Thirteen members of the University of Chicago faculty have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.
Profs. Frederic Chong, Christian Hansen, Augusta McMahon and Marcelo Nóbrega have been named distinguished service professorships; Profs. Megan Applewhite, Luís Bettencourt, Susan Burns, E. Summerson Carr, Henry Frisch, Linda Ginzel, Scott Oakes, Jiwoong Park and Ming-Te Wang have received named professorships.
Their appointments are effective July 1.
Biological Sciences Division
Megan Applewhite has been named the Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor in Honor of Mark Siegler in the Department of Surgery.
Applewhite is a board-certified surgeon who specializes in endocrine surgery, specifically focused on the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands. She performs surgical procedures that involve operating on these glands to help manage a wide range of conditions, including thyroid cancer, benign thyroid disease, parathyroid disease and adrenal disease. In addition to her clinical work, Applewhite conducts research on the care of endocrine surgery patients, as well topics at the intersection of surgery and clinical medical ethics. In her role as the associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, she focuses on bioethics education and research ethics, including the challenges surrounding surgical informed consent.
Her work in clinical research, as well as ethics research, has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Surgery, Annals of Internal Medicine, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, The American Journal of Bioethics and more. She is also dedicated teacher who has guided medical students as they embark on their medical careers and serves as a committed mentor for residents and fellows, inspiring and educating the next generation of health care professionals.
Luís Bettencourt has been named the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution and the College.
Bettencourt’s research focuses on the theory and modeling of complex systems and the processes that underlie the structure and growth of cities. His work creates multidisciplinary theory and methods that integrate concepts from the natural and social sciences, based on network structures and dynamical processes of learning and adaptation. His research also explores new data and global contexts that allow for quantitative comparisons through time and space to advance our understanding of nature and society.
He collaborates with governments, non-governmental organizations and interdisciplinary researchers worldwide to co-produce new insights and transformative practices for sustainable development. He is a pioneer in the field of urban science and wrote one of its foundational textbooks. His work has contributed significantly to a new sense of excitement about our scientific understanding of cities and processes of development, unifying urban themes over space and time and leading to new insights across complex systems more generally.
Bettencourt is also associate faculty of the Department of Sociology and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Vienna Complexity Science Hub.
Marcelo Nóbrega has been named the Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Human Genetics and the College.
Nóbrega was recently named chair of the Department of Human Genetics. He is a globally respected investigator whose work has deepened understanding of how noncoding regions of the genome influence gene regulation and human diseases, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, asthma and preterm birth. By combining functional genomics, computational biology and experimental approaches, his research has provided important insights into how genetic variation contributes to complex traits. This work is helping to advance the field of precision medicine and expand opportunities for therapeutic innovation.
In addition to his scientific contributions, Nóbrega is a highly regarded mentor and collaborator who has strengthened interdisciplinary partnerships across the Biological Sciences Division and the University. He is deeply committed to fostering scientific curiosity, collaboration and the development of future leaders in genetics.
He has served as an associate dean for faculty affairs for basic science faculty in the Biological Sciences Division, where he helped lead efforts to promote faculty development, including orientation of new faculty, career development and skill building workshops on such topics as preparing for promotion, scientific writing, grantsmanship, trainee mentoring, leadership training and wellness. He has also served as the chair of the Committee on Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology, along with several committees focused on recruitment, mentoring and training of graduate students and faculty.
Scott Oakes has been named the first Frank W. Fitch Professor in the Department of Pathology.
A pathologist and cell biologist, Oakes studies the signaling pathways that allow mammalian cells to sense, communicate and respond to intracellular stress and injury. His laboratory has made key discoveries into how these ancient stress-signaling pathways contribute to cancer, diabetes and other diseases, and has designed early therapeutics to control them.
He has a long history of training college students, Ph.D. students, MD/Ph.D. students, postdoctoral fellows and physician-scientists who have gone on to successful careers in biomedical research.
Oakes holds multiple leadership positions in the Biological Sciences Division. As the vice chair of research for the Department of Pathology, he has greatly expanded the Experimental Pathology section through the recruitment of pathologist-scientists. He co-leads the Molecular Mechanisms of Cancer Program at the UChicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is vice dean of clinical science research in the BSD and plays a central role in steering the research enterprise for the division, including the creation of the new Therapeutics Discovery Institute and Hyde Park Labs.
