UChicago News

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Marshall Chin elected to National Academy of Medicine

Tue, 17 Oct 2017 14:41 -0500

University of Chicago Medicine physician Marshall Chin has been elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Chin was one of 80 new members elected to the Academy, it was announced Oct. 16. Election to the Academy is one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. It indicates that an individual has made major contributions to medicine and health care and demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

Chin, the Richard Parrillo Family Professor of Healthcare Ethics and associate chief and director of research for the Section of General Internal Medicine, is a general internist with extensive experience caring for both the clinical and social needs of vulnerable patients with chronic disease.

“Marshall Chin is an international leader in improving care and outcomes for racial and ethnic minority patients and persons with social risk factors,” said Kenneth S. Polonsky, dean of the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine and executive vice president of medical affairs.

“He has devised and implemented a series of innovative approaches to patient care with particular emphasis on the alleviation of difficult clinical, social and economic problems,” Polonsky added. “He is also a talented physician, with a lifelong commitment to improve patient care, reduce health care disparities and make the best use of available resources.”

Chin directs the NIH-funded Chicago Center for Diabetes Translation Research. He and Assoc. Prof. Monica Peek co-direct the South Side Diabetes Project, which has advanced diabetes care and outcomes through healthcare system and community interventions.

Chin also leads the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Finding Answers: Solving Disparities through Payment and Delivery System Reform. Through that program, he and his team created the Roadmap to Reduce Disparities, a six-step framework to help health care organizations improve minority health and foster equity.

Chin studies the patient-centered medical home—a team-based care-delivery model—in safety net clinics, and efforts to improve shared decision-making between clinicians and LGBTQ persons of color. His research has improved care in federally qualified health centers through the national Health Disparities Collaboratives.

Chin co-chairs the National Quality Forum’s Disparities Standing Committee, which works to reduce health care disparities and reform clinical performance measurement and payment. He currently serves on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Community Preventive Services Task Force and is a former president of the Society of General Internal Medicine.

In addition to his clinical and research roles, Chin is a teacher and award-winning mentor, committed to providing opportunities for trainees and young faculty. He is also associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. He joined the UChicago faculty in 1994.

With Chin’s appointment, there are now 15 current or emeritus UChicago faculty members who have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, formerly known as the Institute of Medicine.

Richard Thaler wins Nobel Prize 'for his contributions to behavioural economics'

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 05:06 -0500

University of Chicago Prof. Richard H. Thaler has been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2017.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Thaler, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, “for his contributions to behavioural economics,” a relatively new field that bridges the gap between economics and psychology. Thaler’s research investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human.

“Richard’s original, broadly influential and paradigm-defining work has richly earned this recognition,” President Robert J. Zimmer wrote in a message to the UChicago community. “We look forward to celebrating Richard’s work and his place in the distinguished legacy of eminent economics research at the University of Chicago.”

He is among the 90 scholars associated with the University to receive Nobel Prizes, and among the 29 who have received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. In addition to Thaler, five current UChicago faculty members are Nobel laureates in economics: Profs. Eugene Fama and Lars Hansen (who won in 2013), Roger Myerson (2007), James Heckman (2000) and Robert E. Lucas Jr. (1995).

Thaler learned of the award after his cell phone rang at 4 a.m. The phone number was from Sweden, so “I had a pretty good idea what that might be,” he said Monday. The award was particularly meaningful because behavioral economics was “really out in the wilderness 40 years ago,” when Thaler began his research.

“It’s been a long journey,” he said, “so I’m happy about that.”

‘Knowledge with enduring impact’

At a news conference Monday morning in the Charles M. Harper Center, Chicago Booth Dean Madhav Rajan said Thaler “represents the quintessence of Chicago Booth’s mission: to produce knowledge with enduring impact, and to influence and educate current and future leaders.” Rajan also credited Thaler with helping to build Chicago Booth’s faculty in behavioral science, “vastly expanding the school’s footprint and stature in this field.”

