Nine scholars, researchers join University’s faculty

Nine distinguished scholars have received faculty appointments at the University this year and have joined their new Chicago colleagues in the Biological Sciences Division, the Division of the Humanities, the Social Sciences Division, the Oriental Institute and the Graduate School of Business.

The nine new members of the faculty are Richard Baron, Albert Bendelac, Philip Berger, Kathy Cohen, Michael Kremer, James Madara, Brian Popko, Gil Stein and Hisashi Yamamoto.

Richard Baron

Richard Baron, a pioneer in abdominal imaging and in the gastrointestinal applications of magnetic resonance and computed tomography scans, has been appointed Chairman of Radiology.

Baron, 53, comes to Chicago from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a professor of radiology and the founding president and CEO of the University of Pittsburgh Physicians Practice Plan. He also served there as chairman of the department of radiology from 1992 to 1999.

Particularly well known for his work on the diagnostic imaging of liver disease, Baron has received numerous research awards. He has served in leadership roles for several national radiology societies, most recently as president of the Society of Computed Body Tomography and Magnetic Resonance from 1998 to 1999.

The author of more than 100 articles in scientific journals, over 40 book chapters and review articles and hundreds of invited lectures, Baron has also served as an editorial consultant or reviewer for several medical specialty journals.

In addition to his research, he has played an active role as a teacher at the University of Pittsburgh and numerous national radiology specialty societies.

Baron graduated from Yale University in 1972 and earned his M.D. from the Washington University School of Medicine in 1976. He did his residency in radiology and a fellowship in abdominal radiology at Washington University’s Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology. He also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of Washington in Seattle prior to his appointment in Pittsburgh.

Albert Bendelac has joined the University faculty as a Professor in Pathology. He comes to Chicago from Princeton University, where he was an associate professor of molecular biology.

Bendelac studies the immune system, with particular emphasis on how the system recognizes markers other than proteins on the surface of cells. In the process, he has discovered a previously unknown component of the immune system, a type of natural killer T cell known as NK1.1 T cells.

These cells recognize lipids often found on the surface of bacterial cells. NK1.1 T cells are unusual because they appear to fit somewhere in between the brute weapons of the innate immune system and the high-tech targeted response of the adaptive immune system. They also appear to play a role in the onset of autoimmune diseases like type-1 diabetes, the prevention of infectious diseases and the control of rejection after transplantation.

A citizen of France, Bendelac earned his B.A. and Ph.D. in immunology and his M.D. from the University of Paris, where he completed subspecialties in dermatology and pathology.

He did his residency at the Public Hospital of Paris, followed by a research fellowship in clinical immunology at Hospital Necker in Paris. He came to the United States as a researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and he then joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1994.

Philip Berger

Philip Berger has joined the faculty of the University’s Graduate School of Business as Professor in Accounting and the school’s first Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow.

Berger’s research interests include firm valuation, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, and the effects of accounting and tax regulations. He also studies the quality of accounting disclosures and organizational design and corporate governance.

His work has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Accounting and Economics. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Accounting Research, on the advisory board of Israel’s Center for Economic Development and as an ad hoc reviewer for numerous academic journals.

In 1997, Berger was awarded the American Accounting Association’s Tax Manuscript Award for best paper published during 1993 to 1995 for “Explicit and Implicit Tax Effects of the R&D Tax Credit.”

Prior to joining the GSB, Berger served on the faculty of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Berger received a B.Com. in accounting with high honors and great distinction from the University of Saskatchewan College of Commerce in 1984 and an M.Sc. in accounting from the University of Saskatchewan College of Graduate Studies in 1987. He received an M.B.A. in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Accounting and Economics in 1992, both from the University’s GSB.

Cathy Cohen

Cathy Cohen, a leading scholar in race, politics and gender, has been named Professor in Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (See related story in the University of Chicago Chronicle, April 25, 2002, Vol. 21, No. 14, http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020425/cohen.shtml).

Formerly a member of the faculty at Yale University, Cohen studies political resistance and mobilization by marginal groups. She is the author of The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, which provides a fresh understanding of race in the nation. At Yale, Cohen founded the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics.

She received a B.A. in 1983 from Miami University, and a Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of Michigan.

Michael Kremer

Michael Kremer, an expert on logic and analytical philosophy, has joined the University faculty as a Professor in Philosophy. Currently, he is at work on a book, titled Nonsense, Logic, Ethics and Life, about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Kremer comes to Chicago from the University of Notre Dame, where was an associate professor in philosophy.

His articles, including “The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense” and “Kripke and the Logic of Truth,” have been published in journals such as Nošs, the Journal of the History of Philosophy and Mind.

He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, including “Sense and Meaning: The Origins and Development of the Distinction” in The Cambridge Companion to Frege and “Paradox and Reference” in Truth or Consequences.

