Twenty-six members of the University of Chicago faculty have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.
Provost Katherine Baicker, along with Profs. Jean Decety, Robert Gertner, John Heaton, John Levi Martin, and Robert Vishny, have received distinguished service professorships. Profs. Daniel Arnold, Daniel Bartels, Diana Bolotin, Mohamad Bydon, Christina Ciaccio, Emanuele Colonnelli, Michael Gibbs, Alex Imas, Bana Jabri, Hoyt Long, Yueran Ma, Ross Milner, Pascal Noel, Jeffrey Rathmell, Alison Siegler, Jeffrey Stackert, Edward Vogel, Bernd Wittenbrink, Jennifer Wolf, and Eric Zwick have received named professorships. The appointments are effective July 1.
Jean Decety has been named the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology and the College.
A pioneering scholar who helped establish the field of social neuroscience, Decety has shaped what is now a dominant approach in psychological science—using brain imaging to inform scientific understanding of the social mind. His research spans cognitive neuroscience, developmental science, and global approaches, pursuing understanding of the perception and analysis of others’ actions and the mental simulation of actions. His groundbreaking bodies of research with children around the world, with medical residents, and with psychopaths probes the origins and limits of human empathy. In his latest work, he interrogates tensions that arise in reasoning about conflicting moral values, in particular the value on preserving life and ensuring individual autonomy in decisions about assisted suicide.
One of the most highly cited scholars in social neuroscience, Decety has authored hundreds of scientific publications. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science. He joined UChicago as a senior faculty member in 2004, having held prior positions at the University of Washington, Seattle, and INSERM in Lyon, France.
Edward Vogel has been named the Irving B. Harris Professor in the Department of Psychology and the College.
A leader in the study of visual working memory, Vogel’s groundbreaking research integrates behavioral, neuroscience, and computational approaches to shed new light on the mechanisms that support working memory and the nature of individual variation in this capacity. His work has changed the field’s understanding of foundational cognitive processes and shed new light on the nature of the cognitive deficits involved in clinical disorders, including schizophrenia, ADHD, and Parkinson’s disease.
Vogel is a prolific and highly cited scientist with an influential body of published research. As one indicator of the field’s reception of his work, he has consistently attracted substantial federal support from the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Naval Research. He is an Elected Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He serves as Director of the Institute for Mind and Biology and is an engaged mentor to doctoral students and to a growing group (that he has helped to recruit) of early-career faculty cognitive scientists. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2015, having launched a field-leading career in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon.