Faculty members receive named chairs, distinguished service appointments

Eleven University faculty members - L'aszl'o Babai, Joy Bergelson, Thomas Christensen, Maud Ellman, Nicholas Epley, Martha Feldman, Heinrich Jaeger, Damon Phillips, Gary Steinberg, Eve Van Cauter and Amanda Woodward - have received named professorships, while 12 others - Raymond Ball, Bill Brown, Lars Hansen, Robert Kottwitz, Saul Levmore, Françoise Meltzer, Dennis Pardee, Steven Sibener, Abbie Smith, Robert Topel, Robert Vishny and Candace Vogler - had Distinguished Service Professor added to their titles.

 

Division of the Humanities

Bill Brown has been named the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture.

Brown is currently the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in English Language& Literature, Visual Arts, the Committee on the History of Culture, and the College. He studies literary, visual and material culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, from popular fiction, amusement parks and amateur photography, to the poetry of Walt Whitman and the fiction of Henry James and Gertrude Stein.

Brown's book, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), explored the role of objects in American literature at the turn of the last century and received the 2005 Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press.

His other books include The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane and the Economies of Play (1996) and Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Novels (1997). In 2001 he edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry titled Things.

Brown received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. He has been teaching at UChicago since 1989.

Thomas Christensen has been appointed the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities.

Currently, Christensen serves as Master of the Humanities Collegiate Division; he was chair of the Music Department from 2001-04.

Christensen's research focuses on the history of music theory from the Middle Ages to the present. He has been particularly interested in situating music theory within broader currents of intellectual and social history. Among his publications is Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (1993), which examined the late Baroque composer's music theory in the context of Enlightenment science and empiricism.

He also co-authored Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Koch. An active pianist, Christensen is the general editor of the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (2002), and he served as president of the Society for Music Theory from 1999 until 2001.

He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1985. He joined the UChicago faculty in 1999.

Maud Ellmann has been named the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor in the Development of the Novel in English.

Her research areas include modern British and Irish literature, gender studies and literary theory.

Ellmann is the author of The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (1987), The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (1993), Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (1994). Her 2003 book, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (2003), received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for literary scholarship from the British Academy.

Ellmann received an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty fellowship at Harvard University in 1989, and was named a Guggenheim fellow in 1998. She also has held fellowships from the ACLS and the National Humanities Center.

Ellmann received her B.A. from King's College, Cambridge, in 1975, and her D.Phil from St. Anne's College, Oxford, in 1982. Formerly Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Cambridge until 2004, she held the Donald and Marilyn Keough Chair in Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame before joining the UChicago faculty in 2010.

Martha Feldman has been appointed the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Music and the Humanities and chair of the Department of Music.

Currently Professor in Music and the College, Feldman studies European vernacular music of the 16th to early 20th centuries, with a focus on Italian opera. Her most recent book, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy, received the 2009 Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press. Her next project, The Castrato in Nature, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

Among Feldman's many honors are the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association in 2001, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and the Ruth A. Solie Prize of the American Musicological Society in 2007. She is also a 2009 recipient of the University's Graduate Teaching Award.

Feldman received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and has taught at UChicago since 1991.

Francoise Meltzer has been named the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities.

Currently the Mabel Greene Myers Professor in Romance Languages& Literatures, Comparative Literature and the College, Meltzer is also Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Professor of Religions in the Divinity School. Her work focuses on contemporary critical theory and 19th-century French and German literature. Meltzer's publications include Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (1994) and For Fear of the Fire Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001). Since 1982 she has co-edited Critical Inquiry.

Meltzer has recently completed a book entitled Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity, which the University of Chicago Press will publish next spring. The Press also will publish a series of essays on saints that Meltzer edited with UChicago colleague Jas Elsner.

In 2006, Meltzer received the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Acad'emiques (Knight in the Order of the Academic Palms) from the French government, the highest honor for academics in France.

She began teaching at UChicago in 1975, after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dennis Pardee has been appointed the Henry Crown Professor of Hebrew Studies.

