DSPs, named professorships awarded to 10 on faculty

Ten faculty members have been named Distinguished Service Professors or appointed to named chairs, effective July 1. These are among the highest honors that can be bestowed upon faculty members by the University.

"These outstanding faculty members bring great honor to the University," President Sonnenschein said in making the announcement. "We are pleased to recognize their many contributions to Chicago. They have enhanced the quality of teaching and research at the University in immeasurable ways."

Distinguished Service Professorships have been awarded to six faculty members: Spencer Bloch, Robert Fogel, Frank Richter, Robert Soare, Geoffrey Stone and Wu Hung. Four professors have been appointed to named chairs: Christine Cassel, Kunio Doi, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Richard Taub. The faculty members and their appointments are as follows.

Spencer Bloch

Bloch, a noted expert in number theory, has been named the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor.

Bloch, who earlier this year was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses his research on algebraic geometry, K-theory and number theory. He has been the editor of several mathematics journals -- including the American Journal of Mathematics, the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Composito Mathematica and Communications in Algebra -- and he currently serves as editor of K-Theory, Mathematical Research Letters and the Journal of Algebraic Geometry.

He received his B.A. in 1966 from Harvard and his Ph.D. in 1971 from Columbia, and he taught at Princeton and the University of Michigan before joining the Mathematics Department at Chicago in 1976.

Robert Fogel

Fogel, 1993 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, has been named the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor. A faculty member in the Graduate School of Business, Economics and the Committee on Social Thought, he is also Director of the University's Center for Population Economics. He has been the Charles R. Walgreen Professor since 1981.

Fogel, together with Douglas North of Washington University, was recognized with the Nobel Prize for "having renewed research in economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change." He is author or co-author of 18 books, including the two-volume "Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery" (1974) and the four-volume "Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery" (1989-92). He has several books in progress, including "The Escape From Hunger and Early Death: Europe, America and the Third World: 1750-2100."

Fogel received his A.B. in 1948 from Cornell, his A.M. in 1960 from Columbia and his Ph.D. in 1963 from Johns Hopkins. He joined the faculty at Chicago in 1964 and taught here until 1975. After serving on the faculties at the University of Rochester and Harvard, he returned to Chicago in 1981.

Frank Richter

Richter (S.M.'71, Ph.D.'72), an expert on the convection of the earth's mantle, has been named the Sewell Avery Distinguished Service Professor.

Richter uses silicate melts to model the flow of materials beneath the earth's crust, mimicking processes in planetary interiors on a laboratory scale. He also studies the distribution of strontium isotopes in sea water as indicators of global tectonic activity.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the editorial boards of Geophysical Research Letters and the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Richter received his undergraduate degree from the Colorado School of Mines in 1965 and his S.M. in 1971 and his Ph.D. in 1972 from Chicago. He has been a faculty member in Geophysical Sciences since 1975 and Chairman of the department since 1985.

Robert Soare

Soare, a specialist in mathematical logic, has been named the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor.

A mathematician and computer scientist, Soare has focused his research on the theory of recursive, or computable, functions. A faculty member in Mathematics since 1975, Soare was named the first Chairman of Computer Science when the department was formed in 1983. He served as Chairman of the department until 1987, overseeing its development into an internationally recognized research and teaching program. He currently holds appointments in both departments.

Soare received his A.B. in 1963 from Princeton and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1967 from Cornell. Before joining the University faculty, he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Geoffrey Stone

Provost Geoffrey Stone (J.D.'71), an authority on civil rights, constitutional law and the First Amendment, has been named the Harry Kalven Jr. Distinguished Service Professor.

Stone, a faculty member in the Law School since 1973 and the Harry Kalven Jr. Professor since 1984, is co-author of the nation's leading constitutional law casebook and editor of the Supreme Court Review. In 1991, he was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal.

As Dean of the Law School from 1987 to 1993, Stone broadened the school's public-service program and strengthened the University's Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. He also expanded interdisciplinary studies within the Law School by adding faculty from the Political Science Department and the College.

