Faculty Honors

Lawrence J. Christiano, professor of economics, has been named the Alfred W. Chase Professor in Business Institutions.
A macroeconomic theorist with strong applied interests, Christiano has published more than 50 articles on econometric modeling, monetary policy and institutions, the business cycle and time series analysis, and the nature of fiscal policy in a global economy. The National Science Foundation has supported his work continuously since 1991.
Christiano is a research affiliate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Christopher Herbert, professor of English, has been named the Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professor.
Herbert chaired the department of English for four years and served five years as the Weinberg College associate dean for the humanities. This year he is acting chair of the department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Herbert’s professional interests are 19th century British and Continental fiction; Vic-torian social and intellectual history; theory of culture; and history and theory of science.
He is the author of “Trollope and Comic Pleasure” (1987), “Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century” (1991), and “Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery” (2001), all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Theodore Jardetzky, whose crystallographic studies of antibody receptors have led to a breakthrough in understanding the mechanisms of allergies and asthma, has been named the Soretta and Henry Shapiro Research Professor in Molecular Biology.
Jardetzky is associate professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and of microbiology and immunology at the Feinberg School of Medicine.
Jardetzky’s research concerns molecular mechanisms involved in human immunity and disease. He studies the three-dimensional structures of key proteins involved in immunity and viral pathogenicity to gain insights into underlying molecular mechanisms as well as information for the development of new structure-based therapeutic treatments for disease.

David Meyer, professor and chair of physics and astronomy, has been named the Martin and Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Professor.
Meyer’s research specialty is the application of sensitive spectroscopic techniques to astrophysical problems in the areas of cosmology, galactic evolution, and the interstellar medium with a variety of ground-and space-based observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope.
His work pushes the sensitivity of astronomical detectors to new limits in the measurement of weak interstellar and extragalactic absorption lines in the optical and ultraviolet spectra of stars and quasars. Such measurements provide important information about the composition, chemistry, structure and physical conditions of intervening gas clouds in the Milky Way and other galaxies.
Meyer has published more than 50 articles in the Astrophysical Journal.

Alfonso Mondragón, professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, has been named the Owen L. Coon Professor in Molecular Biology.
Mondragón’s work has centered on understanding the structure and function of proteins, nucleic acids and their complexes. His laboratory provided the first atomic structure of type IA DNA topoisomerases, enzymes that control the topology of DNA by allowing one strand of DNA to pass through another. These enzymes are of intense scientific interest because of the remarkable molecular transformations that they catalyze and their critical roles in cellular processes.
He also is investigating the protein spectrin, responsible for the elasticity of blood cells, and the RNA component of Rnase P, one of only two ribozymes conserved in all organisms.