19 UChicago faculty receive named, distinguished service professorships

Nineteen University of Chicago faculty members have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.

Profs. Marshall Chin, Thomas Ginsburg, Robert Kendrick, Ernst Lengyel, Christian Leuz and Jason Merchant have received distinguished service professorships.

Profs. Matthew Boyle, Jacob Goldin, Colleen M. Grogan, Tara O. Henderson, Sherwin S.W. Ho, Karen Kim, Guido Lorenzoni, Noémie Ndiaye, Shigehiro Oishi, Adriana Robertson, Tobin Sosnick, Gil Stein and Alan C. L. Yu have received named professorships.

All appointments are effective July 1, unless otherwise noted.

Biological Sciences Division

Marshall Chin has been named the Richard Parrillo Family Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Medicine.

Chin joined the University of Chicago in 1994 and currently serves as the associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, associate chief and director of research in General Internal Medicine, and co-director of the Chicago Center for Diabetes Translation Research.

The general internist and health services researcher has dedicated his career to reducing health disparities in the U.S. at the individual, organizational, community and policy levels. He co-directs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Advancing Health Equity program and Merck Foundation Bridging the Gap program. He co-chairs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services HCP LAN Health Equity Advisory Team, advises the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute on their health disparities portfolio, and serves as lead subject matter expert advising the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality on updating its strategic plan for health equity research.

Chin’s research includes evaluating the value of the federally qualified health center programs, improving diabetes outcomes in Chicago’s South Side through health care and community interventions, enhancing shared decision making among clinicians and LGBTQ persons of color, and using the arts to teach about advancing health equity. A former president of the Society of General Internal Medicine, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and will join its council in July 2022.

Tara O. Henderson has been named the Arthur and Marian Edelstein Professor in the Department of Pediatrics.

Henderson joined the UChicago faculty in 2005, and she currently serves as chief of pediatric cancer and blood diseases at Chicagoland Children’s Health Alliance, chief of pediatric hematology/oncology and stem cell transplantation at UChicago Medicine, and co-lead of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Her research focuses on the long-term outcomes of pediatric cancer survivors and has contributed to improvements in the understanding, management, and prevention of the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation therapy for these patients. Currently, she is the principal investigator of two National Cancer Institute (NCI)-funded intervention trials to improve screening and early detection of second cancers in adult survivors of childhood cancer as well as an NCI-funded international study of colorectal cancer in childhood, adolescent and young adult cancer survivors.

Henderson is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. In addition, she serves on the American Society of Clinical Oncology Board of Directors and the NCI Cancer Prevention Steering Committee, was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee on Childhood Cancer and Disability, and was a 2018 Presidential Leadership Scholar.

Sherwin S.W. Ho has been named the first Tang and Frank Families Professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery & Rehabilitation Medicine.

An expert in sports medicine, Ho joined the University of Chicago in 1992. He specializes in minimally invasive arthroscopic procedures of the shoulder, elbow, hip, knee and ankle, and serves as the director of UChicago’s Sports Medicine Fellowship Program. He is also a team physician for all varsity sports for the University of Chicago Maroons and Concordia University Chicago Cougars. He has served as a team physician for the U.S. and China's women's national and Olympic volleyball teams (silver medal in Beijing with the U.S., and gold medal in Rio with China), and currently serves as a member of the medical team for the WNBA Chicago Sky (WNBA champions in 2021).

Ho’s research involves the use of gene therapy to treat cartilage injuries in the knees. He has taught numerous advanced arthroscopic shoulder and knee courses for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and served two terms on the academy's Board of Councilors and as one of its official spokespersons. Recently elected to the prestigious Herodicus Society—an elite society of the world’s leading sports medicine physicians—Ho has been recognized as a "Top Doctor" by Castle and Connolly in every survey since its inception, as published biannually in Chicago magazine.

Karen Kim has been named the Sara and Harold Lincoln Thompson Professor in the Department of Medicine.

The Vice Provost for Research, Kim manages large-scale research infrastructure projects and works across the University to establish strategic research priorities and implementation strategies to increase research funding and its broader impact. She also serves as associate director of the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center and director of the Center for Asian Health Equity, the only research center dedicated to the study of Asian health disparities in the Midwest.

Kim’s research focuses on generating the evidence to reduce cancer disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations through community-engaged health services research methods and accounting for the impact of social determinants of health. Her research centers on the rigorous development and evaluation of multi-level strategies to advance health equity. She has received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Minority Health-National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the Agency for Health Research and Quality, as well as numerous foundations, including the American Cancer Society and the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation.

