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School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes 10 new faculty

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Dean Agustín Rayo and the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences recently welcomed 10 new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research.

Isaiah Andrews PhD '14 joins MIT as a professor in the Department of Economics. Andrews is an econometrician who develops reliable and broadly applicable methods of statistical inference to address key challenges in economics, social science, and medicine. He is the recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Sloan Research Fellowship. Andrews earned his PhD in economics from MIT and was previously an assistant and associate professor in the Department of Economics.

Joshua Bennett is professor of literature and distinguished chair of the humanities. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, including most recently "Spoken Word: A Cultural History" (Knopf, 2023) and  " The Study of Human Life" (Penguin, 2022), which is being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios. He earned his PhD in English from Princeton University, and an MA in theater and performance studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. For his creative writing and scholarship, Bennett has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

Nathaniel Hendren PhD '12 is a professor in the Department of Economics. His research quantifies the differences in economic mobility and opportunity for people of different backgrounds, explores why private markets often fail to provide economic opportunity, and offers new tools for government policymakers evaluating the effectiveness of social programs. Hendren founded and co-directs  Policy Impacts  and  Opportunity Insights . He has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a Sloan Research Fellowship. Hendren earned his PhD in economics from MIT.

Crystal Lee PhD '22   is an assistant professor in computational media and design with a shared appointment in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. She works broadly on research related to ethical tech, social media, data visualization, and disability. This research has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the MIT Programs for Digital Humanities. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where she co-leads the Ethical Tech Working Group, and a senior fellow at Mozilla. She graduated with high honors from Stanford University and completed her PhD at MIT.

Eli Nelson joins the Program on Science, Technology, and Society as an assistant professor. Nelson completed a PhD in the history of science from Harvard University in 2018. His research focuses on the history of Native sciences in North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before coming to MIT, Nelson was an assistant professor of American studies at Williams College.

Ashesh Rambachan  is a new assistant professor in the Department of Economics. He studies economic applications of machine learning, focusing on algorithmic tools that drive decision-making in the criminal justice system and consumer lending markets and developing algorithmic procedures for discovering new behavioral models. Rambachan also develops methods for determining causation using cross-sectional and dynamic data. He earned his PhD in economics from Harvard, and is joining MIT after spending a year as a postdoc at Microsoft New England.

Nina Roussille joins the Department of Economics as an assistant professor after completing postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and the London School of Economics (LSE). Roussille studies topics in labor and gender economics, including how biased beliefs about outside options can keep workers stuck in low-wage jobs and how gender differences in salary demands can generate wage inequality. She is also the executive director of LSE’s  Hub for Equal Representation . Roussille earned her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Jessica Ruffin is an assistant professor of literature. Her first book, "Becoming Amphibious: critical ethical encounters between land and sea," engages philosophical aesthetics, critical theory, and philosophies of race to trace the potential for ethics amid white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Her essays include "Preface to a Philosophy by Which No One Can Live" (New German Critique); "The Myth of the Sneeze in the Dream of Film History" (Discourse); and "Between Friends" (qui parle). Her second manuscript reframes Frankfurt School critical theory and psychoanalysis in light of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetics — exploring the ethical and mystical in German avant-garde media through the conclusion of World War II. She earned a PhD in film and media, with a designated emphasis in critical theory (2021). She also holds an MA in German literature and culture (University of California at Berkeley, 2018) and an MA in humanities (University of Chicago, 2008). She comes to MIT after two years as assistant professor of film, television, and media and member of the Michigan Society of Fellows at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Caitlin Talmadge PhD '11 is an associate professor of political science. She also serves as a senior non-resident fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution; a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense; and a series editor for Cornell Studies in Security Affairs at Cornell University Press. During academic year 2023-24, she is on leave from MIT as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington. Talmadge’s research and teaching focus on nuclear deterrence and escalation, U.S. military operations and strategy, and security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. Talmadge is a graduate of Harvard (BA, government, summa cum laude) and MIT (PhD, political science). Previously, she has worked as a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; a consultant to the Office of Net Assessment at the U.S. Department of Defense; and a professor at the George Washington University and Georgetown University.

Miguel Zenón is an assistant professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. He is a Puerto Rican alto saxophonist, composer, band leader, music producer, and educator. He is a multiple Grammy Award nominee, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. He also holds an honorary doctorate degree in the arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. Zenón has built a distinguished career as a leader, releasing several critically acclaimed albums while touring and recording with some of the great musicians of our time.

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MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes six new faculty

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First-year applicants: Creative portfolios

Researchers, performing artists, visual artists, and makers may submit optional portfolios for review by MIT staff or faculty through SlideRoom .
 For more information on each type of portfolio, please review the descriptions below. Creative portfolios are truly optional, and should only be submitted if they feature work that is both significant to you and relevant to your MIT application.

Portfolios must be submitted by the same deadline as your corresponding application cycle—Early Action or Regular Action.

Students who have worked on a significant research project outside of high school classes are welcome to submit the Research Supplement via SlideRoom . If you have worked on more than one research project, focus on one project that is most significant to you.

• Please answer a brief questionnaire about your research experience.
• Include a PDF of your abstract or research poster, if available. If the work being submitted has been published, provide a citation.
• Nominate your research advisor, mentor, or Principal Investigator to submit a letter of recommendation directly through the SlideRoom portfolio.

Note: only one Research Supplement is permitted per applicant.

Music & Theater Arts

Students with exceptional musical, theater arts, or performing arts talent who would like their work to be reviewed by professional faculty from the MIT Music & Theater Arts department may submit a portfolio via SlideRoom .

• All Music & Theater Arts submissions: We require one letter of recommendation from a current or recent music or theater arts teacher, requested directly through the SlideRoom portfolio. We also ask that you upload a performing arts résumé.
• If you play two instruments equally well, you may optionally choose to submit a separate music portfolio for each instrument. Please create a second SlideRoom account using a different email address to submit a separate portfolio for your second instrument.
• The composition portfolio is currently designed for musicians who compose music using Western musical notation. If possible, we ask that submissions that feature music production or electronic beats provide some musical notation, scores, or arrangements.
• Actors, dancers, directors, and designers: Submit up to three videos or images. 10 minutes maximum total combined video time.
• This portfolio option is meant for screenwriters/playwrights only. While MIT values creative writing, we do not currently offer a portfolio to review creative writing, essays, poetry, etc.

Visual Art & Architecture

The Visual Art & Architecture portfolio is designed for students with exceptional creative talent who would like their work to be reviewed by professional faculty and staff at MIT. You should consider submitting work via SlideRoom if your work is a significant part of your application and demonstrates strong creative talent for a young artist.