Thaler, who took the stage to cheering from the excited students and faculty who had lined the staircases of the Winter Garden, described the experience being a Booth faculty member as one of “tough love. The behavioral science group, it’s a little less tough, but only a little.”

He admitted he hadn’t persuaded all of his colleagues and fellow economists of the importance of behavioral economics, so instead, “I’ve used the strategy of corrupting the youth, whose minds aren’t already made up,” he said. “Many great, young economists have embraced behavioral economics…The growth of the field is really due to the work of the people that followed me.”

Spotting fellow Nobel laureate Eugene Fama, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, in the front row, Thaler added, “It’s been good to be here all these 20 years, arguing with guys like Fama. It’s good for me.” These days, however, “[we] try to keep our arguments to the golf course.”

Prof. Richard Thaler talks to Cass Sunstein, his former UChicago scholar and his Nudge coauthor, via Skype from his living room after winning the Nobel Prize. (Photo by Anne Ryan)

‘The father of behavioral economics’

Thaler, who has been dubbed the “father of behavioral economics,” wrote the bestselling books Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (2015) and Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (2008). He is renowned for creating easy-to-understand scenarios that show how human behavior often contradicts traditional economic logic.

Many economic models, Thaler told National Public Radio last year, assume people are rational, unemotional, and self-controlled. “I believe that for the last 50 or 60 years, economists have devoted themselves to studying fictional creatures,” he said. “They might as well be studying unicorns.” Every day, his research reveals, we behave in ways that violate economic principles.

In keeping with his research into these human idiosyncrasies, Thaler joked in a Nobel news conference Monday morning that he planned to spend the 9 million Swedish krona (about $1.1 million USD) he will receive with the prize “as irrationally as possible.”

In Misbehaving, which Financial Times named one of the six most influential business books of 2015, Thaler chronicles the struggle to bring the academic discipline of economics back down to earth and reveals how behavioral economic analysis can change the way we think about everything from household finances to the NFL draft.

For instance, Thaler’s research has challenged the classical economic notion that money is fungible—that is, that one dollar is the same as any other dollar. But Thaler’s work on mental accounting, one of the areas of research highlighted by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in its Nobel citation, has shown that, in practice, people don’t treat money this way. Instead, they mentally earmark money for specific purposes, such as housing, food, and travel, and make financial decisions based on how those decisions will affect each small fund. “Money in one mental account is not a perfect substitute for money in another account,” Thaler wrote in a 1999 paper.

Thaler illustrated the point with his own Nobel win. Most economists, he said at the news conference, would challenge the premise of a question like, “What do you plan to do with your prize money?” Because they view money as “fungible,” they wouldn’t—in theory—distinguish prize money from any other money.

Not Thaler. “I believe in something called mental accounting, which is precisely people putting labels on money,” he explained. “Anytime I spend any money [on something] that’s really fun, I’m going to say that came from the Nobel Prize.”

‘Make it easy’

Nudge, coauthored with Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein, explores how the concepts of behavioral economics can be used to tackle many of society’s major problems and influence public policy. Ranked as the Best Book of the Year by The Economist and Financial Times, the research prompted the United Kingdom’s government in 2010 to establish a Behavioral Insight Team, or “Nudge Unit,” to create policies that nudge British citizens to make better choices and, in turn, save the state money. Thaler served as an advisor in setting up the unit’s guiding principles.

At the heart of Nudge is what Thaler calls his “mantra”: “If you want to get people to do something, make it easy. Remove the obstacles,” he explained. “Nudges” push people toward better choices by making those choices easy. For example, employers can “nudge” employees by automatically enrolling them in a retirement savings plan, rather than requiring them to opt in; schools can “nudge” kids toward healthy food choices by putting fruit at eye level.

“If you want to get people to do something, make it easy. Remove the obstacles.” Prof. Richard Thaler on the mantra behind 'Nudge'

Thaler’s other books include Quasi-Rational Economics and The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life. His work has been published in the American Economics Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Political Economy.

Thaler was named in 2015 to Bloomberg Markets 50 Most Influential People; he also was the American Economic Association’s president for 2015. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.

Before joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 1995, Thaler taught at the University of Rochester and Cornell University. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia, the Sloan School of Management at MIT, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Originally from New Jersey, Thaler attended Case Western Reserve University where he received a bachelor's degree in 1967. Soon after, he attended the University of Rochester where he received a master's degree in 1970 and a PhD in 1974.

Alumni and faculty recognized for distinguished service to the University

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 12:10 -0500

The alumni awards, presented by the University of Chicago Alumni Association and the Alumni Board, honor those who have shaped the world and strengthened UChicago’s global community.

The Norman Maclean Faculty Award recognizes emeritus or senior faculty for extraordinary contributions to teaching and to the student experience of life within the University community. This year’s recipient is Prof. Emeritus Peter O. Vandervoort, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60.

The Alumni Service Awards recognize the achievements of individuals working on behalf of the University through service in alumni programs, on advisory committees and through efforts made to ensure the welfare of the institution. The Young Alumni Service Awards acknowledge and encourage service to the University by alumni aged 35 and younger.

Nominations for the Professional Achievement Awards, which recognize outstanding alumni contributions to their vocational fields, are due June 16. Nominations for all Alumni Association award categories are received year-round and can be submitted online.

2017 Norman Maclean Faculty Award winner

Peter O. Vandervoort, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60, is a professor emeritus in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, a position he has held since his retirement in 2003. Starting in 1961 and continuing to today, he has taught and individually guided many generations of undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs and junior colleagues.

Vandervoort served as acting dean for the Division of the Physical Sciences, master of the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division, associate dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences and of the College, and associate chairman of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

2017 Alumni Service Award winners

Vincenzo Barbetta, AB’99, MBA’05, is a founding member and former president of the LGBT Alumni Network. Barbetta strengthened bonds among LGBT alumni and between those alumni and the University. In cooperation with the board of directors and steering committee, he pioneered several aspects of the chapter model now used to organize affinity groups nationally and globally. His aim was to have alumni remain connected to the academic work happening on campus and ensure that the group had a social mission.

Barbetta currently serves as the LGBT Alumni Network’s metro chair in San Francisco. From 2003 to 2010, he volunteered for the Alumni Club of Chicago in leadership roles including treasurer and vice president. He received the Dean’s Award of Distinction in 2005 upon his graduation from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Sean Singleton, MBA’08, is president of the University of Chicago Military Affinity Group and has led efforts to foster awareness and institutional support for veterans across the University community. His leadership has helped current students and alumni to connect their military service to their education, helping the University community understand the training and skill sets of its students and military-affiliated alumni.

Singleton also has given his time and talent to Chicago Booth as a judge for its Volunteer Leadership Program, presented a webinar for Alumni Career Programs titled “Navigating Career Transition for Military Personnel, and traveled to New York to sit on a panel during Volunteer Caucus.

2017 Young Alumni Service Award winners

Joe Anzalone, AB’04, is the president of the Alumni Club of Virginia. As an alumni volunteer, Anzalone began addressing questions and opportunities to reach unengaged alumni populations and help the Alumni Association meet its major engagement goals. His grassroots efforts toward building the Alumni Club of Virginia soon evolved into recruiting a diverse group of board members representing different regions, degrees, class years and industries.

Before his tenure as president of the Alumni Club of Virginia, Anzalone volunteered for the Alumni Club of Washington, D.C., serving as program chair and vice president. Additionally, he has held leadership roles for Phoenixphest DC and Participate Chicago, and has supported the alumni efforts of the Alumni Law Society and the Institute of Politics.

Jennifer Glickel, AB’08, has held various leadership roles as a board member of the Alumni Club of NYC over the past nine years, including Phoenixphest co-chair, programming committee co-chair, and most recently, engagement and outreach co-chair. She is a strong advocate for UChicago alumni and is credited with recruiting many of the current volunteers in the region.

Before graduation, Glickel was a leader with the Senior Class Gift Committee. She has since also acted as a leader for her class reunions, promoting alumni spirit and participation as co-chair for the Participate NYC events.

College recognizes excellence in teaching with Quantrell Awards

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 16:00 -0500

The Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards, believed to be the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, reflect the College’s commitment to honor inspiring teachers.

Andrew Abbott, the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology and the College

For Andrew Abbott, teaching isn’t about material.

“If you want to learn European history, you’re going to do that better by reading a book—and reading it again, and reading it again,” Abbott said.

Instead, Abbott teaches skills. He wants students to learn how to read, how to think and how to make an argument. He finds too many undergraduates enter his class being able to make a point, but not summarize the idea of a classmate and then reframe it to make an argument against it.

“What a faculty member can actually do is teach you how to teach yourself, teach skills on how to think,” Abbott said.

Abbott, AM’75, PhD’82, joined the UChicago faculty in 1991 with his research focusing on the professions. Over the last two decades, his work has shifted to focus on higher education, the evolution of knowledge and the development of libraries. The results include what he described as two “off-beat” textbooks—Methods of Discovery and Digital/Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials.

One skill that Abbott finds crucial to teach is the ability to sift through deluge of information students face today. “The answer to every question is staring you in the face, but so is a lot of other stuff that’s irrelevant and what you need is actual ideas in your head so that you can say ‘Oh, I should follow that,’” he said.

Agnes Callard, Assistant Professor in Philosophy and the College

In many ways, Agnes Callard, AB’97, never really stopped being a student at the University of Chicago.

“I haven't had to find my way in the world in the sense that college ends and something different starts,” she said. “I kind of just kept doing what I was doing as an undergrad until now.”

Despite being an assistant professor in philosophy, teaching courses on ancient philosophy and contemporary ethics, Callard has never given up her role as a student. In her time on the faculty, Callard raves about courses she has taken on epistemology with Anubav Vasudevan as well as two classes she took from colleague Gabriel Lear.

“I really would have liked to have taken Robert Pippin’s class on Hegel this quarter,” she said. “But I couldn’t because it was the same time as the class I was teaching.”

Hearing Callard’s philosophy of teaching, it makes sense that she never truly separated the student and the teacher from her own life.

“Teaching is a really special form of cooperative activity,” she said. “Aristotle says that teaching only happens when the student is learning. That’s because the teaching and learning happen in the same place, in the student, in the mind of another person.”

Bana Jabri, Professor in Medicine, Pediatrics and the College

Bana Jabri likes to compare her teaching method to a cubist painting.

“At the beginning of the course, I introduce different elements for which students don't necessarily see a meaning or a global image,” she said. “I tell them they have to trust me, that it's not done randomly, but that it's part of how we think scientifically.”

Jabri structures her courses in immunology and immunopathology so that students can build a foundation on the basic concepts without getting lost in the details. She says her somewhat old-fashioned method of using a whiteboard instead of computer slides in class sometimes unsettles students, but it helps her avoid overloading them with too much information too quickly.

Her goal is not only to help them master the fundamentals, but also give them the confidence that they can contribute their own ideas.

“Initially they are very scared because they think they cannot do it,” Jabri said. “But the one thing they learn—and it’s absolutely key for me that they take out of class—is that however young, one can have an outstanding idea.”

Scott Snyder, Professor in Chemistry and the College

Scott Snyder’s favorite classroom is Kent 107—a cavernous, octagonal room where he can move from blackboard to blackboard as he teaches.

“I’m kind of old-school. I like teaching with chalk,” he said.

Snyder teaches introductory courses in the undergraduate organic chemistry sequence, holding a keen awareness of differences among the students. He said it’s crucial to understand in a single row of seats there may be a first-year thinking about medical school, a third-year interested in chemical engineering, and a second-year who wants to get a doctorate in chemistry.

“On a basic level, I have to teach how A gets converted into B, but teaching is trying to tie the subject into real-world applications—how is this reaction used to make a new sweetener that doesn’t have caloric content, or how it makes the color of Mountain Dew have that weird look to it,” Snyder said.

Such applications are a part of what Snyder has contributed as a co-author of the textbook that is used at UChicago for the introductory organic chemistry sequence. He also has co-authored a text entitled Teach Better, Save Time and Have More Fun, aimed at helping faculty in teaching scientific courses, big or small.

“Being prepared, having thought ahead, having your notes, maybe even practicing things first, that solves most of the mechanical problems and challenges that exist within teaching,” Snyder said.

Faculty honored for excellence in graduate teaching

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 16:00 -0500

The Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring recognizes tenure-track and tenured faculty in the Biological Sciences, Divinity School, Humanities, Institute for Molecular Engineering, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences.

Alison James, Associate Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures and the College

Alison James’ teaching style has evolved in the 12 years she’s been at UChicago.

“I used to think of myself as someone who is supposed to know things and somehow transmit knowledge to the students. That’s really shifted.

“I don’t think about my job as just communicating everything I’ve learned. It’s about formulating questions, carving out space for a collective inquiry and asking questions I don’t know the answers to,” she said.

James has been teaching 20th- and 21st-century French literature since 2005. Her courses, which examine the French literary avant-garde with a particular focus on writer Georges Perec, are constantly works in progress, driven largely by the questions and conversations that arise from her students.

“Teaching is always surprising,” she said. “I still learn a lot from the students. I go into a classroom with a syllabus, I think students are going to respond in particular ways to the texts, and they always surprise me. That’s what is so exciting about teaching here.”

And if James wasn’t in the classroom? She said in the future she might just try to take a page from her research subjects. “I could see myself writing,” she says. “Perhaps one day I’ll try to write fiction.”

Jason MacLean, Associate Professor in Neurobiology and the College

While it would be easy for a busy scientist to settle on a routine format for the courses he teaches, Jason MacLean changes them every year.

“Frankly, I’m never satisfied, because I think you can always do better,” he said.

MacLean learned to constantly re-examine and critically evaluate his work while studying with his PhD advisor, neurologist Brian Schmidt at the University of Manitoba, Canada.

“Each time I thought that I had a solid result, Brian would poke holes in my conclusion and would force me, either through argument or additional experiments, to convince him of its validity,” MacLean said. “While difficult in the end, it made me a much better scientist.”

MacLean builds this spirit of challenging assumptions and conclusions into both his laboratory and his undergraduate courses in neuroscience. He wants graduate students in the lab to be open-minded and not be constrained by the tenets of neuroscience. In his undergraduate course, he guides students through contemporary literature and asks them to critically evaluate the data and conclusions.

He wants students to take these critical thinking skills and apply them toward whatever field they decide to pursue.

“Whether they remember anything about the brain or not,” he said, “it’s a great vehicle to teach them to think critically and evaluate evidence.”

Joseph Masco, Professor in Anthropology and the College

A scholar of many interests, Joseph Masco’s courses deal with subjects ranging from the global environment to science and technology to mass media and national security.

But one of Masco’s greatest joys is watching his graduate students grow through research and begin to approach their topics in new ways. “There are these moments in the collaborations with students,” Masco said, “where you’re moving away from training and toward thinking together about something that’s shaping the current world in a serious manner.”

From master’s students who are refining their skill sets to doctoral students who are spending years on original work, the end goal is “that they’re original thinkers,” said Masco, “and that they’re able to move across very different discursive worlds, and communicate the insights of their research.”

Masco also enjoys learning via the independent research of his students, who work in many regions of the world and tackle projects he would enjoy investigating on his own, if he had the time.

“Each doctoral student in anthropology has unique experiences in the field and builds a one-of-a-kind ethnographic archive. I learn a lot about contemporary conditions from these encounters,” he said, “and that is really the secret and great pleasure of the whole operation.”

Julie Orlemanski, Assistant Professor in English Language & Literature and the College

When Julie Orlemanski began her PhD at Harvard, she was conflicted about becoming a Modernist or a Medievalist. But one thing that helped her make a choice was the encouragement from her advisors to simply explore.

“They always treated me as someone who’s self-determination they took very seriously,” she said. “That has influenced my style of graduate teaching and mentoring.”

