The following endowed chair elections and reports were presented to the Cornell Board of Trustees at its meetings in May and June of this year. They all became effective July 1.
Jeffrey G. Scott, professor of
entomology, has been appointed the first Daljit S. (Ph.D.
'48) and Elaine Sarkaria Professor in Insect Physiology and Insect
Toxicology, which was created with generous
support from the Sarkaria family last spring. The appointment is for
a five-year term.
Scott's research focuses on the evolution, genetics and molecular biology of insecticide resistance, insecticide toxicology and pesticide metabolism. He also examines cytochrome P450 monooxygenases, which are vital enzymes that help to metabolize chemicals such as drugs, hormones, pesticides and plant toxins.
Scott joined the Cornell faculty in 1986 as an assistant professor. He become an associate professor in 1992 and a professor in 1998. He received his B.S. (1979) in biochemistry (with honors) and his master's degree (1981) in entomology from Michigan State University. He earned his doctorate in entomology from the University of California-Riverside in 1985. Scott received the 1997 Orkin Award for Research Excellence and the Prominent Achievement Award from the Pesticide Science Society of Japan in 1996. He is a member of editorial boards for Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology and Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Brown joined the Cornell English faculty in 1981 after teaching at the University of California-Riverside. She earned her B.A. with highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from Stanford University in 1971 and her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1977. She received the Regents fellowship from the University of California and has twice been the recipient of a faculty fellowship from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell.
Brown, widely known and recognized as a scholar and critic of the English 18th century, also is an active graduate teacher and adviser. Her own work includes studies of women's roles in the literary imagination, the relationship between literature and history, the nature of culture, the emergence of imperialist thought and the effects of ideas of racial difference. She is the author or editor of five books, which treat a range of genres and ideas in 18th-century literary culture, including: English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760; Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Literature; and Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century.
Brown has been active in promoting new approaches to the study of the English 18th century, most notably in her co-edited collection The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, which helped to sponsor a re-evaluation of 18th-century materials in the light of new theoretical and historical methodologies.
Martha P. Haynes, professor in the Department of Astronomy, has been elected the Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy. Her scientific research concentrates on observational cosmology and the evolution of galaxies in different environments. Haynes' ongoing work includes measuring deviations from Hubble expansion in the local universe and trying to understand the origin of scaling relations in spiral galaxies. In 1989, she was awarded the Henry Draper Medal by the National Academy of Sciences for her work on the mapping of the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies in the local universe. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Haynes earned her Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1978 and was a research associate at Arecibo Observatory from 1978 to 1981. Since joining the Cornell faculty in 1983, she has been director of undergraduate studies in the astronomy department for 11 of the last 13 years.
In 1993 she was awarded the Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising. She is a faculty participant in the Knight Institute Writing in the Majors program and this fall is teaching a Knight sophomore seminar.
Ronald R. Hoy, professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, has been elected the Merksamer Professor of Biology.
Hoy's research focuses on the bioacoustics and neuroethology of insects. His dedication to undergraduate-level education and development of innovative teaching tools, such as the "Project Crawdad" curriculum, which demonstrates the principles of nervous system electrophysiology in all animals via the common crayfish, recently was recognized with a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor award.
Before joining the Cornell faculty in 1973, Hoy earned a B.S. degree in 1962 at Washington State University, a Ph.D. in 1968 at Stanford University, conducted postdoctoral research at University of California-Berkeley in 1969-70 and taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1970 to 1973.
Walter LaFeber, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor Emeritus of American History, has been appointed the first holder of the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished Professorship at Cornell University for a three-year term.
LaFeber came to Cornell as an assistant professor in 1959 at age 26, with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He became a professor in 1967 and gained the Noll Professorship, a permanent appointment, in 1968.
LaFeber has written and co-authored nearly 20 books, dozens of articles, as well as op-ed pieces in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Newsday, among others. He has been a Guggenheim fellow, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has lectured at dozens of universities and has appeared widely on television and radio, including on Walter Cronkite's "American Presidencies," PBS's "American Century" and the BBC's "End of the Cold War?"
He is the author of many important books on U.S. foreign policy. LaFeber's America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1989, published in 1966, is in its ninth revised edition His The Clash: America Japan Relations Throughout History won both the Bancroft Prize and the Ellis Hawley Prize; his Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America won the Gustavus Myers Prize; and The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 won the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association.