Currently Professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Pardee studies northwest Semitic languages and is a leading scholar of Ugarit, the language spoken by the residents of the ancient Syrian city. He is the author of two-volume scholarly translation of Ugaritic rituals, many of which had been difficult for scholars to access before the publication of Pardee's translation.

In 2008, Pardee translated the inscription on an ancient stone slab uncovered by an Oriental Institute team in southeast Turkey. The slab provided the first written evidence in the belief that the soul was separate from the body.

Pardee teaches intermediate and advanced Biblical Hebrew, and is a 2010 recipient of the University's Graduate Teaching Award. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. In 2007 he delivered the British Academy's prestigious Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology.

He received his Ph.D. from UChicago in 1974 and has been teaching at UChicago since 1972.

Candace Vogler has been named the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor in Philosophy and the College.

Vogler works in ethics, action theory, social and political philosophy, psychoanalysis, sexuality and gender studies, and philosophy and literature. She has special interests in Marx, Aquinas, Rousseau, and Elizabeth Anscombe.

She is the author of two books, John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An essay in moral psychology (2001) and Reasonably Vicious (2002), and she co-edited The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Reflections on Disability Criticism (2001). She is currently working on two projects, a book about unconscious mental activity and a book about Anscombe's Intention.

Vogler received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1994 and joined the Chicago faculty that year.

 

 

Division of Biological Sciences

 

 

An accomplished researcher of the fine evolutionary balance between plants and bacteria, Joy M. Bergelson has been named the Louis Block Professor in Ecology& Evolution.

Bergelson's research career has focused on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana and its resistance to bacterial pathogens, and how that interaction influences and is influenced by ecological systems.

Combining genetic manipulations, field trials and greenhouse experiments with gene mapping, Bergelson's research has characterized the mechanisms that underlie the "trench warfare" of this biological relationship.

Bergelson also has focused on the other side of that prolonged "trench warfare," studying the evolution of bacteria such as Pseudomonas syringae and Pseudomonas viridiflava. The project inspired the creation of the University of Chicago Microbial Observatory, funded by the National Science Foundation, which studies the various bacterial species that colonize Arabidopsis and the ecological repercussions of these plant-bacteria interactions.

Bergelson, who chaired the Department of Ecology& Evolution in 2006, is the recipient of a Presidential Faculty fellowship, a Packard fellowship, a Young Investigator Award from the Society of Naturalists, and she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

She earned a Ph.D. in zoology/ecology in 1990 from the University of Washington.

A nationally recognized authority on the surgical treatment of bladder cancer, Gary D. Steinberg, has been named the Bruce and Beth White Family Professor of Urology.

Steinberg has been instrumental in developing innovative surgical procedures for patients with bladder and kidney cancers and studying potential molecular markers for the early detection and surveillance of bladder cancer. In addition to coordinating all of the clinical trials for the Urology section as the Director of Urologic Oncology, Steinberg also is leading several clinical trials for patients with urological malignancies, especially bladder cancer.

He presently chairs the scientific advisory board of the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network and the executive committee of the Bladder Cancer research network. He also is the past program chairman of the annual Bladder Cancer Think Tank Meeting.

Steinberg is a peer reviewer for multiple medical journals relating to cancer as well as a winner of the best reviewer award for bladder cancer from the Journal of Urology. He is the author or co-author of more than 140 medical articles, reviews and editorial commentaries. He is also on the editorial board of the journal Urology.

Prior to joining the UChicago faculty in 1994, Steinberg was an instructor at Johns Hopkins University and then an assistant professor of surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine.

An internationally known expert on the hormonal and metabolic consequences of chronic partial sleep deprivation and on the connections between circadian rhythms and the endocrine system in normal and pathological conditions, Eve Van Cauter has been named the Frederick H. Rawson Professor.

A series of landmark studies by Van Cauter and colleagues, beginning in 1999, have shown that chronic partial sleep loss can reduce the capacity of even young adults to perform basic metabolic functions, such as processing and storing carbohydrates or regulating hormone secretion.

A 2004 study found that partial sleep deprivation alters the circulating levels of the hormones that regulate hunger, causing an increase in appetite and a preference for calorie-dense, high-carbohydrate foods.

