A total of 27 faculty members recently have received named professorships or have been named distinguished service professors. Wendy Freedman and James Robinson have received University Professorships. Richard Jordan, Vinay Kumar, John List, Philip Reny and Shmuel Weinberger have received distinguished service professorships; and Daniel Adelman, Fernando Alvarez, Frederic Chong, John Cunningham, Dhammika Dharmapala, Darby English, Deborah Gorman-Smith, Melina Hale, Seenu Hariprasad, Alison LaCroix, Richard Miller, Sanjog Misra, Amit Seru, Wendy Stock, Theo van den Hout, Bernd Wittenbrink, George Wu, Dali Yang, Dingxin Zhao and Mark Zmijewski have received named professorships.
Biological Sciences Division
John Cunningham, Professor and Chair in the Department of Pediatrics, has been named the Donald N. Pritzker Professor.
Cunningham is an internationally known expert in the treatment and research of childhood cancers and blood diseases. He has particular expertise in treating leukemia, lymphoma, immunodeficiencies, sickle cell disease and thalassemia. He is a recognized leader in the field of pediatric stem cell transplantation, and helped to develop a bone marrow transplant technique for children who do not have a sibling match. An active researcher, Cunningham is involved in the development of clinical trials for the treatment of leukemia and genetic diseases. He also studies the biology and therapy of hemoglobinopathies, hematopoiesis, and the leukemia stem cell and transcriptional mechanisms operative during the development of vertebrate organisms.
Cunningham is an accomplished author and has published more than 70 scientific articles, as well as several book chapters and invited reviews. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and is a reviewer for Blood, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Cancer Research, and Genomics. Cunningham has also been selected as a top doctor by Chicago magazine. He is a member of the scientific council of the American Cancer Society and of the editorial board of The Oncologist.
Cunningham joined the UChicago faculty in 2006.
Melina Hale, Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the College, has been named William Rainey Harper Professor.
Hale’s research focuses on neural circuits involved in movement and their evolution, to better understand how the brain functions and is organized. She studies how the brain works with the body’s biomechanics to generate and modulate movement. By studying neural circuits in a comparative context, across the evolution of vertebrate animals, she studies how the neural circuits that mediate our own movements came to be and are constrained by their deep history.
Hale is dean of the Office of Faculty Affairs of the Biological Sciences Division. She chairs the Division of Comparative Biomechanics for the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology and has been featured in national programs for neuroscience outreach, including Explain the Brain from the National Science Foundation and iBiology.
Hale has received numerous honors for her work, including a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, a National Academies Education Fellowship in the Life Sciences and an Institute for Defense Analysis Fellowship. She is a prolific author and a highly regarded educator, teaching neuroscience, biology and biomechanics at all levels. She was awarded a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring in 2012 and a Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1994.
Hale joined the UChicago faculty in 2002.
Seenu Hariprasad, Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Science, has been named the inaugural Shui-Chin Lee Professor in Ophthalmology and Visual Science.
Hariprasad is an internationally renowned expert in diseases and surgery of the retina, vitreous and macula. He is a leading specialist in vitreoretinal disorders, including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic eye disease, intraocular infection and retinal vein occlusion. He has been recognized for bringing sutureless microincision vitrectomy techniques, which have reduced surgery time and postoperative pain, to the University of Chicago.
Hariprasad is an active leader in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Science, serving as chief of the Vitreoretinal Service, director of Clinical Research and director of the Fellowship in Vitreoretinal Diseases and Surgery. His clinical research has contributed to the understanding and use of new medications to combat a wide variety of vitreoretinal disorders. He has served as principal or sub-investigator in more than 40 national and international clinical trials. His work has led to nearly 200 peer-reviewed publications, meeting abstracts and textbook chapters, including a recently published textbook, Management of Retinal Vein Occlusion: Current Concepts.
Hariprasad has been awarded numerous honors, including an American Academy of Ophthalmology Achievement Award and an American Society of Retina Specialists Honor Achievement Award. He has been named a top doctor in publications such as US News & World Report and Chicago Magazine. Hariprasad was also selected as one of 135 leading Ophthalmologists in America by Becker’s ASC Review.
