Faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships

UChicago News

Twenty-four faculty members received named professorships or were appointed distinguished service professors. Steven Davis, Daniel Diermeier, Angela V. Olinto and Canice Prendergast received distinguished service professorships; and Zeresenay Alemseged, Bariş Ata, Katherine Baicker, Joy Bergelson, Michael Bourdaghs, John M. Cunningham, Thomas F. Gajewski, Mikhail Golosov, Rex Haydon, Jeffrey Hubbell, Emir Kamenica, Stefan Nagel, Madhav Rajan, Wilhelm Schlag, Sonali M. Smith, Nir Uriel, Christopher Woods, Ben Zhao, Haitao Zheng and Laurie Zoloth received named professorships.Biological Sciences Division















Zeresenay “Zeray” Alemseged has been named the Donald N. Pritzker Professor in Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the College.

A noted paleoanthropologist, Alemseged studies the origin of early human ancestors and the environmental factors that influenced their evolution. He established and led the Dikika Research Project, in which Alemseged made several breakthrough findings, including the discovery of the almost-complete fossilized remains of “Selam,” a 3.3-million-year-old child of the species Australopithecus afarensis. Now known as “the world’s oldest child,” it is the most complete skeleton of a human ancestor discovered to date and represents a major advancement in the understanding of human and pre-human evolution.Alemseged is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the co-founder and president of the East African Association of Paleontologists and Paleoanthropologists. He was a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute and recently the Irvine Chair and senior curator of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences.















Joy Bergelson has been named the James D. Watson Professor in Ecology and Evolution and the College.

Bergelson’s work focuses on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the community of bacteria that inhabit it, with particular interest in understanding how the ecology of these interactions shapes evolutionary change. Her studies combine molecular evolutionary research with functional genomics under natural field conditions to test models of host-pathogen co-evolution. Along with colleagues she also has pioneered the ...

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