In 2008, Van Cauter and her research team linked poor sleep quality to increased diabetes risk, by showing that suppression of slow-wave sleep in healthy young adults significantly decreases their ability to regulate blood-sugar levels and increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.

 

She joined the UChicago faculty as a professor in 2000. Van Cauter is a recipient of the Gerald D. Aurbach Award from the Endocrine Society for outstanding contributions to research in endocrinology, and the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society.

A native of Belgium, Van Cauter completed her Ph.D. in biophysics from the Universit'e Libre de Bruxelles in 1977.

 

 

Division of the Physical Sciences

 

 

L'aszl'o Babai, Professor in Computer Science and Mathematics, has been appointed the George and Elizabeth Yovovich Professor.

He specializes in theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, especially computational complexity theory, algorithms, combinatorics and finite groups, with an emphasis on interactions between these fields. A native of Budapest, Hungary, Babai was instrumental in launching the highly acclaimed study-abroad program Budapest Semesters in Mathematics.

In 2005, he received the University's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. His other honors include the "Erd"os Prize" in mathematics from the Hungarian Academy of Science (1983) for his early work, and the international G"odel Prize (1993) in theoretical computer science for developing the concept of interactive proofs, which helped reshape the landscape of the theory of algorithms. In an indication of potential applications of his foundational work to emerging technologies, so-called "Babai points" in n-dimensional grids have recently been widely cited in the area of mobile communications.

Babai was elected a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1994, and spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1990 and 1994. He held the Andre'-Aisenstadt chair at the Universite' de Montre'al in fall 1996. In 2010, an international conference was held at Ohio State University to celebrate Babai's 60th birthday, with more than 100 mathematicians and computer scientists attending from all corners of the world, including Australia, China, India, Israel, Canada and the United States.

Heinrich Jaeger, Professor in Physics, has been named the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Professor.

Jaeger, who also is Director of the James Franck Institute, focuses much of his research on nanoscale physics. At this scale, metallic, superconducting and semiconducting structures display properties that differ fundamentally from behavior on larger scales. Another interest of Jaeger's is the flow of granular materials, including dry sand and powders.

These materials perplex physicists because they exhibit flow behavior far different from ordinary solids, liquids and gases. Yet understanding the peculiar behavior of granular materials is vital for predicting and controlling them under a variety of industrial, civil engineering and scientific conditions.

Jaeger's many honors include the University's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and an Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of Minnesota. A fellow of the American Physical Society, he was named one of Crain's Chicago Business' "40 Under 40" in 1995.

Jaeger received a Ph.D. in physics in 1987 from the University of Minnesota.

Robert Kottwitz, the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Professor in Mathematics, has been named the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor.

Kottwitz pursues research interests in number theory, representation theory and algebraic geometry. He has held many visiting positions, including three at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. He was co-organizer of the Clay Mathematics Institute Summer School held in Toronto in 2003, and co-organized a conference to honor University of Toronto mathematician James Arthur in 2004.

Kottwitz was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences earlier this year. Among his many invited talks was a presentation in Berlin at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians, and at conferences to honor mathematicians Jean-Pierre Labesse in Paris in 2003 and Robert MacPherson at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2004.

Kottwitz also has received a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching from the University.

Kottwitz, who received his Ph.D. in 1977 from Harvard University, taught at the University of Washington before joining the UChicago faculty in 1989.

Steven Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Professor in Chemistry, has had the distinction of Distinguished Service Professor added to his title.

Sibener employs advanced techniques such as molecular beams, laser spectroscopy and scanning probe microscopy to his pioneering research in chemical physics, materials research and nanoscience.

He served as director of the University's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, the multi-university Center for Materials Chemistry in the Space Environment, and The James Franck Institute, where he played a key role in the conceptualization and implementation of the Gordon Center for Integrative Science that opened in 2006. In 2009 he became the founding director of the national NSF Center for Energetic Non-Equilibrium Chemistry at Interfaces. He served as chairman of the Division of Chemical Physics of the American Physical Society.

Sibener chaired faculty committees in 2007 and 2009 that recommended the establishment of The Institute for Molecular Engineering, envisioned to explore engineering frontiers that bridge physical, biological and medical sciences.