He has lectured on such subjects as “To What Extent is Solipsism a Truth?” and has discussed the topic of “Mathematics and Meaning” at the Zeno Conference on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at the University of Utrecht.

Among his awards are an Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh and the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal in Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Kremer is a member of the American Philosophical Association and the Association for Symbolic Logic, and he is a reviewer for the Journal of Philosophical Logic, the Journal of Symbolic Logic and Synthese, among many other publications.

He earned his B.A. from the University of Toronto, and completed his M.A. in 1983 and his Ph.D. in 1986 at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1986 he became an instructor at the University of Notre Dame, an assistant professor in 1987 and then an associate professor in 1993 and a full professor in 2001.

Brian Popko

Brian Popko has been appointed the first Jack Miller Professor in Neurological Diseases. Popko comes to Chicago from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a professor of biochemistry and biophysics and director of the functional genomes core facility.

Popko is an authority on myelinating glial cells, the nervous system cells that produce myelin, an insulating substance that surrounds and protects neurons and allows them to function, and on interactions between the immune and nervous systems.

His research has provided significant insights into how glial cells interact with neurons, how the myelination process is regulated and how the myelin sheath––which is damaged by diseases such as multiple sclerosis and peripheral neuropathy––is maintained. Popko has developed several mouse models that allow his team to alter genes in glial cells and analyze how these changes affect the development and maintenance of the mammalian nervous system.

The author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, Popko also edited the book Mouse Models in the Study of Genetic Neurological Disorders.

He is the recipient of several research awards for his contributions to the field of neuroscience, including an Alfred P. Sloan Neuroscience Research Fellowship, a National Institutes of Health Research Career Development Award and the Jordi Folch-Pi Award from the American Society for Neurochemistry.

He earned a B.S. in microbiology from Pennsylvania State University, and his Ph.D. in microbiology in 1984 from the University of Miami School of Medicine. Before joining the faculty at UNC, he spent three years as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Gil Stein

Gil Stein, a distinguished scholar of the emergence of civilization in the ancient Near East, has been named Director and Professor in the Oriental Institute. He also has appointments in the Humanities Collegiate Division and Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations.

He joins the University after serving on the anthropology faculty at Northwestern University, where he helped organize a number of important archaeological expeditions to Turkey.

He is the author of Rethinking World Systems: Diasporas, Colonies, and the Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia (1999).

Stein received a B.A. from Yale University in 1978 and a Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Pennsylvania.

James Madara

One of the nation’s foremost academic pathologists and an authority on epithelial cell biology and on gastrointestinal disease, James Madara, the Dean of the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs, has been named the Richard T. Crane Professor in Pathology.

Madara, who began his deanship on July 1, has made important contributions to understanding the biology of the cells that line the digestive tract. He has elucidated, at the molecular level, how these cells permit the absorption of nutrients while serving as a barrier to intestinal bacteria, and how these cells help regulate the immune response to normal and disease-causing bacteria.

This research has advanced the understanding of infectious diseases that affect the intestines, the treatment of inflammatory disorders such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, and improvements in drug delivery.

In recognition of his research, Madara received the 1990 Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Award from the American Association of Pathologists, the 1991 Physician Scientist Award from the American Gastroenterological Association and the 1994 International State-of-the-Art Lectureship by the British Society of Gastroenterology.

In 1997, he was elected to the Association of American Physicians and received a prestigious MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Madara graduated from Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1975 and completed residency and research training in pathology at Harvard Medical School’s New England Deaconess and Peter Bent Brigham Hospitals. He joined the faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1980, serving as director of the division of gastrointestinal pathology.

In 1993, he was appointed professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and from 1994 until 1997, when he left Harvard for Emory, he served as director of the Harvard Digestive Diseases Center.

Hisashi Yamamoto

Hisashi Yamamoto has joined the faculty as the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry and the College.

An organic chemist, Yamamoto aims his research at engineering an artificial proton of a special shape, which could be used as an effective tool for driving chemical reactions. His efforts are focused on Lewis acid catalysis, which involves an acid catalyst that contains a metal ion. Many organic transformations proceed smoothly with such catalysts, which make reactions at a low temperature with high selectivity.

Yamamoto was a faculty member at the University of Kyoto from 1972 to 1997, at the University of Hawaii from 1977 to 1980 and at the University of Nagoya from 1980 to 2002.

His many honors include the Tetrahedron Chair in Organic Synthesis, Le Grand Prix de la Foundation Maison de la Chimie, the Max Tishler Prize, the Toray Science Award, the IBM Award and the Chemical Society of Japan Award.

He also has received the Prelog Medal, the Chunichi Award, the Houkou Award and the Chemical Society of Japan Award for Young Scientists.

He received his B.A. in 1967 from Kyoto University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971.