.

Skinner joins IME after serving for 26 years as director of the Theoretical Chemistry Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and four years as chair of the Department of Chemistry. The Joseph O. and Elizabeth S. Hirschfelder Professor of Chemistry, Skinner is the world leader in the theoretical and conceptual understanding of hydrogen bonding in water. Among many other accomplishments, he and his team are noted for their calculations detailing hydrogen bonding, the factor that dominates and complicates water properties.

“I’m very excited to join IME,” Skinner said of his appointment. “Its world-class researchers have accomplished a very considerable amount in a short period of time, including laying the groundwork for the Water Research Initiative. Now the initiative is ready to advance as well.”

Skinner will lead the development and expansion of the Water Research Initiative, which was launched in 2013 in collaboration with researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Argonne National Laboratory. Originally charged with using nanotechnology to create new materials and processes for making clean, fresh drinking water more plentiful and less expensive by 2020, the initiative will now broaden its scope.

“Professor Skinner is uniquely qualified to guide the Water Research Initiative through its next phase of expansion,” said Matthew Tirrell, dean and Founding Pritzker Director of IME. “His expertise and track record of academic leadership will enable him to articulate a coherent vision for the initiative, and to successfully recruit new investigators.”

Skinner said that over the past 10 to 20 years, water has become a critical issue for many reasons: availability, potability, climate change and energy. “Research on water is extremely timely,” he said, “and that’s one reason coming to IME is so exciting. We have an opportunity here to make a difference on a global scale.”

Skinner received his PhD from Harvard in 1979 and joined the faculty of Columbia after a two-year postdoc at Stanford. He became a full professor at Columbia in 1986, where he remained until 1990, when he was named director of the Theoretical Chemistry Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Skinner has published approximately 220 refereed research articles. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His many awards include the American Chemical Society Physical Chemistry Division Award in Theoretical Chemistry and the Irving J. Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics from the American Chemical Society.

Skinner is a member of the advisory board of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials, led by Giulia Galli, the Liew Family Professor at IME. In 2018, Skinner will chair the Welch Foundation’s annual conference, which will be devoted to fundamental and applied research on water.

Prof. Michael Greenstone to lead Becker Friedman Institute

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 16:15 -0600

Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman Professor and a leading economist, has been appointed director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.

Greenstone will build upon the work of Lars Peter Hansen, the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor and inaugural director of the Becker Friedman Institute, and Kevin M. Murphy, the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor, who has served as co-chair with Hansen since 2014. The institute supports economic research and interdisciplinary scholarship, bringing together scholars from around the world and building programming and public outreach that draws upon the University’s strength in the field of economics.

“The Becker Friedman Institute carries on the University’s distinctive tradition of developing new ideas through intense discussion and collaboration. Michael embodies those ideals in his work, and he is the right leader to continue developing the institute’s ambitious intellectual approach,” President Robert J. Zimmer said.

“Michael is an exceptional scholar who also has a deep understanding of public policy,” Provost Daniel Diermeier said. “As director, he will further enhance the development and impact of the creative thinking and rigorous research for which the institute has become known under the leadership of Lars Hansen and Kevin Murphy.”

The research of Greenstone, who is director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), spans issues of energy and the environment, developed and developing country growth, and financial markets. He brings to the institute extensive policy experience, including serving as chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisors and director of The Hamilton Project, an economic policy group studying a range of policies to promote broad-based economic growth. He is currently on the Hamilton Project’s Advisory Council.

“Michael’s research has had a considerable impact on the modern study of economics, underscoring the field’s relevance for policy and people’s quality of life,” said John List, chairman of the Department of Economics and the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor. “He is a prominent voice in the field who will build importantly on the innovative insights and groundwork laid by Lars Hansen and Kevin Murphy.”

“Becker and Friedman were giants in helping to shape understanding of the world, both within economics and more broadly. It is an honor to lead an institute that aims to carry on the tradition and high bar for excellence that they have set for Chicago economics.” Prof. Michael Greenstone

Greenstone’s appointment takes effect July 1, 2017. He will continue in his role as director of EPIC, which will function as an integral part of the Becker Friedman Institute. EPIC is an interdisciplinary center that brings together the University’s research efforts on energy and the environment and translates research to maximize its impact on policy, while working to train the next generation of global energy leaders.