• We encourage all types of media art, including design, drawing, painting, mixed media, digital media, photography, sculpture, and architectural work.
• You may submit a portfolio of up to 10 images of your work for review. Include the title, medium, a brief description, date completed, and a brief description of each work’s concept or inspiration.

Note: only one Visual Art & Architecture portfolio is permitted per applicant.

The Maker Portfolio is an opportunity for students to showcase their technical creativity—from carpentry to coding to cosplay. Your submission will be evaluated by the Engineering Advisory Board, a group of MIT faculty, staff, and alumni with notable technical expertise in different modes of making. If you make the kind of thing(s) you might exhibit at a Maker Faire, demo at a hackathon, or just do for yourself and friends, then the Maker Portfolio in SlideRoom is a way to show us.

• Please answer a brief questionnaire about what you make, how you make, and why you make. Provide clarity on relevant goals, issues, setbacks, and lessons learned. We want to know about your problem-solving process and motivations, not just your visible end result.
• Sometimes, less is more! If you’re particularly prolific, consider focusing on the details for a few of your favorite projects.

Note: only one Maker Portfolio is permitted per applicant.

Portfolio fee or waivers

The fee to submit each portfolio is $10. However, we understand that paying college application fees presents a hardship for some families. If the submission fee presents a hardship for you and your family, you may qualify for a fee waiver. To request a fee waiver, send a brief email to our SlideRoom portfolio team with the subject line “SlideRoom Fee Waiver” by the deadlines listed below. Include your full name and date of birth in the body of the email. Your SlideRoom portfolio must be in progress to receive a fee waiver; we cannot proactively grant fee waivers for portfolios that have not been started.

Fee Waiver Deadlines

Early Action: October 27 (Portfolios must be submitted by November 1)

Regular Action: December 28 (Portfolios must be submitted by January 4)

Allow 3–5 days for your request to be processed. You will receive an email once your fee has been waived; you must then submit your portfolio by the submission deadline.

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Prospective Students

Comparative Media Studies/Writing is at the vanguard of media and writing education and practice.

We’re home to some of the world’s great talents: Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz , digital media scholars-and-makers Fox Harrell and Nick Montfort , ethnographer T.L. Taylor , fiction writer Helen Elaine Lee , science writers Tom Levenson and Seth Mnookin , and many others .

CMS/W is where the humanities rise from the page and canvas into what we call “applied humanities”.

We also feature more than half a dozen research groups , where the humanities rise from the page and canvas into what we call “applied humanities”—work developed by faculty, staff researchers, and students who together produce games, tools for civic action, code for data visualization, documentary filmmaking, and much more.

As you look through our degree offerings below, you might ask, “What’s in a slash? Is CMS/W one thing or two?” The answer is…yes. As an undergraduate, you’ll major in either Comparative Media Studies, Creative Writing, Science Writing, or Digital Media. As a graduate student, you’ll graduate with a degree in Comparative Media Studies or Science Writing. Likewise, your curriculum will be shaped to meet the requirements of those courses of study.

But the faculty , lecturers , staff , research groups , subject offerings , events , and thus the ethos of CMS/W contribute to form a single unit.

And now the nitty gritty about the degree programs themselves, how to major, and how to apply…

Degrees and Majors

Comparative media studies, undergraduate major, minor or concentration.

• Undergraduate Major, Minor or Concentration in Comparative Media Studies : for undergraduates already at MIT

Undergraduate Majors, Minor, Concentration, or Joint Degrees

Undergraduate majors, minor, concentration, and joint degrees (with engineering or the sciences) : for undergraduates already at MIT.

Majors and areas of study in Writing include:

• Creative Writing
• Science Writing
• Digital Media

Graduate Program in Science Writing

Graduate Program in Science Writing (Master’s Degree): for prospective students who already hold a bachelor’s degree or equivalent.

International Applicants

All programs are open to students from outside the United States. Materials needed for admission are largely the same but must also include test scores proving English proficiency. Learn more at the MIT Office of Graduate Admissions and the International Students Office .

Visiting Students and and Special Students

• Visiting student : for students currently enrolled in another graduate or undergraduate degree program who have been invited by CMS/W faculty to participate in research here.
• Special student : for people not currently enrolled in a degree program, who wish to take classes in CMS/W.

Embrace an ExpansIve Vision of Literary Study

With a faculty composed of renowned scholars and dedicated teachers, the MIT Literature section offers a wide range of courses across time periods, international cultures, and languages. Literature courses at MIT examine how novels, poems, plays, films, visual art, and other media make imaginative and critical sense of history and the present.

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Comparative Media Studies/Writing

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The General Institute Requirements include a Communication Requirement that is integrated into both the HASS Requirement and the requirements of each major; see details below.

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Summer Creative Writing Institute Wraps Up with Showcase of Faculty and Student Talent

The Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation wrapped up for the summer on June 20, with its wildly popular Creative Writing Showcase. Students, faculty, and special guests met on a warm evening on the Secchia Terrace to read from the work they produced throughout the semester. They also enjoyed pizza and a drink together while Romero Biagini-Rosenbaum, a participating student of Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins and classical guitar at the Peabody Institute, serenaded all with his spectacular guitar playing.  The event topped a great summer of readings and lectures.

The 2024 Writer in Residence, Rachel Cantor , launched the Institute’s events with a reading on May 21, and the reception that followed on the Secchia Terrace allowed students and faculty to meet and mingle. Rachel Cantor also conducted a Master class with all four Creative Writing classes during the five weeks of the Institute.

In week two, Professor Moira Egan moderated a discussion with Whitbred-winning author Matthew Kneale and JCU professor Silvia Giagnoni about the challenges of writing non-fiction and fiction when positioned as cultural outsiders. Later that same week, students and faculty were entertained by a wonderful reading by former alumnus Jahan Khajavi, who read from his debut poetry collection, Feast of the Ass .

In week three, JCU Professor Allison-Grimaldi Donahue, a writer and translator herself, was in conversation with author and translator Marzia D’Amico to discuss how translation can be an act of activism. Later that same week, multiple award-winning writer, Cynthia Zarin, who teaches at Yale, read from her poetry collections and her first novel, Inverno.

In week four, the Institute welcomed best-selling writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius award, Ocean Vuong , who gave his first-ever reading in Rome at John Cabot in the Lemon Tree Courtyard. His reading was followed by a stimulating and thought-provoking exchange with the audience about the importance of reading and the craft of writing. Students and faculty had the pleasure of enjoying casual conversation with him after the event during a dinner on the Secchia Terrace.

In the last week of the Institute, Rachel Cantor and Institute Director and Associate Professor of English Literature, Shannon Russell, discussed the Bronte siblings in relation to Cantor’s re-imagining of their lives in her latest novel, Half Life of a Stolen Sister. All events were well attended by both students, faculty, and the general public. If you would like to join our mailing list to hear about next summer’s Institute events, please write to [email protected] .

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The Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) supports the development of creative projects, artist residencies, cross-disciplinary classes, and research that integrate the arts across the Institute and have significant student engagement or impact on campus.

CAST offers several categories of funding for MIT faculty and principal or senior research staff from all departments, labs, and centers. Two new types of grants were established in 2016, the Mellon Faculty Grant and the Fay Chandler Creativity Grant . In 2018, the International Exhibition and Performance Fund was introduced to defray the costs of a faculty member’s performance, exhibition, installation, or other creative project that will appear by invitation in a major international venue.

How to apply

For more information, contact  [email protected]

Azra Akšamija’s Displaced Empire

The MIT Future Heritage Lab, in collaboration with displaced Syrian refugees, humanitarian workers, and host communities in Jordan, presents Displaced Empire at the Co-habits section of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia curated by Hashim Sarkis.

Focused on the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan, one of the region’s largest camps sheltering more than 35,000 displaced Syrians, the large-scale installation speculates a near-future world in which the majority of people have been forcibly displaced. In this scenario, the Azraq Camp has become the capital of the global Displaced Empire .

2020-21 International Exhibition and Performance Grant

Azra Akšamija’s Lightweaver

Azra Akšamija’s Lightweaver prototypes are playful kinetic lighting machines and educational devices developed in collaboration with artists, engineers and inventors from the Al Azraq refugee camp. The Lightweaver translates stories from textiles into a sensory play of light, aiming to preserve cultural memory and inspire hope.

2017 CAST Faculty Grant

Xavi Laida Aguirre's Proofing: Resistant and Ready

Assistant Professor Xavi Laida Aguirre’s project  Proofing: Resistant and Ready  features at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture in a pavilion curated around the theme of “Everlasting Plastics.” Incorporating a built environment and an immersive video experience,  Proofing: Resistant and Ready  explores the contradictory nature of plastics in architecture as they help us create more robust and durable environments while also being partially responsible for the climate disaster. The project offers a series of prototypes and building techniques to intervene subversively in the built environment with the intention of reintroducing the lost promises of plastic’s longevity through both material and digital tactics.

2023 CAST Mellon Faculty Grant

Judith Barry's All the light that is ours to see

Judith Barry ‘s exhibition at Lumiar Cité constitutes the international premiere of her two-channel immersive installation All the light that’s ours to see , for which the artist appropriates the story of a New York video rental chain store, the infamous Mondo Kim’s, and the quest to find a home for 55,000 video tapes and films after it closed.

2019 International Exhibition and Performance Grant

Judith Barry's HA®DCELL

First exhibited in  Crash: Nostalgia for the Absence of Cyberspace  at Thread Waxing Space in 1994, and included in MoMA’s 1995 landmark exhibition,  Video Spaces: Eight Installations , Judith Barry’s  HA®DCELL  explores the life, death, and afterlife of technology. With support from CAST and a team of MIT artists, technologists, and tinkerers, Barry is reimagining and reanimating  HA®DCELL  for the present. As society grapples with Artificial Intelligence and ubiquitous “smart” technology, the dead tech of  HA®DCELL  reawakens.

2023 Mellon Faculty Grant

Joshua Bennett's The People’s Poetry Archive

Joshua Bennett’s  The People’s Poetry Archive  is a public humanities project to digitally preserve canonical and contemporary poems from across the African diaspora, as well as historically under-theorized works in the realm of spoken word performance.

2023-24 Mellon Faculty Grant

Charlotte Brathwaite's Bee Boy

Charlotte Brathwaite’s Bee Boy is an interdisciplinary artistic response to the violent murders of black men and women around the country, to bee colony collapse disorder, to #Blacklivesmatter, to an unjust prison/industrial complex, to human-animal-technological hybridization, to life in urban streets, and the emotional toil it takes to turn hate to love. It is a meditation on struggle and change in a world of chaos.

2021 CAST Faculty Grant

Charlotte Brathwaite and The Future is Present

The Future is Present (TFP) is a high-impact, liberatory media project that engages a core group of Black and Indigenous youth activists and art makers working in tandem with students, adult movement leaders, artists, and researchers.

Brandon Clifford’s Filament: Megaphones at the New York Philharmonic

Brandon Clifford and Ashley Fure, Dartmouth College Assistant Professor of Music, designed and fabricated megaphones to distribute the visceral power of sound to the far reaches of a concert hall in a project titled  Filament: Megaphones at the New York Philharmonic .

2018 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant

Ian Condry’s Dissolve Music

Ian Condry ‘s “Dissolve Music @ MIT” was a two-and-a-half-day conference, workshop and sound festival held on March 7-9, 2018. Combining art and scholarship in a spirit of experimentation, the conference aimed to dissolve boundaries between different arenas of sonic engagement to identify paths towards alternative, more inclusive futures.

Ian Condry’s Sound, Learning, and Democracy

Ian Condry ‘s “Sound, Learning, and Democracy” is a collaborative project aimed at developing works and performances for the MIT Spatial Sound Lab, an initiative led by Condry, a cultural anthropologist and professor in Global Studies and Languages with joint appointments in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and Anthropology at MIT. Working with the d&b soundscape, a new technology that enables high-resolution, precise localization of sound objects in 360-degree space, the Spatial Sound Lab is housed in the START Studio (W20-429).

2019 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant

Delia Duong Ba Wendel's A Memory Atlas for Racial Justice

The  Memory Atlas for Repair is an exhibition that attempts to reckon with the historical persistence of racialized dispossession in cities. Located in the MIT Student Center Plaza, it evokes a place of memory as the site of the 1968 exhibition that commemorated the civil rights work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after his assassination. Exhibition opening spring 2023.

Lerna Ekmekçioğlu's Twelve Faces of Armenian Feminism

As a CAST Mellon Faculty Fellow, McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is creating an exhibition and digital archive, “Twelve Faces of Armenian Feminism, 1860s to 1960s.” The project, based on research conducted by Ekmekçioğlu and Dr. Melissa Bilal (Visiting Scholar at MIT 2017–18), highlights 12 pioneering Armenian women writers and activists who produced work from the 1860s to 1960s.

