University welcomes 10 new faculty members

Ten distinguished scholars have received faculty appointments at the University this year and have joined their new Chicago colleagues in the Biological Sciences Division, the Physical Sciences Division, the Social Sciences Division and the Divinity School.

The 10 new members of the faculty are Lance Fortnow, Computer Sciences and Physical Sciences; Mark Ghiorso, Geophysical Sciences; Arthur Haney, Obstetrics & Gynecology; Amy Hollywood, Divinity School; Alexei Khokhlov, Astronomy & Astrophysics; Young-Kee Kim, Physics; Trevor Price, Ecology & Evolution; Paul Seidel, Mathematics; Robert Shimer, Economics; and Bernard Wasserstein, History.

Lance Fortnow

Lance Fortnowhas been appointed Professor in Computer Science and the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division. He specializes in computational complexity theory and its applications to bounded rationality in game theory, cryptography, learning theory, property testing, bioinformatics and electronic commerce.

Fortnow began his academic career as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and the College in 1989. He left the University in 1999, when he became a senior research scientist at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton. He has given invited talks in the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, the Czech Republic, India and the United States.

During Fortnow’s first stint at Chicago, he directed the dissertation of Dieter van Melkebeek, who received the Association of Computing Machinery’s Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1999. Another of Fortnow’s doctoral students, Carsten Lund, was runner-up for the same award in 1991.

Fortnow was a Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands between 1996 and 1997, and the recipient of a National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1992.

He graduated summa cum laude in mathematics and cum laude in computer science from Cornell University in 1985. He earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.

Mark Ghiorso

Mark Ghiorso has been appointed Professor in Geophysical Sciences and the College. Ghiorso is a computational petrologist who developed MELTS, an evolving, thermodynamically based model of rock formation from magma. His work has helped to predict several unexpected features of the melting behavior of peridotite, one of the most common types of rock formed in Earth’s interior.

Ghiorso is currently associate editor of the American Journal of Science and formerly served as associate editor of American Mineralogist and Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

Since 1980, Ghiorso has been a faculty member in the department of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. He is an elected fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union.

His honors include the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Dana Medal from the Mineralogical Society of America. He also has been the distinguished lecturer of that society.

Ghiorso received his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Arthur Haney

Arthur Haney, a specialist in reproductive endocrinology, infertility and the prevention of adhesions following gynecologic surgery, has been appointed the Catherine Lindsay Dobson Professor in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Haney came to Chicago as Chairman of Obstetrics & Gynecology last spring from Duke University, where he was the Roy T. Parker professor and director of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility.

The recipient of numerous honors, including a Distinguished Professor Award from Duke in 1986, Haney has served as president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, as president of the Congress of the International Federation of Fertility Societies, as well as an examiner and director of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

He has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals, authored dozens of review articles and book chapters, and served as editor for the 9th edition of the most widely used textbook for medical students and residents, Danforth’s Obstetrics and Gynecology.

He also has served as a consultant on fertility issues to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute on Environmental Health Sciences, the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Haney received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, and his M.D. from the University of Arizona in 1972. He joined the faculty at Duke University in 1976.

Amy Hollywood

A scholar of medieval Christian mysticism, Amy Hollywood joins the Chicago faculty as a Professor in the Divinity School.

Hollywood’s work explores questions of ritual, gender, the body, and the philosophy of religion. She is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, which won the Otto GrŸndler Prize for best book in Medieval Studies, and Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, published by the University Press.

She currently is beginning a project on experience and authority in high and late medieval Christian mysticism.

Prior to her professorship in religion at Dartmouth College, she taught at Rhodes College and Syracuse University, and was a visiting professor and fellow in women’s studies and religion at Harvard University. Hollywood also was a Visiting Associate Professor of Theology at Chicago during the 2001-02 academic year.

Among her awards is the Karen Wetterhahn Prize for Scholarship, the John M. Manley Huntington Award for Outstanding Teaching from Dartmouth College, and grants from the American Academy of Religion and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Hollywood earned an A.B. in religion with high honors from Bryn Mawr College in 1985, an M.A. in Religious Studies from Chicago in 1986, and a Ph.D. with distinction in Theology, also from Chicago, in 1991.

Alexei Khokhlov

Alexei Khokhlov, who specializes in computational astrophysics, fluid dynamics and supernovae (exploding stars), has been appointed Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics. He also will be affiliated with the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes.

Much of Khokhlov’s research pertains to type Ia supernovae, which play a crucial role in physics and astronomy, where they are used for measuring distances and estimating cosmological parameters of the universe. Among his major achievements are the first three-dimensional computer simulations of thermonuclear supernova explosions.

Khokhlov was a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory from 1996 to 2003. He was an astronomy researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1992 to 1996, and a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. He also served as a scientist for the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1984 to 1991.

While at the Naval Research Laboratory, Khokhlov garnered eight NRL awards for publications, technology transfer and other contributions.

