November 30, 2006

Endowed Professorships

Mark S. Daskin
Bette and Neison Harris Professor in Teaching Excellence

Mark S. Daskin, professor of industrial engineering and management sciences and a professor in the Transportation Center, has been appointed the Bette and Neison Harris Professor in Teaching Excellence.

Daskin’s research interests are in the application and development of operations research techniques for the analysis of transportation, logistics, supply chain and manufacturing problems.

He has taught a wide variety of courses, from introductory surveys to required methods to highly specialized graduate courses. Daskin connects his students to the practical world of engineering and management through his collaborations with industrial partners. He has been the coordinator for senior design projects in his department, bringing industry clients and students together for this capstone experience.

Daskin’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. He is author of more than 50 refereed publications and a textbook, “Network and Discrete Location: Models, Algorithms, and Applications” (1995).

He currently is the president of INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, the premier international professional organization in his field. Daskin is the immediate past editor-in-chief of IIE Transactions and has served as the editor-in-chief for Transportation Science. He is an honorary fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers and of INFORMS.

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Katherine Faber
Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Katherine T. Faber, professor of materials science and engineering, has been appointed the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

Faber’s expertise is in the field of ceramics, including the mechanical behavior of ceramics, ceramic composites and coatings, thermal shock and reliability. She is author of a book, a book chapter and more than 120 papers on materials for which she has been named a highly cited author by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Faber serves as Northwestern’s liaison for a long-term art conservation and scientific research program with The Art Institute of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Faber’s honors include the Distinguished Educator Award from the Society of Women Engineers and the Creativity Extension Award and Presidential Young Investigator Award, both from the National Science Foundation.

She is president of the American Ceramics Society, which has more than 7,000 members in 80 countries. Faber also serves on the scientific advisory committee of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.

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Lincoln J. Lauhon
Morris E. Fine Junior Professor of Materials and Manufacturing

Lincoln J. Lauhon has been named the Morris E. Fine Junior Professor of Materials and Manufacturing in the department of materials science and engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Lauhon’s multidisciplinary research group focuses on three important aspects of nanoscale science and technology: the design and synthesis of new low-dimensional materials; the development of new techniques to probe the structure and properties of nanomaterials at the smallest length scales; and the realization of new device technologies enabled by nanomaterials research.

Lauhon’s research seeks a fundamental understanding of how novel physical properties arise in rationally designed nanostructures as a basis for exploiting these properties in various applications.

His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the Semiconductor Research Corporation, among others.

In recognition of the quality of his research and teaching, Lauhon received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2005, the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence Junior Fellowship in 2004 and the Nottingham Prize of the Physical Electronics Conference in 2000.

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Thomas Z. Lys
Eric L. Kohler Chair in Accounting

Thomas Z. Lys, professor of accounting information and management in the Kellogg School of Management, has been appointed the Eric L. Kohler Chair in Accounting.

Lys, who has a courtesy appointment as professor of law in the School of Law, was director of the Guthrie Center for Real Estate Research at Northwestern from 1997 to 2006. The center engages the Kellogg School faculty and students in research projects that involve real estate markets, public and private finance, project management and the development process. The center also assists students in finding summer and full-time employment.

His research investigates analyst earnings forecasts and stock valuations; efficiency of analysts’ earning forecasts; implications of tax laws for the optimal structure of two-tier merger offers; stock price behavior following earnings announcements; and properties of estimators of auto-correlation coefficients.

Lys teaches courses in Kellogg’s MBA program in real estate finance, financial reporting, security analysis and mergers and acquisitions. He also co-teaches mergers and acquisitions with a faculty member from the School of Law. This course is offered to both business and law school students.

In Kellogg’s Executive Master’s program Lys teaches courses on financial reporting, security analysis and behavioral finance, integrating both the economic and the behavioral perspectives of financial decision making.

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Gokhan Memik
Lisa Wisner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Junior Professor of Computer Science

Gokhan Memik, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been appointed the Lisa Wisner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Junior Professor of Computer Science.

Memik’s research interests lie in computer architecture, specifically embedded systems, high-performance and low-power microarchitecture and design of application-specific programmable processors.

He is the co-author of NetBench and MineBench, two widely used benchmarking suites for network processors and data mining, respectively. Memik also is the author of two book chapters and more than 50 journal and refereed conference publications.

Memik joined Northwestern in 2003. His honors include an Early Career Award in Mathematical, Information and Computational Sciences from the U.S. Department of Energy. He also has been selected to become the technical program co-chair of the 2007 International Symposium on Microarchitecture, the premier venue for microarchitecture research. Memik is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.

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Hamid Naficy
John Evans Professor of Communication

Hamid Naficy, professor of radio/television/film in the School of Communication, has been named the John Evans Professor of Communication. Naficy is author of a ground-breaking and influential history of Middle Eastern films and filmmakers titled “An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking.” That book was selected by Choice magazine as one of the outstanding books published in 2001.