2019 CAST Faculty Grant

Stephanie Frampton’s ARTificial Intelligence

Stephanie Frampton’s ARTificial Intelligence is a collaborative project between MIT and the Cambridge Public Library. The project is a multifaceted ongoing program fostering public dialogue about the emerging ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence (AI) through art and design.  ARTificial Intelligence radically draws on the university and the public sphere as sites of critical engagement and embodies the spirit of public-facing scholarship.

Christian Frederickson’s The Hammer and the Feather

The Hammer and the Feather, an immersive audio and visual installation, takes its name from the experiment performed on Earth’s moon by U.S. astronaut David Scott, which proved Galileo’s assertion that gravity exerts equal force on all objects. Developed at MIT by technical instructor Christian Frederickson and visual artist and filmmaker Greg King, The Hammer and the Feather uses the architecture of the liturgical mass as a structural and conceptual framework to create a contemplative and spiritual environment where audience participants can connect with large questions and pursue their own inquiries into the nature of existence. Bridging humanistic and scientific inquiry, the piece uses gravity as a poetic and conceptual departure point for musical, visual, and sonic material.

2020-21 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant

Deborah Garcia's A SEAT AT THE TABLE

A project by MIT Department of Architecture’s 20-22 Marion Mahony Emerging Practitioner Fellow Deborah Garcia, A SEAT AT THE TABLE  is a two-story table set on the MIT campus, serving as both a physical and virtual platform for performances and dialogue. The  TABLE , an architectonic platform scaled to the dimensions of the theatrical, serves the double task of interiorizing its activities within its constructed environment, while communicating outwardly by recording and broadcasting itself.

2021 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant

Rania Ghosn’s Blue Marble Circus

Rania Ghosn’s Blue Marble Circus is a monument to industrial humanity’s plastic footprint, which—although at a planetary scale—remains outside our geographical imagination.

2017 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant

Rania Ghosn's The Planet After Geoengineering

Commissioned for the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale and responding to the theme, “How will we live together?,”  The Planet After Geoengineering  tracks five geoengineering technologies in a series of 25 large-scale drawings that make visible geographies of deployments—sites, forms, externalities, the color of the sky, the smell of the air—and situates future promises within the genealogies of modern climate control technologies ranging from 19th-century rainmaking machines to Cold War weather modification schemes. In drawings and narratives,  The Planet After Geoengineering  makes geoengineering and its controversies public, inviting the viewer to interrogate the expansion of engineering (and by extension, design) to the scale of the planet.

Ekene Ijeoma's Deconstructed Anthems Boston

Deconstructed Anthems is a series of compositions, instruments, performances, and installations that portray black incarceration in the US using data from the US Department of Justice.

Assistant Professor in Media Arts and Sciences Ekene Ijeoma programmed an algorithmic composition that sonifies the over 1.5 million people who were removed from their communities from 1925 to today by repeating The Star-Spangled Banner while removing notes at the increasing incarceration rates. 

2024 Fay Chandler Faculty Creativity Grant

Mikael Jakobsson’s Maria: Voicing Counter Colonialism Through Board Game Creation

Mikael Jakobsson and his collaborators are designing a counter colonialist board game to establish networks for social impact through creative practices.

2018 Fay Chandler Faculty Creativity Grant

Anna Kohler’s Immense Joy/ Hots

Senior Lecturer Anna Kohler’s latest devised work Immense Joy/ Hots  is based on the writing of Clarice Lispector, a revolutionary Brazilian author (1920-67). The project was performed at MIT on September 10 as a work-in-progress presentation, and will have a full premiere at The Tank NYC  in winter 2022

Anna Kohler’s Mytho? Lure of Wildness

Anna Kohler’s Mytho? Lure of Wildness is a surround-sensorial theatrical experience/experiment, conceived and performed by MIT faculty member Anna Kohler and directed by lecturer Caleb Hammond. It is an experiment, a study of the beast within, of beauty and its transformation from young and fresh to old and worn, but not resigned.

2016 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant

Kent Larson and the Media Lab City Science Group's Two Mobility Futures 0∞

Two Mobility Futures  0∞ , exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, presents a dichotomy of divergent possibilities for mobility in the future. The 2020 pandemic instantly halted most human travel while products, food, information, and experiences were delivered to each household. At the same time, fantastic new land, air, and space mobility modes may enable humans to move frictionlessly to wherever they desire.

2022 CAST International Exhibition Grant

Tod Machover and Jay Scheib's VALIS

VALIS , composed by Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and director of the Media Lab’s Opera of the Future Group Tod Machover, was commissioned for the 10th anniversary of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, premiered there in December 1987, and then toured the U.S. (including performances in the MIT Media Lab’s Cube) and Asia through the early 1990s. A recording of the opera is still a best-seller for Bridge Records and various voice-instrument-electronics versions have been presented over the past years, but a full production of VALIS has not been mounted for almost 30 years. A new production will be directed by Jay Scheib and developed in MIT’s Theater Arts performance space (W97). Technology will be created at the MIT Media Lab, under the direction of Tod Machover, marking the first collaboration between the Media Lab and the Theater Arts program.

Keeril Makan and Jay Scheib’s Person a

Persona , a chamber opera based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 classic film, composed by Keeril Makan , with direction and libretto by Jay Scheib , previewed in a workshop performance at MIT on October 17, 2015.

The fully staged production premiered at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY on October 23-24, 2015. Persona starred soprano Amanda Crider, was produced by Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) and conducted by Evan Ziporyn.

2016 CAST Faculty Grant

Ana Miljački's Critical Broadcasting Lab

Through a series of interventions including workshops and public lectures,  Critical Broadcasting Lab  performs as a curatorial entity at MIT and beyond. In a series of Agit Arch Experiments in fall 2018, Miljački and participants of  Critical Broadcasting Lab  investigate contemporary media and methods of broadcasting architectural discourse and criticism. The lab simultaneously conducts an oral history, presented in the form of an exhibition, about two forms of refusal by architects to engage—refusal to accept commissions and refusal to sue for copyright infringement.

2018 CAST Faculty Grant

Ana Miljački's See Us Seesaw Together

Critic, curator, and Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT Ana Milja​​čki’s  See Us Seesaw Together  is a network of inflatable seesaws that allow for an embodied comprehension of another’s presence and cooperation, all at a six-foot distance. As one player sits, the others bob up and down as the structure responds to their movement. The installation opens in fall 2021.

Richard Milner's Visualizing the Proton

Richard Milner , in collaboration with physicist colleagues Rolf Ent and Rik Yoshida at Jefferson Lab and video artists C hris Boebel and Joe McMaster at MIT, have taken inspiration from the colorized Hubble images of the large-scale structure of the universe from original black-and-white exposures. The creators of these images describe them as “equal parts art and science.” This project’s goal is to create similarly scientifically authentic, visually inspiring images of the microcosm and explore the creative process, the challenge of scientific “accuracy,” evidence, and the very concept of “understanding.” Milner and his colleagues are motivated by new and planned electron accelerators that aim to deliver snapshots of the fundamental structure of matter with unprecedented clarity.

