The following was published in UChicago News on Dec. 21, 2021. 

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

Profs. Nicholas Epley, Christopher Faraone, Bana Jabri and John Maunsell have received distinguished service professorships.

Profs. Curtis Bradley, Eric Budish, Hans Christensen, Daisy Delogu, Brent Doiron, James Evans, Ariel Kalil, Jonathan Levy, Valeri Nikolaev, Monica Peek, Andrei Pop, Devin Pope, Shyam Prabhakaran and Jane Risen and Asst. Prof. Emily Kern have received named professorships.

All appointments listed below are effective Jan. 1, 2022.

Biological Sciences Division

Brent Doiron has been named the first Heinrich Kluver Professor of Neurobiology, Statistics and the College.

Doiron uses advanced mathematics to understand how networks of neurons process information about sensory inputs. His research focuses on a combination of nonlinear dynamics and statistical mechanics, with an emphasis on the genesis and transfer of variability in neural circuits. He has developed core theoretical insights that have contributed to both neural coding and network learning. He works closely with experimental neuroscientists who work in the electrosensory, olfactory, somatosensory, auditory and visual systems.

Doiron serves as the inaugural director of the Grossman Center for Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior. His work has won awards from multiple organizations focused on neuroscience innovation, including the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative, the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Global Brain, and the Department of Defense’s prestigious Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship.

He came to UChicago from the University of Pittsburgh, where he co-directed the program in neural computation at the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint venture with Carnegie Mellon University. His postdoctoral research at New York University was recognized with both an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a Human Frontier Long-Term Fellowship.

Bana Jabri has been named the Sarah and Harold Lincoln Thompson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Pathology, Pediatrics and the College.

Jabri’s research focuses on celiac disease, autoimmune disorders and inflammatory bowel disease. Her laboratory’s overall interest is in mucosal and innate immunity, and more specifically the interplay between the immune system and mucosal surfaces. The lab has a particular interest in intestinal inflammatory diseases, with a focus on celiac disease and inflammatory bowel disease. Using a range of molecular and cellular approaches—including the study of signal transduction, cellular immunology and genetic engineering of mouse models—her group studies the developmental and functional aspects of immune function in the mouse and human intestine.

Jabri is chair of the Committee on Immunology and vice chair for Research for the Department of Medicine. Her awards include the international William. K Warren Jr. Prize for Basic Research in celiac disease, the Lloyd Mayer Mucosal Immunology Prize and the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education. She is a member of the Association of American Physicians.

John Maunsell has been named the Albert D. Lasker Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and the College.

Maunsell’s research is aimed at understanding how neuronal signals in the visual cerebral cortex generate perceptions and guide behavior. His group’s approach is to record from individual neurons in trained, behaving animals while they perform visual tasks. Much of that work is directed at understanding how paying attention to specific visual targets affects the way that they are represented in the brain, and how changes in the sensory representation caused by attention relate to changes in perception and behavior.

Maunsell is director of the Neuroscience Institute. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received awards from the McKnight Foundation and Office of Naval Research.

Monica Peek has been named the Ellen H. Block Professor for Health Justice in the Department of Medicine.

Peek’s research pursues health equity and social justice, with a focus on promoting equitable doctor-patient relationships among racial minorities, integrating the medical and social needs of patients, and addressing healthcare discrimination and structural racism that impact health outcomes—including diabetes, COVID-19 and many more chronic conditions. She has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed research papers and publications and has served as the principal investigator of multiple grants from institutions such as NIH/NIDDK, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation and the Merck Foundation.

She is the associate director of the Chicago Center for Diabetes Translation Research, the executive medical director of Community Health Innovation, and the director of research and associate director at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. She is also a senior associate editor for the journal Health Services Research, a member of the Executive Council for the American Diabetes Association, a member of the international advisory board for Physicians for Human Rights and a board member for the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

Peek has won numerous awards for community service and advocacy. She was named one of the “Top 40 under 40” by Crain’s Chicago Business and has been ranked among Chicago magazine’s Top Female Physicians.

Shyam Prabhakaran has been named the James Nelson and Anna Louise Raymond Professor in the Department of Neurology.

Prabhakaran is a vascular neurologist and epidemiologist and an internationally recognized leader in stroke research and treatment. He has led projects focused on uncovering the underlying causes of stroke using novel imaging techniques, improving stroke care delivery in prehospital and hospital settings, and optimizing stroke recovery. His research explores intersections between individual stroke risk factors and biomarkers, community health disparities, and learning health systems and uses computational and engineering methods to design and implement multi-level interventions to improve stroke care and patient outcomes. A powerful advocate for improving disparities in stroke care, he has been instrumental in reorganizing ambulance transports for acute stroke patients in Chicago and improving access to proven time-sensitive stroke treatments for Chicago residents.

He is chair of the Department of Neurology, an elected fellow of the American Heart Association and the American Neurological Association, and principal investigator of the Chicago Regional Coordinating Center in the National Institutes of Health’s Stroke Trials Network.

Humanities Division

Daisy Delogu has been named the Howard L. Willett Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the College.