Oakes has won numerous awards for his research, including an HHMI Early Career Physician Scientist Award, American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award, Harrington Discovery Institute Scholar-Innovator Award, American Association for Cancer Research Award, Induction into the American Society for Clinical Investigation and Outstanding Investigator Award from the American Society for Investigative Pathology.
Physical Sciences Division
Frederic Chong has been named the Seymour Goodman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College.
Chong's research focuses on the design of software and hardware architectures for practical quantum computing. He was the lead principal investigator for the EPiQC Project (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing), a National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing from 2018-2024. Chong was a member of the National Quantum Advisory Committee from 2020-25, which advised the president on the National Quantum Initiative Program. In 2020, he co-founded Super.tech, a quantum software company, which was acquired by Infleqtion (formerly ColdQuanta) in 2022. In addition to his faculty position, Chong currently serves as chief scientist for quantum software at Infleqtion.
Prior to joining UChicago, Chong was a faculty member and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Davis, from 1997-2005. He was also a professor of computer science, director of computer engineering and director of the Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing at University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2005-2015.
He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, 17 best paper awards, and both UChicago’s Quantrell Undergraduate Teaching Award and its Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.
Henry Frisch has been named the Herman C. Bernick Family Professor in the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute and the College.
Frisch’s early work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, with Nobel laureate Jim Cronin, resulted in successful searches for point-like substructure of the proton, later shown to be quarks, and for muons from short-lived heavy particles, later shown to contain the charm quark.
Frisch was one of the founding members of the Collider Detector at Fermilab Collaboration, where he concentrated on the trigger electronics and rapid analysis. He was co-editor of the design report, drafted the collaboration bylaws, and co-invented the “Godparent Review” process for detector sub-systems. He led the first precise measurements of the Z and W boson masses, and then searched for events that are highly suppressed in the standard model.
Later, Frisch focused on developing instrumentation for experiments that could be done on the UChicago campus. He and his students set direct limits on the flux of cosmic monopoles, and developed systems for precise time measurements for use in large-area applications in particle and nuclear physics and medical imaging; the work has resulted in 14 patents.
Frisch has served on the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the Atomic Energy Commission, as divisional councilor of the American Physical Society, as an editor of Physical Review Letters and on the organizing committees of more than 30 conferences. At UChicago, he has served on the Committee of the College Council, as spokesman for the Committee of the Council of the Faculty Senate, and on the Presidential Search Committee of 2005.
He authored a 2025 textbook titled Honors Classical Mechanics: From Special Relativity to Newtonian Physics and has received UChicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Provost’s Teaching Award.
Jiwoong Park has been named the James Franck Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College.
Park’s research focuses on the science and technology of precisely engineered nanomaterials. Among his laboratory’s main goals are building atomically thin integrated circuitry and exploring novel electrical, optical, thermal and quantum properties of two-dimensional nanomaterials. These may lead to the development of advanced devices such as highly efficient solar cells, ultrasensitive bolometric detectors, novel valleytronic devices and molecule-based transistors.
Park’s awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the David Turnbull Lectureship. He was named Scientist of the Year by the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He has served as chair of the Department of Chemistry for the past three years.
Social Sciences Division
Susan Burns has been named the James Westfall Thompson Professor in the Departments of History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College.
A leading historian of early modern and modern Japanese history (1780s-1910s), Burns is especially known for her work in the history of medicine, law, gender and the body. She is the author of Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (2003) and Kingdom of the Sick: Leprosy, Citizenship, and Japan (2019). Her third book, Mapping Medical Modernity: Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868–1920 (2026), explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late-nineteenth- and early-20th-century Tokyo.
Burns also co-edited Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium (2013/2014), has contributed numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and guest-edited a special issue of U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal on “Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Context of Modernity.” Her work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the IIE Fulbright, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She currently chairs the Department of History and has previously directed the Center on East Asian Studies.
Booth School of Business
Linda Ginzel has been named the Konstantin Sokolov Clinical Professor of Managerial Psychology.