Joseph Paradiso's Diversifying Space

Diversifying Space centers on two classes: STS.058 Space Exploration and Interplanetary Habitation (Boucher, spring 2019) and MAS.S64 Prototyping our Sci-Fi Space Future: designing & deploying projects for zero gravity flights (Paradiso, fall 2019), as well as a series of workshops and presentations by visiting artists. Topics range from parabolic flight research to the social impact of science and technology at an interplanetary level.

Cristina Parreño Alonso's Tectonics of Wisdom

Tectonics of Wisdom is an art installation that aims to expand architecture’s temporal sensibilities by examining the physical and material space of the library building.

In response to the question of the future of public architecture raised in an exhibition organized by the Schusev Museum of Architecture in Moscow, Tectonics of Wisdom situates the building of the library within the temporal scales of the Earth.

Elena Ruehr’s Songs from Extrasolar Spaces

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) , launched in April 2018, aims to survey 85 percent of the sky in the search for new planets. Songs from Extrasolar Spaces sets this mission to music during the MIT TESS Science Conference , the first academic gathering dedicated to TESS mission science, including exoplanets, asteroseismology, stellar binaries, variable stars, Solar System science, and extragalactic astronomy.

Rafi Segal and Marisa Jahn's Architecture for New Collectives

Architecture for New Collectives is an immersive installation featuring digital, urban, and architectural platforms seeking to leverage the power of solidarity to strengthen economic sovereignty, housing affordability, communal self-determination, and mutual aid. Led by MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, founded and directed by architect Rafi Segal and artist Marisa Morán Jahn with MIT Civic Data Design Lab Director Sarah Williams, Architecture for New Collectives asks how communities can be formed, organized, and strengthened through both the digital and physical design of space.

2020-21 International Exhibition and Performance Fund

Pawan Sinha’s Vision in Art and Neuroscience

Pawan Sinha’s 9.S52/9.S916 Vision in Art and Neuroscience introduces students to core concepts in visual perception through the lenses of art and neuroscience. Students engage with these concepts through hands-on studio practice. The material has been selected both to expose students to the study of brain and cognitive sciences and to engage those already within the neuroscience community in art production as a means to explore and visualize the principles of perception.

2017 and 2018 CAST Faculty Grants

Jay Scheib's The Silence

As an MIT CAST Mellon Faculty Fellow, Jay Scheib is reinventing Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (1963). The film, described both as a “landmark of modernist cinema” (Lloyd Michaels) and a “tangle of brooding confusions and despairs” ( The New York Times ), exposes the tense and uncomfortable relationship of two sisters at a hotel in an unfriendly, unknown city.

Anne Whiston Spirn's Making Change: In Place Over Time

Anne Whiston Spirn, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, and filmmaker John Moody collaborate on a 60-minute film featuring personal and collective reflections on the  West Philadelphia Landscape Project , an award-winning action research project founded by Spirn in 1987. The project engages MIT faculty and students in exploring how to restore the urban natural environment and rebuild low-income communities of color, simultaneously and synergistically. More than six years in the making, the film depicts the struggle to envision and implement an integrated approach to wicked problems of pollution, poverty, and race. Design as research is featured, including the role of design thinking and design experiments, and how real-world successes and failures test and generate ideas, prompt pivots, and forge deep relationships among university and community partners.

2022 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant

Hans Tursack and Viola Ago's Understorey: University Design Research Fellowship Pavilion For Exhibit Columbus

The pavilion design, titled “Understorey,” is a large open-air vivarium built from a combination of off-the-shelf agricultural products, and custom, digitally fabricated structural elements.

Ken Urban’s The Immortals

The Immortals , a work in progress by playwright Ken Urban, draws from the strange and troubling case of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose “immortal” cancer cells (HeLa cells) continue to be used in biological research over 65 years after her death. The idea for The Immortals stems from interviews with scientists who work in biological research labs, exploring the issues surrounding HeLa cells and the acquiring of cellular material for research purposes.

Gediminas Urbonas’s The Swamp School

For the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas curate the Swamp Pavilion, which represents their native Lithuania. It is a networked effort to create new imaginary space for exercises in architectural and artistic practices, theory and pedagogy through events including public interventions, field trips, workshops, lectures, discussions, chat channels and printed publications.

Christine Walley's Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project

The  Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project  highlights a remarkable collection of objects, gathered and preserved by residents of a steel mill community as its industrial base was collapsing, and “storylines” that explore their meaning by weaving together artifacts, documentary film, and online storytelling.

Christine Walley, Chris Boebel, and Jeff Soyk collaborate on a new documentary storyline on post-industrial environmental activism spearheaded by Latina leaders. Tentatively titled “From Wetlands to Waste,” the storyline begins with the artifact of a jar of “petcoke,” an industrial pollutant that community activists successfully fought against.

2022–23 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant

J. Meejin Yoon’s FloatLab

J. Meejin Yoon’s FloatLab project is an educational platform to study and observe the transforming urban waterway and is sited within the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Professor Yoon leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and environmental scientists to explore how cities like Philadelphia are revitalizing their riverfronts and learning from urban river ecologies.

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Creative Writing Faculty - In the News

Emory professor t cooper interviews screenwriter ron nyswaner.

T Cooper hosts a podcast for the Writers Guild of America's OnWriting podcast series. He interviews Ron Nyswaner, the screenwriter of Philadelphia . They talk mostly about his most recent project, Fellow Travelers , which is on Showtime, but also about representation, craft, and storytelling around LGBTQ lives in film/television.

Emory professor Jericho Brown named Academy of American Poets chancellor

Kimberly Belflower on childhood, growing up and reclaiming the “Lost Girl”

Nostalgia and growth are the driving forces behind Lost Girl, a feminist follow-up to J.M. Barrie’s famous tale of Wendy Darling and the boy who never grew up. It’s appropriate that playwright Kimberly Belflower essentially grew up while she wrote the play, which she began at age 20 and finished nearly 10 years later.

Tayari Jones takes Emory president to creative writing class on podcast

On the latest episode of One Big Question, Emory President Gregory L. Fenves talks to bestselling author and creative writing professor Tayari Jones about the power of storytelling.