A leading scholar of medieval literature, Delogu seeks to reveal the complexity of thought and sophistication of literary practice found in vernacular texts of the Middle Ages. She researches the ongoing relevance of medieval works for our own times by showing how the practices of figuration that characterize the literary—such as metaphor and allegory—convey ideas about human political society that continue to resonate with today’s readers.

Currently, Delogu is working on a book entitled Good Shepherds and “Sheep of Human Descent”: Pastoral Politics in late medieval France and Burgundy, in which she reveals how shepherds and sheep serve as avenues for thinking about relationality between populations and leaders. The figure of the good shepherd, for instance, offered both an ethical and a practical paradigm for political rule, while sheep provided a model for subjects as docile, obedient provisioners of abundance.

Christopher Faraone has been named the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College.

A UChicago faculty member since 1991, Faraone focuses his research on ancient Greek poetry, religion, and magic—topics about which he has spoken and published extensively. His books include The Getty Hexameters: Poetry, Magic and Mystery in Ancient Greek Selinous (2013), co-authored with Dirk Obbink, and Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times (2019).

His most recent book is Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus; in reviewing the book, Jan N. Bremmer at the University of Groningen wrote that Faraone conjured up “a world of pre-Homeric hexametrical poetry whose existence we did not know of,” and has “completely revolutionised our idea of the literary culture of early Greece.” With his UChicago colleague Sofia Torallas-Tovar, Faraone is currently co-directing an international project that aims at editing and translating the magical handbooks from Roman Egypt, The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies (forthcoming in 2022).

Faraone has twice been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities and has also won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was a fellow at the Getty Research Center, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the Institut d’Études Avancées in Paris.

Faraone also founded UChicago’s Center for the Study of Ancient Religions, which he directed from 2008–2018. In 2008, he received a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring. Previously, he served as associate editor of Classical Philology, published by UChicago Press.

Social Sciences Division

James Evans has been named the Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Sociology and the College.

Evans uses large-scale data, machine learning and generative models to understand how collectives think and what they know, inquiring into the emergence of ideas, shared patterns of reasoning, and the processes of attention, communication, agreement and certainty. As the founding director of UChicago’s Knowledge Lab, he designs observatories that connect data from text, images and other sensors with findings from interactive crowdsourcing and online experiments.

Evans is also the founding faculty director of the Masters in Computational Social Science Program. He teaches sought-after classes ranging from the Social Sciences Core curriculum, to upper-level courses on topics like “Imaginings of the End of the World,” and graduate courses on deep learning. In addition, and as a further demonstration of a remarkable commitment to student mentoring, he and his wife Jeanie have served as resident deans of the Campus North Residential Commons since 2016.

Emily Kern has been named the History of Science Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the College.

Kern earned her doctorate in history at Princeton in 2018 and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of New South Wales before joining UChicago’s Department of History as an assistant professor in July of this year. Her first book project, entitled The Cradle of Humanity: Science and the Making of African Origins, is focused on the multi-national and multi-armed scientific project of understanding human origins during the 19th and 20th centuries.

She has already garnered two major scholarly awards—a dissertation prize from the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, and the Ronald Rainger Early Career Award in the History of the Earth and Environmental Sciences from the History of Science Society.

Kern is the inaugural holder of this professorship, established last year by an anonymous donor to attract and support the top early-career scholars in the history of science, with a potential reach across the fields of history, anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

Jonathan Levy has been named the James Westfall Thompson Professor in the Department of History, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College.

Levy is among the intellectual leaders of a new vanguard in the study of economic history with a particular focus on the history of capitalism. His first book, the multiple prize-winning Freaks of Fortune (2012) offered a fundamentally new approach to the rise of modern corporate capitalism in the United States by putting financialization, particularly insurance, at the center of the story. His well-received second book, Ages of American Capitalism (2021), is an entirely original synthetic account for general readers of American capitalism from the 17th century to the present.

He is at work on three book-length projects. The Fetish of Liquidity expands on a series of invited lectures Levy gave in 2017 at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales that examined the history of capital investment since 1945. At the same time, he is beginning a project on the climate history of the city of Houston—work he began in 2019 at Harvard’s Center for History and Economics—and is also completing a book of essays. He has held fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Library of Congress and is also an outstanding teacher and mentor who has recently taken on leading the undergraduate program in Law, Letters and Society.

Andrei Pop has been named the Allan and Jean Frumkin Professor in the Department of History, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College.

Pop is an innovative and ambitious scholar who has made substantial contributions at the intersection of art history and philosophy. He is also an active colleague across campus, enlivening scholarly discourse in the Department of Art History, where he has a secondary appointment, as well as in his primary appointment home, the Committee on Social Thought.

His first book, Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (2015), offered an innovative re-examination of the ways in which 18th-century neo-classical and romantic artists—with Fuseli as the focal case—depicted and conceptualized classical antiquity. His most recent book is A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019).