Naficy taught at the Free University of Iran, University of Southern California, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of California at Los Angeles and Rice University before joining Northwestern’s faculty this year. He is the producer of numerous educational films and experimental videos, and has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement and on Iranian and Third World cinema.

Naficy, who speaks at conferences and universities around the world, also is author of “The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles,” “Iran Media Index” and of anthologies titled “Home, Exile Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place and Otherness” and “The Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged.”

His research focuses on comparative media theory, film and television history, Middle Eastern studies and diaspora studies. Naficy is the recipient of numerous awards and grants from federal agencies, foundations, corporations and professional societies, including the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for Humanities and the Social Science Research Council.

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Abe Peck
Helen Gurley Brown Research Professor

Abe Peck has been named the Helen Gurley Brown Research Professor at the Medill School for a five-year term. Peck, who was named Medill’s Sills Professor in 2001, was an editor of Rolling Stone and Outside magazines and other publications before joining Northwestern’s faculty in 1980.

Longtime director of Medill’s magazine program, Peck was elected national Editor of the Year by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2004 and again in 2006. He has conducted editorial and publishing workshops across the nation and in Ecuador, England, Finland, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

In 2006, Peck was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame. He has written, edited or contributed to 10 books, including “Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (Pantheon/Citadel) and Dancing Madness” (Anchor/Doubleday). He judges the National Magazine Awards and the Jesse Neal Awards. He has served as a consultant to publications from Spin to Sensors.

Peck was a contributing writer to “Voices from the Underground,” Rolling Stone’s history of the sixties, and “The Eighties: A Look Back.” A former reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Daily News, Peck also served on the advisory board of the National Arts Journalism Program.

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Lynn Spigel
Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures

Lynn Spigel, professor and chair of radio/television/film in the School of Communication, has been named Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures.

Spigel’s specialties include media and U.S. cultural history, gender and media and cultural theory. She teaches courses on television history, science fiction, media theory, feminist media studies, cultural theory and historical research methods.

An internationally sought speaker at universities and museums, Spigel has written two highly influential works on television history. These are “Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs” (Duke University Press) and “Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America” (University of Chicago Press).

Her forthcoming book is “TV By Design: Modern Art and Commercial Television.” She is also conducting research on new media, architecture and smart homes.

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Swaminathan Sridharan
John L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished Professor of Accounting Information and Management

Swaminathan Sridharan, professor of accounting information and management in the Kellogg School of Management, has been named John L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished Professor of Accounting Information and Management.

Sridharan’s primary areas of research are contracting and incentives issues, disclosures, managerial decision making and capital market responses in the presence of incomplete information and auditing.

He has studied the impact of the interaction of different factor markets on the characteristics of accounting and information systems of a firm; strategic implications of disclosures to multiple constituents; managerial incentives in the adoption of accounting and other disclosure policies; the use of accounting and other data by the financial markets in firm valuation and the interaction of disclosure and investment decisions.

He has taught courses in financial accounting, managerial accounting, profit planning and control, project management and project report, global initiatives in management and information economics and contracting.

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Jonathan Widom
William Deering Professor in Biological Sciences

Jonathan Widom, professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been appointed the William Deering Professor in Biological Sciences.

A structural biologist, Widom works in the area of protein and nucleic acid biophysics, specifically on the physical and molecular basis of gene expression. He has made important contributions to the understanding of how genetic material is organized within the cell and is read by regulatory proteins to define how and when genes are expressed. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have supported his research since 1985.

Widom served as chair of his department from 1998 to 2004 and was director of the University’s Center for Structural Biology from 1994 to 2000. He led a successful effort to obtain substantial funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation to purchase state-of-the-art instrumentation to create the Keck Biophyics Facility, a major research facility for the analysis of biochemical and biophysical properties of biological macromolecules. He has served as its director since its inception in 1997. In addition, as director of the University’s NIH Molecular Biophysics Training Program from 1992-98, Widom played a major role in the reorganization of the curriculum in biochemistry and biophysics.

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Teresa K. Woodruff
Thomas J. Watkins Memorial Professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology

Teresa K. Woodruff, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and of endocrinology at the Feinberg School of Medicine and professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been appointed the Thomas J. Watkins Memorial Professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Woodruff’s career has included a strong focus on ovarian biology, interdisciplinary approaches to problems in reproductive science and the translation of her work to humans. Her research addresses methods to preserve fertility for young women and girls with a cancer diagnosis and the role of two peptide hormones, inhibin and activin, in regulating the reproductive axis.

Woodruff, who joined Northwestern in 1995, has been appointed director of the Feinberg School’s newly created Institute for Women’s Health Research and is chief of the newly established Division of Fertility Preservation. She also is associate director for basic sciences in the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and director of the Center for Reproductive Research.

She has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and 50 reviews, book chapters or editorials.