UChicago News

University to bestow five honorary degrees at Convocation

Tue, 29 May 2018 14:48 -0500

The University of Chicago will present honorary degrees to five distinguished scholars during the 531st Convocation on June 9.

The honorary degree recipients are Fabiola Gianotti, the director-general of CERN; Charles M. Lieber, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor at Harvard University; Michael C.A. Macdonald, research associate in the faculty of Oriental Studies and the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford; Robert E. Ricklefs, the Curator’s Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis; and William S-Y. Wang, chair professor of Language and Cognitive Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Fabiola Gianotti, an experimental particle physicist who led the search and characterization of the Higgs boson, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science.

Gianotti led the 3,000-member ATLAS collaboration since its inception at CERN Laboratory to search for the Higgs boson, one of the most sought-after objects in scientific history. Her early career was devoted to the search for supersymmetric particles, which could provide stability to nature’s two very different fundamental energy scales—gravity and weak interaction.

Gianotti is a member of the Italian Academy of Sciences, a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. She is the author or co-author of more than 500 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Her scientific and societal contributions have been recognized by prestigious honors, including the Special Fundamental Physics Prize of the Milner Foundation, the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society, the Medal of Honor of the Niels Bohr Institute of Copenhagen, and the honor of “Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’ordine al merito della Repubblica” by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

Charles M. Lieber, a groundbreaking scholar of nanoscience and nanomaterials, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science.

Lieber has defined directions and demonstrated applications of nanomaterials in areas like electronics, computing and photonics, and has pioneered the interface of nanoelectronics with biology and medicine, including his current focus on brain science. He has originated new paradigms that have defined the rational growth, characterization and original applications of functional nanometer diameter wires and heterostructures, and provided seminal concepts central to the bottom-up paradigm of nanoscience.

Lieber’s work has been recognized by a number of awards, including two National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Awards, the MRS Von Hippel Award, the Willard Gibbs Medal and the Wolf Prize in Chemistry. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He is also a fellow of the Materials Research Society and American Chemical Society, and honorary fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society. In addition, Lieber is co-editor of the journal Nano Letters, and serves on the editorial and advisory boards of a number of other journals. He has published over 395 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and is the principal inventor on more than 40 patents.

Michael C.A. Macdonald, a leading expert in early language and civilization in the Arabian Peninsula, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Macdonald has improved knowledge of the languages, religions, cultures and history of ancient Arabia and neighboring areas, including the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, through his scholarship on the vast number of inscriptions on the Arabian peninsula that predate the language of the Quran. Macdonald created the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia, a database that collects more than 70,000 inscriptions, many of which were unearthed, edited and translated by Macdonald himself. He was instrumental in establishing the field of Ancient North Arabian studies as an academic field in its own right, and has been its foremost scholar for the past three decades. He has fundamentally enabled the work of scholars of Ancient North Arabia, and has contributed research and writing that has shaped and guided this field.

In addition to his many articles, Macdonald also wrote the book Literacy and Identity in Pre-Islamic Arabia (2009). Macdonald was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2016.

Robert E. Ricklefs, a leading figure in evolutionary ecology, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science.

Ricklefs has contributed fundamental research linking disease dynamics to macro-ecology, linking life-history evolution with macro-evolutionary patterns, and searching for commonalities in patterns of ecological communities across types of organisms and geographic areas. His research focused on history’s role in determining population densities and distributions on islands, at a time when other leading ecological researchers were emphasizing the importance of species interactions at local scales for shaping species distributions. Because of this, his work represents the modern foundation for the recent synthesis of local conditions and historical processes in shaping the composition of communities of organisms.

Ricklefs is the recipient of the 2015 Ramon Margalef Prize from the government of Catalonia, the 2011 Alfred Russel Wallace award from the International Biogeography Society and the 1999 President’s Award from the American Society of Naturalists, among other honors. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

William S-Y. Wang, a pioneer in the study of language evolution and the emergence of new languages, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Wang is an internationally renowned linguist whose scholarship and academic impact have spanned two continents across the Pacific Ocean. He has performed multidisciplinary research on the biological and evolutionary basis of language, as well as computational linguistics with a focus on the production and processing of language, the brain and computer interface, machine translation, and speech synthesis and recognition. He was one of the first to apply a combination of linguistics and acoustics to the problem of machine recognition of speech.

Wang is the founder and lead editor of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, which is the top publication in this field. He has had full professorial careers at the University of California, Berkeley; at the City University of Hong Kong; and at National Taiwan Normal University. His wide-ranging scholarship has been written in or translated into Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Japanese.

Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, to receive Benton Medal

Thu, 24 May 2018 16:50 -0500

The University will award the Benton Medal for Distinguished Public Service to Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. Baron will receive his honor at the University of Chicago’s 531st Convocation on June 9.

Baron is regarded as an influential leader in the field of investigative journalism, whose work reflects dedication to fact-based reporting around difficult or controversial issues, the responsibility to inform the public and the protection of freedom of the press. He is the 15th recipient of the Benton Medal, which recognizes people who have rendered distinguished public service in the field of education, including anyone who has contributed in a systematic and distinguished way to shaping minds and disseminating knowledge.

Baron oversees more than 800 journalists at The Washington Post. News organizations under his leadership have won 14 Pulitzer Prizes, including seven at The Post, six at The Boston Globe and one at The Miami Herald. In Boston, he launched an investigation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of clergy sexual abuse that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service and was portrayed in the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight. He also held top posts at The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

Baron is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded the 2016 Hitchens Prize from the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation, which is bestowed upon a journalist or author whose work “reflects a commitment to free expression, a depth of intellect and an unswerving pursuit of the truth, without regard to personal or professional consequence.”

Nominations for the Benton Medal are submitted by members of the faculty, evaluated by the Committee on Awards and Prizes and voted upon by the Council of the University Senate.

The University President extends an invitation to Benton nominees to receive their medals during Convocation. The nominees also are invited to give a public lecture or workshop the following academic year.

Three UChicago faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences

Wed, 02 May 2018 17:19 -0500

Three University of Chicago faculty members are among the 2018 members of the National Academy of Sciences, announced May 1: Profs. Joy Bergelson, Olaf Schneewind and Richard Thaler.

These scholars, studying microbiology, evolution and behavioral economics, were among the 84 new members and 21 foreign associates recognized by their peers for “their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

Joy Bergelson is the James D. Watson Professor in Ecology and Evolution and chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Research in her lab is best known for dispelling the long-held belief that arms-race dynamics typify the evolution of plant resistance to microbial pathogens in nature. An early researcher in research on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, particularly from an evolutionary and ecological perspective, Bergelson and her group completed the first experiments using genetically manipulated plants to disentangle the mechanisms driving observed evolutionary dynamics. They have also pioneered research at the interface of ecology and evolution, namely eco-evolutionary dynamics.

Through her international collaborations, Bergelson has been instrumental in developing genome-wide association mapping in Arabidopsis, providing resources to the community and ultimately leading to the 1001 Genomes project. She has received numerous other awards; she is a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Science, a Packard Fellow, a Marshall Fellow, a Presidential Faculty Fellow and a Cheung Kong Scholar Honorary Professor.

Olaf Schneewind is the Louis Block Professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology. He is best known for his work discovering sortases—enzymes that assemble proteins in the envelope of Gram-positive bacteria. Without sortases and their surface protein substrates, bacteria (such as Staphylococcus aureus or its drug-resistant forms, known as MRSA) cannot cause disease or interact with their environment.

Investigation of sortase motif sequences has enabled Schneewind and his team to identify the surface proteins of any bacterial pathogen based on genome sequences and to study these molecules for their contributions to disease establishment and for vaccine development. These insights have allowed his team to find and study how S. aureus evades detection by the immune system and to create vaccines for safety and efficacy testing in humans.

Richard Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. One of the founders of the field of behavioral economics, Thaler studies the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. His pioneering work was honored in October 2017 when Thaler was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The author of the best-selling books Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (2015) and Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (2008), Thaler is director of the Center for Decision Research and co-director of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Finance Association and the Econometrics Society, and a past president of the American Economic Association.

Established by an Act of Congress signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. Its scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, founded in 1914, is today one of the premier international research journals.

Forrest Stuart book about L.A.’s Skid Row earns top honor from UChicago Press

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 13:50 -0500

The University of Chicago Press has awarded the Gordon J. Laing Prize to Asst. Prof. Forrest Stuart for Down, Out & Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row, the UChicago sociologist’s close-up look at the relationship between police and the poor living in Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

The Laing Prize is the Press’ top honor, awarded annually since 1963 to the UChicago faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction.