In addition, Pop has produced an outstanding body of published work, including a translation of Karl Rosenkranz’s 1853 Ästhetik des Hässlichen (Aesthetics of Ugliness); an edited anthology, Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory(2014); as well as an impressive set of articles and essays. Pop is developing a new project on caricature, which deepens his thinking about the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in artistic expression and takes it into more politically topical territory.

Booth School of Business

Eric Budish has been named the first Paul G. McDermott Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship.

Budish’s main area of research is market design, with specific topics studied including financial markets, matching markets, ticket markets, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, and incentives for innovation. His most recent research has concerned various aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, especially on how to use market design to accelerate global vaccination.

Budish’s work on high-frequency trading and the design of financial exchanges received the AQR Insight Award and the Leo Melamed Award; has been discussed in major policy addresses by the New York Attorney General and the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; and has influenced exchange design proposals in both stock markets and futures markets. His research on patent design and cancer R&D received the Kauffman/iHEA Award for Health Care Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research, and the Arrow Award for the best paper in health economics. He has also been honored with a Marshall Scholarship, awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, and selected to give the 2017 AEA-AFA joint luncheon address.

Budish also serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-director of Chicago Booth’s Initiative on Global Markets.

Hans Christensen has been named the Chookaszian Family Professor of Accounting.

Christensen’s research primarily focuses on the effect on society of regulation aimed at incentivizing firms to act responsibly. This includes the effect of transparency regulation on health care prices and labor safety, as well as foreign corruption regulation on economic development. He is also an expert in international accounting harmonization, mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and disclosure behavior.

Within the corporate world, Christensen has worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where he audited financial statements prepared according to US-GAAP, IFRS and various national European accounting standards, and worked on complex deals such as transactions related to mergers and acquisitions.

His research has been published in the Journal of Accounting Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, the Review of Accounting Studies and the Review of Financial Studies.

Nicholas Epley has been named the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science.

Epley studies social cognition—how thinking people think about other thinking people—to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other. His research has been featured by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC and National Public Radio, among many others; and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Templeton Foundation.

His awards include the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the 2011 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, the 2015 Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science, and the 2018 Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. Epley was named a “professor to watch” by the Financial Times, one of the “World's Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors” by Poets and Quants, and one of the 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics in 2015 by Ethisphere.

He is the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want.

Valeri Nikolaev has been named the James H. Lorie Professor of Accounting.

Nikolaev studies the intersection of financial reporting and corporate finance. His current research focuses on understanding the quality of accounting information and on how contracts shape financial reporting. His broad interests include the role of accounting in capital markets, corporate governance, transparency, earnings manipulations and the applications of machine learning. He is a recipient of the Ernest R. Wish Accounting Research Award.

Nikolaev’s research has been published in the Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, The Accounting Review, Management Science and The Review of Accounting Studies. He has served as associate editor at the Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics and Management Science. Starting in 2022, Nikolaev will join the group of senior editors at the Journal of Accounting Research.

Devin Pope has been named the Steven G. Rothmeier Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics.

Pope studies a variety of topics at the intersection of economics and psychology. Using primarily observational data, he researches how psychological biases play out in field settings and economic markets. Examples include left-digit bias and projection bias in car markets, and time inconsistency in housing markets.

He has published work in top economics outlets such as the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy and Review of Economic Studies. He has also published in psychology and multidisciplinary outlets such as Management Science and Psychological Science.

Jane Risen has been named the H.G.B. Alexander Professor of Behavioral Science.

Risen conducts research in the areas of judgment and decision making, intuitive belief formation, magical thinking, stereotyping and prejudice, and managing emotion.

Her research has been published in several notable publications—including Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Review—and been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post and Psychology Today.

She is an elected fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and her work was recently recognized with 2021 Robert B. Cialdini Prize by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Harris School

Ariel Kalil has been named the Daniel Levin Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy.

She is a developmental psychologist who studies economic conditions, parenting and child development. Her current research examines the historical evolution of income-based gaps in parenting behavior and children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

At Harris, she directs the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and co-directs the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab. At the BIP Lab, she is leading a variety of field experiments designed to strengthen parental engagement and child development in low-income families using tools drawn from behavioral economics and neuroscience.

Kalil has received the William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholars Award, the Changing Faces of America's Children Young Scholars Award from the Foundation for Child Development, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 2003 she was the first-ever recipient of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Award for Early Research Contributions.

Law School

Curtis A. Bradley has been named the inaugural Allen M. Singer Professor of Law.

Bradley, a pioneer in the study and teaching of comparative foreign relations law and an international leader in the broader field of foreign relations law, joined the Law School in July 2021 after 16 years at Duke Law.

Bradley—whose work has been cited in numerous court decisions, including at least seven times by the U.S. Supreme Court—writes on issues such as the war powers of Congress and the president, the making of and withdrawal from international agreements, the presidential use of emergency powers, and the status of international law within the U.S. legal system. He has written or edited more than a half dozen books, including The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Foreign Relations Law, a 900-page volume that earlier this year was awarded the American Society of International Law’s inaugural Robert E. Dalton Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Field of Foreign Relations Law.

Bradley graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1988, and then clerked for Judge David Ebel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit and Justice Byron White of the U.S. Supreme Court.