New faculty appointments made across University

As a returning faculty member of the Graduate School of Business at the University, Ray Ball begins his appointment as the Eli B. and Harriet B. Williams Professor of Business.

Ray Ball

Ball returns teaching at the University after having taught as an Assistant Professor in Accounting and Finance from 1969 to 1972. Prior to his return this Fall Quarter, Ball served as the Wesray professor in business administration in the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester.

He was a visiting professor in accounting at the London Business School from 1996 to 1999 and has held appointments at the Australian Graduate School of Management, the University of Queensland, Australia, and Loyola University of Chicago.

As a previous Fulbright scholar and Ford Foundation fellow, Ball also holds honorary degrees from Helsinki School of Economics and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

His research with Philip Brown on the relation between earnings and stock prices received the inaugural award for Seminal Contributions to the Accounting Literature from the American Accounting Association. Among his research interests are the institutions of a market economy; corporate disclosure; earnings and stock prices; international accounting; market efficiency and profitable investment strategies; and Australian economy and share market.

The author of four books, including Share Markets and Portfolio Theory, Ball also is the author of more than 60 published articles. His current research projects include “Tax Options and Venture Capital” (with Ludger Hentschel) and “Episodic Risk and Expected Return.”

He has been appointed as an editor of the GSB’s Journal of Accounting Research. Previously, he was editor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics and has been associate editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Business Finance and Accounting. Ball is the founding editor of the Australian Journal of Management.

He is a member of several academic associations, including the American Economic Association and the European Finance Association. He also is a member of the Advisory Council and a Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies (Sydney, Australia) as well as a professor in the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (Brussels).

Ball received a B.Com. degree in accounting from the University of NSW in 1965, and an M.B.A. in 1968 and a Ph.D. in 1972 from the GSB at the University.

John Brehm, an expert on survey research, political psychology and public opinion, has been named Professor in Political Science.

John Brehm

He is the author of The Phantom Respondents: Opinion Surveys and Political Representation and co-author of Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public.

His research on opinion polls looks at the problems caused by high refusal rates. People who are willing to answer polling questions are often quite different from those who choose not to respond, a factor that undermines the ability of polls to predict voter behavior. According to Brehm’s research, people who do not respond to polls are more socially isolated, less informed and less active in politics and society.

Brehm’s work on bureaucracies has explored the self-selection of people into bureaucracies as a reason for their effectiveness.

Currently, Brehm is working on three research projects, each of which he plans to publish as books. One project explores the decision-making process people go through as they answer questions on a poll, a second project looks at social trust and a third explores alternative conceptions of supervision in public bureaucracies.

Brehm received his A.B. in politics from Princeton University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan in 1990. He comes to Chicago from Duke University where he has taught since 1990.

Frederick de Armas, Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures, comes to Chicago from Pennsylvania State University, where he was the Edwin Erle Sparks professor in Spanish and comparative literature.

Frederick de Armas

An expert on the writings of Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Calderón, de Armas’ scholarly work has focused primarily on Spanish drama, prose and poetry of the Golden Age. He is the author of five books, including Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics and The Return of Astraea: An Astral Imperial Myth in Calderón.

His current projects include “Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art” and “A Theater of Planetary Gods: Spanish Drama 1580 – 1680.”

An editor and co-editor of numerous books in his field of expertise, de Armas has edited six volumes, including A Star-Crossed Golden Age: Myth and the Spanish Comedia and together with Patrick Cheney as his co-editor, Western Literary Careers: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance.

In addition to writing and editing books, de Armas has authored more than 90 research articles and essays that have been published in academic journals and texts. He has chaired and organized more than 40 conferences and panel discussions, including a session last year following a performance of Calderón’s Life’s a Dream at Court Theatre.

De Armas, who has been an Institute for the Arts & Humanistic Studies fellow, a Carnegie fellow, and has received multiple National Endowment for the Humanities grants and fellowships, has taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Duke University, where he served as a visiting professor; and at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, where he served as director of graduate studies in Spanish and Portuguese.

He received his B.A. from Stetson University, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Philip Hamburger, a distinguished legal historian, joins the University faculty as a Professor in Law after serving as a Visiting Professor at the Law School during Winter Quarter 2000.

During the fall of 1999, Hamburger was the Jack N. Pritzker distinguished visiting professor in law at Northwestern University School of Law. He was on the faculty of the George Washington University National Law Center from 1991 to 1999, where he was named the Oswald Symister Colclough research professor in law in 1995.