“Publishing our faculty is a special privilege, and the Laing Prize is a wonderful opportunity to spotlight these vital works,” said Garrett Kiely, director of the UChicago Press. “Forrest Stuart’s Down, Out & Under Arrest is a deserving winner that fits neatly into the Press’ prestigious list of ethnographic studies that are both timely and timeless.”

In his research, Stuart investigates how recent developments—specifically mass incarceration, zero-tolerance policing, digital social media and new forms of music—have reshaped the social fabric of disadvantaged neighborhoods in the 21st century.

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Laing Prize 2018

Stuart said that the book and his career in sociology were inspired by pioneering UChicago sociologist Gerald D. Suttles, who lived for three years on Chicago’s West Side in researching The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (1968).

“It was one of the first sociology books I ever read,” Stuart said of the work, which received the Laing Prize in 1970. “Suttles reinvigorated this tradition that UChicago established, which was about getting out of your office and getting intimately immersed within the community. That was actually my huge inspiration to go into sociology and do the work for Skid Row.”

In researching Down, Out & Under Arrest, Stuart lived in Skid Row in Los Angeles, long regarded as the “homeless capital of America.” His work has received rave reviews, and in 2017 was honored by the American Sociological Association as the best book in community and urban sociology.

Stuart is currently researching his second book, which looks at the intersections of poverty, culture, digital social media and hip-hop on Chicago’s South Side. His goal as a scholar is to recreate what Suttles did in the 1960s at UChicago, making the Department of Sociology the “epicenter” of up-close field work.

“You spend years every day following people and shadowing them, meeting their moms and their pastors, going to work and school with them,” Stuart said. “You can produce really original findings about how the world works with the shifts in how we communicate and how communities are tethered with the digital economy.”

Chicago Booth’s Douglas Diamond wins Onassis Prize in Finance

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 09:30 -0500

Prof. Douglas W. Diamond, one of the world's leading authorities on bank runs and liquidity crises who is considered the father of modern banking theory, has been awarded the 2018 Onassis Prize in Finance.

Awarded every three years, the Onassis Prize recognizes the world’s foremost academics in the fields of finance, international trade and shipping, to honor outstanding academic achievements that have had international significance. Nobel laureate and Chicago Booth scholar Eugene Fama won the inaugural prize in finance in 2009.

“I am delighted to receive the Onassis Prize,” said Diamond, the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “After the recent financial crisis, policymakers and scholars have a renewed focus on the stability of financial institutions.”

Diamond changed the way people view banks through his pioneering research, which laid the groundwork for how central bankers, regulators, policymakers and academics approach modern finance. His research agenda for the past 30 years has been to explain what banks do, why they do it and the consequences of these arrangements.

Named after Aristotle Onassis who excelled in these three disciplines, each Onassis Prize is worth $200,000; they are sponsored by the Onassis Foundation and awarded jointly by Cass Business School London with the Onassis Foundation.

—This story first appeared on the Chicago Booth website.

Two undergraduates recognized for academic excellence in STEM fields

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:01 -0500

Adel Rahman and Naomi Sweeting, third-years in the College, have been awarded Barry Goldwater Scholarships, awarded annually based on academic merit in natural sciences, mathematics, computer science and engineering.

The two students were nominated by the College and are among 211 scholars selected from a field of 1,280 applicants nationwide. The one- and two-year scholarships cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to $7,500 per year.

“As future scientists, engineers, technologists and mathematicians, UChicago’s students have the drive and dedication to make a meaningful impact on their fields,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College. “We are proud that the Goldwater Foundation has recognized the work of Adel and Naomi, and we hope the award will give them the resources and encouragement to continue their academic pursuits.”

A physics and mathematics major, Rahman plans to pursue a doctorate in theoretical physics and conduct research focused on geometric and topological aspects of gravitational, high-energy and condensed matter physics. After pursuing his doctoral studies, he would like to teach at the university level.

“As a theorist, my work is somewhat disconnected from the real world, so it's easy to worry that people outside my field might not understand or care about what I am doing,” said Rahman. “Knowing that the Goldwater committee sees value in my research and aspirations has helped reaffirm my desire to keep pursuing my goals.”

Rahman is currently conducting research focused on general relativity. Under the guidance of Prof. Robert Wald, he is attempting to understand if, and if so, how, incoming gravitational radiation might alter the structure of a black hole and what consequences such an alteration might have. Rahman first developed an interest in general relativity when he took an introductory course on the subject from Wald. “I found the theory, in particular its elegant weaving of concrete physical ideas with high-powered mathematical machinery, to be both fascinating and profound.”

Rahman also has been engaged in a research project in mathematical hydrodynamics. Outside of the classroom, Rahman is a member of the Ransom Notes a cappella group and has served as a tutor for the Harper Tutors Program and the Department of Physics’ Bridge Program.

Sweeting is a mathematics major and history minor who plans to study number theory in graduate school. After earning a doctorate in theoretical math, Sweeting would like to teach at the university level.

Sweeting developed a love for math at a young age, and her interests were solidified through participation in math competitions at the middle school and high school level.

“I’ve always been fascinated by open problems—even ones that I knew were completely unapproachable,” said Sweeting. “I am amazed that with all the brilliance that has gone into mathematics for centuries and all the problems that have been solved, there are still simple mathematical questions that no one can answer. The thought of one day solving some of them myself has always been irresistible to me.”

Last summer, she completed an independent reading project about geometric measure theory and served as a teaching assistant at UChicago’s NSF Research Grant Summer Bootcamp, in which she planned curriculum and supervised student lectures. This summer, Sweeting will study number theory and arithmetic geometry at Emory University.

“I find number theory fascinating because it combines very concrete questions—many open problems could be understood by middle school students—with diverse and sophisticated methods drawn from very abstract areas of math.”

When she’s not engaged in math, Sweeting is a member of UChicago’s College Bowl team. She also participated in the European Civilization in Paris study abroad program.

Rahman and Sweeting were supported throughout their application process by the College Center for Scholarly Advancement, which supports undergraduates and College alumni through the highly competitive application processes for prestigious national scholarships and fellowships.

Fifteen UChicago faculty elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 16:00 -0500

Fifteen faculty members at the University of Chicago have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies.

UChicago has the most newly elected faculty members among universities and colleges. The scholars join a class of 213 individuals, announced April 18, which features world leaders, innovators and artists. This year’s class also includes President Barack Obama, a former scholar at the University of Chicago Law School; and seven UChicago alumni, including Carla Hayden, AM’77, PhD’87, the Librarian of Congress.

The newly elected UChicago faculty members include:

Fernando Alvarez, the William C. Norby Professor in Economics and the College, is a macroeconomist whose research focuses on dynamic general equilibrium models applied to asset pricing, holdings of liquid assets, nominal rigidities, international trade, and labor market search and insurance. During his tenure at UChicago, he was a visiting research scholar at the Enaudi Institute of Economics and Finance in Rome, the research departments at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, Minneapolis and Philadelphia; the European Central Bank and the Central Bank of Argentina. Alvarez has received numerous recognitions for his research, including fellowships and or grants from the European Central Bank, European Research Council, N.S.F., the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Tinker Foundation, Bank of France Foundation and the Organization of American States.

Katherine Baicker is dean of the Harris School of Public Policy and the Emmett Dedmon Professor. A leading scholar in the economic analysis of health policy, Baicker is one of the leaders of a research program investigating the effects of insurance coverage on health care and health. Her research has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. From 2005-2007, she served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English Language and Literature. Her work focuses on the aesthetics and affects of intimate relations in the United States from the 19th century to the present, stretching across formal and informal modes of attachment, social belonging and citizenship. Berlant is the author of Cruel Optimism (2011), which received the 2012 Rene Wellek Award from the American Comparative Literature Association; The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008); The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997); and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (1991).

Bill Brown, senior adviser to the Provost for arts and the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, teaches in the Department of English, the Department of Visual Arts and the College. His research—at the intersection of literary, visual and material cultures—has tracked how objects form and transform human subjects, and, most recently, how the arts can contribute to social theory.

Laurie Butler is a professor of chemistry with the James Frank Institute. She investigates fundamental inter- and intramolecular forces that drive the courses of chemical reactions, integrating our understanding of quantum mechanics into chemistry. Among other applications, her current work has implications for our models of atmospheric and combustion chemistry. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a former Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

Cathy J. Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science, is a leading scholar on race and politics. She is the principal researcher on the Black Youth Project and the GenForward Survey. She has served as the deputy provost for graduate education, chair of the Political Science department and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Culture and Politics. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997).