He graduated from Moscow State University in 1981 with combined B.S. and M.S. degrees with honors in astronomy. He completed his Ph.D. in physics and mathematics at Moscow State in 1984.

Young-Kee Kim

Young-Kee Kim Young-Kee Kim, an experimental particle physicist who conducts research to understand the fundamental constituents of matter and the interactions between them, has been appointed Professor in Physics and the College. She also will be affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute.

Kim’s research focus is to understand the origin of mass via accurate determination of both the mass of the W boson, the particle that carries the force responsible for radioactive decay, and the mass of the top quark, the heaviest elementary particle. She and other scientists expect that these precision measurements will help to reveal the theory that describes the behavior of elementary particles and forces, and in particular explains the mechanism for how particles acquire their mass.

She is a member of the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration, which conducts particle physics research with the Tevatron, the most powerful particle collider in the world.

Kim was a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from 1990 to 1996, when she joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is a recipient of an Alfred Sloan Foundation Fellowship and an award from the National Science Foundation’s Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education.

Kim earned her B.S. and M.A. degrees from Korea University in Seoul, South Korea, and her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

Trevor Price

Trevor Price has been appointed Professor in Ecology & Evolution.

Price studies the roles of sexual selection and natural selection in speciation. Most of his fieldwork is in India and is focused on a single genus of birds, the Phylloscopus warblers, which breed in the Himalayas and in temperate Asia and winter in tropical Asia. He has been researching this group as a model for the way by which speciation occurs on continents.

In addition to his academic research, Price is actively involved in conservation issues in India. He has published nearly two-dozen papers on Indian natural history in both Indian and popular journals.

His most recent academic papers include: “Determinants of the Northern and Southern Range Limits of a Warbler” in the Journal of Biogeography; “The Imprint of History on Communities of North American and Asian Warblers” in American Naturalist; and “Speciation in a Ring” in Nature.

Price earned a B.A. from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He first joined the University faculty as a post-doctoral fellow in 1984, when he also received the American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator’s Award.

Price also held posts at the University of Houston and the University of California-San Diego before returning to Chicago.

Paul Seidel

Paul Seidel has been appointed Professor in Mathematics and the College. He maintains research interests in symplectic typology, mirror symmetry and homological algebra. At Chicago he hopes to develop his interest in string theory, a description of elementary particles that requires the existence of extra dimensions in order to unify gravity with the other three dominant forces of nature.

Seidel comes to Chicago from Imperial College, London, where he has been a professor of mathematics since 2002. He also has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn. Additionally, he was a research fellow and lecturer at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris from 1999 to 2001.

Seidel was an invited speaker to the differential geometry section of the International Congress of Mathematics in Beijing in 2002. He also has delivered seminars recently at Northwestern and Harvard universities, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2000, he received the European Mathematical Society Prize at the European Congress of Mathematics in Barcelona, Spain.

Seidel obtained his diploma in mathematics from Heidelberg University in 1994 and his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1998.

Robert Shimer

Robert Shimer, a specialist in labor markets, has been named Professor in Economics.

Shimer served as an associate professor of economics at Princeton University before coming to Chicago.

He has published numerous research papers, including “The Impact of Young Workers on the Aggregate Labor Market” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Assortative Matching and Search” (with Lones Smith) in Econometrica; and “Efficient Unemployment Insurance” (with Daron Acemoglu) in the Journal of Political Economy.

Shimer studies employment from a macroeconomic perspective and is currently looking at reasons for large fluctuations in the unemployment rate. He uses search models to study the length of time it takes workers to find jobs and employers to find employees. His work examines other aspects of employment searches as well, such as when workers choose inappropriate jobs and firms hire inappropriate workers. He also looks at the impact of job searches on distortions in the economy, such as company investment decisions.

Shimer, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, is an editor of BE Journals in Macroeconomics.

He received a B.A. in economics from Yale University in 1990; an M.Phil. in economics from Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1992; and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.

Bernard Wasserstein

Bernard Wasserstein, a specialist on modern European Jewish history and the history of modern Israel and Palestine, has been named the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor in History. He joins the faculty after serving as a professor of history at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Wasserstein studies the history of the Jews in 20th-century Europe as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict, seeking to understand its origins, its nature and the possibilities for its resolution.

Among his works are Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945; Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945; Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City; The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict; and The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, for which he won the Golden Dagger Prize for nonfiction from the Crime Writers Association in the United Kingdom. His latest book is Israelis and Palestinians: Why Do They Fight: Can They Stop?, which Yale University Press published this fall.

Wasserstein has taught in Britain, as well as at Brandeis University, where he was a faculty member from 1980 to 1996. He was president of Oxford University’s Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies from 1996 to 2000.

Wasserstein received a B.A. in modern history in 1969, an M.A. in modern history in 1972, a D.Phil. in modern history in 1974, and a D.Litt. in 2001, all from Oxford University.