As a legal historian, Hamburger has focused on American constitutional law. His book, Separation of Church and State, will be published next year by Harvard University Press. His many published articles on the history of the law include “Revolution and Judicial Review: Chief Justice Holt’s Opinion in City of London v. Wood,” which was awarded the Sutherland Prize in 1994 as “the article deemed the most significant contribution to English legal history published in the past year.”

That same year, the Notre Dame Law Review honored him as among “scholars whose work has demonstrated a partisanship for justice, a commitment to

explore the moral questions raised in legal studies and an effort to respond to human need.” He also was awarded the Sutherland Prize in 1989 for his article, “The Development of the 19th-Century Consensus Theory of Contract.”

Hamburger’s early career included an appointment on the faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Law between 1985 and 1992, where he began as an associate professor and was named professor in 1988. He also was a visiting associate professor at the University of Virginia Law School in 1986. Before his academic career, Hamburger was an associate at the law firm of Schnader, Harrison, Segal and Lewis in Philadelphia.

He received a B.A. in History from Princeton University in 1979, where he graduated summa cum laude and was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a J.D. at Yale Law School in 1982, where he was awarded the Colby Townsend Prize for “best individual research done for academic credit by a member of the second-year class.”

Hamburger’s teaching has included courses in contracts, legal history, corporations, and trusts and estates.

John Heaton has joined the faculty in the Graduate School of Business at the University as the first James H. Lorie Professor. Heaton came to the University in July from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where he had served as a professor in finance since 1997.

John Heaton

He also was an associate professor at Northwestern University from 1995 to 1997, and he was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management from 1994 to 1995.

Heaton was a national fellow of the Hoover Institution prior to his appointments at MIT. He is also currently a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also has been a National Science Foundation fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellow, and has received Sloan Foundation Dissertation and NSF Doctoral Dissertation fellowships.

He is an editor for the Review of Financial Studies. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Money Credit and Banking and Review of Economics and Statistics.

Among Heaton’s scholarly papers, which have been published in such journals as Macroeconomic Dynamics, the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, are “Market Frictions, Savings Behavior and Portfolio Choice” (with Deborah Lucas); “Finite Sample Properties of Some Alternative GMM Estimates” (with Amir Yaron and Lars Peter Hanson); and “Evaluating the Effects of Incomplete Markets on Risk Sharing and Asset Pricing” (with Deborah Lucas).

He received his B. Com. from the University of Windsor in 1982, his M.A. in economics from the University of Western Ontario in 1984 and his Ph.D. in economics from the University in 1989.

Tanya Luhrmann, a cultural anthropologist who studies the connections between mental health and culture, has been named Professor in the Committee on Human Development. Her recent research focuses on ways in which psychiatric practices of both professional and folk-based varieties, operate as distinct cultural systems.

She is the author of Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Modern Culture, The Good Parsi: The Postcolonial Anxieties of an Indian Colonial Elite and the recently published Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry.

The latter is a comparison of the assumptions and practices of two forms of contemporary psychiatric practice in the United States. Based on five years of research in offices, clinics and hospitals, the book analyzes the contrasting cultural logistics implicit in the biomedical and psychodynamic understandings of mental illness and its treatment as well as the implications of these differences for the changes in practice arising from health management organizations.

In the book, Lurhmann shows how the biomedical model assumes a normal person has been afflicted by an external illness, whereas the psychodynamic model assumes that the conflicts faced by the ill person are similar to the problems faced by everyone and are a central part of the complexity of being human. Characteristic treatments, attitudes toward patients, and institutional practices all flow from these contrasting visions of the nature of mental illness, she writes.

Luhrmann has received numerous grants for fieldwork, including a Fulbright Senior Research award for research in India in 1990. She also has received several awards for her work, including the Stirling Prize from the American Anthropological Association for an essay on psychological anthropology titled “The Magic of Secrecy.”

Luhrmann joins the Chicago faculty after serving as a professor in anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She received a B.A. in folklore and mythology from Harvard University in 1981, an M.Phil. in social anthropology from Cambridge University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge University in 1986. She was a research fellow at Christ’s College at Cambridge, from 1985 to 1990.

Neil Shubin, who specializes in paleontology and evolutionary developmental biology, has been appointed Professor and Chairman of Organismal Biology & Anatomy.

Neil Shubin

Shubin, whose focus has been particularly on the evolution of limbs, found in 1997 a 375-million-year old fossil that had fingers. Before that, in 1995 he and his students discovered one of the earliest creatures to walk on land.

In 1982 while still a graduate student at Harvard University, Shubin collected a fossil, which 14 years later was determined to be that of the first known frog. This creature, found in the Arizona desert, lived 200 million years ago.