Heinrich Jaeger is the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics and the James Franck Institute. His laboratory studies the investigation of materials under conditions far from equilibrium, especially 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 – which could lead to everything from soft robotic systems that can change shape to new forms of architectural structures that are fully recyclable. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and is currently a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Matthew T. Kapstein is the Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Divinity School. He specializes in the history of Buddhist philosophy in India and Tibet, as well as the cultural history of Tibetan Buddhism more generally. He has published more than a dozen books and numerous articles, including a translation of an 11th-century philosophical allegory in the acclaimed Clay Sanskrit Series, The Rise of Wisdom Moon (New York 2009). Kapstein is also director of Tibetan Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris.

Robert L. Kendrick is professor in the Department of Music. He works largely in early-modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin American music, historical anthropology, traditional Mediterranean polyphony, music and commemoration, and the visual arts. His most recent book is Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (2014).

Susan Levine is the Rebecca Anne Boylan Professor in Education and Society, director of the UChicago Science of Learning Center, co-director of the Center for Early Childhood Research and chair of the Department of Psychology. She is also a member of the Department of Comparative Development and the Committee on Education. Her research focuses on language and cognitive development in children, especially mathematics and spatial learning, as well as how early childhood experiences and injuries to the brain relate to developmental trajectories. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Jacqueline Stewart is professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College, and director of UChicago’s Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Her research and teaching consider the intersections of race and American cinema, particularly the history and preservation of African American film. She is the director of the South Side Home Movie Project, an archival and community engagement initiative that collects, digitizes, researches and exhibits home movies shot by South Side residents. She is the author of Migrating to the Movies (2005) and co-editor of L.A. Rebellion (2015), and curator of Cinema 53, a film series at the historic Harper Theater in Hyde Park.

Jessica Stockholder is the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Visual Arts. She works at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Her work has exhibited widely in North America and Europe, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SITE Santa Fe, and the Venice Biennale, and her work is represented in various collections including the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received numerous grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Melody Swartz is the William B. Ogden Professor of Molecular Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research. Her research focuses on how the lymphatic system affects and participates in the immune system—particularly its role in cancer – using engineering tools and approaches. She is a MacArthur Fellow, and her other honors include the Wendy Chaite Leadership Award in Lymphatic Research and the Wenner Prize from the Swiss Cancer League.

Andrei Tokmakoff is the Henry J. Gale Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry with the James Franck Institute. He studies the chemistry of water, and molecular dynamics of biophysical processes such as protein folding and DNA hybridization. His lab uses advanced spectroscopy to visualize how molecular structure changes with time to study these problems. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and has received the American Physical Society’s Ernest Plyler Prize, among others.

Linda Waite is the Lucy Flower Professor in Urban Sociology and senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include social demography, aging, the family, health, sexuality and social well-being. Her current research focuses on the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, which she directs. This study examines the links between social connectivity and health at older ages, and has at its heart a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of older adults. She is the recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health.

The UChicago alumni elected to the Academy this year include: John R. Bowen, AM’77, PhD’84; Richard V. Kadison, AM’47, PhD’50; Laurie Patton, AM’86, PhD’91; David Reichman, AB’92; Christopher A. Walsh, PhD’83, MD’85; and Birgitta K. Whaley, SM’82, PhD’84.

Playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07, wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 12:44 -0500

Editor’s note: Playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Cost of Living. In the award, the play is described as “an honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection through two pairs of mismatched individuals.” The play appeared Off-Broadway in 2017 and was called ‘immensely haunting’ by The New York Times.

The Polish-born Majok spoke with UChicago News in 2014 about another of her works, a comedy entitled Ironbound that appeared at the Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as her experience as a performer and playwright while at the University. The original story appears below:

Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound” is the story of the relationship between Darja, a struggling Polish immigrant, and three very different men. The play, she says, was inspired by the work of Marxist theorist Slavoj Zizek.

It’s also a comedy.

Despite its weighty subject matter, the last thing Majok wants is “for the audience to sit there for the next hour and a half thinking this is just drama. You have to give them permission to laugh.”

“Ironbound” emerged as Majok was preparing to marry her then-fiancé and reflecting on “who has the privilege to marry for love.” Both Majok and her husband grew up poor and chose to pursue careers in the arts. Majok says they feared they would never have economic security. “We know how hard it is to get out of a cycle of poverty.”

She began to reflect on the romantic choices made by her mother—like Darja, a working-class immigrant from Poland.

“She would make what ended up being the wrong decisions for all the right reasons, trying to do the best thing that she could for her children and for herself,” Majok explains.

Around the same time, Majok was reading Zizek’s Violence during long commutes between a residency and teaching position at a theater in New Jersey and Connecticut, where her fiancé was in graduate school. “What I took away from that is that capitalism makes us treat each other as commodities,” she says. “‘What can you do for me, what can I do for you’ doesn’t exactly equal love.”

With Zizek’s writing, her mother’s experience, and her own impending marriage all simmering in her head, Majok dashed off the first draft of “Ironbound” in just a week. The play follows Darja over 22 years, depicting her at different points in her three marriages and showing her fierce struggle to survive and provide security for her son.

After two workshop productions, she submitted “Ironbound” to Steppenwolf at the suggestion of the company’s literary manager, who had mentored Majok during an internship after college.

“Part of our deal was that if I came to Chicago, I had to bring him Polish food, so I just brought him three pounds of kielbasa and some pierogi. Hopefully he liked it. I haven’t heard back from him, so maybe it was too much,” Majok jokes.

Becoming a playwright was never Majok’s plan, although she always showed a flair for writing. She didn’t see her first play until high school, when she won $45 playing pool and decided to treat herself to a production of “Cabaret” on Broadway.

As a University of Chicago undergraduate, she tried out for a play and fell in love with the strong bonds she created with her castmates. “I loved the communities that you form—these little ridiculous, inside joke-y families,” she says.

Her love of theater flourished as she studied with David Bevington and Nick Rudall at UChicago. She delved into playwriting during a quarter studying abroad in Paris.

She describes her first play as “the 22-year-old play that you write about your family. It was a super dark and ungenerous and emo play.” University Theater ultimately produced the piece, and Majok decided she wanted to make playwriting a career.

“It’s the thing that I found challenging and exciting and I felt it had worth,” she explains. “Leaving some sort of permanence was attractive.”

Supported by a fellowship from the Merage Foundation for the American Dream, Majok spent the first two years after graduating from UChicago immersing herself in the theater community by watching, studying, reading and writing as many plays as she could. She went on to study playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.

Over time, she says, she’s worked to make her plays funnier and less self-serious than her earlier efforts, and to write rich, complex female characters. “Women with strong appetites and flaws—I would like to see these women on stage, and if I were an actor, I would want to play these women who go after something hungrily,” she says.

Her next project focuses on the women and families that continued to live near Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster, despite the risks to their health and safety.

Even when tackling the weighty topic of Chernobyl, Majok’s darkly comedic sensibility still shines through. “It’s a musical,” she says.

Four faculty members receive Guggenheim fellowships

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 15:40 -0500

Four UChicago faculty members and a visiting faculty member have won John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships: Alain Bresson, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Classics; Lenore A. Grenoble, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics; Srikanth Reddy, associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature; and David Schutter, associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts. Annie Dorsen, visiting assistant professor of practice in the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, also was honored.

Chosen from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants, the four UChicago faculty are among 173 Guggenheim Fellowship winners who will receive financial support to pursue a variety of projects, from endangered languages to the invention of money.

A scholar of the ancient economy, Bresson is the author of “The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy,” which won the 2017 James Henry Breasted Prize from the American Historical Association.

Bresson will use his Guggenheim prize, which he said came to him “as a wonderful surprise,” to work on a new book about the specific form taken by money in the ancient Greek world, with a central focus on the question of why the ancient Greeks “invented” coinage.

“The Greeks and the Lydians are famous for having invented a new means of payment, an instrument that we still have in our pockets in our daily life: coinage,” Bresson said. “But a frequent confusion is the idea that the Greeks invented money. Of course they did not. Their contribution was to give to money a political form. I have explored these questions in almost twenty articles which, hopefully, will constitute the foundation for the book I plan to write.”