“Becker and Friedman were giants in helping to shape understanding of the world, both within economics and more broadly. It is an honor to lead an institute that aims to carry on the tradition and high bar for excellence that they have set for Chicago economics,” said Greenstone, a professor in Economics, the College and the Harris School of Public Policy. “Specifically, we will continue to build economic theory that deepens understanding, tests those theories with all of the modern tools available to researchers today and communicates the results in ways that are broadly accessible. I feel especially fortunate to be able to build upon the tremendous foundation that Lars Hansen and Kevin Murphy have constructed.”

Greenstone said his new role at UChicago comes at an exciting time for economic research, when a confluence of advances in techniques, computing and access to data have laid the groundwork for much deeper understanding of economics and the world. “We are entering a golden era where economic theory and empirical work are poised to make great advances that can be of tremendous value outside of academia, particularly to policymakers,” Greenstone said.

“Michael’s research is cutting-edge, practical and relevant to real-world challenges,” said Henry M. Paulson Jr., chairman of the Paulson Institute at the University of Chicago who serves on the Becker Friedman Institute Council. “He combines great analytical and communications skills and is an excellent choice for this role.”

The Becker Friedman Institute was created in 2011 with the joining of the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics and the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory. Based in the Saieh Hall for Economics, the institute works in collaboration with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the Department of Economics, the Law School and the Harris School of Public Policy.

The institute’s first chair was Gary S. Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, University Professor of Economics and Sociology, who pushed economics into new scholarly fields and policy areas, such as crime, discrimination, education and addiction. Becker died in 2014.

Before coming to the University in 2013, Greenstone served as the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an editor of The Journal of Political Economy.

In addition to serving as the chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2009 to 2010, Greenstone now serves on the U.S. Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board, and continues to consult with governments around the world to develop sound economic policies. He was a member of the EPA Science Advisory Board’s Environmental Economics Advisory Committee.

Greenstone has deep roots at UChicago. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and served as an assistant professor of economics at the University from 2000 to 2003. His grandmother, Erika Fromm, was on the psychology faculty at UChicago and his father, J. David Greenstone, was a professor and chairman of the Department of Political Science before his death in 1990.

Court Theatre establishes named directorship in honor of donors

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 08:00 -0500

Court Theatre is establishing the Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director position, made possible through the support of longtime arts patrons and Court supporters David and Marilyn F. Vitale. Court created the named position in appreciation of the couple’s significant gift to the theater in June, as well as their previous giving to Court’s Center for Classic Theatre Campaign. Artistic Director Charles Newell will be named the inaugural Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre.

The naming honors Marilyn Vitale for her dedication to the theater’s mission and growth. She has served on Court’s board of trustees for more than 20 years, three as board chair, overseeing the theater’s 60th anniversary and solidifying the vision for The Center for Classic Theatre, which mounts theatrical productions and audience enrichment programs in collaboration with University of Chicago faculty. David Vitale continues to be a visionary force for arts education in Chicago, most notably through the groundbreaking Chicago Public Schools Arts Education Plan.

“Court Theatre has created an ambitious national model of what a professional theater at a major university can achieve, while providing a distinctive cultural resource for our community and the city of Chicago,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “I am deeply grateful to the Vitales for their generous support of Court’s mission, and their deep appreciation of the value of theater and its simultaneous connections to intellectual inquiry and community engagement. Marilyn’s leadership has contributed greatly to Court’s continued growth and flourishing.”

Marilyn Vitale said the gift reflects the couple’s support for outstanding artistic leadership.

“My leadership of the board helped me fully understand how critical the artistic leadership is to any theater,” Vitale said. “Our gift will provide support to the remarkably talented Charles Newell, whom I greatly admire, and I believe it will offer Court an unmatched platform to mount great productions, build a loyal audience and find new ways to serve the community.”

Newell has been the artistic director of Court Theatre since 1994. Under his artistic leadership over 22 seasons, Court Theatre has grown in size and national standing. He has directed more than 50 productions, guiding the theater toward a focus on re-envisioned classic plays that explore and add to the African American canon and American musicals. His directorial highlights at Court Theatre include “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” “Agamemnon,” “The Secret Garden,” “Iphigenia in Aulis,” “The Misanthrope,” “Tartuffe,” “Proof,” “Angels in America,” “An Iliad,” and “Porgy and Bess.”

