Ver Steeg Fellowship

The Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship Award supports research and scholarship and is awarded annually to two tenured Northwestern professors whose work enhances the national and international reputation of the University. It carries an award of $40,000 per award recipient.

Clarence Ver Steeg was for many years a faculty member in the Department of History, served as dean of The Graduate School, and was a leader in the Northwestern community.

Congratulations to the 2022 Recipients

Paul Gowder

Professor of Law, Pritzker School of Law

Paul Gowder has made tremendous contributions to the rule of law, social and racial equality, democratic theory, institutional and organizational governance, law and technology, and classical Athenian law and political thought. His pioneering work inspires scholars to rethink how the rule of law operates in contemporary society, especially in the context of the current debates surrounding critical race theory.

Gowder publishes widely in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals. An elected member of the prestigious American Law Institute, Gowder served as a consultant to Facebook, advising the company’s “civic integrity” team on the normative boundaries around protecting elections and other democratic institutions. He is a former civil rights and legal aid lawyer.

Read the official announcement of Gowder’s award.

Bryna Kra

Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Mathematics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Bryna Kra’s work in ergodic theory on multiple ergodic averages settled a decades-old problem and uncovered the key role played by certain algebraic objects in understanding configurations in large sets of integers. This opened the way for novel developments, including structure theorems in ergodic theory and in topological dynamics, convergence results for numerous other averages and recurrence phenomena in other settings. Kra’s work in symbolic dynamics has focused on systems with low complexity, uncovering algebraic and geometric structures in such systems and developing connections to combinatorial problems.

Kra was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. She has been a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2012 and was recently elected president of the society with her term beginning next year.

Read the official announcement of Kra’s award.