Fitzcarraldo Editions has hired Rachael Allen to launch a poetry list

Fitzcarraldo Editions has hired Rachael Allen to launch a poetry list, including a collection from Emory Poetry Fellow, Sasha Debevec-McKenney:

Meet the #AWP25 HBCU Fellowship Program Creative Advisor (AWP):

Thriving undergraduate creative writing programs exist at many historically Black colleges and universities

News & Events

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

• Faculty & Staff
• Instructors

Sarah R. Akaaboune

Class of 2025 General science

Sarah R. Akaaboune is a writer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She attended the University of Michigan, where she studied neuroscience and English. In the lab, she studied the impacts of Golgi fragmentation on lysosomal protein biogenesis and the development of neurological disorders. Outside of the lab, she served as a writer and editor for her student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, where she covered a variety of topics, most notably medical malpractice and its impact on survivors.  

Sarah has also explored science communication and data accessibility as a community leadership fellow at her local health department and as a student correspondent for Teen Vogue, where she covered the 2024 presidential election cycle in Michigan.

When she isn’t writing, Sarah can be found in the lab, listening to old episodes of This American Life , or spending time with her cat.  

Anika Jane Beamer

Class of 2025 Environmental science, microbiology

Anika Jane Beamer  is a Midwesterner and a writer with a background in the biological sciences. She’s spent years researching and thinking about life’s little guys—viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Now, she’s interested in writing about how manmade changes to the environment are transforming microscopic life, for better and worse.

Anika Jane has spent the last two years as the science writer for Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. There, she shared stories about research, faculty, and students in fields as far-flung as robotics, galaxy formation, water geochemistry, and lung cancer.   She sees herself as a translator, deconstructing the “language of science” to ensure that the hard-to-see, and harder-to-fathom, can be understood by a wide audience. Whether hiking, painting, birdwatching, or playing soccer, she’s often thinking about her place in nature and the science that surrounds her.

Jessica Chomik-Morales

Class of 2025 General science, neuroscience

Jessica Chomik-Morales was raised in South Florida, where from an early age she wondered why people act the way they do. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and since graduation, has worked in a cognitive neuroscience lab at MIT, where she uses fMRI to explore abstract thought in humans.

As a daughter of immigrant parents from Paraguay, Jessica is fiercely proud of her heritage and uses her privileged position as a bilingual scientist to bridge the gap between a predominantly English-speaking academic world and the Spanish-speaking public. She hosts and produces Mi Última Neurona , a neuroscience podcast in Spanish, to ignite curiosity, spark conversations, and empower her community.

At MIT, Jessica is excited to expand her communication abilities while serving the Spanish-speaking community, weaving together population-relevant narratives to foster understanding and inclusivity within the scientific landscape.

Nanticha Ocharoenchai

Class of 2025 Environmental science, general science, wildlife conservation

Nanticha Ocharoenchai , or Lyn,  first started journaling when she left her hometown of Bangkok to go on a year-long exchange in Italy. When she found hiking and backpacking, the se hobbies and adventures sparked her  love of environmental journalism and activism.

Just before graduating in communications from Chulalongkorn University in 2019, Lyn organized what grew into Thailand’s first youth climate movement. Since then, she has written and produced short films for WWF, Greenpeace, Mongabay , The Pulitzer Center, and more, covering topics from wildlife conservation and sustainable design, to Indigenous knowledge and land rights. In a search for practical—and fun!—environmental solutions, Lyn is furiously learning about natural science and conservation technology and is excited to explore more at MIT.

Pratik Pawar

Class of 2025 Global health, medicine, science policy

Pratik Pawar is a science journalist who covers stories about global health, medicine, and science policy. He is particularly interested in covering neglected health issues in the Global South and in understanding the role of inequity and socio-political realities in furthering health crises. His work has been published in The Atlantic , Nature , Science , and Undark , among other outlets.

At MIT, Pratik aims to learn new skills in data and investigative journalism to help him tell nuanced and substantive stories about global health. When he’s not at his desk, you can find Pratik noodling on his guitar, reading personal essays, or out in nature.

Paula Rowińska

Class of 2025 Environmental science, geography, math, mental health

Paula Rowińska is a writer from Warsaw, Poland, and is the author of Mapmatics: A Mathematician’s Guide to Navigating the World, a popular science book about the mathematics of maps.

While pursuing her Ph.D. in mathematics and statistics at Imperial College London, Paula discovered that she prefers science communication to research. She has shared her passion for math by contributing to newspaper articles, radio shows, and TV programs. Since graduation, she has been creating interactive math and data science content for Brilliant, an educational company.

At MIT, Paula will continue exploring the role of mathematics in our daily lives while also covering topics like mental health and environmental issues. In her free time, she reads more books than she cares to admit, loves learning foreign languages, and has a soft spot for musicals.

Mackenzie White

Mackenzie White is a writer and planetary scientist from Austin, Texas. Her journey into science writing began at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received liberal arts and science degrees.

Driven by curiosity about other worlds, she earned a Ph.D. in geophysics, specializing in temperatures on the Moon and Mars. During graduate school, she worked on NASA missions, which fueled her enthusiasm for sharing discoveries with the public. She has contributed to outlets like Google Arts & Culture and Eos and was a 2022 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Science Friday .

At MIT, Mackenzie aims to strengthen the connection between humans and the natural world through storytelling. When she’s not writing about space rocks, you can find her along the rivers of central Texas with her dogs, Rocky and Maggie.

Celina Zhao

Class of 2025 Anthropology, biology, technology

Celina Zhao is pumped to be staying in Cambridge for another year after studying writing and biology as an undergraduate at MIT.

Celina’s work with Science, NOVA, and Cell Press has led her to explore scientific topics ranging from telescope cyberattacks to controversial fossils to microbes that travel through wildfire smoke. She’s fascinated by the relationship between culture, technology, and the natural world, and is excited to work on long-form projects that explore the evolution of this intersection in the coming year.

Outside the classroom, you can find Celina running along the Charles, drinking too much matcha, and challenging herself to try something new every day.

Eva Cornman

Class of 2024 Biology, medicine

Eva Cornman is a writer from the suburbs of Chicago. While studying molecular and cellular biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she realized that she preferred writing and talking about science over actually doing it. She left the University of Illinois with a bachelor’s in biology, a minor in creative writing, and a newfound passion for science writing.

After graduating, Eva spent a year managing a clinical research laboratory that studies the human gut microbiome. At MIT, Eva hopes to use her science background and clinical lab management experience to inform her writing on biology and medicine.

When she isn’t writing, Eva can often be found dancing, hiking, or hanging out with her cat.  

Class of 2024 Health, medicine

Noah Daly is a writer and reporter covering drug policy, psychedelic science, art, and medical tech innovations. His reporting can be found in The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Up Magazine , and Lucid News , among other publications.

Originally from New York City, Noah’s love for science was nurtured by watching MythBusters and Steve Irwin: Crocodile Hunter as a kid. After graduating from CUNY Brooklyn College, his love of journalism inspired him to get as close as possible to people telling true stories that change minds and hold truth to power, first as an intern at Foreign Affairs Magazine  and then as a graduate administrative aide at New York University’s journalism school.  

At MIT, Noah will investigate the therapeutic convergences of trauma, violence, and substances that alter our states of consciousness. Outside of the classroom, Noah is an avid reader, a novice guitar strummer, a better-than-average chef, and a Purple Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under Gregor Gracie.

Sophie Hartley

Class of 2024 Conservation

The woodlands of eastern Vermont sparked Sophie Hartley ‘s early interest in forest ecosystems. She studied human development and creative writing at the University of Chicago, where she wrote about wild boar, rewilding, and rural Montana’s pushback against bison conservation.

Her work with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the New Hampshire State Parks helped Sophie find her footing as a photojournalist. Since graduating, she has been writing fauna and flora identification guides for hikers in Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests.  

At MIT, Sophie wants to keep investigating how culture and science clash in conservation efforts. When she’s not writing or taking pictures, you can usually find her trying to redecorate her apartment.

Sarah Hopkins

Class of 2024 Climate change, migration, public health, science and the law, social justice

Sarah Hopkins holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in literature from the University of Oxford and Sarah Lawrence College. She has worked as a writer, editor, and communicator for social justice organizations, including the ACLU, where she translated complex legal concepts to non-expert audiences and to the media. In these roles, she saw how the law relies on experts trained in scientific fields to move people in power toward informed decisions. She also witnessed how people in power seek to suppress the truth from the public and from the people most impacted by their decisions or policies.

At MIT, Sarah is excited to expand her storytelling across different mediums. She is interested in researching the use of junk science within the criminal justice system and the complex ways in which the law intersects with science—two disciplines that seek the truth but operate in contradictory ways. She also plans to explore other intersections between science and social justice, such as climate change and public health.

Class of 2024 Climate change, environmental justice, urban studies

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Alex Ip graduated with a bachelor’s in environmental engineering from Georgia Tech. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Xylom , a student-led nonprofit newsroom exploring how communities are influenced and shaped by science. Alex is also leading a team to translate the KSJ Science Editing Handbook into Chinese (Traditional and Simplified).

At MIT, Alex aims to cover the future of cities and environmental justice in the American South, in addition to the often contentious dynamic between evangelical Christianity and climate change. When he’s not writing, you could see Alex zipping around town on his bike, watching a lot of basketball, and cuddling his cat.

Hannah Richter

Class of 2024 Astrophysics, environmental science

The moment Hannah Richter learned about science writing, she was hooked: it combined her lifelong loves of nature and storytelling.

Hannah holds a bachelor’s in environmental science and a minor in creative writing from the University of Chicago. In the lab, she studied bivalves and ocean acidification before interning at Circle of Blue, where she covered East Coast saltwater intrusion, and at the  Living on Earth  radio show and podcast, where she produced segments from methane-filled cow burps to cryptocurrency and energy use. Hannah also took her sights from Earth to the stars, interning in communications at NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope team and writing an ebook for the Fermi Space Telescope.

At MIT, Hannah aims to cover more stories about the environment and humans’ role in shaping it.

Lily Stewart

Class of 2024 Climate change, reproductive health

Lily Stewart is a writer from Northeast Ohio. She attended the University of Cincinnati, where she studied writing, literature, and biology. She has explored multimedia storytelling and science writing through her varied experiences as an interpretive writer for local parks, a science communication intern at environmental organizations, a strategic foresight researcher focused on the future of misinformation, and an organizer in the reproductive justice movement.

At MIT, Lily plans to write about reproductive health and medicine. She is especially interested in the intermingling of climate change and reproductive health. When Lily isn’t writing, she loves to bind books, garden, and practice her plant identification skills.

Alex Viveros

Class of 2024 Biotechnology, health, medicine

Alex Viveros stumbled into journalism as a college freshman when he spontaneously joined his student newspaper, The Tufts Daily , and signed up for the first section he could think of: “Sports!” He went on to lead The Tufts Daily as its managing editor and editor-in-chief during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alex majored in biology and community health at Tufts, and was a member of the Politico Journalism Institute’s 2021 class. He has interned at Science Magazine and The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he wrote about biological sciences, gene therapy, machine learning, and chimpanzees.  

At MIT, he hopes to cultivate long-form stories on chronic disease and advancements in biotechnology. When he’s not writing, you can find Alex practicing martial arts, playing competitive video games, building Legos, and supporting his favorite Premier League football club.

Covering a story? Visit our page for journalists or call (773) 702-8360.

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Thirty-one UChicago faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships in 2024

Thirty-one members of the University of Chicago faculty have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.

Profs. Clifford Ando, Curtis A. Bradley, Cathy J. Cohen, Steven Durlauf, Christopher Faraone, Ayelet Fishbach, Anthony Kaldellis, Young-Kee Kim, Sanjog Misra, Mitchell C. Posner and Alexander Todorov have been named distinguished service professors. Profs. David Archer, Daniel Bartels, David W. Chang, Paul Cheney, Tom S. Clark, Anna Costello, Benson Farb, Dwight N. Hopkins, Yamuna Krishnan, Gabriel Richardson Lear, Kay F. Macleod, Rochona Majumdar, Nadya Mason, Michael Minnis, Marcelo Nóbrega, Sarah Nooter, Joseph L. Pagliari, Eduardo Perozo, Oleg Urminsky and Yingming Zhao have received named professorships.

The appointments are effective July 1, unless otherwise noted.

Biological Sciences Division

David W. Chang has been named the first Ruth Hanna Simms Foundation Professor in the Department of Surgery.

Chang is a pioneer in the field of reconstructive surgery for cancer patients and is an expert in treating lymphedema—chronic swelling of the limbs that can occur in cancer patients after lymph node removal or radiation therapy. He has been instrumental in developing and promoting microsurgical treatments for lymphedema, including lymphovenous bypass and vascularized lymph node transplants.

An accomplished researcher, Chang has published widely and served on the editorial board of leading medical journals such as Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery . He is a past president of the American Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery and the World Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery.

Kay F. Macleod has been named the Hospira Foundation Professor in the Ben May Department of Cancer Research and the College.

