Seventeen University of Chicago faculty members have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.
Profs. Fernando Alvarez, Diane Lauderdale, Jeffrey Matthews, Magne Mogstad, Mark Payne, Douglas Skinner, Marsha Rosner, Matthew Tirrell and Everett Vokes have been named distinguished service professors.
Profs. Mark Anderson, Leonardo Bursztyn, Guangbin Dong, Scott Gehlbach, Kevin Hector, Patrick Jagoda, Shabaana A. Khader and Matthew Notowidigdo have received named professorships.
All appointments were effective Jan. 1, 2023, unless otherwise noted.
Biological Sciences Division
Mark Anderson has been named the Paul and Allene Russell Professor in the Department of Medicine, effective Oct. 1, 2022.
Anderson serves as the Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, Dean of the Division of the Biological Sciences and Dean of the Pritzker School of Medicine, overseeing the medical and biological research, education, care delivery, and community engagement enterprise for UChicago Medicine, the Division of the Biological Sciences, and the Pritzker School of Medicine.
He is a leading expert on the mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias and heart failure. His research is focused on the role of the calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II in heart failure and cardiac arrhythmias, which are a common cause of sudden cardiac death. He has published more than 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and book reviews, has given invited talks across the United States and in more than a dozen nations, and has been included over many years in the Castle and Connolly listing of the top doctors in the U.S. In 2017, Anderson was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Anderson came to the University of Chicago Medicine from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he served as director of the Department of Medicine, the William Osler Professor of Medicine and physician-in-chief of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Previously he led the Cardiovascular Research Center and the Department of Medicine at the University of Iowa and served on the medical faculty at Vanderbilt University, where he directed educational and clinical programs.
Shabaana A. Khader has been named the first Bernard and Betty Roizman Professor in the Department of Microbiology and the College.
Khader’s research focuses on the interaction of the host immune system with the causal agent for tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. She studies the complex host-pathogen interaction mechanisms by which the bacterium escapes a protective casing of immune cells where it can be constrained for long periods in a latent state, and then spreads as a pathogenic organism throughout the host environment. Her group leverages fundamental discoveries in tuberculosis research to develop novel approaches to vaccine development, diagnostics and biomarkers, and defining new treatments for tuberculosis in humans. This ongoing work, in collaboration with academic and industry partnerships, aims to build new platforms for developing and testing the next generation of tuberculosis vaccines.
Khader is chair of the Department of Microbiology. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a recent alum of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program at Drexel University.
Diane S. Lauderdale has been named the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and the College.
Lauderdale is an epidemiologist whose research examines how behavioral and social factors influence health. Her recent work has focused on sleep as a behavioral risk factor. This work includes studies of how people’s perceptions of sleep duration and disruption are related to objective sleep measures, studies of how social factors such as social connectedness and loneliness relate to measured and perceived sleep, and studies of how both sleep perceptions and objective measures are associated with health outcomes, including coronary artery disease, obesity, mortality, cortisol levels, and sensory perception. Her group was the first to report marked racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in objective sleep duration and disruption among middle-aged adults, and they demonstrated that self-reported sleep duration is systematically biased relative to objective measures in a way that could generate spurious correlations with health. She has carried out a series of studies about the health of immigrants to the U.S., including work demonstrating that a surge in discrimination following 9/11 increased preterm birth and low birthweights for Arab-American women pregnant at the time. She has also worked with the complex systems group at Argonne National Laboratory on agent-based modeling of COVID-19 to inform public health policy.
Lauderdale is chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences. She is the founding director of UChicago's new Master of Public Health program and the Master of Science for Clinical Professionals in Public Health Sciences, a degree program that prepares clinicians to carry out research in clinical epidemiology and health services research. She has received the Biological Sciences Division award for Distinguished Senior Educator and Mentor and is a past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research. She is an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society.
Jeffrey Matthews has been named the Dallas B. Phemister Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Surgery.
A leading gastrointestinal surgeon with special expertise in diseases of the pancreas, Matthews also has made significant scientific contributions concerning fundamental mechanisms of regulation of epithelial ion transport and barrier function in the gastrointestinal tract.
Matthews is chair of the Department of Surgery and surgeon-in-chief for the University of Chicago Medicine—roles he has served in since 2006. He has authored more than 200 original articles, chapters and editorials, as well as multiple surgical textbooks. He has served on the editorial board of 12 prestigious surgical and scientific journals and is editor-in-chief emeritus of the Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery. A nationally and internationally respected leader, he is widely recognized for his support for increasing diversity and inclusion in the field of surgery.
He is a senior director of the American Board of Surgery and past president of the Society of Surgical Chairs, the Society of University Surgeons, and the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract (SSAT). He is also past chair of the Surgery Review Committee of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and a member of the Academy of Master Surgeon Educators of the American College of Surgeons.