Ginzel specializes in negotiation, managerial psychology, leadership and executive development. She is an award-winning educator and the author of the best-selling book Choosing Leadership.
She served on the faculty at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is a charter member of the Association for Psychological Science and a member of the Academy of Management.
Her teaching has been recognized with numerous honors across Booth’s programs, including the Faculty Excellence Award, the inaugural Global Hillel J. Einhorn Excellence in Teaching Award, the Phoenix Award, multiple Hillel J. Einhorn Excellence in Teaching Awards, the Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching and the inaugural Master in Management Teaching Award from the Class of 2025.
Beyond the classroom, she is a prominent consumer and child-safety advocate. In 2000, President Bill Clinton presented her with the President’s Service Award in recognition of her work as cofounder of Kids In Danger, a nonprofit dedicated to improving children’s product safety. Linda also served on President Obama's Transition Team and on the board of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports.
Christian Hansen has been named the Wallace W. Booth Distinguished Service Professor of Econometrics, Statistics and Applied AI.
Hansen is the academic coordinator for Booth’s Sokolov Executive MBA Program and the faculty director of the CAIO program. He studies applied and theoretical econometrics and is co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.
Hansen’s research has chiefly been in the areas of the use of high-dimensional statistical methods in economic applications, estimation of panel data models, inference using clustered standard errors, quantile regression and weak instruments. His most recent research has looked at the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence as an input to estimation of causal and policy effects.
Hansen’s published work appears in leading journals in economics and statistics including the American Economic Review, Annals of Statistics, Econometrica, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, Review of Economics and Statistics and Review of Economic Studies. Hansen has been a Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at Booth and a National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant recipient.
Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
E. Summerson Carr has been named the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, the Department of Anthropology, and the College.
An anthropologist who studies social work and the helping professions, Carr’s ethnographic research has shaped how we understand expertise, professional knowledge and language in institutions. Working at the intersection of sociocultural, linguistic and medical anthropology, her work has especially influenced the study of behavioral health and psychotherapeutic interventions.
Carr’s first book, Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety (2010), traces the cultural and clinical history of American ideas about addiction and sobriety. Her most recent monograph, Working the Difference: Science, Spirit and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (2023), is an ethnographic study of the rise and spread of a prominent behavioral intervention. She is also the co-editor of the 2016 volume, Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Carr’s current project is a study of full-time “facility dogs” who are employed as full-time workers in human service settings.
Carr is the former president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the premier scholarly organization in the field
Ming-Te Wang has been named the first Kersten Professor in the Wallman Society of Fellows.
Wang is the faculty director of the Kersten Institute for Urban Education. His research seeks to understand how young people learn, grow and thrive across the many settings that shape their lives, including families, schools, neighborhoods, peer networks and digital spaces. With a focus on diversity, opportunity and equity, his work examines how social and educational environments can either widen or reduce disparities in academic, socioemotional and health outcomes among children and adolescents.
A central feature of Wang’s scholarship is its commitment to research-practice partnerships. He works closely with schools and communities to ensure that research is not only rigorous, but also useful, responsive and actionable. Through these partnerships, his work helps translate developmental science into strategies that support student engagement, strengthen school and family contexts, and promote more equitable opportunities for historically marginalized youth.
Wang has published extensively in leading peer-reviewed journals across child development, education, psychology and health. Since 2020, he has been consistently ranked among the top 1% of highly cited interdisciplinary researchers in science and social science. His scholarship has received national and international awards and recognition for advancing understanding of youth development, educational equity and the conditions that help young people thrive.
Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures
Augusta McMahon has been named the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and the College.
McMahon, PhD’93, is an archaeologist who has excavated widely in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and Yemen, including directing excavation projects at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak in Syria and at Lagash in Iraq. She currently directs the ISAC excavations at the important 6th-1st millennium B.C.E. religious centre of Nippur in south Iraq. Her research focuses on late prehistoric and historic Mesopotamia, particularly issues of early cities and urban challenges, social stress and warfare, and sensory archaeology.
McMahon returned to Chicago in the autumn of 2022 after teaching in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge since 1995.