Hariprasad joined the UChicago faculty in 2005.
Vinay Kumar, currently the Donald N. Pritzker Professor and Chair in the Department of Pathology, has been named the Alice Hogge and Arthur A. Baer Distinguished Service Professor.
Kumar is an authority on the cellular and molecular biology of natural killer cells and a global leader in medical education. He was one of the first to propose the existence of a novel subset of lymphoid cells with antileukemic activity, subsequently identified as natural killer cells. His research has focused on understanding the origin and differentiation of these cells and their role in the rejection of transplanted bone marrow. His group also discovered that mutations in the human perforin gene give rise to severe and fatal disorders of immune dysregulation, which was recently recognized as a “pillar of immunology” by the Journal of Immunology.
Kumar is the senior editor and co-author of five pathology textbooks—including Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease, which has been translated into more than 13 languages and is the most widely used pathology text in the world. He has published more than 170 original articles in scientific journals, a dozen book chapters and nearly 20 review articles. He served on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Immunology, and recently completed his term as president of the American Society of Investigative Pathology. He has received many honors for his research, including election as a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Sciences in 2004 for “pioneering studies on the discovery of NK cells.”
Kumar joined the UChicago faculty in 2000.
Wendy Stock, Professor in the Department of Medicine, has been named the inaugural Anjuli Seth Nayak Professor.
Stock is a leading authority in the treatment of leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes, including hematopoietic cell transplants. Her research efforts are directed to the design of clinical trials that tailor therapy to individual patients, the identification of new prognostic factors in subsets of leukemia and the development of methods for molecular detection and monitoring of subclinical disease. Stock recently led national trials for treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in adults, focusing in particular on improving survival rates for young adults with ALL, and on the development of innovative trials for patients with advanced ALL and AML.
Stock is a co-leader of the University of Chicago Cancer Research Center’s Program in Hematopoiesis and Hematological Malignancies and is a core member of the Leukemia and Leukemia Correlative Sciences Committees in the Alliance, a National Cancer Institute sponsored clinical trials cooperative group. She is co-chair of the NCI national clinical trials network Leukemia Steering committee.
Stock has been awarded numerous honors, including the Catherine Aldinger Cancer Research Award and the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Gold DOC Award. She also has been named as a top doctor in US News & World Report and Chicago Magazine. A prolific author, her work has led to more than 160 publications, reviews and book chapters. She serves on the editorial boards for numerous high profile journals, including Blood and the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Stock joined the UChicago faculty in 2000.
Humanities Division
Darby English, Professor in the Department of Art History and the College, has been named the Carl Darling Buck Professor.
English is an art historian focused on modern and contemporary art. He is the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007) and co-editor of Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (MIT Press, 2003; republished Rizzoli, 2007). A new book, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, studies cultural experiments with modernist art undertaken over the period just prior to that year, and is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
From 2013-15, English was the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute. He is also consulting curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. English previously served on the Art History faculty at UChicago from 2003-13. In 2010, he received the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Theo van den Hout, Professor in the Oriental Institute, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the College, has been named the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Western Civilization.
While interested in all aspects of Late Bronze and Iron Age Anatolia, his work focuses on Hittite culture, history and language. His recent research interests include ancient record management, literacy and writing in Hittite society. Van den Hout is the editor-in-chief of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary at the Oriental Institute.
He is the author of several books, most recently The Elements of Hittite (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and many articles. Van den Hout is a corresponding member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Van den Hout joined the UChicago faculty in 2000.
Physical Sciences Division
Frederic Chong, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College, has been named the first Seymour Goodman Professor.
Chong’s research interests include emerging technologies for computing, quantum computing, multicore and embedded architectures, computer security, and sustainable computing. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Google, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Mitsubishi, Altera and Xilinx. He has led or co-led $20 million in awarded research, and contributed as a co-investigator to an additional $10 million in research funding.
