The Cornell Board of Trustees voted recently to elect the following faculty members to named professorships. The appointments became effective July 1.
Barbara L. Finlay, professor of psychology in the Section of Neurobiology and Behavior and chair of the Department of Psychology, has been elected the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology.
The professorship was established at Cornell in 1986 by the late University of North Carolina graduate William R. Kenan Jr. to support professors whose enthusiasm for learning, commitment to teaching and interest in students would make a notable contribution to the university's undergraduate community.
Finlay's teaching is in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and developmental bio-psychology, and her research in the structure and function of the vertebrate nervous system focuses on the visual system and cerebral cortex. Finlay also is the curator of Cornell's noted Wilder Brain Collection.
Finlay joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor in 1976. She was appointed an associate professor in 1982 and a full professor in 1988. She earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 and has served as a visiting scientist at the Oxford University Laboratory of Physiology and as a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales' School of Anatomy.
Paul Goldsmith, professor of astronomy and director of the National Astronomy Ionospheric Center (NAIC), has been elected the James A. Weeks Professor in the Physical Sciences.
The professorship was established in 1975 by a gift from Floyd R. Newman '12, former member of the Cornell Board of Trustees and a longtime benefactor of the university, in honor of his lawyer, business associate and friend.
The NAIC, based at Cornell, operates the Arecibo Observatory for the National Science Foundation.
Prior to his arrival at Cornell in 1993, Goldsmith was a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he had been since 1977. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1969 and his doctorate in 1975 from the University of California-Berkeley, he worked as a radio astronomer for Bell Labs in New Jersey. Goldsmith also has been a consultant to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass., and he has served as the associate director of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory, a consortium that built a 14-meter radio telescope in Amherst for high-frequency observations.
In 1982, Goldsmith co-founded Millitech Corp., an Amherst company formed to transfer technology from the astronomy research community to the commercial sector. He remained vice president of Millitech until 1992.
Paul L. Houston, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has been elected the Peter J.W. Debye Professor of Chemistry.
The professorship was established in 1994 through the gift of an anonymous donor and honors Nobel laureate and theoretical physical chemist Peter J.W. Debye, a Cornell faculty member who served as an eminent teacher and scholar at the university from 1939 until his death in 1966.
Houston is an experimental physical chemist who has forged an international reputation in the field of laser spectroscopy. Much of his research has involved the study of photodissociation dynamics, dynamics of molecules on solid surfaces and collisional energy transfer.
He graduated from Yale University in 1969 with a B.S. in chemistry and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973 with a Ph.D. in chemistry. From 1973 to 1975, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. He came to Cornell in 1975 as an assistant professor of chemistry, rising to full professor in 1985. He was named department chair in 1997.
He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and was senior editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry from 1991 to 1997.
Harry Kesten, professor of mathematics, has been elected the Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics.
The first Goldwin Smith professorships were established in 1912 in the fields of Latin, English literature, American history, political science and English. Since that time they have been awarded in a number of other fields, including mathematics. In 1989 the professorships were expanded from 11 to 15.
Kesten, who grew up in the Netherlands, studied at the University of Amsterdam, where he obtained his degree in mathematics. He received his Ph.D. at Cornell in 1958, then spent a year as an instructor at Princeton University and two years at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, returning to Cornell as a visiting assistant professor in 1961.
He works in probability theory, and one of his main interests is percolation, a probabilistic model that is of interest in statistical physics because it is the simplest model that exhibits a phase transition.
Kesten's study "Hitting probabilities of single points for a process with independent increments" is considered a work of seminal influence. The proceedings of a conference held at Cornell last year to honor and discuss Kesten's work will be published shortly.
Dorothy Mermin, professor of English and director of graduate studies in the English department, has been elected the Gold-win Smith Professor of English Literature.
She is the author of three well-respected books on Victorian literature and is co-editing the Harcourt Brace anthology Victorian Poetry and Prose.
Mermin's area of specialization has been Victorian poetry. Her first book, The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets, studies poetic address in the Victorian era, focusing on the development of the dramatic monologue and related forms. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry, is a critical biography of the first major Victorian woman poet. Her third book, Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880, describes and analyzes the first great period of women's writing in England, surveying the literary landscape and offering readings and reassessments both of authors who remained well-known in this century and those whose accomplishments feminist criticism has recently begun to discover.
Mermin's service to the department and college includes a six-year term as chair of the Department of English and two terms as director of graduate studies. She has served on numerous college and university committees and, since 1992, has directed the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Cornell.
Mermin has taught at Cornell since 1964, when she arrived with her husband, David Mermin, the Horace White Professor of Physics.