Grenoble has been studying language endangerment for the last 20 years, specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. In 2017, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Guggenheim award will go towards supporting Grenoble’s research project on the relationship between language and well-being among Arctic Indigenous peoples in the face of rapidly changing social and environmental conditions, including urbanization and climate change.

“Linguists estimate that 50-90 percent of the world’s languages will be lost over the course of the next century due to a process called language shift, whereby speakers cease to use their mother tongue in favor of another language,” Grenoble said. “Receiving the Guggenheim is both recognition and validation of the importance of the project that I am working on.”

Reddy is a poet and scholar and currently serves as the interim director for creative writing & poetics. The author of two books of poetry, Reddy’s writing on contemporary poetry has appeared in various publications including The New York Times and The New Republic.

The award meant a great deal to Reddy, who says he sees it as a sign of “encouragement to pursue my creative inclinations, no matter how eccentric or foolhardy.”

Reddy will use the award to complete a new book of poetry, titled “Underworld Lit.” The poem, built from fragments of lecture notes from an imaginary college humanities course, will weave together a disparate range of subjects including academic satire and a journey through versions of the underworld from various cultures.

“Needless to say, it’s a very UChicago poem,” Reddy said.

Schutter is a visual artist who specializes in painting and drawing and his work often draws on historical works in these disciplines.

A former recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize, Schutter has had exhibitions around the world, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Gemaeldegalerie Berlin, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Palazzo Poli, and most recently in the Frans Hals Museum and documenta 14.

Schutter will be working on a new project on Thomas Eakins, the late 19th-century American realist painter, utilizing Eakins’ archives at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“The archives contain letters, studies, anatomical models and oil sketches—things of that sort that I’ll be using for an upcoming project,” Schutter said.

Dorsen is a director and writer whose work explores the intersection of mathematical algorithms and live performance. Her projects have appeared throughout the U.S. and Europe, and she is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange.

Dorsen, in the second year of an initial three-year appointment with TAPS, called the Guggenheim “an enormous honor” and will put the prize toward a new theater project.

“I’m working on a new theater project, as yet untitled, that has to do with forms of online social life, the kinds of virtual communities that we are constructing, and the ways of being together that the internet makes possible—for good or for ill,” Dorsen said. “The piece is part of my ongoing interest in how the technological tools we create end up re-creating us in all kinds of unforeseen ways.”

Two UChicago scientists win fellowships fostering ‘blue-sky’ research

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 17:10 -0500

Two University of Chicago scientists have earned fellowships through the U.S. Department of Defense that support innovative, “blue-sky” research at the limits of today’s technology.

Profs. David Freedman and Supratik Guha are among the 11 scientists and engineers chosen for the 2018 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship program—awarded every year to conduct foundational research in fields including quantum information science, neuroscience, nanoscience, novel engineered materials, applied mathematics and statistics.

A professor of neurobiology, Freedman studies the mechanisms by which brains process and adapt to their environments. Guha, a professor in UChicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and director of the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory, studies new materials and devices for electronics, sensing and energy. The awards are typically $3 million over five years.

Freedman’s lab works to decode how neurons process and react to their environments. They saw an opportunity to use that expertise to help artificial neural networks, which still struggle with tasks that the brain is incredibly good at—like taking knowledge from previous situations and applying it to new ones. His project will seek to deepen our understanding of the ways the brain generalize knowledge, and explore how to transfer it to artificial neural networks.

“For this proposal, we put our heads together to look at the most ambitious questions we could explore,” Freedman said. “We’re thrilled to have the flexibility to pursue the theoretical limits of what we can do in this area.”

Guha’s project studies the science behind new ways of creating single-crystal semiconductor thin films. This is relevant to a key limitation of processing for electronics like solar cells and microprocessors today: The crystalline semiconductor layers that make them up must be laid on top of a high-quality crystalline wafer.

“We’re very pleased with this award, which gives us the freedom to focus on long-term, fundamental semiconductor materials science with a strong high-risk, high-payoff component,” said Guha. “The ability to create single crystal layers without the need for an atomically matched underlying wafer will revolutionize semiconductor manufacturing.”

The fellowships aim to foster long-term relationships between the Department of Defense and university researchers—two groups whose paths don’t always cross regularly, Freedman said, so they’re looking forward to new connections.

The fellowships named for Vannevar Bush, who directed wartime scientific research and development during World War II. After the war, he authored a key report calling for expanding government funding in science and technology, calling basic research “the pacemaker of technological progress.”

Two UChicago faculty members win Sloan research fellowships

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 12:35 -0600

University of Chicago chemist Timothy Berkelbach and neurobiologist Mark Sheffield have been awarded Sloan research fellowships.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gives the awards annually to early-career scholars identified as the promising scientific researchers working today in the United States and Canada. This year's 126 winners will receive $65,000, which may be spent over a two-year term on any expense supportive of their research.

Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists, and fellows are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars on the basis of a candidate’s independent research accomplishments, creativity and potential.

Tim Berkelbach, a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, is a theoretical chemist who studies the electronic and optical properties of nanoscale materials. His group adapts computational models written for tens of atoms and scales them up to work for sets of hundreds or thousands—which you need to model materials for applications in solar energy, catalysis and manufacturing, chemical sensing and electronics.

“It’s an honor to be selected, especially alongside such an amazing lineup of people who have been recognized as Sloan fellows over the years,” Berkelbach said.

He joined the University in 2016.

Asst. Prof. Mark Sheffield studies memory—how memories are formed, retrieved and altered over time. Recent advances now let scientists identify, monitor and manipulate the neurons involved in a specific memory; his lab uses imaging and optogenetics to track how individual and groups of neurons in the hippocampus (the center of emotion and memory) interact.

“We know quite a lot about memory at a psychological level, but our understanding of the neurobiology that underlies memory function lags far behind,” Sheffield said. “We’re very excited, with the help of the Sloan fellowship, to move forward with these experiments, which we hope will provide insight for the development of treatments for memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s and PTSD.”

He joined the University in 2017.

Lorraine Daston honored for research on the history of science

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 12:24 -0600

Lorraine Daston, a visiting professor in UChicago’s John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the Department of History, has been awarded the Dan David Prize for her achievements in the research of the history of science.

The annual award, which includes a $1 million prize, recognizes scholars for innovative and interdisciplinary research in technological, scientific, social or cultural fields covering the past, present and future. Daston said she was in “disbelief but delighted beyond measure” to be recognized.

“It is grand that the history of science, always a small, interstitial discipline lodged between the natural and social sciences and the humanities, has been recognized for its essential contributions to the understanding of the past,” Daston said.

Daston arrived at UChicago in 1992 and said she fell in love with the “intellectual earnestness” of the University, as well as the unique nature of the Committee on Social Thought, to which she returns to teach each year. Since 1995, she has directed the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and she now divides her time between Berlin and Chicago. She has written on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early-modern science, and the history of scientific objectivity.

Robert B. Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy and the College, commended Daston, calling her “one of the most influential and widely respected historians in the world today.”

“Professor Daston is the embodiment of the interdisciplinarity that the Committee and indeed the University have tried to foster,” Pippin said. “Her role in introducing our graduate students to the various relations between the sciences and the humanities has been absolutely indispensable, and her generosity with students is legendary.”

Daston said she is looking forward to putting the prize toward “many happy hours in various dusty archives” as she continues her research. Laureates also donate 10 percent of their prize to postgraduates in their respective field to foster a new generation of scholars. Daston will share her prize with a student at MIT and another at the University of Cambridge.

The Dan David Prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University. Past winners have included UChicago Prof. James Heckman, novelist Margaret Atwood and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Two UChicago mathematicians awarded one of field’s top prizes

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 12:23 -0600

University of Chicago mathematicians Alexander Beilinson and Vladimir Drinfeld have been awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize for Mathematics “for their groundbreaking work in algebraic geometry, representation theory and mathematical physics.”

Awarded by the Israeli Wolf Foundation, the prize honors the greatest achievements every year in the fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, physics, medicine and the arts. The award for each subject area carries a $100,000 prize.

“It is a great pleasure to see such deserving people recognized with this prestigious prize,” said Prof. Edward W. “Rocky” Kolb, dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences. “Their work in algebraic geometry is truly remarkable.”

Beilinson, the David and Mary Winton Green University Professor, and Drinfeld, the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor, specialize in algebraic geometry, which uses abstract algebra to solve questions of geometry. Frequent collaborators, their association dates back to 1975, when they were both students of Yuri Manin at Moscow State University.