Shubin’s many honors include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Miller Research Institute of the University of California at Berkeley, the National Science Association of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Harvard-Danforth Award for Excellence in Teaching of Harvard University.

Shubin comes to Chicago from the University of Pennsylvania. He also is a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

Shubin received his A.B. from Columbia University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in organismal and evolutionary biology from Harvard in 1987.

Sally Radovick, former director of the Reproductive Endocrinology in the Division of Endocrinology at Children’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., has been appointed Professor in Pediatrics and Section Chief of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University Hospitals.

Sally Radovick

Radovick’s research interests center on the human gonadotropin-releasing hormone gene, which contributes to the control of reproduction. She has cloned the gene, determined its transcriptional start site, and now is examining intracellular signaling pathways within its neuron. One such pathway, Radovick found, may play a large role in pubertal development disorders. Most recently, she discovered a gene mutation present in many patients with growth hormone, prolactin and thyrotropin stimulating hormone deficiencies.

A native of Youngstown, Ohio, Radovick earned a B.A. in biology and chemistry and a M.S. in theoretical chemistry from Youngstown State University. She attended Northeastern Ohio University’s College of Medicine, where she earned her M.D. From 1983 to 1986, she completed her internship and residency at Case Western Reserve University’s Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. Radovick then completed a fellowship in pediatric endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

From 1990 to 1992, Radovick was an assistant professor of pediatrics at Case Western’s School of Medicine. Most recently, she was an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Radovick is a member of several professional societies and committees, including the Society for Pediatric Research, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the population study section of the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development

She is the author or co-author of 32 peer-reviewed articles, 10 book chapters and co-editor of Clinical Management of Pediatric Endocrine Disorders, a book published this year.

Theo van den Hout, one of the world’s leading authorities on Hittite, has joined the faculty as a Professor in the Oriental Institute.

Theo van den Hout

He is the author, and co-author or co-editor of seven books related to Hittite studies. He also has written numerous articles on topics related to the Hittite civilization.

His doctoral dissertation, published in 1995 in the distinguished Hittite studies series, Studien zu den Bogazk–y-Texten, explores a treaty text, putting it and the individuals involved into historical context. Van den Hout also is the author of The Purity of Kingship (1998),which examines the theory and practice of royal oracles.

Van den Hout is co-editor of the Hittite Dictionary, a position he shares with Harry Hoffner, the John A. Wilson Professor Emeritus in the Oriental Institute, and he is editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Religions. He began his work on the Hittite Dictionary as a Senior Research Associate, a position he held from 1988 to 1990.

Since 1992, he has been a professor for Hittite and related Anatolian languages as well as the history of Anatolia in the preclassic period at the University of Amsterdam.

He studied Hittite and related Anatolian languages at the University of Amsterdam and received his Ph.D. in 1989.

Fredric Wondisford, a nationally recognized authority on the molecular mechanisms of thyroid hormone action, hormonal regulation and thyroid hormone resistance, and on the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid disease, has been named Professor in Medicine and Chief of the Endocrinology Section at the University Medical Center.

Fredric Wondisford

Wondisford, 41, comes to the University from Boston where he was an associate professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the thyroid center and chief of the thyroid unit at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

A native of Youngstown, Ohio, Wondisford earned a joint B.S. from Youngstown State University, where he graduated summa cum laude, and an M.D. from the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine in 1983. He completed his medicine residency at University Hospitals of Cleveland and Case Western Reserve University in 1986, followed by two two-year fellowships at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, in Bethesda, Md. He taught at Case Western Reserve University for two years before joining the faculty at Harvard in 1992.

The author or co-author of more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals and 15 reviews or book chapters, Wondisford serves on the editorial boards of the specialty journals Endocrinology, and Thyroid.

He also shares two patents with a co-inventor, one for synthetic thyrotropin and one for the synthesis of recombinant human thyroid stimulating hormone, which is FDA approved for use in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with thyroid cancer.

Wondisford has received many awards, most recently the Weitzman Memorial Award and the Knoll Award for excellence in thyroid research from the Endocrine Society, and the Van Meter Award from the American Thyroid Association.

He is a member of the Executive Council of the American Thyroid Association, the Endocrinology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health and the Intramural Review Committee of the National Cancer Institute for the Laboratories of Metabolism and Biochemistry.

He and his wife, Sally Radovick, who also joined the faculty in September as a professor in pediatrics and section chief of pediatric endocrinology, live in Hyde Park with their two children.