Marsha Rich Rosner has been named the Charles B. Huggins Distinguished Service Professor in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and the College.
Rosner is an authority on fundamental signaling mechanisms leading to the generation of tumor cells and their progression to metastatic disease, particularly in triple-negative breast cancer that lacks targeted therapies. Her group uses systems level approaches, including activity-based proteomics, RNA sequencing, and mass spectrometry, as well as computational, molecular, biophysical, cellular and mouse model-based methodologies to identify and characterize key regulators of tumor growth and metastasis. Their studies have led to potential therapeutic treatments based on the concept of targeting key regulators of tumorigenesis, mimicking the action of metastasis suppressors or reprogramming signaling networks in cells to sensitize tumors to therapeutic agents.
Rosner is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received UChicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching twice, for cell biology and cancer biology.
Everett Vokes has been named the John E. Ultmann Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Radiation and Cellular Oncology.
Vokes has a distinguished career in clinical and translational research involving head, neck and lung cancer, and is an internationally renowned expert in treating these malignant tumors. His scientific focus has been on early-phase translational and clinical trials, the interaction of chemotherapy and radiation, and curative-intent combined modality therapies. Vokes has been a leader of integrated research teams at both the University of Chicago and on a national level, and his research has contributed to significantly increased cure and organ preservation rates. Vokes has maintained an active clinical practice for more than 30 years and has been named regularly on various “Best Doctors” lists.
Vokes is chair of the Department of Medicine and is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and American Association of Professors. His work is widely published, with more than 500 peer-reviewed papers and 90 book chapters. He has served on numerous advisory committees, review panels and editorial boards of several impactful journals, including the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet Oncology, Annals of Oncology, and Clinical Lung Cancer. He recently served as president for the American Society for Clinical Oncology and was one of two recipients of their Translational Research Professorship.
College
Scott Gehlbach has been named the Elise and Jack Lipsey Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Harris School of Public Policy and the College.
Gehlbach is a scholar of authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes. Much of his research is motivated by the contemporary and historical experience of Russia and Ukraine. His early work focused on the post-communist transition in these and neighboring countries—a period of enormous political and economic change that exposed the centrality of institutions and the often divergent effects of similar reforms. More recently, Gehlbach has examined the relationship between reform and rebellion in autocracies, with an empirical focus on late imperial Russia, and the impact of political connections on economic outcomes using large firm-level datasets from Ukraine. An early and leading practitioner of the use of game theory to model the institutions of authoritarian regimes, Gehlbach is the author of the widely used textbook Formal Models of Domestic Politics, now in its second edition.
Gehlbach is currently first vice president of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and organizer of the annual Summer Workshop in the Economic History and Historical Political Economy of Eurasia. At the University of Chicago, Gehlbach co-led the process to create a new Ph.D. Program in Political Economy, a joint offering of the Department of Political Science and the Harris School of Public Policy; he now leads the program as its director.
Patrick Jagoda has been named the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology and the College.
Jagoda specializes in media theory, game studies and design, and 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture. He’s the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab and also serves as executive editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry. Jagoda is the faculty director of the Weston Game Lab and the Media Arts and Design major at the University of Chicago. He co-directed and designed a number of board, card, video, and alternate reality game projects.
Additionally, Jagoda is the author of Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and co-author with Michael Maizels of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (MIT Press, 2016). His most recent publication is a collaborative multimedia book, Transmedia Stories Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (Stanford University Press, 2022). Along with these books, Jagoda has edited several books and special issues and published over 60 essays in humanistic journals and scientific journals. He is a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Humanities Division
Mark Payne has been named the Chester D. Tripp Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Classics and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College.
Within Greek and Roman literature, Payne has worked on lyric and didactic poetry, comedy, and Hellenistic poetry. More broadly, he is interested in animal and plant studies, primitivism ancient and modern, and, most recently, speculative fiction. Payne is the author of four books: Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (2007); The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (2010), for which he received the 2011 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; Hontology: Depressive Anthropology and the Shame of Life (2018); and Flowers of Time: On Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (2020).
Physical Sciences Division
Guangbin Dong has been named the first Weldon G. Brown Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the College.
His expertise is in organic synthesis, catalysis, organometallics and organic materials. His ongoing research interests lie in developing powerful chemical tools for addressing questions of biological or material importance. His research group tackles fundamental challenges in organic chemistry, including activation of inert carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds, synthesis of atomic precise graphenic materials, enabling automated organic synthesis to access complex molecules, etc.
His awards include the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award (2021), Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists Finalist (2022 and 2020), Sloan Research Fellowship (2014), Searle Scholar (2013), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2013-18).
Social Sciences Division
Fernando Alvarez has been named the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics and the College, effective Jan. 2, 2023.
