July 1, 2024
Thirty-one members of the University of Chicago faculty, including four from the PSD, have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.
David Archer
David Archer has been named the first Allyse and Helmut Heydegger Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the College.
Archer uses computer simulations to understand the balance between carbon dioxide levels in the oceans and in the atmosphere in the past to better predict the impact that changing levels will have on future climate. He has worked on a wide range of topics pertaining to the global carbon cycle and its relation to global climate, as well as the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
He is the author of The Long Thaw: How humans are changing the next 100,000 years of Earth's climate (2008), which earned him the 2009 Walter P. Kistler Book Award; as well as The Global Carbon Cycle (Princeton Primers in Climate) (2010); The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast (2010); and an undergraduate textbook for non-science majors, titled Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast.
He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
Benson Farb
Benson Farb has been named the first Ann Gillian Sheldon Professor of Mathematics and the College.
Farb's work has spanned geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, dynamical systems, differential geometry, Teichmuller theory, cohomology of groups, representation theory, algebraic geometry and 4-manifold theory, as well as the connections among these topics.
Farb was elected a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021 and spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014. Farb and his former student Dan Margalit were awarded the 2024 Steele Prize for their book “A Primer on Mapping Class Groups.” He has supervised 52 PhD students and has been senior scientist for 15 NSF postdocs.
Young-Kee Kim
Young-Kee Kim has been named the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and the College.
Kim, special advisor to the provost, previously held the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and the College. She is an experimental particle physicist and devotes much of her research to understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles.
Kim co-led the Collider Detector at Fermilab experiment, a collaboration with more than 600 particle physicists from around the world. She is currently working on the ATLAS particle physics experiment at CERN, as well as on accelerator physics research. She was deputy director of Fermilab between 2006 and 2013 and has served on numerous national and international advisory committees and boards.
She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Sloan Foundation, as well as the recipient of the Ho-Am Prize and the Arthur L. Kelly Faculty Prize.
Kim notes that Albert A. Michelson, the recipient of the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics, for whom the chair is named, was the first chair of the UChicago Department of Physics in 1892; Kim served as chair of that department between 2016 and 2022. Michelson also served as president of the American Physical Society in 1901-1902, and Kim is currently president of the American Physical Society.
Yamuna Krishnan
Yamuna Krishnan has been named the Louis Block Professor of Chemistry and the College.
Krishnan is a groundbreaking chemist who crafts tiny “machines” out of DNA that can be used to monitor and explore how cells work at the microscopic level. Such knowledge can help us better understand diseases and disorders, develop drug targets, and check whether a drug is reaching its intended target in a cell. She investigates the structure and dynamics of nucleic acids, nucleic acid nanotechnology, cellular and subcellular technologies.
She has received numerous awards, including the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Infosys Prize for Physical Sciences, the Sun Pharma award for Basic Medical Sciences and the Bhatnagar Award for Chemical Sciences and the Scientific Innovations Award from the Brain Research Foundation. She has been named one of Lo Spazio Della Politica’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2014 and to research journal Cell Press’s “40 Under 40.”
Read about all of the UChicago faculty members who received named and distinguished service professorships this year.