His many honors include the Marlow Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was twice elected a Visiting Fellow of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.

Sibener received his Sc.B. in chemistry and B.A. in physics, both with honors, in 1975 from the University of Rochester, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977 and 1979, respectively. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories

 

 

Department of Social Sciences

 

 

Lars Hansen, one of the world's leading economists linking economic dynamics with econometric methods, has been named the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics and the College.

Hansen, formerly the Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor, is director of the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.

Hansen's research looks at ways to bridge the gap between dynamic economic theories and data. His work has led to improved methods for formulating, analyzing and testing models of dynamic economies. He has applied these methods to study the determinants of consumption, savings and security market prices.

In the 1980s, Hansen was the leading contributor to the development and application of rigorous estimation and testing methods for financial data. His 1982 Econometrica paper, "Large Sample Properties of Generalized-Methods of Moments Estimators," fundamentally altered the way that empirical research is done in finance, macroeconomics and economic dynamics more generally. He also has collaborated with co-authors to investigate a variety of questions related to risk and uncertainty using these empirical techniques.

A faculty member at UChicago since 1981, Hansen received his Ph.D. in economics in 1978 from the University of Minnesota.

Amanda Woodward, a leading expert on infant development, has been named the William S. Gray Professor in Psychology and the College.

Woodward served on the UChicago faculty from 1993 until 2005, when she was appointed a professor at the University of Maryland.

At Maryland, she was lab director of the Maryland Infant Studies program, which examined how much babies understand. She did similar work while at Chicago and showed that well before their first birthday, babies are keen observers of their surroundings, setting up the pathways for future development.

She operated a lab while at UChicago and will join colleagues working on child development in psychology.

Her research has been recognized with the John Merck Fund Young Scholars Award (1994), the APA Boyd McCandless Award (2000) and the James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical fellowship (2003-04). She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1992 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University.

 

 

Chicago Booth

 

 

Raymond Ball, the Sidney Davidson Professor of Accounting, has been named the Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting.

Ball studies corporate disclosure, earnings and stock prices, international accounting and finance, market efficiency and investment strategies.

He co-authored "An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers," an article published in the Journal of Accounting Research in 1968, which won the American Accounting Association's inaugural award for seminal contributions in accounting literature. The article revolutionized the understanding of the impact of corporate disclosure on share prices, and of earnings releases in particular. It laid the foundation for much of modern accounting literature.

Ball also is the author of "Anomalies in Relationships between Securities' Yields and Yield-surrogates," published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1978, the first academic reference to systematic anomalies in the theory of efficient markets.

Ball is a member of the board of trustees of Harbor Funds, and chairs its audit committee. He also serves on the advisory group for the financial reporting faculty of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

He received a Ph.D. in economics from UChicago in 1972.

Nicholas Epley has been named the John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavior Science. He joined the faculty in 2005 as an assistant professor and was appointed a professor in 2008.

Epley conducts research on the experimental study of social cognition, perspective taking and intuitive human judgment. He has published more than 50 articles about his research in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Psychological Review and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research also has been featured in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and broadcast on National Public Radio.

Epley received the Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2008, along with co-authors John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology, and Adam Waytz, a doctoral student in social psychology.

A fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, Epley taught at Harvard University before joining the Chicago Booth faculty.

He received a Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell University in 2001.

Damon Phillips has been named the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Organizations and Strategy.

Phillips studies social structural approaches to labor and product markets, organizational strategy and structure, as well as social network theory and analysis. His research has led to advancements in the understanding of labor markets, cultural markets and entrepreneurship, and he incorporates these advancements into his classes on management and strategic leadership.

Phillips is a recipient of a Charles E. Merrill Faculty Research scholarship, a two-time recipient of a Neubauer Family Faculty fellowship and a three-time recipient of a Kauffman Foundation Research Grant for Entrepreneurship.

He is a past associate editor and a member of the editorial board of Management Science, and also served on the editorial board of Administrative Science Quarterly. He is currently a special editor for an Organization Science issue on Status. He also is a faculty associate with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics,& Culture as well as the Population Research Center.