Chong is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and DARPATech’s Significant Technical Achievement Award for the most significant project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency between 2001 and 2002. He also has received five best paper awards, including one from the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, two from the Computing Frontiers international conference, and two more “top picks” from IEEE Micromagazine. Chong was a faculty member and Chancellor’s fellow at the University of California, Davis from 1997 to 2005.
Chong joined the UChicago faculty in 2015.
Wendy Freedman, University Professor in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the College, has been named the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor.
Freedman focuses her research on measuring both the current and past expansion rates of the universe, and on characterizing the nature of dark energy—the mysterious force that causes the universe to accelerate its expansion. She leads a project to use the Spritzer Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Magellan telescope to measure the expansion rate to an accuracy of three percent. She also co-leads the Carnegie Supernova Project, which uses the 100-inch and Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas to better understand dark energy.
Freedman has served as chair of the board of directors of the Giant Magellan Telescope project since its inception in 2003. The telescope, which has entered its construction phase and is expected to become fully operational by 2024, will be able to produce images 10 times sharper than those of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Freedman is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. She also is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Physical Society. Additional honors include the American Philosophical Society’s Magellanic Prize and the Gruber Cosmology Prize.
Freedman joined the UChicago faculty in 2014.
Richard Jordan, Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the College, has been named the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor.
Jordan’s research focuses on organometallic chemistry, the study of compounds that contain metal-carbon bonds. The central theme of his work is the interplay between the structures and reactivity of organometallic compounds, especially in systems relevant to catalysis. His fundamental studies of cationic metallocene alkyl complexes comprised a significant advance in the development of modern single-site olefin polymerization catalysis. Jordan and his students are currently exploring new approaches to the synthesis of functionalized plastics. They harness a wide range of synthetic and spectroscopic methods for this work, including anaerobic synthesis techniques, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, molecular modeling and X-ray crystallography.
The author of approximately 200 publications and 14 patents, Jordan has given 350 invited lectures at conferences, universities and companies. He has consulted for and participated in research collaborations with numerous industrial organizations. He also has served on the editorial and advisory boards of Organometallics and the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry, the board of directors of the University of Iowa Research Foundation, and the Governing Board of the Council for Chemical Research.
Jordan has been a visiting professor at the University of Rennes in France and at Zhejiang University in China. He chaired the Organometallic Subdivision of the American Chemical Society in 1998 and the 2010 Gordon Research Conference on Organometallic Chemistry. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Jordan’s honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a Union Carbide Research Innovation Award.
Jordan joined the UChicago faculty in 1999.
Shmuel Weinberger, Professor and Chair in the Department of Mathematics and the College, has been named the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor.
Most of Weinberger’s research involves topology and geometry. In recent years, he has written papers on the applications of topology and geometry to areas including economics and the analysis of large data sets.
Weinberger has delivered more than 20 major invited addresses at institutions worldwide. He is the author of 110 papers and two books,Computers, Rigidity and Moduli: The Large Scale Geometry of Riemannian Moduli Space (2005), and The Topological Classification of Stratified Spaces (1994). He is editor of Geometriae Dedicata, and was a founding editor of the Journal of Topology and Analysis. He serves on the board of directors for the Foundations of Computational Mathematics, an international organization that supports and promotes research at the interface of mathematics and computation. Weinberger also is a member of the board of governors for UChicago’s Stevanovich Center, which is devoted to understanding the increasingly complex world of financial markets by integrating mathematics, statistics and economics.
Weinberger is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. Early in his career he earned a Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a Presidential Young Investigator Award.
Weinberger joined the UChicago faculty in 1984.
Social Sciences Division
Fernando Enrique Alvarez, Professor in the Department of Economics and the College, has been named the William C. Norby Professor.
Alvarez’s primary research interest is in macroeconomics, specializing in monetary economics, including discussions of interest and exchange rates, money demand and nominal rigidities; on asset pricing, including the study of asset market with frictions such as segmentation and borrowing restrictions; and on unemployment, including the study of frictional reallocation of workers across space, industries and skills levels.