Claude Cohen, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering, has been elected the Fred H. Rhodes Professor in Engineering. The chair is
named for the first director of the School of
Chemical Engineering, from 1938 to 1957.
Cohen's research involves the structure and properties of elastomers, unique rubber-like materials that are made from cross-linked polymers. Elastomers have many applications, such as tires, heart valves, gaskets in supersonic jets, super absorbents, implants and drug-delivery vehicles. A number of synthetic and physical techniques are used in Cohen's research to achieve the goal of relating the structure to the properties of these materials in order to tailor-make novel materials. A current interest of his is the synthesis of polymeric nanoparticles for use in soil remediation, the removal of pollutants from contaminated soil.
Cohen earned his B.Sc. in chemistry, with high honors, from American University in Cairo in 1966 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton University in 1972.
Before coming to Cornell, Cohen was a research associate at the California Institute of Technology from 1975 to 1977. He was a visiting faculty member at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 1983; at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in 1989; and at IBM, San Jose, Calif., in 1993.
Emmanuel P. Giannelis, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected the Walter R. Read Professor in Engineering.
His research is in polymer nanocomposites, which offer the prospect of a new materials technology that can function as low-cost alternatives to high-performance composites for applications ranging from automotive to food packaging to biotechnology. The nanocomposites exhibit properties superior to conventional composites, such as strength, toughness, thermal stability and barrier properties, as well as unique behavior such as flame resistance, controlled biodegradation and lasing (a material or device acting like a laser).
Before coming to Cornell, Giannelis was a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Fundamental Materials Research in 1985-86 and at the Composites Center in 1986-87 at Michigan State University. He serves on the editorial boards of Chemistry of Materials and Macromolecules Recent News. His research has been featured on the Nanotechnology Top 25 list by ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). For the past two years he has taught a popular freshman course in nanotechnology, which this semester has an enrollment of 170 students.
James T. Jenkins, a professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, has been elected the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of Engineering.
Jenkins is interested in the mechanics of granular materials. One aspect of his research concerns the slow deformation of granular materials, which is of interest in soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering. For example, the predictability of catastrophic liquefaction in loose, water-saturated sand, such as sometimes occurs during earthquakes, depends on an understanding of how discrete systems of particles interact through contact and frictional forces. Another aspect of his research concerns rapid deformations. Geophysical examples are avalanches and rock slides.
Rapid deformations of dry, relatively dense granular materials also occur in many industrial processes, such as the movement of cereals, ores and pharmaceuticals down slopes and through chutes. In his program of experiment, numerical simulation and theoretical modeling, Jenkins is attempting to discover the relationship between stress and deformation.
Jenkins came to Cornell in 1971 after spending two years as a research associate in France and Scotland, where he contributed to the development of continuum theories for liquid crystals. He has held visiting positions at Sandia National Laboratory and at a number of universities. He has received distinguished fellowships from the University of Pisa, Italy; McGill University, Canada; and the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. In March 2001, he received an honorary doctorate from Université de Rennes 1, France.
David Ruppert, a professor in the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, has been elected the Andrew Schultz Jr. Professor of Industrial Engineering.
Currently Ruppert is co-principal investigator on an Environmental Protection Administration-funded project, "Statistical Modeling of Waterborne Pathogen Concentrations." He also is a member of Cornell's Semiconductor Manufacturing Research Team, which aims to create novel modeling approaches and analysis techniques for semiconductor manufacturing. It was established in 1997 with grants from the National Science Foundation and Semiconductor Research Corp. The goal is to help semiconductor manufacturers to make the best possible capacity acquisition decisions.
Ruppert is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and won the Wilcoxon Award in 1986 for the best applications paper in Technometrics. He is now completing his third book, Semiparametric Regression, to be published by Cambridge University Press next year.
His interests include robustness, semi-parametric modeling, measurement error models, environmental statistics, applications of statistics to finance, applied Bayesian statistics and data mining.
Ruppert obtained his Ph.D. in 1977 in statistics from Michigan State University. Before coming to Cornell in 1987, he was associate professor of statistics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Christine A. Shoemaker, a professor in the School Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been elected the Joseph P. Ripley Professor in Engineering. The professorship was established in May 1968 by Ripley and funded in part by the Ford Foundation.
Shoemaker, who served as chair of the Department of Environmental Engineering at Cornell from 1985 to 1988, received the prestigious Humboldt Research Prize in 2001. Previously, in 1999, she was awarded the Julian Hinds Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) "for her leadership and research in ecosystems management, water resources systems analysis, and groundwater modeling and protection." She also was elected a fellow of ASCE in 1996.