Phillips's published research includes "Client Leadership and the Promotion of Women Attorneys," written with C. M. Beckman and published in the American Sociological Review in 2005; and "Why Pseudonyms? Deception as Identity Preservation among Jazz Record Companies, 1920-1929," with Y. Kim in Organization Science in 2009.

He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1998 after receiving his Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Abbie Smith, the Boris and Irene Stern Professor of Accounting, has had the distinction of Distinguished Service Professor added to her named appointment.

Smith's research on corporate governance and transparency was stimulated by service on corporate and mutual fund boards as well as the heightened interest in these issues among accounting policy-makers, corporate officers and directors, auditors, analysts, and investors following a wave of corporate accounting scandals that began with Enron Corp.

Her research includes the paper, "Price Discovery and Dissemination of Private Information by Loan Syndicate Participants" (coauthored with Robert Bushman and Regina Wittenberg-Moerman), which will be published in the Journal of Accounting Research; "Does Analyst Following Increase Upon the Restriction of Insider Trading?" published in the Journal of Finance; and "What Determines Corporate Transparency," published in the Journal of Accounting Research-Supplement. The latter two papers were coauthored with Bushman and Joseph Piotroski.

Smith received a Marvin Bower fellowship from Harvard Business School, a McKinsey Award for Excellence in Teaching at Chicago Booth, and a GE Foundation Research Grant.

She is a member of the board of directors and chairs the audit committee of Ryder System Inc., where she also serves on the company's finance committee. She is a director of HNI Corp., and chairs its human resources and compensation committee. She also serves as a director and member of the audit committee of Dimensional Funds and the Chicago-based UBS Funds.

Smith received a Ph.D. in accounting from Cornell University in 1981.

Robert Topel, the Isidore Brown and Gladys J. Brown Professor of Economics, has had the distinction of Distinguished Service Professor added to his named chair.

Topel conducts economics research in a variety of areas, including labor economics, industrial organization and antitrust, business strategy, health economics, energy economics, national security economics, economic growth and public policy. He is the director of the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, and the director of the University of Chicago Energy Initiative.

In 2007 the International Health Economics Association awarded Topel and fellow Chicago Booth Professor Kevin Murphy with the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the best research paper in health economics. They received the honor for their paper "The Value of Health and Longevity," published in the Journal of Political Economy.

Topel is the author of six books and more than 60 articles and monographs in professional journals. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, an elected member of the Conference for Research on Income and Wealth, and an elected founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Topel joined the UChicago faculty in 1979 as he was completing his Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Robert Vishny has been appointed the Myron S. Scholes Distinguished Service Professor of Finance.

Vishny studies the market for corporate control, corporate governance around the world, privatization and the role of government in the economy, investor sentiment and the limits of arbitrage. His most recent research paper, "Unstable Banking," appears in the September 2010 issue of the Journal of Financial Economics. The paper was co-authored with Andre Shleifer.

Vishny, who currently teaches the course "Behavioral and Institutional Finance," previously taught "Cases in Financial Management and Corporate Finance" at Booth over a 20-year period. During that time on the faculty, Vishny moved up the ranks from assistant professor to the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance.

He is a founding partner of LSV Asset Management and he served as a trustee of College Retirement Equity Fund. His most recent research focuses on financial innovation and financial fragility.

Vishny received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

 

Law School

 

 

Saul Levmore has been named the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School. Formerly the William B. Graham Professor, he joined the Law School faculty in 1998 and was dean from 2001-09.

Levmore's research has cut across many fields, and most recently has concentrated on topics in public choice, Internet anonymity, financial and risk regulation, and double jeopardy. He has taught torts, corporations, non-profit organizations, comparative law, public choice, corporate tax, commercial law, insurance, contracts and copyright. Away from law, he has been an advisor on corporate governance issues and development strategies, and he has authored a book on games and puzzles.

Prior to joining the UChicago faculty, Levmore was the Brokaw professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a past president of the American Law Deans Association and a trustee of the Law School Admissions Council.

He received a Ph.D. in economics in 1978 and a J.D. in 1980, both from Yale University.