A research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the Econometric Society, Alvarez has served as a research visitor to the Enaudi Institute of Economics and Finance in Rome, and worked as a consultant to the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He was also an associate editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics and editor of the Journal of Political Economy.
Alvarez has received numerous recognitions for his research, including fellowships from the European Central Bank, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Organization of American States, the National Science Foundation and the European Research Council.
Alvarez joined UChicago faculty in 1996.
John List, currently the Homer J. Livingston Professor in the Department of Economics and the College, has been named the Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor.
Chair of Economics, List is one of the world’s leading experts on experimental economics. He has pioneered work using field experiments in which he developed scientific methods for testing economic theory directly in the marketplace. His work has provided insight on such issues as pricing behavior, market structure, the valuation of non-marketed goods and services, the impact of environmental regulation, the economics of charitable giving and the impact of incentives on education and weight loss.
List received the Kenneth Galbraith Award in 2010 and in 2008 the Arrow Prize for Senior Economists for his research on behavioral economics in the field. He has been at the forefront of environmental economics and has served as senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers for Environmental and Resource Economics. List is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor and a university fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
List joined the UChicago faculty in 2005.
Philip Reny, currently the William C. Norby Professor in the Department of Economics and the College, has been named the Hugo F. Sonnenschein Distinguished Service Professor.
An economic theorist, Reny focuses on auction theory, information aggregation, game theory and the theory of mechanism design. His current research interests focus on the existence of Nash equilibrium in discontinuous games, providing a methodology for analyzing rational behavior in extensive form games with infinite actions and types, and optimal mechanism design with multi-dimensional private information.
Reny serves on the board of editors for American Economic Journal: Microeconomics and served as the head editor of Journal of Political Economy. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015, a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory in 2012, a charter member of the Game Theory Society in 1999 and a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1996.
Reny joined the UChicago faculty in 1999.
Dali Yang, Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College, has been named the William Claude Reavis Professor.
His scholarship focuses on the politics of China’s development. Among his numerous books and scholarly articles are Calamity and Reform in China (1996), which led in the innovative analysis of the causes of the Great Leap Famine and how that paradoxically helped unleash the post-Mao reforms, and Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China (2004). His current research deals with social risk regulation, governance and state-society relations. He is also collaborating on two related projects on China’s environmental governance.
Yang is the founding faculty director of the UChicago Center in Beijing, was a past chair of the political science department, and was the previous director of the Center for East Asian Studies and of the Committee on International Relations.
Yang joined the UChicago faculty in 1992.
Dingxin Zhao, Professor in the Department of Sociology and the College, has been named the Max Palevsky Professor.
Zhao’s research covers the areas of social movements, nationalism, historical sociology, social change and economic development. His interests also extend to micro-sociology, ecological sociology, sociological theory and methodology. His 2001 book on China’s pro-democracy movement, The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, won the American Sociological Society’s Charles Tilly Award for Best Book.
His new book, Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History, will be published by Oxford University Press this fall. He is now writing two books, one on social sciences methodology and another on Internet political activism in China today.
Zhao joined the UChicago faculty in 1996.
Chicago Booth School of Business
Daniel Adelman, Professor of Operations Management in the Chicago Booth School of Business, has been named the first Charles I. Clough Jr. Professor.
Adelman is a leading expert in business analytics, helping firms and institutions deploy data and decision analysis to build world-class strategic and tactical management capabilities. He conducts research on foundations of the operations research field, as well as studies the link between operational performance metrics and financial performance. Recent projects include work on the electricity smart grid, gasoline supply chains and software-release planning.
He leads the Healthcare Analytics Laboratory at Chicago Booth, in which teams of students work on real-world projects with providers to improve health care delivery through the analysis of large datasets. He also serves on the faculty advisory board of the newly created Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership.
Adelman publishes regularly and holds editorial positions in leading academic journals, including Area Editor for Operations Research, the flagship journal of the field. He teaches regularly in Chicago Booth’s Executive MBA Program.
Adelman joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1997.
