DSP, named chair recipients announced

Appointments include first recipient of Martin Boyer Professorship Douglas Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Professor and Dean of the Law School, and Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Professor in the Divinity School, have been named Distinguished Service Professors. DSPs also have been awarded to Robert Kaster, Professor and Chair of Classical Languages & Literatures, and Robert Zimmer, Professor in Mathematics.

David Oxtoby, Dean of the Physical Sciences Division, has received a named chair, as have mathematician Carlos Kenig and gastroenterologist Eugene Chang, who is the first recipient of the Martin Boyer Professorship.

Douglas Baird

Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor and Dean of the Law School, is one of the nation's leading experts on bankruptcy and corporate reorganization.

His scholarly work involves the exploration of bankruptcy law in the context of modern corporate finance theory. His most recent books on the subject are Game Theory and the Law (1994), which he wrote with Randal Picker and Robert Gertner, and The Elements of Bankruptcy (1992). He is also the co-author of two casebooks, Cases, Problems and Materials on Security Interests in Personal Property (1984) and Cases, Problems and Materials on Bankruptcy (1985), both with Thomas Jackson.

Baird, who this year was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, served as Associate Dean of the Law School from 1984 to 1987 and was Director of the Law & Economics Program from 1990 until 1994. He has been the Harry A. Bigelow Professor since 1988. He was appointed Dean of the Law School in 1994.

Before joining the Chicago faculty in 1980, he was a law clerk to Judge Shirley Hufstedler and Judge Dorothy Nelson, both of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his B.A. in English from Yale in 1975 and his J.D. from Stanford in 1979.

Wendy Doniger

Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor in the Divinity School, South Asian Languages & Civilizations, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, the Committee on Social Thought and the College.

An expert on Hindu mythology and a Sanskrit scholar, she specializes in the culture of South Asia. Her teaching and research address themes from a cross-cultural perspective, ranging from ancient India and Greece to the American cinema.

Doniger is the writer, editor or translator of over 20 books -- including the English-language version of Yves Bonnefoy's Mythologies, a comprehensive encyclopedia of world mythologies -- and the author of over 200 articles and reviews. Her books include Other Peoples' Myths: The Cave of Echoes. She has just completed a book on sexual masquerades and is about to deliver the 1996-97 ACLS/AAR Lectures in the History of Religions, "The Implied Spider: Myths as Political and Theological Microscopes." She is working on a novel, Horses for Lovers, Dogs for Husbands, and on the translation of the last books of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata.

Doniger is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society and a past president of the American Academy of Religion. She received her B.A. from Radcliffe in 1962, her M.A. in 1963 and her Ph. D. in 1968 from Harvard, and her D. Phil. from Oxford in 1973. She joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1978 and has been the Mircea Eliade Professor since 1986.

Robert Kaster

Kaster, Professor and Chair of Classical Languages & Literatures and Professor in the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World and the College, has been named the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities.

Kaster studies the history of education in classical society. His books include Suetonius: "De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus" (1995), The Tradition of the Text of the "Aeneid" in the Ninth Century (1990) and Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (1988), which won the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit given by the American Philological Association.

He is presently working on 17 articles on the history of Roman scholarship and education commissioned for the Neue Pauly, the condensed version of the definitive encyclopedia on classical scholarship. He is also at work on a study of the emotions, values and institutions of Roman social inhibition.

Kaster has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and is currently the president of the American Philological Association. He received his A.B. from Dartmouth in 1969, his M.A. from Harvard in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1975, when he joined the Chicago faculty.

Robert Zimmer

Zimmer, Professor in Mathematics and the College and Associate Provost for Research and Education, has been named the Max Mason Distinguished Service Professor.

A specialist in geometry, particularly ergodic theory, lie groups and differential geometry, he is the author of two books, Ergodic Theory and Semisimple Groups (1984) and Essential Results of Functional Analysis (1990), and more than 70 mathematical research articles. The recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, he served on the Board of Mathematical Sciences of the National Research Council from 1992 to 1995, and was on the executive committee from 1993 to 1995.

Zimmer came to the University as an L.E. Dickson Instructor in Mathematics in 1977. He was Chairman of Mathematics from 1991 to 1995, when he was appointed Associate Provost for Research & Education. He received his A.B. from Brandeis in 1968 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1975.

Eugene Chang

Eugene Chang, Professor in Medicine & Cell Physiology, has been named the first recipient of the Martin Boyer Professorship in Gastroenterology.

One of the world's leading authorities on the biology, immunology and pathology of the intestines, Chang's research deals with the biological basis, precise diagnosis and treatment of diseases that cause diarrhea, particularly inflammatory bowel disease.

Chang has published more than 60 original scientific articles and nearly 40 invited review articles or book chapters. He has served as president of the Gastrointestinal Research Group, co-chairperson of the American Gastroenterological Association's section on gastrointestinal disorders and was a founding member of the International Regulatory Peptides Association.

Since 1993, Chang has been Director of the Emma Getz Inflammatory Bowel Disease Research Center at the University and has been Director of Gastrointestinal Research since 1986. He received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1972 and his M.D. from Chicago in 1976. He then taught at Chicago for two years, was assistant professor of medicine at Columbia for two years, and rejoined the Chicago faculty in 1986.

Martin Boyer, a Chicago native and insurance executive, donated the funds for an endowed chair for an inflammatory bowel disease specialist. The gift acknowledges the research, teaching and clinical care accomplishments of Boyer's physician, gastroenterologist Joseph Kirsner, Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in Medicine.

Carlos Kenig

Kenig, Professor in Mathematics, has been named Louis Block Professor.

A specialist in the application of harmonic analysis to partial differential equations, Kenig is an expert in Fourier analysis, particularly singular integrals and their applications to partial differential equations.

The author of more than 100 papers in mathematical research, he has been the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 1984, he received the Salem Prize, which is awarded annually to an outstanding young mathematician who has done work in the field of Fourier analysis and related topics. Kenig was cited for his "results on potential theory and partial differential equations obtained by improving and developing real variable methods of harmonic analysis."

He studied at the University of Buenos Aires before coming to Chicago, where he received his M.S. in 1975 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He taught at Princeton for two years and was then on the faculty at the University of Minnesota from 1980 to 1985, when he joined the Chicago faculty.

David Oxtoby

Oxtoby, Dean of the Physical Sciences Division and Professor in Chemistry, the James Franck Institute and the College, has been appointed the William Rainey Harper Professor in the College.

Oxtoby is a theoretical chemist who specializes in phase transitions, particularly the crystallization of liquids on an atomic and molecular level. Known for his strong commitment to teaching, particularly at the undergraduate level, Oxtoby was awarded the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1986. He is the co-principal investigator on a $4.86 million National Science Foundation grant to improve undergraduate instruction in chemistry, and was a member of the Provost's Task Force on Undergraduate Education from 1994 to 1996.

Oxtoby has been on the University faculty since 1977. He served as Master of the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division and Associate Dean of the College from 1984 to 1987, and was Director of the James Franck Institute from 1992 to 1995, when he was appointed Dean of the Physical Sciences Division. He received his B.A. in 1972 from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1975.