Deeply committed to civic engagement, Kim has dedicated significant time to advancing health through numerous nonprofit organizations and national boards. She was recently elected to serve on the Cook County Health and Hospital System Board of Directors and is a steering committee member for the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable. She received the BSD Distinguished Leader in Diversity and Inclusion Award, the John D. Arnold Mentor Award, the International Women’s Leadership award, the Chicago Foundation for Women Impact Award, and the Prevent Cancer Foundation’s Cancer Prevention Laurel for Increasing Health Equity through Innovation.

Ernst Lengyel has been named the Arthur L. and Lee G. Herbst Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the College.

Lengyel, chair of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, is a translational scientist and gynecologic oncologist. He is an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of ovarian cancer, including surgery for advanced ovarian cancer. Named one of the city’s “Top Doctors” by Chicago magazine every year since 2010, he joined the University of Chicago in 2004.

Lengyel directs a translational research laboratory focused on understanding ovarian cancer biology. Specifically, he looks at the interactions of ovarian cancer cells with the normal cells surrounding them to understand how the cellular microenvironment affects their growth. Recently, his group discovered how adipocyte and fibroblast cancer cell interactions promote ovarian cancer metastasis through the metabolic reprogramming of tumor cells. Lengyel has published more than 150 papers and recently received a prestigious NIH R35 Outstanding Investigator Award and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research. He became a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.

Tobin Sosnick has been named the William B. Graham Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the College.

The chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for the past decade, Sosnick joined the University in 1996. His research is based on the premise that rigorous and innovative studies of basic processes have broad implications in many areas of biological research. He is a strong believer in collaboration, having co-mentored more than two dozen students and postdoctoral fellows. His ever-evolving research interests started in low-temperature physics, but he now focuses on experimental and computational studies of the folding and dynamics of soluble and membrane proteins; applications of hydrogen exchange using NMR and mass spectrometry; optogenetics; cellular stress response; and, most recently, ion channels and mechanobiology.

Sosnick co-founded the Graduate Program in Biophysical Sciences, a unique dual-mentored graduate training program. A member of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics and a fellow of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, he earned a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University.

Humanities Division

Matthew Boyle has been named the first Emerson and Grace Wineland Pugh Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College.

Boyle works on topics in the philosophy of mind and on some issues in the history of philosophy. He has been especially concerned with the question of how we know our own minds and with debates about the scope and limits of such knowledge. He has written mainly on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, although he also has interests in the work of Aristotle, Aquinas, Fichte, Hegel and Sartre.

His book Transparency and Reflection, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2023, examines the distinction between rational and nonrational minds, the connection between rationality and the capacity for first-person awareness of one’s own cognitive activity, and the continuing relevance of these topics to contemporary debates in philosophy and psychology.

He has been the recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Rhodes Scholarship.

Robert Kendrick has been named the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Music and Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College.

Kendrick works in early modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin America, historical anthropology, traditional Mediterranean polyphony, laments and the visual arts. His most recent book is Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna. He has advised or worked with multiple early music performance groups, including Chicago’s Newberry Consort, Bologna’s Cappella Artemisia and Boston’s La Donna Musicale.

In 2018, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2019, a Knight of the Italian Republic (Class VI). He serves as a member of Milan’s Accademia Ambrosiana. He also received a 2006 Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring.

Jason Merchant has been named the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the College.

Merchant’s primary research is in formal syntax, where he has published and edited books and articles on grammatical theory, analyzing language structures in more than two dozen languages (with special emphasis on modern Greek and the West Germanic languages), and in formal semantics, morphology, and phonology. His work has helped establish the existence of silent syntactic structures in the grammatical representation of elliptical utterances, with important implications for computational and psycholinguistic models of language. He has also done experimental syntax, fieldwork in the Balkans, work on bilingual children’s language competency, and joint work on historical corpus semantics and legal interpretation showing that the phrase “bear arms” in the Second Amendment had an overwhelmingly plural and collective use only.

He has served as associate editor for Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, and for Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and is on the editorial boards of several journals and book series. He is a recipient of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and currently serves as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs of the University and as faculty director of UChicagoGRAD, overseeing policy for the University’s graduate programs and postdoctoral researchers.

Noémie Ndiaye has been named the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern English Literature in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College.

Ndiaye’s work explores the relation between theater—understood simultaneously as a medium, a practice, an industry, an institution, a social force, and a vibrant malleable set of literary forms—and the social, political, and cultural struggles of early modernity. These reveal crucial processes of racial, gender, and identity formation that have shaped our world. Her book, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press in August 2022, dissects the stagecraft used in early modern theater to represent and racialize Africans and Afro-descendants across borders in England, France and Spain.