Sanjog Misra, Professor of Marketing in the Chicago Booth School of Business, has been named the Charles H. Kellstadt Professor.
Misra is an expert in algorithmic and data-driven marketing. His research focuses on the use of structural econometric methods to study consumer and firm decisions. In particular, his research involves the construction of data-driven models aimed at understanding how consumers make choices and the investigation of firm decisions pertaining to advertising, pricing, distribution and sales-force management.
He currently serves as co-editor of Quantitative Marketing and Economics and has served as an associate editor for several marketing and management journals. He is also chairman of the research advisory committee at Convertro, part of Verizon’s AOL division, in which Misra advises the unit and its parent company on data strategy and science. Misra has worked on research projects with companies that include Eli Lilly, Sprint, MGM, Bausch & Lomb and Xerox.
Misra received a PhD in management at the State University of New York at Buffalo 1999, where he also earned a master’s degree in statistics. Misra joined Chicago Booth faculty in 2015. Prior to coming to Chicago Booth he held academic appointments at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA and the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School. Misra also has taught at the Johnson School at Cornell and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University as a visiting faculty member.
Amit Seru, Professor of Finance in the Chicago Booth School of Business, has been named the Dennis and Karen Chookaszian Professor.
Seru is known for his research in corporate finance. He studies issues related to financial intermediation and regulation, interaction of internal organization of firms with financing and investment, and incentive provision in firms.
His research has been published in top academic journals in finance and economics. His research on the behavior of banks and regulators during the housing crisis won the 2013 AQR Insight distinguished paper award and has been featured in major media, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the Economist. He received the 2014 Journal of Financial Economics best paper award for his work related to corporate finance and organizations. Seru is also the recipient of the 2013 Crowell Memorial Prize from PanAgora Asset Management, for cutting-edge research that connects theory and practice.
Seru joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2007.
Bernd Wittenbrink, Professor of Behavioral Science in the Chicago Booth School of Business, has been named the Robert S. Hamada Professor.
Wittenbrink is known for his research on how social stereotypes shape people’s decision-making and behavior. His research has been published in premier social psychology journals and has been featured by The New York Times, NBC and National Public Radio, among others. He has received funding though the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Wittenbrink is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and member of several professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association, Society of Personality and Social Psychology, and the European Association of Social Psychology.
Wittenbrink joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1996.
George Wu, Professor of Behavioral Science in the Chicago Booth School of Business, has been named the John P. and Lillian A. Gould Professor.
Wu studies the psychology of individual, managerial and organizational decision-making; decision analysis; and cognitive biases in bargaining and negotiation. Wu’s research has been published widely in a number of journals in economics, management science and psychology.
Additionally, he has received research funding as part of a three-year, $3.6 million project entitled “Enhancing the Human Experience through Behavioral Science: New Paths to Purpose,” to advance the behavioral science of purpose. Project research explores how people adopt, pursue and fulfill their intentions to accomplish something that is meaningful to the self, and often is of consequence to the world beyond the self.
From 1991 to 1997, Wu was on the faculty of Harvard Business School as an assistant and associate professor in the managerial economics area and then in the negotiation and decision-making group.
Wu joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1997.
Mark Zmijewski, currently the Leon Carroll Marshall Professor in the Chicago Booth School of Business, Accounting, has been named the first Charles T. Horngren Professor.
Zmijewski is an expert in on issues related to valuation, security analysis and the effect of financial and other disclosures on capital market participants and security prices. His research has appeared in several notable accounting journals, and he has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Accounting Research and the Accounting Review.
He is a former Chicago Booth deputy dean, PhD program faculty director and the Center for Research in Security Prices faculty director. He was awarded the 1999 Hillel J. Einhorn Excellence in Teaching Award from the Chicago Booth, a 1988 Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Chicago Booth and a 1984 Competitive Manuscript Award from the American Accounting Association. He is a member of the American Accounting Association and the American Finance Association.
Zmijewski joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1984.
Divinity School
Richard B. Miller, Professor in the Divinity School, has been named the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor.
