February 3, 2005

Honors

Zdenek P. Bazant, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science, has received his fifth honorary degree, an honorary doctorate from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquees, Lyon, France.

Previous honorary degrees were awarded by Karlsruhe University, Germany; Milan Polytechnic, Italy; Czech Technical University in Prague; and the University of Colorado.

Adding to his list of honors, Bazant has been elected honorary president of the International Association of Fracture Mechanics of Concrete Structures of which he was founding president in 1991-93. He also has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois Structural Engineering Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Melissa Macauley, associate professor of history, is one of 79 scholars awarded a 2004 fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies for postdoctoral research in the humanities and humanities-related social science.

The ACLS is a private, non-profit federation of 68 scholarly associations devoted to the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning.

Macauley’s current research in China and in the British and French colonial archives in London and Aix-en-Provence is also funded by a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship.

Jeffrey Manza, associate professor of sociology and acting director of the Institute for Policy Research, is one of 18 historians, political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars and other experts to be named to the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting. 

A non-partisan initiative of the Social Science Research Council, the commission brings academic research to the study of recent elections.

Manza is a political sociologist whose research focuses on how different types of social identities and inequalities influence political processes such as voting behavior, partisanship and public opinion. The co-author of "Social Cleavages and Political Change" and "Navigating Public Opinion," he currently is studying the disenfranchisement of felons.

Amy Rosenzweig, associate professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology and of chemistry, has been named the Irving M. Klotz Research Professor in Chemistry

Rosenzweig holds a $500,000 five-year MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She has been the recipient of several prestigious awards for new scientists, including the Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award in 2001 and a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering in 1999.

Before joining Northwestern in 1997, Rosenzweig held a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.

Robert P. Schleimer, chief of the allergy division and professor of medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, has been named the Dr. Roy Patterson Professor of Medicine.

Dr. Patterson was responsible for establishing the allergy-immunology division as a leading allergy research center, and was chairman of the department of medicine in the 1990s.

Schleimer has earned international recognition in the study of asthma. He studies the mechanisms of inflammatory responses responsible for allergic diseases as well as the molecular basis for the action of anti-inflammatory steroids.

Constantinos Skiadas, professor of finance, has been named Harold L. Stuart Distinguished Professor of Finance.

Skiadas has made contributions to modeling economic choice under uncertainty, the theory of trade with asymmetrically informed agents, the theory of competitive asset pricing, and portfolio theory, as well as to mathematical methodology in finance and economics. Currently he is working on the theory of optimal lifetime consumption-portfolio choice with sophisticated modeling of personal preferences and price dynamics, taking into account trading constraints.

Nathaniel J. Soper, M.D., professor and vice-chair of surgery at the Feinberg School of Medicine, has been named the James R. Hines Professor in Surgery.

An expert in the field of laparoscopic techniques, Soper’s research interests include the applications of laparoscopic surgery for gastrointestinal disease, alternative treatments for gallstones and motility of the gastrointestinal tract.

Before joining Northwestern in 2003, Soper was professor of surgery at Washington University and directed its Institute for Minimally Invasive Surgery.