Gary A. Rendsburg, professor of Near Eastern studies and acting chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, was elected the Paul and Berthe Hendrix Memorial Professor in Jewish Studies.
The Hendrix chair was established in 1997 as a living memorial to Paul and Berthe Hendrix and their two sons, all of whom perished in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The chair is held by a faculty member affiliated with the Jewish Studies Program whose scholarly work as well as teaching addresses the contributions of Jewish men and women to Jewish history, literature and culture.
Rendsburg's wide-ranging scholarship focuses on biblical history and literature, Hebrew language, ancient Egypt and Semitic linguistics. He is the author of four books and dozens of articles in peer-reviewed journals.
A co-editor of four books, Rendsburg also served for nine years as book review editor of the AJS Review, published by the Association of Jewish Studies. In addition, he has been an invited scholar to special colloquia in Israel on a number of occasions and is internationally known in his field.
Rendsburg teaches a popular course in Jewish studies, the Introduction to the Bible, and has developed and taught a successful course on women in the Bible. He has served twice as acting chair of Near Eastern studies since his arrival at Cornell in 1986.
Saul A. Teukolsky, professor of physics and astronomy, has been elected the Hans A. Bethe Professor in Physics and Astrophysics.
The chair, established in 1994, honors Cornell Professor Emeritus Hans Bethe, a member of the physics department since 1935 and the winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1967. The first and only previous holder of the professorship was Maury Tigner, professor of physics emeritus.
Teukolsky, an internationally known leader in relativistic astrophysics, was congratulated by his colleagues in physics and astronomy, including Bethe, at a June 8 reception. Two of his major books are Black Holes, White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars: The Physics of Compact Objects and Numerical Recipes.
Teukolsky was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and earned his B.Sc., in both physics and applied mathematics, at the University of the Witwatersrand. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1973 at the California Institute of Technology.
Teukolsky joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor in 1974, becoming a full professor in 1983. In 1991 he was the first prize winner in the IBM Supercomputing Competition. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.
Yervant Terzian, professor of astronomy, has been elected the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences.
The professorship was created in 1976 in honor of David Christie Duncan, a professor emeritus of physics at Pennsylvania State University. It was created by a gift from Floyd R. Newman '12, a longtime benefactor of the university.
The chair was last held by the late Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy and space sciences.
Terzian joined the Cornell faculty in 1965 as a research associate, heading scientific services at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. He became an assistant professor in 1967, an associate professor in 1972 and was promoted to professor in 1977. He was named the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences in 1990.
Terzian, a leading expert on the physics and astronomy of planetary nebulae, served as chair of the Department of Astronomy and Space Sciences from 1979 until he stepped down on July 1 of this year.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1939 to parents of Armenian and Greek origin, Terzian received his primary and secondary education in Cairo. He earned his bachelor of science degree in 1960 from the American University in Cairo and earned his master's (1963) and his doctorate (1965) in astronomy from Indiana University. Since joining the Cornell faculty, he has served on more than 30 national and international bodies in astronomy and science education.
Jack W. Bradbury, professor of neurobiology and behavior, has been elected the first Robert G. Engel Professor of Ornithology.
The professorship is named for the late Robert G. Engel '53, a former member of the Cornell Board of Trustees and longtime member of the Laboratory of Ornithology's administrative board.
Bradbury, who was an assistant professor in neurobiology and behavior at Cornell from 1969 to 1972, returns to that section with affiliations with the Library of Natural Sounds in the Laboratory of Ornithology.
His research concerns social evolution of animals, with a focus on the overlaps between animal settlement patterns, sexual selection and communication, and with fieldwork conducted in Trinidad, Costa Rica, Mexico, Gabon, Kenya and New Guinea. He is the co-author, with Sandra Vehrencamp, of the 1998 textbook Principles of Animal Communication.
After his first stint at Cornell, Bradbury was appointed a Richard King Mellon Fellow at Rockefeller University, where he had earned his Ph.D., and joined the faculty of the University of California-San Diego in 1976. At San Diego he served as associate dean of the Division of Natural Sciences and as a professor of biology.
James Garbarino, professor of human development and co-director of the Family Life Development Center, has been elected the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor.
The professorship was established in 1998 in honor of Elizabeth Lee Vincent, the second dean of the College of Human Ecology (then called the College of Home Economics) from 1946 to 1953.
Garbarino has won national and international recognition for his research in child development, recently in the area of maltreatment and violence. His research has earned him numerous awards from the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
He is the former president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development in Chicago, the author of numerous books, including Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment and Understanding Abusive Families, as well as the author or co-author of more than 100 scientific articles or chapters on child maltreatment and child welfare, child development, schools and instructional materials.
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