Orlemanski said thanks to her own experience, she has great respect for her students.

“I’m in a position to facilitate intellectual exchange, but I really think of grad students as peers,” she said.

Since joining the English Department (as a Medievalist), Orlemanski has worked to encourage her graduate students to develop a practice of writing, to be creative and intellectually engaged, and to write without dread.

“It’s a really crucial part about how one can position oneself to be a successful scholar,” she said.

While in grad school, Orlemanski also took part in Occupy Boston—an unlikely inspiration for how she leads class discussions.

“I took away a lot of thinking about how one facilitates conversation among people coming from lots of different knowledge positions,” she said. “How do we bring people’s different insights to bear on a shared conversation? That’s not something that inevitably happens, and it takes work.”

James T. Robinson, Professor of the History of Judaism and the College

In 14 years at the University of Chicago, James T. Robinson has taught more than 25 different courses in the field of medieval Judaism.

“One of the great things about UChicago is the freedom to teach anything I want, and often I don’t teach the same courses twice,” he said.

From “The Jewish Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages” to an experimental course he plans to teach next year on the history of popular culture called “Jewish Superheroes,” Robinson has found plenty of spaces to share his wide research interests with students.

But in all those varied classes, one thing remains the same.

“I give the same advice to graduate students when they are deciding on general exams or dissertation topics: Follow your heart, do what you really enjoy doing: Don’t pay attention to the market, for the market is fickle.

“More than anything I want students to have fun, to laugh, to enjoy learning, and to end the quarter wanting to learn more about the subject,” he said.

Prof. David Nirenberg awarded Laing Prize from UChicago Press

Thu, 11 May 2017 10:10 -0500

The University of Chicago Press has awarded the Gordon J. Laing Prize to Prof. David Nirenberg for Neighboring Faiths, his examination of the interactions of Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages that provides new insight into how the faiths relate today.

The Laing Prize is the Press’s top honor, awarded annually to the UChicago faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction. Nirenberg, dean of the Division of the Social Sciences and the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor in History, Social Thought, Romance Languages and Literatures, is the 54th recipient of the award.

“Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today is the rare historical work that, in looking backward, can help point a way forward,” said Garrett Kiely, director of the UChicago Press. “Now, more than ever, we need scholars like David to remind us of our shared religious past and of our shared future. I am very pleased that the Board of University Publications conferred the Laing Prize on this outstanding work of scholarship.”

In his research, Nirenberg explores how the interactions of the three religions help shape how they define themselves and each other. He describes his work as getting closer to an understanding of what it meant for a Muslim in Christian Spain to convert to Judaism in the 14th century, or how Muslim and Christian readings of Hegel in the 20th century have shaped how members of these faiths perceive the other.

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2017 Laing Prize ceremony

In Neighboring Faiths, Nirenberg examines how the three religions interact by focusing on medieval Spain, but finding overlaps in more recent times from Pope Benedict XVI to the leaders of Hamas.

“How these three faiths interact with each other—and take shape through each other—is crucial to our current world and animates a huge amount of our geopolitical energy,” Nirenberg said. “Although the book is largely medieval, it begins with and ends with meditations on how this process of co-production among the three faiths is still going on.”

Writing in the London Review of Books, Carlos Fraenkel described Neighboring Faiths not as a “feel-good story” about the faiths getting along, but instead an argument for why ideas matter and how they can harden over time, requiring a study of the past to inform future relations.

What inspired Nirenberg to write Neighboring Faiths was a curiosity that emerged from his own background as a Latin American immigrant to the U.S. of Jewish descent. Further impetus came more recently when he taught an undergraduate course in Jerusalem.

“It was there, discussing the scriptures of Islam, Judaism and Christianity with a class evenly divided between all three faiths, that I first began to perceive the possibility, and perhaps even the importance, of such a project,” Nirenberg said.

Nirenberg is also author of Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages; Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition; and Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry and Politics. His honors include receiving the Historikerpreis der Stadt Münster this year, awarded for outstanding works in historical sciences.