Ndiaye is the co-editor of Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Pre-modern World (forthcoming with ACMRS Press in Spring 2023). She has published articles in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, Literature Compass and Thaêtre, as well as essays in many edited collections. She is currently at work on a new monograph tentatively entitled Early Modernity in Black and Brown and on a special anniversary issue of Shakespeare Quarterly.

Ndiaye greatly enjoys collaborating with theater makers and visual artists. She is a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Research Board, and co-curator of the forthcoming “Race Before Race” exhibition at the Newberry Library.

Gil Stein has been named the Rowe Professor in Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the Oriental Institute, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the College.

Stein serves as director of the Chicago Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation. His research investigates the development of the earliest urbanized states in the Near East, ancient economies, the archaeology of colonialism, inter-regional interaction, zooarchaeology and the preservation of cultural heritage. He has led field projects of excavation, survey and museum work in Turkey, Syria and Afghanistan, and is currently digging at the 5th-4th millennium BC Chalcolithic site of Surezha in Northeast Iraq. He also conducts cultural heritage preservation projects in Afghanistan and Central Asia (Uzbekistan).

Stein has written over 50 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews; including the book Rethinking World Systems: Diasporas, Colonies, and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia; and the edited volumes The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives and Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Afghanistan.

Alan C. L. Yu has been named the William Colvin Professor of Linguistics and the College.

His research investigates questions related to language variation and change, particularly with regard to the so-called “actuation problem”—that is, what causes the inception of language change? He has also done extensive work on Cantonese and Washo, a Native American language spoken in California and Nevada.

He serves as director of the UChicago Phonology Laboratory and co-editor-in-chief of Laboratory Phonology. He is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

His books include A Natural History of Infixation (2007), Origins of Sound Change: Approaches to Phonologization (2013), and The Handbook of Phonological Theory with Prof. John Goldsmith and Assoc. Prof. Jason Riggle (2011).

Social Sciences Division

Shigehiro Oishi has been named the Marshall Field IV Professor in the Department of Psychology and the College.

Oishi will join UChicago on July 1 from the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 2004. A leader in the study of happiness, psychological well-being, the experience of a meaningful life and cultural psychology, Oishi’s research program is distinctive in its methodological range and ingenuity as well as its broad theoretical reach. Currently, he is focused on the effects of economic inequality and residential mobility on the well-being of individuals and communities.

His work has been recognized by major awards, including the 2021 Outstanding Achievement Award for Advancing Cultural Psychology, awarded by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He also recently received a Templeton Foundation Grand Challenges Grant. Oishi earned his bachelor's degree from International Christian University in Tokyo, his master’s from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Booth School of Business

Christian Leuz has been named the first Charles F. Pohl Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting and Finance.

He studies the role of disclosure and transparency in capital markets and other settings; the economic effects of regulation; international accounting; corporate governance; and corporate financing.

Leuz is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research and Leibniz Institute SAFE; and a fellow at the European Corporate Governance Institute, Goethe Universität Frankfurt's Center for Financial Studies and CESifo Research Network.

He has published articles in Science, Journal of Finance, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Accounting & Economics and Review of Financial Studies. He is also an editor for the Journal of Accounting Research and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Accounting & Economics, The Accounting Review, the Journal of Business, Finance and Accounting and the Review of Accounting Studies.

Leuz received the 2016 and 2014 Distinguished Contribution to the Accounting Literature Awards; a Humboldt Research Award in 2012; and the 2011 Wildman Medal Award. He is recognized as a “Highly Cited Researcher” by Thomson Reuters and was included in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” five years in a row.

Guido Lorenzoni has been named the Joseph Sondheimer Professor of Economics. 

His fields of research include macroeconomics and international finance. In recent work, Lorenzoni analyzed the macroeconomic effects of the pandemic and of the post-pandemic recovery. He has focused on how employment losses in sectors directly affected by the pandemic can cause reductions in aggregate demand that propagate the shock to other sectors, and on the role of fiscal policy (in Macroeconomic Implications of COVID-19, American Economic Review, 2022). He also analyzed how sectoral asymmetries can make it harder for the central bank to achieve at the same time full employment and low inflation (in Monetary Policy in Times of Structural Reallocation, Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, 2021).

Lorenzoni is a research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research and a consultant for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. In 2021, he was a consultant to the Office of the Italian Prime Minister. In 2019, he was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society. He is a co-editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association and an associate editor of the American Economic Review. He is a past recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

Colleen M. Grogan has been named the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, effective Aug. 1.