Several mathematical techniques and conjectures bear their names, including the Beilinson Conjectures, cited as a guiding influence in number theory and algebraic geometry; and the Drinfeld module, which Drinfeld used in 1974 to prove parts of the Langlands program.

“The Geometric Langlands Program is a far-reaching network of conjectures, and sometimes theorems, connecting number theory, algebraic geometry, representation theory and mathematical physics in unexpected and illuminating ways,” said Prof. Kevin Corlette, who chairs the Department of Mathematics. “It is wonderful to see Profs. Beilinson and Drinfeld recognized for their work, which has been fundamental to the development of this subject.”

In addition to his proof of a case of the Langlands conjecture, Drinfeld is also known for his work in representation theory, mathematical physics and quantum group theory. In 1990 he was awarded the Fields Medal, often described as the mathematics counterpart to the Nobel Prize, awarded only once every four years to a mathematician under 40. He is a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Beilinson specializes in geometric representation theory and mathematical physics. His honors include the Ostrowski Prize and the Moscow Mathematical Society Prize.

Both Beilinson and Drinfeld joined the University of Chicago in 1998. They frequently work together—they co-authored a 2004 textbook called Chiral Algebras, one of the most prominent texts on the subject—and they jointly run a seminar called the “Geometric Langlands Seminar,” which runs Mondays from 4:30 p.m. “until both the speaker and the participants are regularly exhausted,” according to a 2006 collection of mathematics articles titled Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory.

Drinfeld called the Wolf Prize “a great honor.” “We’re in good company,” Beilinson added. “To receive a prize together with Paul McCartney—who would think it would happen?” (McCartney received the Wolf Prize in Music this year.)

The Wolf Foundation was established by the German–born inventor, diplomat and philanthropist Ricardo Wolf; he later served as Fidel Castro’s ambassador to Israel, where he lived until his death in 1981. The prizes will be awarded by Israeli president Reuven Rivlin at a May ceremony in Jerusalem.

Award honors Prof. Eugene Parker’s lifetime of physics research

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 15:11 -0600

Prof. Emeritus Eugene Parker’s ideas were once widely questioned in the physics world. This week, he will receive one of the field’s highest honors.

Parker will receive the American Physical Society’s Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research at a Feb. 1 ceremony in Washington, D.C. The medal citation notes Parker’s “fundamental contributions to space physics, plasma physics, solar physics and astrophysics for over 60 years.”

“I’ve been a member of the APS since 1952, so this is a nice honor,” said Parker, the S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Physics at the University of Chicago. “I’m very pleased, particularly since people were skeptical about these concepts for a long time.”

Early in his career Parker proposed a theory that faced widespread skepticism—notably that a “solar wind” was carrying charged particles from the surface of the sun to the far reaches of the solar system. Beginning with the Mariner II space probe to Venus in 1962, however, measurements from spacecraft began to validate his predictions.

In addition to the solar wind, he has investigated magnetic fields, including the role played by cosmic rays in Milky Way magnetic fields and how cyclonic turbulence generates magnetic fields.

“Gene Parker has a wonderful and exceptional record of seminal contributions to solar, space and astrophysics over the many years of his distinguished career,” said Roger Falcone, chair of the 2018 APS Medal selection committee. “It is remarkable to see so many effects that bear his name.”

It’s been an eventful year for Parker, whom NASA honored in May 2017 by naming its first mission to send a spacecraft through the sun’s corona after the professor. The Parker Solar Probe, which recently embarked on its thermal testing phase to be frozen and then blasted with heat to simulate conditions on its journey, is scheduled to launch in July 2018. It is the first spacecraft to be named after a living person.

Scientists are eager to explore the surface of the sun, especially as flares, winds and ejections from the sun can affect electronics and infrastructure here on Earth.

Parker said he plans to travel to witness the probe’s launch this summer. He’s looking forward to it; he’s never seen a rocket launch. “I imagine it’s like the Taj Mahal,” he said. “Everyone’s seen a picture of it, but to see it in person is a completely different story.”

Historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo receives Humboldt Award

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 11:08 -0600

Prof. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo has received a prestigious award from a German foundation for his research on Latin American history.

Granted annually by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, the Humboldt Research Award honors a scholar “whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.”

Tenorio-Trillo was nominated by Sebastian Conrad, a professor of history from the Free University in Berlin, in recognition of his work in global history, as well as his more recent pursuit studying the history of 19th-century world philology of the languages of the Iberian Peninsula, a region in Portugal and Spain.

“Starting in the late 18th century and the second part of the 19th century,” Tenorio-Trillo said, “I argue the world experienced a ‘logophilic,’ or love of words, moment, when people sought the meaning of words as concepts according to the evolution of different languages.”

Tenorio-Trillo, the Samuel N. Harper Professor of History, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College, said he knew he was a candidate but didn’t expect to receive the award.

“It was a great and happy surprise,” Tenorio-Trillo said. “For me, I want to believe the recognition is a way to show the excellence of topics and languages which are often considered marginal in mainstream scholarship.”

The Humboldt Award comes with a prize of 60,000 euros, which Tenorio-Trillo will put toward travel and research in Germany for his project looking at the historical study of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan languages in the 19th century. In particular he is interested in the rise of “word hunters,” amateurs and professionals who became fascinated with the origins of languages, and who would eventually create the dictionaries and grammars of modern Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan.

“It is a fascinating history that involves book collectors, nationalists and imperialists of all sorts, poets, and professional philologists and linguists,” said Tenorio-Trillo. “And of course, behind any single world language there is always 19th-century German philology, thus my need to visit Berlin libraries and archives.”

Tenorio-Trillo joined the University of Chicago in 2007. In 2015, he received the Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press for his book, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, which looks at the decades between 1880 and 1930 when Mexico City emerged as a modern city.

Tenorio-Trillo received his PhD in history from Stanford University. He is also an affiliated faculty at the Center for Latin American Studies and the Katz Center for Mexican Studies, and an associate professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City.

Up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards are granted each year by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which is named after the late Prussian naturalist and explorer.

UChicago names recipients of Diversity Leadership Awards

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 10:55 -0600

Advocating for the concerns of those whose voices aren't heard is a hallmark of diversity leadership. The University of Chicago’s 2018 Diversity Leadership Award recipients have dedicated their lives to helping support underrepresented communities: Faculty member Randolph N. Stone, alumna Sunny Fischer and staff member Scott Cook have their own areas of public service interests, but are united in their passion for equality and justice.

Regina Dixon-Reeves, assistant vice provost for diversity and inclusion, praised the commitment of this year’s awardees, who will be honored Jan. 16 during the University’s annual MLK commemoration. “We are extremely proud of this year’s recipients as their collective years of work and sustained engagement in support of marginalized populations demonstrates the inclusive excellence valued by the University of Chicago.”

Defending all communities

A lifelong advocate for the underrepresented, Clinical Professor of Law Randolph N. Stone is dedicated to supporting and representing disadvantaged individuals and groups in the Chicago area. As founder of the Criminal Juvenile Justice Project, he works with law and social work students to defend children and young adults who have been charged with criminal behavior, reform juvenile and criminal law policies, and improve the criminal justice system. He continues his child advocacy as a board member of the Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. and the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice.

“We started the CJP because we wanted to help stop the movement to criminalize African-American children,” Stone said. “Illinois was a leader in transferring children out of juvenile court to the adult criminal court by curtailing judicial discretion, lowering the age of transfer, and increasing the number and types of crimes for transfer. Moving forward, we want to continue to help children and young adults be treated with compassion and fairness.”

In addition to working on programs devoted to fair child sentencing policies, Stone also serves on the advisory board of the Federal Defender Program and served on Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force. Throughout his career Stone has mentored hundreds of minority students, chaired the American Bar Association’s criminal justice section and served as the public defender of Cook County, where he helped increase the number of minority and women lawyers hired to the office while improving the quality of representation.

Confronting stereotypes

Sunny Fischer, AM’82, has worked as a teacher, social worker and executive in philanthropy. After earning her master’s degree at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, she went on to work with abused women in the community. Learning how women-focused organizations were under-resourced, she helped start the women’s funding movement, serving as executive director of The Sophia Fund, the first private women’s foundation solely devoted to women’s issues. She also co-founded the Chicago Foundation for Women, and had leadership roles in the Women’s Funding Network and Chicago Women in Philanthropy.

Later in her career, Fischer served as executive director of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, where she focused on historic preservation, the arts, and architecture and design, especially in low-income neighborhoods. While at the foundation, Fischer helped start a public housing museum in Chicago. Fischer was enthusiastic about this opportunity, as it combines her commitment to social justice and the arts, and it challenges stereotypes of public housing residents and the role of public housing.

