The School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has named 11 faculty members to endowed professorships. Four of these appointments went to women.
Gloria Choi was selected as the Mark Hyman Jr. Career Development Professor. Dr. Choi, an associate professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences and an investigator with the Picower Institute, examines the interaction of the immune system with the brain and the effects of that interaction on neurodevelopment, behavior, and mood. She joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 2013. Dr. Choi is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and holds a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
Arlene Fiore joins the MIT faculty as the inaugural Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone Professor in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. She was an associate professor at Columbia University. Her research encompasses air pollution, chemistry-climate connections, trends and variability in atmospheric constituents, and biosphere-atmosphere interactions. Dr. Fiore holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental geoscience and a Ph.D. in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard University.
Danna Freedman has been named the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry. Dr. Freedman leverages inorganic chemistry to solve problems in physics. Her research focuses on creating spin-based quantum bits and synthesizing new emergent materials. Professor Freedman joined the MIT faculty earlier this year after teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Seychelle M. Vos has been named a Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences. Vos examines the interplay of genome organization and gene expression to gain insight into how the organization of a cell affects what it becomes. She joined the biology department faculty at MIT in 2018. Professor Vos received a bachelor’s degree in genetics in 2008 from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology in 2013 from the University of California, Berkeley.