Alvarez is a macroeconomist whose research focuses on dynamic general equilibrium models applied to asset pricing, international trade, labor market search and insurance, holdings of liquid assets, and nominal rigidities in price settings.
During his tenure at UChicago, he has been 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; and the European Central Bank and the Central Bank of Argentina. Alvarez has received fellowships and or grants from the European Central Bank, European Research Council, National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Tinker Foundation and Bank of France Foundation. He is an Econometric Society Fellow, an Economic Theory Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Leonardo Bursztyn has been named the Saieh Family Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics and the College, effective Jan. 2, 2023.
Bursztyn uses field experiments, often combined with observational data, to better understand how individuals' main economic decisions are shaped by their social environments. His work has examined educational, labor market, financial, consumption, and political decisions, both in developing and developed countries, and has been published in all leading economics journals.
Bursztyn is the co-director of the Political Economics Initiative at the Becker Friedman Institute at UChicago, as well as an editor of the Journal of Political Economy.
Magne Mogstad has been named the Gary S. Becker Distinguished Service Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics and the College.
His work combines economic theory, statistical methods and micro data to help understand the sources of inequality, the functioning of the labor market, and the effects of policy. Mogstaad has published extensively in the leading scholarly journals in economics. He is the lead editor of the Journal of Political Economy, a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, International Association of Applied Econometrics, and the Econometric Society, and the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize, and the IZA Young Labor Economist award.
Booth School of Business
Matthew Notowidigdo has been named the David McDaniel Keller Professor of Economics.
Notowidigdo studies a broad set of topics in labor economics and health economics. In labor economics, his research has focused on understanding the causes and consequences of long-term unemployment and the economic effects of unemployment insurance over the business cycle. Notowidigdo’s research in health economics focuses on the effects of public health insurance on labor supply and the effects of income on health spending. He is currently working with several state governments on large-scale randomized experiments of existing social insurance programs.
Outside of academia, Notowidigdo has corporate experience as an associate at Lehman Brothers in the Fixed Income Division and has consulted for several professional sports teams on ticket pricing. Within academia, he has teaching experience at both the undergraduate and graduate level. In 2004, Notowidigdo was honored with the Carleton E. Tucker Award for Teaching Excellence. He is currently a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and is a co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy Notowidigdo and an associate editor at The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Douglas Skinner has been named the Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting.
Skinner is a leading expert in corporate disclosure practices, corporate financial reporting, and corporate payout policy. His research is published in leading academic journals including the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, The Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Economics.
A member of the Chicago Booth faculty since 2005, Skinner has served as deputy dean for faculty since 2015 and served as interim dean in 2016–17. He was responsible for the construction and financing of the university’s Hong Kong campus, the home of Booth’s Executive MBA program in Asia, completed in 2018. He has extensive experience teaching in Booth’s MBA, EMBA, Executive Education, and Ph.D. programs. He currently teaches managerial accounting in Booth’s EMBA Program and Empirical Research Methods in Booth’s Ph.D. Program.
Divinity School
Kevin Hector has been named the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor in the Divinity School and the College.
Hector’s teaching and research are devoted largely to interpretive questions, particularly how best to understand faith commitments, and how the outworking of such commitments can shed light on broader cultural issues.
Drawing on recent work in theology and philosophy of language, Hector's first book, Theology without Metaphysics, develops an alternative account of language and its relation to God, thereby demonstrating that one need not choose between fitting God into a metaphysical framework and keeping God at a distance from language. In his second book, The Theological Project of Modernism: Faith and the Conditions of Mineness, Hector explores the idea of 'mineness,' in the sense of being able to identify with one's life or experience it as self-expressive, by tracing the development of this idea in modern theology.
In Hector’s third book, Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (slated for spring 2023), he argues that we can understand Christianity as a set of practices designed to transform one’s way of perceiving and being in the world. In his next book project, tentatively entitled “Life as a Theological Project: Creating a Usable Past,” Hector focuses on life stories as a site of theological reflection. Hector’s research on this project is part of a three-year collaborative grant, “Collaborative Inquiries in Christian Theological Anthropology,” which is funded by the Templeton Foundation.
Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Matthew Tirrell has been named the first D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College.
Since 2011, Tirrell has served as the dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, the first school in the nation dedicated to the emerging, fast-growing field of molecular engineering. Under Tirrell’s leadership, more than a dozen multi-investigator research collaborations have been founded with PME as the leader or a central participant. The PME community has grown to 45 faculty members, nearly 300 graduate students, and over 100 postdoctoral researchers.
Tirrell’s research focuses on the manipulation and measurement of polymer surface properties. His work has provided new insight into phenomena such as adhesion, friction and biocompatibility, and contributed to the development of new materials based on self-assembly of synthetic and bio-inspired materials.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is also a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