He received his B.S. in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania and his J.D. in 1971 from Chicago, where he was editor-in-chief of the Law Review. He was clerk to Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals from 1971 to 1972 and to Justice William Brennan of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1972 to 1973, when he joined the University faculty.

Wu Hung

Wu, an internationally recognized expert on Chinese art history, has been named the first Centennial Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese History. The chair has been endowed by an anonymous donor.

Wu's interdisciplinary work in Chinese art history combines textual, historical, iconographic, archaeological and stylistic methodologies. Through his many books and articles, he has become known as a major contributor to the understanding of early Chinese art across a broad range of materials, periods and subjects. His first book, "The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art" (1989), won the 1990 Joseph Levinson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for the best book in traditional Chinese studies.

A faculty member in Art, Wu has taught at the University since the beginning of this quarter. He previously taught at Harvard, where he was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities. He received his B.A. in 1968 and his M.A. in 1980 from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and his Ph.D. in 1987 from Harvard.

Christine Cassel

Cassel (A.B.'67), a leading gerontologist, medical ethicist and expert on health-care policy, has been named the first George M. Eisenberg Professor in Geriatrics.

The new professorship was endowed by the Eisenberg Foundation for Charities in memory of the founder of American Decal Manufacturing.

Cassel, an expert on dementing diseases of the elderly and on the care of terminally ill patients, played a leading role in the creation of the Frankel Geriatric Care Unit, a specialized inpatient setting for frail older patients at Bernard Mitchell Hospital. She also has long been a champion of a national health plan and long-term care for the elderly.

Cassel has a joint appointment in Medicine and the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and is Section Chief of General Internal Medicine. She serves as Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, the Center for Health Policy Research and the Center for Aging, Health & Society.

She held positions at Oregon Health Sciences University and at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York before joining the Chicago faculty in 1985. She received her A.B. in 1967 from Chicago and her M.D. in 1976 from the University of Massachusetts.

Kunio Doi

Doi, an internationally known medical imaging physicist, has been named the Ralph W. Gerard Professor in the Biological Sciences.

Doi's research has helped elucidate or quantify nearly all physical aspects of the radiographic process, resulting in improved image quality and reduced patient exposure during angiography, skeletal radiography, chest X-ray and mammography. Beginning in the 1980s, he pioneered the development of techniques for computer-aided diagnosis and digital radiography.

Born and educated in Japan, Doi received his B.S. in 1962 and his Ph.D. in 1969 from Waseda University. He was chief of radiography research at Kyokko Research Laboratories of the Dai Nippon Toryo Company and instructor at Tohoku University before coming to Chicago in 1969 as Research Associate (Assistant Professor). A faculty member in Radiology, he is also Director of the University's Kurt Rossmann Laboratories for Radiologic Image Research.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Fitzpatrick, one of the nation's leading scholars on the former Soviet Union, has been named the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor in History.

Her recent book, "Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization," broke new ground in Soviet research as the first book by a Western specialist to explore accounts written by peasants during the period of collectivization. She is also the author of three other books on the Soviet era, all of which have substantially reshaped scholarly interpretation of that period.

Fitzpatrick joined the Chicago faculty in 1990 after serving as Regent's Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her B.A. in 1961 from the University of Melbourne and her Ph.D. in 1969 from Oxford.

Richard Taub

Taub, whose work has led to new understandings of how urban neighborhoods prosper, has been named the Paul Klapper Professor of Social Sciences in the College.

His book "Community Capitalism" (1988) discusses how the South Shore Bank became a leader in helping renew a declining neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. He is also the co-author of "Paths of Neighborhood Change" (1984). In addition, he has studied economic development in Arkansas and in India, and he is working with other researchers on a project to explore ways in which Third World development strategies might be adapted to American urban conditions.

Taub has been a faculty member at the University since 1969. He received his B.A. in 1959 from Michigan and his Ph.D. in 1966 from Harvard. He was a faculty member at Brown before coming to Chicago.