After 10 years of exhibits and programs as a “museum in the streets,” the National Public Housing Museum is expected to open in 2019 in its own building in Chicago. A former resident of public housing, Fischer knows how damaging stereotypes can be, and she hopes that the museum will raise important questions about race and poverty, and the true meaning of “home.”

Fischer reflects on her perseverance: “These years of labor have been worth it,” she said. “If you believe in social justice and that art and culture can bring deeper understanding and can be a call to action, then the belief is motivation enough.”

Bridging political and social gaps

A clinical psychologist who spent much of his life working to improve health care services for minority populations, Scott Cook works at the University of Chicago Medical Center and Biological Sciences Division to help achieve culturally competent health care and reducing health care disparities across all communities.

“Health care disparities are immediate for me because the physical and emotional suffering that they create harm the people that I love the most in this world—my family, community and friends,” said Cook, who is a quality improvement and clinical transformation strategist. “I try to use the power afforded to me by my privileged identities to address these problems and the problems of others in groups that I may not belong to.”

Cook also serves as the deputy director of Finding Answers: Solving Disparities Through Payment and Delivery System Reform, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation geared toward identifying and reducing health care inequities. Throughout his career, Cook has worked with underrepresented communities in rural Missouri, as an intern at Chicago Cook County Stroger Hospital and at the Howard Brown Health Center. At Howard Brown, Cook worked directly with the LGBTQ community to create health care programs and interventions, including a smoking cessation public health campaign.

At these organizations Cook said he “learned so much about how bias, discrimination and oppression play out in people’s lives and damage their health and well-being.” Cook uses this knowledge along with personal experiences to continue working toward health care equality.

Prof. Richard Thaler delivers Nobel Prize lecture

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 13:37 -0600

Until Prof. Richard H. Thaler came along, economists resisted the idea of basing their models on how real people behave. The reality is people don’t always know what they want, much less what’s best for them.

In October, Thaler was honored with the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his pioneering scholarship in the field of behavioral economics. On Dec. 8, the Chicago Booth scholar delivered his Nobel lecture in Stockholm as part of a weeklong celebration of the 2017 Nobel laureates. He will receive his Nobel Medal on Dec. 10 at a white-tie-and-tails affair at the Stockholm Concert Hall. (Live webcast begins at 7:30 a.m. CST here).

In his Nobel speech, entitled “From Cashews to Nudges: The Evolution of Behavioral Economics,” Thaler told stories of various field experiments in his everyday life—ranging from a dinner party as a graduate student in Rochester, N.Y. in the 1970s to the Swedish government’s present-day effort to get its citizens to sign up for retirement plans.

Prof. Richard Thaler delivers the 2017 Nobel Prize Lecture in Economic Sciences on Dec. 8. (Photo by Henrik Montgomery / TT)

“One lesson from these stories is that there are a bunch of things economic theory says we can leave out, and in fact, makes the strong prediction that they simply will not matter,” Thaler said in his Nobel address. “I call these ‘supposedly irrelevant factors.’ And really my research can be summarized as there are a lot of these supposedly irrelevant factors that are not irrelevant. They matter.”

Thaler launched his journey as one of the founders of behavioral economics with a bowl of cashews at a dinner party. He was concerned his guests were eating too many and that it would spoil their appetites, so he took them away. His guests, all economists, were happy when he removed the nuts, and that led to a discussion: How could they be happy, given that a first principle of economics is more choices are better than fewer choices?

“If we learn from other social scientists, we can improve economics and increase its explanatory power, and it can give us new tools we can use to improve people’s outcome. In short, we can nudge them.”Prof. Richard H. Thaler

Prof. Richard Thaler to receive Nobel Prize this weekend

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 12:29 -0600

Nearly two months have passed since a 4 a.m. call from Sweden changed the life of economist Richard Thaler.

That morning, Thaler called receiving the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, the culmination of “a long journey” of scholarship. Known as one of the founding fathers of behavioral economics, Thaler, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said his field had come a long way since being “out in the wilderness” 40 years ago.

“When you’re doing research that’s a little unusual, and your approach is unusual, and you’re criticizing some of the other people in the field, you never know whether anybody’s taking it seriously,” said Thaler, who is in Stockholm, Sweden this week to receive his award.

Thaler will deliver the Nobel Prize Lecture in Economic Sciences on Dec. 8 and receive his Nobel medal on Dec. 10. (Both events will be webcast live on the Nobel website.) Thaler is the 90th scholar associated with UChicago to be awarded a Nobel Prize and sixth current member of the UChicago faculty.

“The last month has been frenetic, so I don’t know if it has sunk in,” Thaler said. “I’m not sure it will sink in until I get back from Stockholm.”

A view of the Stockholm Concert Hall, where Prof. Richard Thaler will receive his Nobel Prize medal during a Dec. 10 ceremony. (Photo by Frank Augstein/Associated Press)

‘A speech to the general public’

Author of the best-selling book Nudge, Thaler is renowned for research showing how human behavior contradicts traditional economic logic. And much like his groundbreaking scholarship, Thaler will be taking a different approach to his Nobel lecture.

Charged with delivering a 35-minute Nobel address, Thaler hopes to make it visual and “not bogged down in technical details.” Thaler knows a few things about writing a Nobel lecture, having heard five Nobel lectures in the two times he’s attended the ceremony—including 2002, when friend and former Stanford University colleague Daniel Kahneman was honored.

“Thirty-five minutes is not that long, and I don’t talk that fast. For the speech, I’m just trying to think about what is the best introduction of this material for 500 to 800 mostly Swedish residents of Stockholm,” Thaler said. “It’s not a speech to experts; it’s not a speech to my colleagues—it’s a speech to the general public.”

Thaler described the day the Nobel Prize was announced on Oct. 9 as a blur. He recalls the flood of congratulatory messages and a news conference at Booth, but also teaching a class that night at the Gleacher Center.

The work of a scholar, Nobel-winning or not, never ends. Soon after Stockholm, Thaler will return to research and tackling the task of writing a technical research paper for Nobel, due Jan. 31, which will be published in the American Economic Review.

“When you wake up in the morning, you still have to brush your teeth and take a shower—and pretty much life goes on,” Thaler said. “People have asked me: ‘Do your colleagues treat you any differently?’ No. They may have cut me slack for 10 or 15 minutes, and then it’s back to normal.”

Fourth-year student, alumna named Marshall Scholars

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 11:00 -0600

Fourth-year Pradnya Narkhede and Valerie Gutmann, AB’17, have won Marshall Scholarships to pursue graduate studies in the United Kingdom next fall. The highly competitive scholarships, announced Dec. 4, will enable 43 American students to study at the graduate level in any field of their choosing.

Narkhede will use her Marshall Scholarship to combine two one-year degrees: the first, at the University of Edinburgh in science and technology in society, and the second at Imperial College London in plant chemical biology.

“This award provides me with an unrivaled opportunity to probe the relationship between science and sustainable development,” said Narkhede, who is particularly interested in the role of agriculture. “Equipped with the tools I hope to gain from my studies in the U.K., I aim to become a globally engaged scientist, contributing innovative discoveries that shape intelligent policy and improve people’s lives worldwide.”

Gutmann plans to pursue a two-year MPhil in comparative social policy at the University of Oxford. She hopes to eventually attend law school and study how social welfare policy can be most effectively designed to help the most vulnerable populations.

“I’m interested in the ways to use a legal degree and a policy perspective to design and implement social welfare policy—in ways that effectively augment human dignity, which is what underlies everything I care about,” Gutmann said. “This is an opportunity to comparatively study welfare systems, not just in the U.S. or the U.K. but in international societies more broadly.”

Narkhede and Gutmann are the 24th and 25th people affiliated with the University of Chicago to win Marshall Scholarships since 1986. It’s the first time since 2010 that the University has had two Marshall Scholars in a single year; it had three winners in 1999.

“We are thrilled for Pradnya and Valerie’s accomplishments,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College. “Marshall Scholarships are awarded to students anticipated to be their country’s future intellectual leaders. Pradnya and Valerie’s rigorous pursuit of knowledge in global sustainability and social welfare policy epitomizes the scholarly leadership the University strives to foster. We are very proud of these students.”