Newell was awarded the Society of Directors and Choreographers Foundation’s Zelda Fichandler Award and the Theatre Communications Group’s Alan Schneider Director Award. He was nominated for 16 Joseph Jefferson Director Awards, winning four times. In 2012, Newell was honored by the League of Chicago Theatres with its artistic achievement award.

In addition to their support of Court Theatre, the Vitales also are actively engaged in other parts of the University. Marilyn is a member of the Women’s Board, and David continues to be involved with the Council on the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Visiting Committee to the School of Social Service Administration.

Newell noted that Marilyn Vitale’s leadership helped make the theater’s 60th anniversary season the most ambitious to date, marked by two world premieres, a reimagining of classic theater, a nod to American musicals and a commitment to the community.

“For more than 20 years, Marilyn has provided tremendous passion and loyalty for the work of Court Theatre,” said Newell. “Court Theatre grew during her tenure as board chair and will continue to thrive, thanks to her extraordinary generosity.”

Prof. Douglas J. Skinner named interim dean at Chicago Booth

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 15:30 -0500

Douglas J. Skinner, the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting and deputy dean for faculty, will serve as the interim dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, effective Aug. 15.

“Doug’s appointment will help sustain the momentum that has been built to further establish Chicago Booth as one of the world’s preeminent business schools while the search for the next dean is conducted,” said President Robert J. Zimmer.

A UChicago faculty member since 2005, Skinner is a leading expert in corporate disclosure practices, corporate financial reporting and corporate finance, with a focus on payout policy. His teaching topics include financial accounting, financial statement analysis, corporate finance and empirical methods in accounting research.

Prior to his appointment at Chicago Booth, Skinner was the KPMG Professor of Accounting at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

“It is a great privilege to be a member of the Booth faculty, and even more so to serve in the dean’s office for the last 16 months. I am now honored to have the opportunity to serve Booth and the University in this even more important role,” Skinner said. “Our faculty, staff, alumni and students continue to make Booth one of the world’s best business schools, and I look forward to working with all of our constituents to continue our success while preserving the school’s long-held values. I am confident that Chicago Booth will continue to flourish during this transition.”

Appointed Booth’s deputy dean for faculty in 2015, Skinner oversees the finance, operations, macroeconomics, organization and markets, and entrepreneurship faculty groups, as well as the Initiative on Global Markets, the Fama-Miller Center for Research in Finance, the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the Social Enterprise Initiative, and the Harry L. Davis Leadership Center.

The formal process for selecting the next dean of Booth will begin soon with the election of a faculty committee to advise the president and provost.

Skinner succeeds Sunil Kumar, the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management, who will become provost of Johns Hopkins University on Sept. 1, after serving as Booth’s dean since 2011.

Anne Walters Robertson named interim dean of Humanities

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 14:02 -0500

Anne Walters Robertson, chair of the Department of Music and the Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College, has been named to serve as the interim dean of the Division of the Humanities until the next dean is in place. Her appointment was effective July 1.

“Anne’s appointment will foster the continued academic advancement of the Humanities Division while the search for the next dean is conducted,” said President Robert J. Zimmer.

Robertson joined the faculty in 1984 and has held several leadership positions at the University and in professional organizations, including serving as deputy provost for research and education and as president of the American Musicological Society.

“I have been privileged to teach and conduct research for more than 30 years in the Division of the Humanities, and I am honored now to serve as interim dean,” Robertson said. “The excellence of our faculty and students has always advanced the division, and I am eager to work with them to help continue to move us forward.”

Robertson’s research is focused on the music of the Middle Ages, with a concentration on 15th-century sacred polyphony, the 14th-century French composer Guillaume de Machaut, French medieval liturgical music, ceremony and architecture, and music and mysticism. She has received many scholarly honors and distinctions. In 2008, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2015 became a member of the American Philosophical Society.

The process for selecting the next dean of the Division of the Humanities is underway. Robertson succeeds Martha Roth, the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology, who has returned to her full-time work on the faculty after serving as dean since 2007.

“Anne enjoys tremendous respect among her peers as a scholar and as an academic leader,” said Provost Daniel Diermeier. “I am very pleased that Anne has agreed to serve as the interim dean. The Division of the Humanities will be in excellent hands under her leadership.”