Named chairs, DSPs given to 13 scholars on faculty

Eight University faculty members, Larry Hedges, John Huizinga, Alan Kolata, Kevin Murphy, Thomas Pavel, Sheldon Pollock, Raghuram Rajan and Richard Thaler, have received distinguished service professorships, and five faculty members, Emil Coccaro, Richard Cohn, Peter Constantin, Sally Radovick and Fredric Wondisford, have received named professorships. All of these new faculty appointments were effective Saturday, Jan. 1.

Larry Hedges

Larry Hedges, one of the nation’s leading scholars of methods for educational research, has been named the Stella M. Rowley Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology.

Hedges, who has been a faculty member since 1980, is an expert on the application of statistical methods to research on education, other social sciences and public policy. He also has contributed to the development of statistical methods for combining information from different research studies (often called meta-analysis). These methods have been widely used in public policy studies and in the social, biological and medical sciences.

A consultant to national leaders on educational matters, Hedges has served on many federal and international advisory committees, including the National Research Council.

Hedges has been Chairman of the University’s Department of Education and Director of Evaluation Activities for the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project. He is a prominent member of a group of quantitative theorists involved in cognitive research in the Department of Psychology and the University’s Center for Early Childhood Research.

He is co-principal investigator for the Data Research and Development Center at the National Opinion Research Center, which examines whether classroom reforms improve education and whether the use of such findings will improve education in schools throughout the nation.

Hedges received a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, in mathematics in 1978, and a Ph.D. in mathematical methods in educational research from Stanford University in 1980.

He is the co-author of Statistical Methods for Meta-Analysis; Combining Information: Statistical Issues and Opportunities for Research; and The Handbook of Research Synthesis.

John Huizinga

John Huizinga, the Walter David “Bud” Fackler Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business, has had the title of Distinguished Service Professor added to his named chair.

Huizinga is an expert in empirical studies in macroeconomics and finance, both domestic and international. His research also includes econometric theory.

Huizinga has been a consultant to the International Monetary Fund and a member of the American Economics Association and the Econometric Society.

He served as Deputy Dean for the Faculty at the GSB from 1993 to 2004, and he was in charge of the planning and construction of the GSB Hyde Park Center, which opened in the fall of 2004.

Huizinga’s many academic publications include “Investing the Correlation of Unobserved Expectations: Expected Returns in Equity and Foreign Exchange Markets and Other Examples,” with Robert Cumby, in the Journal of Monetary Economics, and “Testing and Autocorrection Structure of Disturbances in Ordinary Least Squares and Instrumental Variables Regressions,” also with Cumby, in Econometrica. Huizinga also wrote “An Empirical Investigation of the Long Run Behavior of Real Exchange Rates,” from the publication Carnegie-Rochester Series on Public Policy.

He is a referee for a number of scholarly publications including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Journal of Political Economy.

Before joining the GSB faculty in 1980, Huizinga taught economics for international business at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He received a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1980, and B.A. degrees in both economics and mathematics from Pomona College in 1976.

Alan Kolata

Alan Kolata, a pioneering scholar of the relationship between the environment and the development of ancient civilizations, has been named the Neukom Family Distinguished Service Professor in Anthropology and the College.

His most recent work is a collaborative project with colleagues in Cambodia to examine the interactions between people and the environment in the northwestern part of the country, home of the Angkor temple complex, among the world’s largest archaeological sites and one of its richest agricultural regions. This project integrates natural and social-science methods to analyze contemporary and historic patterns of land use change.

Kolata has done path-breaking work on the development of the Tiwanaku civilization in the high Andes of Bolivia near Lake Titicaca. His work demonstrates how the people of this area developed a sustainable agricultural system at an extreme altitude of 13,000 feet. Kolata has worked with the contemporary Aymara people to re-establish the ancient, raised-bed farming method. He also pursues research on the impact of climate change on ancient and modern civilizations.

Kolata, who is Chairman of Anthropology, joined the faculty in 1987, after serving on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received a B.A. in anthropology from Marquette University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1978.

He is the author of several books, including The Tiwanaku: Portrait of an Andean Civilization; Valley of the Spirits: A Journey into the Lost Realm of the Aymara; Tiwanaku and Its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization, Volume 1: Agroecology; and Tiwanaku and Its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization, Volume 2: Urban and Rural Archaeology.

Kevin Murphy

Kevin Murphy, the George J. Stigler Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business, has had the title of Distinguished Service Professor added to his named chair.

Murphy’s research includes empirical analysis of inequality, unemployment and relative wages, the economics of growth and development, and the economic value of improvements in health and longevity.

In 1997, Murphy received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economics Association, given biannually to the most outstanding American economist under age 40. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, and he is a fellow of the Econometric Society.

Murphy co-authored Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment with Gary Becker, the University Professor in Economics, Sociology and the GSB, and co-edited Measuring the Gains from Medical Research: An Economic Approach with Robert Topel, the Isidore Brown & Gladys J. Brown Professor of Urban and Labor Economics in the GSB.

Among his many scholarly articles and working papers are “Diminishing Returns: The Costs and Benefits of Increased Longevity,” with Topel, published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and “The Transition to a Market Economy: Pitfalls of Partial Planning Reform,” with Andre Shleifer and Robert Vishny, the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance in the GSB, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Murphy joined the faculty of the GSB in 1983 as a lecturer as he was completing his Ph.D. in Economics from the University. He received his A.B. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Thomas Pavel

Thomas Pavel, the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures, Comparative Literature, the Committee on Social Thought and the College, has recently been appointed the Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor.

Pavel has published several books on French 20th-century intellectual life, French 17th-century literature, literary history, literary theory, poetics and narrative prose.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1999, Pavel has been awarded the orders of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2004, and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques (France) in 1990. He was awarded the Jubilary Medal of Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth the Second (Canada) in 1977. In 1992, he received the Rene Welleck Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory by the American Comparative Literature Association.

Pavel’s books Fictional Worlds and Le Mirage linguistique have been translated into several languages. La Pensee du roman, his most recent scholarly publication, is a history of the novel from Greek romances to the present. Translations of that book into English, Spanish and Portuguese are forthcoming.

Pavel also has written several works of fiction, including La sixieme branche and Le Miroir persan.

Born in Romania, Pavel earned his M.A. in linguistics from the University of Bucharest, and his Ph.D. from the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences socials in Paris. He joined the Chicago faculty in 1998, and was Chairman of the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures from 2001 to 2004.

Sheldon Pollock

Sheldon Pollock, the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, has been named the George V. Bobrinskoy Distinguished Service Professor.

Pollock’s work focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of premodern South Asia, and he also is an expert in Sanskrit language and literature.

Pollock’s most recent publications include the forthcoming The Ends of Man at the End of Premodernity; The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India; and Power in Premodern India, all due out later this year. He edited Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (2003), and Cosmopolitanism (2002) with Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor & Co-Chair of South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, Carol Breckenridge and Homi Bhabha.

Pollock was the Gonda Memorial Lecturer at the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in 2004, and will be a visiting professor at the Coll�ge de France in 2005. He currently directs the international collaborative research project “Indian Knowledge-Systems on the Eve of Colonialism” with major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the National Science Foundation.

Pollock has been a member of the University faculty since 1989. He earned his A.B. in classics, and his A.M. and Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian studies, all from Harvard University.

Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Rajan, the Joseph L. Gidwitz Professor of Finance in the Graduate School of Business, has been named the Joseph L. Gidwitz Distinguished Service Professor of Finance.

Rajan is an expert on international financial intermediation and regulation, corporate finance, and the theory of organizations. During the current academic year he is on leave from the GSB and is serving as Economic Counselor and Director of Research for the International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C.

Rajan is the co-author of the book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, with Luigi Zingales, the Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance in the GSB.

Among Rajan’s many academic papers are “The Costs of Diversity: The Diversification Discount and Inefficient Investment,” with Henri Servaes and Zingales in the Journal of Finance, and “Liquidity Risk, Liquidity Creation and Finance Fragility: A Theory of Banking,” with Douglas Diamond, the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance in the GSB, in the Journal of Political Economy.

Rajan is a director of the American Finance Association and program director for corporate finance at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also is a founding member of the academic council of the Indian School of Business.

He is the recipient of many academic awards and honors, including the Fama/DFA Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics and the inaugural Fisher Black Prize, awarded by the American Finance Association to the person under age 40 who has contributed the most to the theory and practice of finance.

Rajan also won the Brattle Prize three times for distinguished papers in the Journal of Finance in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

He received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi).

Richard Thaler

Richard Thaler, the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics in the Graduate School of Business, has had the title of Distinguished Service Professor added to his named chair. He continues his work as Director of the Center for Decision Research at the Graduate School of Business.

Thaler’s research focuses on behavioral economics and finance, and the psychology of decision-making.

Thaler is the author of two books, Quasi-Rational Economics and The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life. He also is editor of Advances in Behavioral Finance.

Leading academic journals have published more than 60 of his research papers, including “Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Savings,” with Shlomo Benartzi, in the Journal of Political Economy; “Libertarian Paternalism is now an Oxymoron,” with Cass Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School, in the University of Chicago Law Review; and “Can the Stock Market Add and Subtract? Mispricing in Tech Stock Carve-outs,” with Owen Lamont, in the Journal of Political Economy.

Thaler, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, also co-directs the bureau’s Behavioral Economics Project with Robert Shiller.

Thaler joined the GSB faculty in 1995 after serving as the H.J. Louis professor of economics at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He also was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York.

He received a Ph.D. and M.A. both in economics from the University of Rochester, and a B.A. in economics from Case Western Reserve University.

Emil Coccaro

Emil Coccaro, appointed last November as Chairman of Psychiatry, has been named the Ellen C. Manning Professor in Psychiatry. Coccaro, who joined the Chicago faculty in 1999, founded and serves as Director of the Department of Psychiatry’s Clinical Neuroscience and Psychopharmacology Research Unit.

He studies the neuropharmacologic and genetic mechanisms of mood, anxiety and personality disorders, and is a leading authority on the neurobiology of suicidal and impulsive aggressive disorders, with a particular interest in intermittent explosive disorder. This work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and private foundations.

Coccaro has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and 40 book chapters, and has edited three books, two of which focus on the neurobiology and treatment of aggression and impulsivity. He is on the editorial boards of several journals, including Aggression and Violent Behavior, Journal of Personality Disorders, Psychiatric Annals and Psychiatry Reports.

Coccaro has received many honors, including the Marcel Heiman Memorial Award for Outstanding Research from Mount Sinai; the A.E. Bennett Neuropsychiatric Research Foundation Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry; and recognition as an exemplary psychiatrist from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. He served as a member of the FDA advisory committee on psychopharmacologic agents from 1995 to 1999, and currently he is a member of the scientific advisory board for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Coccaro received his B.S. in biology from Fordham College in 1975, followed by his M.D. from the New York University School of Medicine in 1979. After an internship in internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati and a residency in general psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, he joined the faculty of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1983.

Richard Cohn

Richard Cohn, Professor in Music and the College, has been named the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in Music.

Cohn is a music theorist whose work focuses on the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Bart—k and Reich. His theoretical interests focus on chromatic harmony, metric dissonance, Schenkerian theory, atonal pitch-class theory and Lewinian transformational theory.

Cohn is a two-time winner of the Society for Music Theory’s Outstanding Publication Award, in 1994 and 1997. He currently is a board member of the Chicago Chorale.

His professional service includes various positions in the Society for Music Theory, organizing the upcoming John Clough Memorial Conference, and serving on the advisory board of the Journal of Mathematics and Music and the board of directors of the American Brahms Society. Cohn also is editor of a book series in music theory for Oxford University Press.

Cohn has been a faculty member at the University since 1985, and was Chairman of the Department of Music from 1998 to 2001. He received his B.A. in music history from Brown University and earned a Ph.D. in music theory from the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester.

Peter Constantin

Peter Constantin, who specializes in analysis and mathematical physics, has been named the Louis Block Professor in Physical Sciences.

Constantin, formerly a Professor in Mathematics and the College, is the author of more than 100 papers and two books. The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative both fund his research.

He also is a member of the Basic Physics Group of the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes. A multi-institutional collaboration based at the University, the Flash Center studies the physics of exploding stars.

Constantin joined the Chicago faculty in 1985. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellow from 1986 to 1990, and was named a fellow of the Institute of Physics (United Kingdom) in 2004. He also has been an invited speaker to the International Congress of Mathematical Physics in Paris in 1994, the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1994, and the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Edinburgh in 1999.

He has made extended visits to research institutions around the world, including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Constantin received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in mathematics and mechanics from the University of Bucharest and his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Sally Radovick, Professor in Pediatrics and Section Chief of Pediatric Endocrinology, has been named the Mary Campau Ryerson Professor in Pediatrics.

Radovick studies the development and function of the human gonadotropin-releasing hormone neuron GnRH, and its role in the control of reproduction. She has developed GnRH-secreting cell lines that make studying the regulatory mechanisms of GnRH possible. She also has cloned the GnRH gene and determined its transcriptional start site. More recently, she has begun to study signaling pathways within the neuron.

Radovick also is interested in pediatric diabetes. In response to the epidemic of obesity in children, she began a pediatric diabetes prevention program at the University Hospitals.

From 1990 to 1992, Radovick was an assistant professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. From 1992 to 2000, she served as an assistant, then associate professor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School and as director of reproductive endocrinology at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

Radovick is the author or co-author of nearly 50 peer-reviewed articles and15 book chapters, and she is co-editor of Clinical Management of Pediatric Endocrine Disorders, a book published in 2003. She has chaired two NIH panels on reproduction and on pediatric diabetes, and serves on the editorial board of Endocrinology and as associate editor of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

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

Fredric Wondisford

Fredric Wondisford, Professor in Medicine and Chief of the Endocrinology Section, has been named the Fredrick H. Rawson Professor. 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, Wondisford came to the University in 2000.

His previous appointment at Harvard Medical School was associate professor in medicine, and he was director of the thyroid center and chief of the thyroid unit at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Wondisford studies the molecular mechanisms responsible for hormone regulation, and he was among the first to explore the mechanism of negative regulation by nuclear hormone receptors. Currently he is exploring the role of transcriptional co-repressors and co-activators in thyroid hormone regulation.

The author or co-author of 75 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 19 reviews or book chapters, and editor of the text Clinical Thyroid Disease, Wondisford serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and the Journal of Molecular Endocrinology.

He has received many awards, most recently the Outstanding Investigator Award from the American Federation for Medical Research.

He also shares four patents with a co-inventor for synthetic thyrotropin and the FDA-approved Thyrogen, which is used in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with thyroid cancer.

An Ohio native, Wondisford earned a B.S. from Youngstown State University, 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 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 Harvard in 1992.