Grogan is among the intellectual leaders studying health policy and politics with a primary focus on the U.S. health care system and its complex entitlement programs. Her first book, Healthy Voices/ Unhealthy Silence: Advocacy and Health Policy for the Poor, focused on elite decision-making and efforts to create a locally focused more democratic participatory process around America’s extremely large and growing Medicaid program. Her broader writing on Medicaid offers a fundamentally new way to view the politics of the program as both middle-class incorporation while stigmatizing the poor and vulnerable.

Her forthcoming second book, Grow and Hide: The History of America's Health Care State, documents the extent of public provision in developing the U.S. health care system, and shows how public discourse hid the role of government and public funding from 1860 to present.

Grogan is at work on two major research projects, one focused on the opioid epidemic and the other on the role of financialization in the U.S. health care system and its implications for health politics and health equity. She is also the associate editor of health policy for the American Journal of Public Health and was the editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy & Law from 2010-2016.

At UChicago, Grogan serves as the academic director of the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Health Administration and Policy. Effective July 1, she will also begin serving as the deputy dean for curriculum in the Crown Family School.

Law School

Thomas Ginsburg has been named the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor.

Ginsburg is internationally known for his expertise on constitutional design, international and comparative law, and democracy around the world. He counsels foreign governments and international organizations on constitutional design, and he cofounded the Comparative Constitutions Project, an acclaimed project that produces the most comprehensive data on the world’s constitutions. He also has played a leading role in bringing the tools of social science to international law scholarship, often using rigorous empirical methods to examine pressing issues.

He is the author of five books, including How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (with Prof. Aziz Huq, 2018), which explored the structure, decline, and preservation of democracy throughout the world and won the International Society of Public Law’s 2019 book prize. He also wrote Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003), which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association; The Endurance of National Constitutions (2009), which also won a best book prize from APSA; Judicial Reputation (2015); and Democracies and International Law (2021). He is also the editor of about two dozen volumes.

Before entering law teaching, he served as a legal adviser at the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, The Hague, Netherlands. He holds B.A., J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jacob Goldin has been named the first Richard M. Lipton Professor.

Goldin, who will join UChicago on July 1 from Stanford Law, is an expert in tax policy whose scholarship brings the tools of law and economics to bear on pressing societal issues such as childhood poverty.

In recent scholarship, Goldin focused on the Child Tax Credit, which was created in 1997 to combat child poverty and was temporarily expanded in 2021 as part of the federal COVID-19 stimulus package. Through his work, Goldin examined the net fiscal cost of the expansion and, in a 2021 paper, he and a coauthor examined data under pre-2021 rules to highlight stark racial disparities in CTC eligibility and benefits.

Goldin and two co-authors were also honored this spring with a National Institute for Health Care Management 2022 Research Award for a paper in which they used empirical analysis to demonstrate a link between increased health insurance enrollment and a decrease in mortality. NIHCM awards recognize the contributions of researchers and journalists who bring to light new evidence that advances the health system and the health of Americans. In “Health Insurance and Mortality: Experimental Evidence from Taxpayer Outreach” (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2021), Goldin and his coauthors studied the impact of an informational letter that the IRS sent to households that had paid a tax penalty for not enrolling in the Affordable Care Act. That intervention, they discovered, led both to increased insurance coverage in the following two years as well as reduced mortality among middle-aged adults.

Goldin holds a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton and a J.D. from Yale. He has been a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2018.

Adriana Robertson has been named the first Donald N. Pritzker Professor.

Robertson, who will join UChicago on July 1 from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is known for her innovative approach to scholarship, in which she often challenges assumptions to better understand how the world actually works.

Her research areas include business law, law and economics, financial markets and securities regulation. In one recent paper, Robertson and a co-author surveyed a representative sample of U.S. individuals about how well leading academic theories describe their financial beliefs and decisions. The results offered insight into what factors individuals consider when deciding what fraction of their portfolio to invest in stocks as well as how individuals consciously perceive themselves to be making financial decisions. In another recent paper, Robertson and three co-authors examined how well leading academic theories describe the motivations and beliefs of high-net-worth individuals. The responses of the wealthy, they found, were surprisingly similar to those of average households—though the wealthy were less driven by discomfort with the market, financial constraints and labor income considerations.

Robertson holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was on the board of the Yale Journal on Regulation and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism; a Ph.D. in Finance from the Yale School of Management; and a B.A. from the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Lorne T. Morgan Gold Medal in Economics.