Carnegie Mellon University, the highly selective educational institution in Pittsburgh has announced the appointment of seven faculty members fo the rank of University Professor. This is the highest faculty rank at the university.
“University Professors are distinguished by international recognition and for their contributions to education, artistic creativity and/or research,” said Provost Jim Garrett. “Each University Professor exempli!es a high level of professional achievement and an exceptional commitment to academic excellence at our university.”
Three of the seven new University Professors are women.
Jessica Hodgins is a professor of computer science and robotics in the School of Computer Science and also directs the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research laboratory in Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on computer graphics, animation and robotics with an emphasis on generating and analyzing human motion. She served as an associate professor and assistant dean in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology before joining the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 2000. Dr. Hodgins earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Yale University and received her Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989.
Kathryn Roeder, the UPMC Professor of Statistics and Life Sciences, holds appointments in the department of statistics & data science and the computational biology department. She also served as the university’s vice provost for faculty from July 2015 through June 2019. Among her research projects. Dr. Roeder has analyzed the variation in the whole human genome and how it relates to disease. Her work has contributed to a better understanding of schizophrenia, autism, and other genetic disorders. Dr. Roeder joined the faculty at the university in 1994. She is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Idaho, where she majored in wildlife resources. Professor Roeder holds a Ph.D. in statistics from Pennsylvania State University.
Susanne Slavick is an artist, curator, and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art. She joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon in 1984 after teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Slavik was head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon from 2000 to 2006. Professor Slavick is the editor of Out of Rubble (Charta Art Books, 2011). Professor Slavick graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Yale University. She studied at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and earned a master of fine arts degree at the Tyler School of Art in Rome and Philadelphia.