The pursuit of global sustainability

Born and raised in rural India, Narkhede grew up visiting her family’s sugar cane farm—an experience that “beckoned an early fascination with the natural world,” she said. Years later that led to work that directly affects the lives of Indian farmers: Since May, Narkhede has served as a senior consultant at the Indian National Commission on Farmers, where she analyzes and designs initiatives to improve both environmental sustainability and agricultural productivity for smallholder growers. She also works to promote the use of science and appropriate technologies in attaining sustainable crop production.

In 2015, she founded and now directs Sustainable Soils, an initiative to serve remote Indian agricultural villages by providing soil testing for smallholder farmers and advice on crop rotation and fertilizer recommendations, while also engaging in the pilot installation of small-scale biogas and water-delivery systems. The award-winning program has garnered a $50,000 United Nations Development Programme sponsorship.

Narkhede also has received numerous research-related awards and fellowships. This past year, she spent several months as a research scholar at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, which allowed her to conduct water research as part of an international collaboration between Blaustein, the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. As part of that fellowship, she oversaw fieldwork in Uganda piloting an irrigation implementation project. Earlier this year she also won a Barry Goldwater Scholarship, an award that honors undergraduates in the natural sciences, mathematics, computer science and engineering.

Previously, Narkhede worked as a virtual research intern at the U.S. Department of Defense and was a 2016 Institute of Biophysical Dynamics Scholar with UChicago’s Department of Chemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, researching single-cell epigenetics. She plans to graduate in June with honors in chemistry and biological chemistry.

During her time at UChicago, Narkhede has taken part in numerous clubs and activities, including serving as president of the group Out in STEM, treasurer and co-director of Women in Science—both committed to the inclusion of women and other underrepresented groups in the sciences—and as a teaching assistant in the Biological Sciences Division. She has participated as a varsity rower/coxswain with UChicago Crew and currently volunteers as manager of a local community garden that provides nutritional education and produce to low-income families in the Hyde Park and Woodlawn neighborhoods. She is also an award-winning pianist.

Chief among her activism, though, is her commitment to science: “In examining and engineering plant, microbial and other living systems, I hope to advance the prospects for food and energy security as well as human health by developing more stress-tolerant crops, robust sources of renewable biofuels and living factories for life-saving medicines,” Narkhede said. “There is incredible power in harnessing the tenets of biochemistry to promote sustainable development, and I hope to be at the forefront of this movement.”

Working to address housing issues

Gutmann became interested in social welfare issues, particularly housing, while a first-year student in the College. As a caseworker with Health Leads, a nonprofit that aims to address the social determinants of health, Gutmann volunteered at federally qualified health centers on Chicago’s South and West sides. She connected medical patients to social service agencies and charitable organizations in the city. “The most common problem patients faced was housing insecurity, and there was nothing I could do for them on that front,” said Gutmann.

“I grew up in a household that had a strong emphasis on what it meant to be physically together in a space, what it meant to understand home as a place of security and refuge and understanding and support,” said Gutmann, who was raised in suburban Long Grove, Ill. “That sense of home seemed really contrary to the kind of housing situations people were facing when they came to Health Leads for help.”

At UChicago, Gutmann took a class on housing, earned a grant from the Pozen Center for Human Rights and eventually decided to major in sociology with a focus on urban inequality. Gutmann wrote her BA thesis on the landmark 1966 case Gautreaux et al. v. Chicago Housing Authority, in which the courts ruled that the CHA was perpetuating racial segregation through its building practices. She examined the contemporary implications of the case, interviewing dozens of attorneys, housing advocates, residents and CHA employees.

Gutmann currently works as a reporting analyst for a private contractor of the CHA that administers 27,000 subsidized housing vouchers in Chicago. She said the job allows her to understand how the private and public sectors work together to serve the public—issues raised in the aftermath of the Gautreaux case.

“When they filed Gautreaux, the ACLU thought that the result would be the building of public housing developments in predominantly white neighborhoods. That didn’t happen. The CHA’s solution to desegregating wasn’t creating concentrations of poverty in more affluent places, it was de-concentrating poverty, which I think has a lot of really interesting sociological complications,” Gutmann said. “I wouldn’t have an appreciation for the work I’m doing now if I hadn’t studied the shift toward subsidized housing vouchers through the course of my thesis.”

While a UChicago student, Gutmann was a research assistant for two School of Social Service Administration scholars. Along with Assoc. Prof. Evelyn Brodkin, Gutmann examined legislative issues in Sweden and Denmark during the European refugee crisis. She also researched Puerto Rican musicians in Woodlawn during the mid-20th century as part of Assoc. Prof. Bill Sites’ upcoming book on music and community building.

The summer after her first year, Gutmann co-founded the nonprofit South Side in Focus, which aims to amplify the voices of South Side community members through public art exhibits. “With every opportunity my goal has been to listen and to learn, instead of assuming that I know what is best for people in situations I have never had to face,” Gutmann said.

Both scholars secured university nomination and application support through the College Center for Scholarly Advancement, which guides undergraduates and College alumni through rigorous application processes for nationally competitive fellowships. Additional support is provided by the British Awards faculty nomination committee; their ongoing service is a critical part of our students’ success at the national level.

Fourth-year student named Rhodes scholar

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 11:55 -0600

Lucas Tse, a fourth-year student in the College, has earned a Rhodes Scholarship for Hong Kong to study at the University of Oxford next fall. He hopes to pursue an MPhil in economic and social history, with aspirations for a career as a scholar and educator.

“There are ideals in both directions that attract me,” Tse wrote in an email from Hong Kong, where he has lived for 19 years and where he was visiting family. “I would like to further my academic training and take on the challenges of scholarship, and at the same time do work outside the university, especially in Hong Kong and in mainland China. Education asks that we build something together that can connect with real human beings.”

Since 1986, one Rhodes Scholar for Hong Kong is selected annually on the basis of intellect, character, leadership and commitment to service, to join the other Rhodes scholars around the world. Tse is the 52nd person affiliated with the University of Chicago to earn a Rhodes scholarship.

“We are tremendously proud of Lucas, as Rhodes Scholarships are awarded to students who demonstrate the highest levels of academic excellence, character and ambition,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College. “The University of Chicago has a long history of fostering rigorous inquiry. We are delighted that Lucas’s pursuit of knowledge will continue to grow in preparation for a career as a scholar and educator.”

Tse has focused on philosophy and philology through the interdisciplinary Fundamentals major. That has afforded him close contact with UChicago scholars, whom he credits for guiding him “through philosophical and religious texts across traditions and helping me work toward an understanding of the core problems.” His Fundamentals paper is a philosophical reading of the Analects of Confucius, in which he examines moral transformation.

While at UChicago Tse has continued an interest in music. He studies voice privately and works with fellow student pianists to give recitals including works such as Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Fauré’s Cinq mélodies “de Venise” and Ravel’s Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. He also is a member of Chicago Chorale, the Rockefeller Chapel Choir and the Early Music Ensemble.

“Music is another way for people to communicate,” Tse said. “It is difficult and fulfilling to truly share an experience.”

Tse also teaches philosophy to youths aged 8 to 16 as part of the Civic Knowledge Project, a program that connects UChicago with South Side communities.

“The University has been an intellectual community for me,” Tse said. “I am often busy organizing and participating in reading groups. I have learned a lot by coming together with people from different academic backgrounds.”

Tse secured application support through the College Center for Scholarly Advancement, which guides undergraduates and College alumni through rigorous application processes for nationally competitive fellowships. Additional support is provided by the British Awards faculty nomination committee; their ongoing service is a critical part of students’ success at the national level.

Three UChicago faculty members named AAAS fellows

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 14:13 -0600

Three members of the University of Chicago faculty were named as 2017 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Fellows are elected by AAAS members for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science and its applications.

Marcela Carena, a professor of physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, was named “for distinguished contributions to high-energy particle field theory, especially detection of Higgs fields, supersymmetry, electroweak baryogenesis, dark matter and extra dimensions.”

Carena’s research explores the possible connections between particle physics, supersymmetry, unification and dark matter, including how to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in the universe using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Head of the Theoretical Physics Department at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, she is a pioneer in exploring how the direct search for Higgs bosons at the Large Hadron Collider and the search for dark matter in deep underground experiments—such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment currently underway at Fermilab—could complement one another.

Don Q. Lamb, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the College, was named “for outstanding contributions to theoretical astrophysics, especially for seminal contributions to the understanding of supernovae and for leadership in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.”

His research interests have included the properties of matter at high densities and temperatures, the evolution of white dwarfs and neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae and most recently, experiments that use intense lasers to study the origin of the magnetic fields in the universe. He played a key role in founding the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and was the co-leader and Mission Scientist for the NASA High Energy Transient Explorer. Head of the Flash Center for Computational Science, Lamb is also affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago and the Harris School of Public Policy.

Panagiotis E. Souganidis, the Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics, was named “for contributions to viscosity solutions, conservation laws, the theory of phase transitions, stochastic homogenization and stochastic partial differential equations.”

His areas of research include applied mathematics, analysis, ecology and evolution, stochastic analysis, partial differential equations and numerical analysis.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes 254 affiliated societies and academies of science.

The new fellows will receive their honors in February 2018 at AAAS’ annual meeting in Austin, Texas.

Japanese government honors Prof. Raaj Sah for analysis of economic and financial policies

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 17:35 -0600

Prof. Raaj Sah has been awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon from the government of Japan.

Conferred on behalf of His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, the award honors Sah’s contributions to the analysis of Japan’s economic and financial policies. Among the government policies that Sah, a professor of public policy and economics at the Harris School of Public Policy, has engaged with are tax reform, public revenues, deficits and redistribution—some of the central issues for contemporary Japan.

“Professor Sah combines his researcher’s incisiveness and his vast knowledge with his practical wisdom. He works seamlessly across cultures and societies, deeply respecting the differences and, at the same time, transcending them. He is admirably original in all domains of his work,” said Prof. Dan Black, deputy dean of Harris Public Policy.

“His ideas have impacted many societies, and not just Japan and India,” said Prof. Errol D’Souza, the director-in-charge of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Sah is a distinguished fellow at the institute.

Sah has previously held faculty positions in business, economics and public policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. Among the honorary positions he has held is at the Ministry of Finance Japan.

Sah holds a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

Chuan He honored for contributions to advancing cancer research

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 11:50 -0600

Chuan He, the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, is one of three recipients of this year’s Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research. The award recognizes promising investigators aged 45 or younger for their efforts in advancing cancer research.

“In order to tackle the problem of cancer, we need to develop a better understanding of the fundamental processes that lead to its formation,” said Craig B. Thompson, a former University of Chicago faculty member and now president and CEO of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “The 2017 Marks Prize winners all have contributed to a deeper and more fundamental understanding of cancer.”

He, who is also the director of UChicago’s Institute for Biophysical Dynamics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, will share the prize with Gad Getz and Aviv Regev of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

“We had an impressive assemblage of nominees this year, and these three young scientists are among the best of the best,” said Helen Piwnica-Worms, who chaired a committee of prominent members of the cancer research community that selected the winners. “The selection committee felt very strongly that this year’s recipients have already made critical contributions to the field of cancer research and are truly poised to continue playing major leadership roles in the coming years.”

He, the director of the Synthetic and Functional Biomolecules Center at Peking University in China, is an expert in the field of cancer epigenetics and RNA modification biology. Epigenetics involves variations in the way that genes are expressed that don’t affect the actual DNA sequence. He was the first to champion the idea that modifications to RNA are reversible and can control gene expression. Control of RNA, the molecule that carries DNA’s “message” to the protein-making machinery of the cell, can affect the outcomes of gene expression.

“When I started this work back in 2008 and 2009, we knew that proteins called writers could install modifications to RNA molecules that altered their function, but no one knew that there were also proteins called erasers that could undo these changes,” He said. His team went on to identify for the first time the eraser proteins. In later work, they characterized a series of reader proteins that explain how RNA methylation functioned.

“This research laid down the mechanistic pathways for our current understanding of how these modifications impact biological outcomes, including those related to cancer,” he said. “Cancer and other diseases can hijack aberrant RNA methylation to gain a survival advantage, allowing cells to proliferate and grow out of control.”

These types of RNA changes are known to play a role in many types of cancer, including endometrial cancer, acute myelogenous leukemia, and glioblastoma. He’s work forms some of the foundations for developing potential future therapies that target RNA methylation effectors against human cancer.

Each recipient will receive a $50,000 award and give a scientific presentation at a Nov. 30 symposium at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

—Adapted from a story on Science Life

Wu Hung honored for helping create field of contemporary Chinese art history

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 16:30 -0600

In recognition of a career spent helping to create the field of contemporary Chinese art history in higher education, Prof. Wu Hung will receive one of the highest academic honors from the world’s largest professional society for art historians and artists.

Wu, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and East Asian Languages & Civilizations, will receive the College Art Association’s distinguished scholar award at its annual conference in February 2018.

“Wu Hung is joining an impressive group of individuals,” said Hunter O’Hanian, the association’s executive director. “The committee looks for someone who has a depth of scholarly accomplishment, and if you look at the depth of his work, especially under difficult circumstances at the time, it’s amazing.”

Wu is considered a giant in the field. While he began his career working on early Chinese architecture, he also in many ways became the father of modern and contemporary Chinese art history. His work began with a series of exhibitions staged at Harvard University in the mid-1980s, before arriving at UChicago as a faculty member. As a consulting curator at the Smart Museum of Art, he has curated a series of exhibitions and he is currently at work on a large-scale exhibition of contemporary experimental art in China, “The Allure of Matter.”

“Wu Hung has long worked, in the very best UChicago ways, across entrenched disciplinary divides, looking at ancient art as much as contemporary practices,” said Prof. Christine Mehring, chair of the Department of Art History. “His scholarship and teaching have propelled our department’s, and the discipline of art history’s, turn to a global art history.”

Opening up Chinese art history

Despite his accomplishments, Wu is quick to recognize the contributions of all scholars in the field working to expand the cultures studied in art history, including China.

“Art history as a field was very compartmentalized by regions and nations, especially so-called Western art and non-Western art,” Wu said. “I feel like a lot of people have made efforts to open up art history.”

In his decades of study, Wu has witnessed firsthand that opening up of contemporary art in China, moving from underground and experimental works in the 1980s and 1990s to the establishment of major museums spaces today, but he still sees plenty of areas for work.

“Art is opening up, but you have to deal with a lot of challenges like censorship, and you have to negotiate with the different traditions and local sentiments of different areas,” Wu said. “And people in China still think of art as something ‘extra,’ but I feel it is essential to modern education. That’s something we have to make people see.”

In addition to his scholarship in contemporary Chinese art, Wu also works to preserve early Chinese art. He is the founder and director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at UChicago, which was established in 2003 to support groundbreaking scholarship and create related digital technologies to advance access to and preserve art, artifacts, and sites.

Wu is particularly proud of a project that uses digital imaging and 3-D technology to map ancient Buddhist caves pillaged in the early 20th century by foreign collectors. Wu and his colleagues spent years locating the scattered pieces around the world, making 3-D scans. They then worked with local archaeologists to scan and reconstruct the historical caves, offering images to scholars through an online database.

“In a way, it’s a healing process,” Wu said about the project. “There was a historical tragedy, and now we’re using new technology to heal in some ways. We’re also creating a model, because we can’t scan all these caves, so scholars in other countries can think about how to do similar projects.”

That openness extends beyond just sharing data. Jeehee Hong, PhD’08, one of his many former students, said that despite his stature in the field, Wu has always made time for his students, and his model of scholarship has shaped a new generation of art historians.

“His work and his manner of engaging with scholars is open, and it’s all about inclusiveness,” said Hong, now an associate professor in East Asian Art History at McGill University. “Given how busy he is, he still sees his students as people. I’ve been teaching for years, and now I see his influence.”

Booth economist Anil Kashyap honored for achievements and contributions to Japan

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 14:00 -0600

The Japanese government has honored Prof. Anil Kashyap, in recognition of his distinguished achievements and contributions to Japan.

Kashyap is among the 149 foreign recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun, awarded for making significant contributions in international relations, promotion of Japanese culture, advancements in their field, development in welfare or preservation of the environment.

Conferred on behalf of the Emperor of Japan, the Order of the Rising Sun was established in 1875 by Japanese Emperor Meiji as the first national decoration awarded by the Japanese government. The modern version of this honor has been conferred on non-Japanese recipients since 1981. Kashyap was honored with a class of the Order of the Rising Sun award called Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon.

Kashyap, the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has played a vital role in promoting and disseminating high-quality research on the Japanese financial system and Japan’s economic policies. He has coordinated conferences that brought together Japanese and American researchers in partnership with the Economic and Social Research Institute, the think-tank under the Cabinet Office of Japan.

“It has been an honor and a privilege to work with the Cabinet office on these conferences. They have generated many good research papers, forged some collaborations and hopefully have helped with the policy process,” Kashyap said.