Miller’s research interests include religion and public life, political and social ethics, theory and method in religious thought and ethics, and practical ethics.
He is the author of Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991); Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 1996); Children, Ethics and Modern Medicine (Indiana University Press, 2003), and Terror, Religion and Liberal Thought (Columbia University Press, 2010). His forthcoming book, Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics and Culture, endeavors to chart and expand the field of religious ethics and is due out from Columbia University Press next year.
Miller, PhD’85, is currently at work on two projects: a critical monograph on theory and method in the academic study of religion, and an intellectual history of “nature” in early-modern and modern critical discourses about religion. He previously taught at Indiana University and was the director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions from 2003 through 2013.
Miller joined the UChicago faculty in 2014.
Law School
Dhammika Dharmapala, Professor in the Law School, has been named the Julius Kreeger Professor.
Dharmapala is a leading authority in tax policy, public economics, and law and economics. His most recent work has sought to use quasi-experimental empirical methods to analyze the consequences of tax law and securities law. His scholarship has been published in leading scholarly journals in law, economics and finance. It has also been cited in various media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek and The Economist.
Dharmapala is an international research fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation and a fellow of the CESifo Research Network, based in Munich. He serves on the Board of Management of the International Institute of Public Finance. Until recently, he was editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal International Tax and Public Finance and served on the board of directors of the American Law and Economics Association.
Dharmapala joined the Law School faculty in 2015, after serving as the Walter Schaefer Visiting Professor in the Winter and Spring quarters of 2014.
Alison LaCroix, Professor in the Law School, has been named the Robert Newton Reid Professor.
LaCroix’s teaching and research interests include legal history, federalism, constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, civil procedure, law and linguistics, and law and literature. She is the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010) and the co-editor of Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law and the British Novel (Oxford University Press, 2013).
LaCroix is the Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Teaching Scholar at the Law School and an associate member of UChicago’s Department of History. While in law school, LaCroix served as essays editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. From 1999 to 2001, she practiced in the litigation department at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. Before joining the Law School faculty in 2006, she was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law.
LaCroix joined the UChicago faculty in 2006.
Public Policy Studies
James Robinson, Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy, has been named a University Professor.
Robinson’s research focuses on political economy, comparative politics and economic and political development, with a particular interest in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. He has written and co-authored numerous books and articles, including the widely acclaimed Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Recent articles include “Institutions, Human Capital and Development,” in the Annual Reviews of Economics; “Chiefs: Economic Development and Elite Control of Civil Society in Sierra Leone,” in the Journal of Political Economy. He currently conducts research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Haiti and in Colombia, where he has taught for many years during the summer at the University of the Andes in Bogotá.
A senior scholar of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies since 2004, Robinson served on the board of the Global Development Network from January 2009 to December 2011, and on the Swedish Development Policy Council, a committee advising the Swedish Foreign Minister on Sweden’s International Development Policy from 2007 to 2010. Robinson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. He was a Florence Gould Foundation Fellow at the Paris School of Economics in 2010; a 2007 Walter Channing Cabot Fellow awarded by Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences; a Carnegie Scholar in 2002; and a Susan Louis Dyer Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1999 to 2000.
Robinson joined the UChicago faculty in 2015.
School of Social Service Administration
Deborah Gorman-Smith, Professor in the School of Social Service Administration, has been named the Emily Klein Gidwitz Professor.
Gorman-Smith’s career has focused on conducting rigorous research designed to inform practice and policy to make a difference in the lives of individuals, families and communities. She has carried out research with children and families in inner-city neighborhoods and schools in Chicago. Much of this work has been devoted to designing and evaluating the impact of family focused and school-based preventive interventions on child and youth behavioral, academic and social outcomes, with a particular focus on youth violence. The Center for Youth Violence Prevention she directs is one of six National Academic Centers of Excellence funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In addition to her research, Gorman-Smith serves as a senior research fellow with the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy. She is immediate past president for the Society for Prevention Research and serves on a number of national and international boards and committees.
Gorman-Smith joined the UChicago faculty in 2012.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
