Six Women Appointed to Named Professorships at the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago recently announced the appointments of 24 faculty members to endowed named professorships. Six of these appointments went to women.

Katherine Baicker has been named the Emmett Dedmon Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy. She was the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics at Harvard University. Professor Baicker holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Joy Bergelson has been named the James D. Watson Professor in Ecology and Evolution. She is chair of he Department of Ecology and Evolution at the university. Her research focuses on the interactions between the host plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, and the community of bacteria that inhabit it. Professor Bergelson is a graduate of Brown University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Angela V. Olinto has been named the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics. She serves as chair of the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the university. Her research focuses on astroparticle physics and cosmology. Professor Olinto is a graduate of Pontıficia Universidade Catolica, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she majored in physics. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sonali M. Smith has been selected as the first Elwood V. Jensen Professor in Medicine. Dr. Smith is an expert on lymphoma treatment and has made outstanding contributions to the field through clinical care, education, and clinical research. Professor Smith is a graduate of the Northwestern University Medical School.

Haitao “Heather” Zheng has been named the Neubauer Professor in Computer Science. Since 2005 she has been a faculty member in the department of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Zheng’s research focuses on mobile computing, wireless networking, and online and mobile data analysis. She is a graduate of Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China, where she majored in electrical engineering. She holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Laurie Zoloth has been named the Margaret E. Burton Professor in the Divinity School. In 2017 Professor Zoloth was named the dean of the Divinity School. Earlier, she was the Charles McCormick Deering Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on bioethics and Jewish studies. She is the author of Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Professor Zoloth holds a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the State University of New York. She holds a master’s degree from San Francisco State University and a second master’s degree in Jewish studies and a doctorate from the Graduate Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California.