Nine on faculty appointed Distinguished Service Professors

Nine University faculty members are starting the year with newly awarded Distinguished Service Professorships: Harry Davis, Gary Eppen and Robert Vishny in the Graduate School of Business; John Goldsmith and Wadad Kadi in the Humanities; Donald Levy and Bruce Winstein in the Physical Sciences; and Jonathan Lear and Michael Silverstein in the Social Sciences.

Among the professorships is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professorship, which is being awarded for the first time. Established by Dennis Keller (M.B.A. '68), founder of DeVry Institute and Keller Graduate School of Management, in memory of his parents, the Keller professorship has been awarded to Gary Eppen, a faculty member in the GSB for more than 30 years.

Eighteen other faculty members have received endowed professorships; those will be reported in the Oct. 9 Chronicle. Harry Davis, the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Professor in the Graduate School of Business, is now the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Distinguished Service Professor.

Davis, who came to Chicago in 1963, has directed his research toward consumer behavior, new product development strategy and leadership. He is the founder of the GSB's Laboratory in New Product Development, in which student teams work with sponsoring firms to research, develop and market new products. He is also the architect of the Leadership Exploration and Development (LEAD) program, a required, student-directed course that focuses on the building of community and the development of managerial skills. Davis served as Deputy Dean at the GSB from 1983 to 1993, when the Harry L. Davis award was established in his honor by the GSB faculty. The annual award goes to a graduating campus M.B.A. student who has made outstanding contributions in the areas of leadership, student life and community service.

Gary Eppen, the Robert Law Jr. Professor in the Graduate School of Business, is now the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor.

Eppen's current interests are in international business and operations. He is presently working on teaching materials concerning international sourcing, production rationalization and entry into developing markets. His most recent research is on transfer prices in multinational firms and outsourcing. Eppen is senior editor of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management and the author (with F. J. Gould and C. Schmidt) of Introductory Management Science (1993) and (with F. J. Gould) of Quantitative Concepts for Management -- Decision Making Without Algorithms (1979). He has been a member of the faculty since 1964.

John Goldsmith, Professor in Linguistics, has been named the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor.

Goldsmith, an expert in phonology, the study of sound systems, has combined linguistics with computer applications in recent work. He was honored by Discover magazine in July as a finalist in the 1997 Technology Awards for his computer application Speakeasy, which transforms the monotone computer voice into a human-sounding voice by using linguistic rules. Gov. Jim Edgar named May 31, 1997, "Professor John Goldsmith Day" in honor of Goldsmith's work. Presently, Goldsmith is working on "radical grammar learning," a series of computer programs that will produce the grammar of a language when provided with a book-length text but no other special information. His recent work also includes the forthcoming Essential Readings in Phonological Theory, which he edited. He joined the faculty in 1984 and won the University's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 1995. Wadad Kadi, Professor and Chairman of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Professor in the College, has been named the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor.

Kadi, a University faculty member since 1988, is an expert on Arabic literature and Islamic studies. Her work focuses on the links between Arabic literature and political, secretarian and cultural Islamic thought. Presently, she is at Oxford University for the year, studying the letters of 'Abd al-Hamid al-Katib (d. 750), the founder of Arabic prose, in order to explore the dynamics of state and statecraft in early Islam. She was awarded the King Faisal International Prize for Arabic Literature in 1994, which is considered the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in the world of Arabic language and literature. Kadi is associate editor of E.J. Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an, co-editor with Ulrich Haarmann of E.J. Brill's series Islamic History and Civilization and an appointed member of the editorial board of Al-Abhath, the journal of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut.

Jonathan Lear, Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, has been named the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor.

Lear, who joined the Chicago faculty in 1996, is a renowned philosopher whose work examines Freud as well as the ancient Greek thinkers. His work has made him one of the leading commentators on Freud and psychoanalysis, while his interdisciplinary research has made him an original and highly regarded scholar on the philosophy of the mind. The author of numerous articles on Aristotle and Plato, he also has written three books: Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980), Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988) and Love and Its Place in Nature (1991). His fourth book, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, will be published by Harvard University Press in the spring.

Donald Levy, the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor in Chemistry, has been named the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor.

Levy, a physical chemist, uses the technique of supersonic jet cooling to study the structure of molecules. He was one of the first chemists to exploit the technique, which entails cooling a gas by rapidly expanding it into a vacuum, thereby "freezing" the motion of the molecules and making them much easier to study. Levy is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He joined the Chicago faculty in 1967.

Michael Silverstein, the Samuel N. Harper Professor in Anthropology, Linguistics and Psychology, the Committee on Ideas and Methods and the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities, has been named the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor. Silverstein's theoretical contributions to anthropology, linguistics and psychology range from modeling the flow of communicated meanings during verbal interaction to the role of language as a medium and symbol of cultural ideologies. These contributions grow out of his long-term studies of the indigenous languages and cultures of North America and of Australia, and of the contemporary sociocultural forces on American English, which he has been studying in the framework of linguistic anthropology. In addition to his own widely published technical papers, Silverstein, along with his students and other collaborators, has published a series of works based on his research, of which the most recent has been Natural Histories of Discourse, published by the Press in 1996. He joined the faculty in 1971.

Robert Vishny, the Eric J. Gleacher Professor in the Graduate School of Business, is now the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor.

Vishny, a Chicago faculty member since 1985, is an expert on issues of corporate control and the ownership structure of corporations. Much of his research focuses on comparative analysis of legal systems and corporate governance practices around the world. He is program director for the corporate finance program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and associate editor of both the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Finance. From 1992 to 1995, Vishny was an advisor to the Russian Privatization Ministry, and from 1994 to 1996, he was director of the American Finance Association. He is the co-author (with M. Boycko and A. Shleifer) of Privatizing Russia (1995).

Bruce Winstein, Professor in Physics, has been appointed the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor.

Winstein is an experimental particle physicist who is recognized worldwide as one of the exceptional researchers in the field. He has made important contributions to the study of CP violation, one of a few outstanding problems in the physics of fundamental particles. Winstein is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society, and currently serves as chairman of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Committee on Elementary Particles. He joined the University faculty in 1976 and has been a visiting scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the intervening years.