Shoemaker has participated in National Academy of Sciences panels on groundwater contamination and pest management and has been a keynote speaker at international conferences on hydrogeology and on applied mathematics. In 1993 she was appointed by the U.S. secretary of health and human services to the Scientific Advisory Board of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Shoemaker's research focuses on applications of optimization algorithms and other aspects of computational mathematics to environmental problems. She received her B.S. degree from the University of California-Davis in 1966 and her M.S. in 1969 and Ph.D. in 1971, both in mathematics, from the University of Southern California.
John and Rilla Neafsey are long-time Cornell and Johnson Graduate School of Management benefactors. John Neafsey '61, BME '62, MBA '63, is a Cornell trustee emeritus and a Cornell Presidential Councillor, as well as a member of the Johnson School's advisory council. The new professorship deploys the endowed fund currently named the Neafsey Endowment Fund to support the synergies between Computing and Information Science and the Johnson School. It reflects Neafsey's belief in the future importance of technology to business management practices and Cornell's strengths in this area.
Huttenlocher joined the Cornell faculty as assistant professor of computer science in 1988, became associate professor in 1994 and was promoted to full professor in 1999. He earned his undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1980 and his master's and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1988, respectively.
He is an award-winning teacher and a former Presidential Young Investigator (1990-95). He won the Faculty of the Year Award from the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates at Cornell in 1992. In 1993 he was selected as New York State Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation. Also in 1993, he earned the Russell Distinguished Teaching Award in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Tau Beta Pi and Cornell Society of Engineers Award for Excellence in Teaching in the College of Engineering. In 1996 Huttenlocher was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow by President Hunter Rawlings, and he has been named three times by Cornell Merrill Presidential Scholars as their most influential educator at Cornell.
Huttenlocher's research interests are in computer vision, computational geometry, interactive document systems, electronic trading systems and software development methodologies. This fall he is teaching a course in computer vision, and, in the spring of 2003, he will teach a new course at the Johnson School on the strategic role of information technology in business.
Robert H. Frank, professor of economics, has been elected the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management. The professorship was established by Michael Louis, great-grandson of Samuel Curtis Johnson, founder of S.C. Johnson and Son, and was named in honor of Louis' mother, Henrietta Johnson Louis.
Frank is an economist with interests in public policy, the work force, compensation practices and consumer behavior. He received the Johnson School Award for Exceptional Research in 1999-2000, has published on a wide variety of subjects in academic journals and in such major media as The New York Times and is a frequent guest on television news programs. His book The Winner-Take-All Society (with Philip Cook) was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was included in Business Week's list of the 10 best books for 1995. He also is the author of Luxury Fever; Passions within Reason; Choosing the Right Pond; and Microeconomics and Behavior.
Frank earned a B.S., with a major in mathematics, from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1966; and an M.A. in statistics, 1971, and a Ph.D. in economics, 1972, both from the University of California-Berkeley. He joined the Cornell economics faculty in 1972 and the Johnson School faculty in 1990. He was named the Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at Cornell in 1991 and held that chair until this year, when he assumed his current chaired professorship.
Richard A. Cerione, professor of pharmacology in the Department of Molecular Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine, and professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been elected the Goldwin Smith Professor of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology. The chair originates in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Cerione's research into the causes of cancer focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms by which signals are transmitted from cell surface receptors to biological effectors. His laboratory has identified and characterized new signaling molecules, such as cdc42, that influence the growth and differentiation of mammalian cells.
He earned a B.S. in 1973 and a Ph.D. in 1979 in biochemistry, both from Rutgers University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry at Cornell, as well as a senior research associate in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Duke University before joining the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor of pharmacology in 1985.
William E. Hornbuckle, professor of small animal medicine, has been appointed the Rudolph J. and Katharine L. Steffen Professor of Veterinary Medicine, for a seven-year term.
Hornbuckle's research involves animal models for viral diseases, such as hepatitis B. A member of the clinical sciences department faculty, he serves as coordinator of Community Practice Service rotation for veterinary clinical students.
He earned a B.S. degree in 1965 and a D.V.M. degree in 1967 from Oklahoma State University and is board certified as a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine. Hornbuckle joined the veterinary medicine faculty in 1977 as an assistant professor.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |