November 20, 2003

Faculty honors

Nina Kraus, professor of communication sciences and disorders, neurobiology and physiology, and otolaryngology, has been named the Hugh Knowles Professor of Audiology.

Kraus is a faculty member of the Institute for Neuroscience and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.

Kraus is primarily interested in understanding neurobiological processes underlying speech encoding and learning-associated brain plasticity. Her interests include visual modality influences on the neural encoding of sound and biological bases of hemispheric specialization for complex stimuli such as speech and music.

Her experiments are aimed at understanding the speech perception difficulties encountered by normal-hearing listeners in noise, by children with language -based learning problems, by older adults, and by users of hearing aids or cochlear implants.

Rodney Ruoff, professor of mechanical engineering, has been named John Evans Professor of Nanoengineering.

Ruoff is director of the Northwestern University Biologically-Inspired Materials (BIMat) Center, a multi-university effort supported by NASA.

Ruoff’s major areas of research interest are synthesis and properties of nanostructures; nanomanipulation and nanorobotics; fabrication and properties of nanocomposites, particle electrokinetics, and light scattering from particles. He has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of solubility of fullerenes and nanotubes and is widely known for his research on the mechanical behavior of nanotubes. He holds five patents.

The co-editor of eight books, Ruoff is an associate editor of Composites, Science and Technology.

Augusta Read Thomas, professor of music, has been named the Henry N. and Ruth F. Wyatt Professor in Music Theory.

Thomas, who is also Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is considered to be among the top composers of concert music today. Her work has been performed by many of the world’s leading orchestras. Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Mstislav Rostropvich, Seiji Ozawa and Christoph Eschenbach, among others, have conducted her music.

Upcoming premieres of Thomas’s works include Silver Chants the Litanies in Dallas in February; Tangle by the CSO next March; Galaxy Dances by the National Symphony in May; New Work by the New York Philharmonic in September; and Grace Notes by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in January 2005.