Macleod’s lab focuses on understanding the role of mitochondria in tissue homeostasis and cancer. As a basic researcher, she uses cutting-edge approaches—in cell and molecular biology, systems biology, novel mouse models and human patient samples—to investigate how mitochondria modulate normal tissue function, how mitochondrial stress responses are regulated and how mitochondrial dysfunction contributes to cancer progression and metastasis.

Since January 2024, Macleod has served as associate director for basic sciences for the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center, overseeing basic research activities and research program infrastructure.

Mitchell C. Posner has been named the Thomas D. Jones Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Surgery.

Posner is also Professor of Radiation and Cellular Oncology, and physician-in-chief for the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center.

He is a leading authority on the treatment and management of upper gastrointestinal cancers, pairing his skills as a surgeon with a commitment to multidisciplinary care. As an award-winning researcher, Posner focuses on the molecular basis of malignancies; he has designed and guided groundbreaking clinical trials for cancers of the pancreas, esophagus, colon, stomach, rectum and liver.

Posner serves as a deputy editor of the Annals of Surgical Oncology , the section editor of the education/training section of Surgical Oncology Insight and the section editor for gastrointestinal diseases for the American Cancer Society journal Cancer . He is also a past president of the Society of Surgical Oncology. He was recently awarded the distinction of fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Marcelo Nóbrega has been named the A.N. Pritzker Professor in the Department of Human Genetics and the College.

Nóbrega’s research program focuses on how genetic variation increases the risk of human diseases, particularly the impact of noncoding genetic variants that are discovered by genome-wide association studies. His lab has developed pipelines that create integrated experimental and computational strategies to uncover the mechanisms linking regulatory variants to several human diseases, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, asthma, and preterm birth.

Nóbrega is an associate dean for faculty affairs for basic science faculty in the Biological Sciences Division, where he co-leads efforts to promote faculty development, including orientation of new faculty, career development, and skill-building workshops on such topics as preparing for promotion, scientific writing, grantsmanship, trainee mentoring, leadership training, and wellness. He has also served as the chair of the Committee on Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology, along with several committees focused on recruitment, mentoring and training of graduate students and faculty.

Eduardo Perozo has been named the Lillian Eichelberger Cannon Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the College.

Perozo is a molecular neurobiologist whose lab seeks to define the molecular principles that drive the conversion of different forms of energy, such as electric fields and mechanical forces, into protein motion. He is particularly interested in protein dynamics, which link structure to function. His lab uses a combination of functional measurements at the single molecule and ensemble levels, biochemistry, and molecular biology, performing structural analyses through a combination of X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy of single particles. These structural techniques help them understand biological functions like mechanosensitivity in hearing and balance, and how proteins sense changes in the electric field across membranes of neurons and other excitable tissues.

He is the director of the newly formed Center for Mechanical Excitability, a senior fellow of the UChicago Institute for Integrative Physiology and is affiliated with the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics and the Neuroscience Institute. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Biophysical Society.

Yingming Zhao has been named the Louis Block Professor in the Ben May Department of Cancer Research and the College.

Zhao’s research is primarily dedicated to developing and applying mass spectrometry-based proteomics technologies, alongside various chemical and biological tools, to identify previously undescribed cellular pathways and investigate their functions. His team discovered 13 types of new, metabolite-mediated lysine acylation pathways. They also identified about 1,000 new histone marks bearing the new protein modifications, more than doubling the number of the previously known histone marks discovered during the first 50 years of chromatin biology. 

His work revealed numerous enzymes that can add or remove the new lysine acylations, identified specific binding proteins (or “readers’) for the novel histone marks, and discovered a new class of enzymes that can catalyze the synthesis of short-chain lipid CoAs which serve as co-factors for lysine acylations. His laboratory's findings demonstrate the crucial roles of these newly discovered ­­­­– pathways in epigenetic regulation and cellular pathophysiological changes. They have shown that these pathways contribute to various inborn metabolic diseases, affect the cellular microenvironment, including conditions like hypoxia, and play significant roles in the functions of immunological cells.

He has co-authored 190 peer-reviewed papers and has been ranked, since 2019, as one of the Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate. He is a co-founder and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of two biotechnology companies.

Humanities Division

Clifford Ando has been named the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History and the College, effective Sept. 1.

Ando’s research focuses on the histories of religion, law and government in the ancient world. His first book centered on the history of political culture in the provinces of the Roman empire, and he continues to write and advise on topics related to the provincial administration, the relationship between imperial power and local cultural change, and the form and structure of ancient empires. He has also written extensively on ancient religion. Significant themes were the connection of religion to empire and imperial government, especially in relation to pluralism and tolerance; and problems of representation in the use of objects in ritual. His current projects include a study of Latin as a language of the law and a study of legal theory in contexts of weak state power.

He is also general editor of Roman Statutes: Renewing Roman Law , a collaborative project that will produce a new edition, translation and commentary on all epigraphically-preserved Roman laws. The project is supported by grants from the The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Neubauer Collegium, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Christopher Faraone has been named the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College.

A member of the UChicago faculty since 1992, Faraone focuses his research on ancient Greek poetry, religion and magic. He is the author of Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual (1992); Ancient Greek Love Magic (1999); The Stanzaic Structure of Early Greek Elegy (2008); Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times (2019); and Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus (2021).

He has also coedited a dozen scholarly volumes including (with I. Polinskaya), Curses in Context 3: The Greek Curse Tablets of the Classical and Hellenistic Periods, Papers and Monographs from the Norwegian Institute at Athens 12 (2021), (with F. Naiden), Ancient Victims, Modern Observers: Reflections on Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice (Cambridge 2012), with D. Obbink, The Getty Hexameters: Poetry, Magic and Mystery in Ancient Greek Selinous (Oxford 2013). Most recently, he has co-edited with Sofia Torallas-Tovar The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies vol. 1 (Berkeley 2022) and The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books and Individual Recipes (Ann Arbor 2022), the latter of which was awarded the 2023 Charles Beebe Goodwin Book Award.

Anthony Kaldellis has been named the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College.

Kaldellis’ research explores the history, culture and literature of the east Roman empire from antiquity to the 15th century. An earlier phase of it focused on the reception of ancient Hellenic culture, for example on how authors conceived their projects in relation to classical models ( Procopius of Caesarea , 2004), as well as the history of identities ( Hellenism in Byzantium , 2007), monuments ( The Christian Parthenon , 2009), and genres ( Ethnography after Antiquity , 2013). A second phase brought to light the enduring Roman matrices of Byzantine life and thought, focusing on its political sphere ( The Byzantine Republic , 2015) and ethnic identities ( Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium , 2019).

He has translated into English the works of many medieval Greek writers, such as Prokopios, Genesios, Psellos, Attaleiates and Laonikos Chalkokondyles. His own monographs have been translated into other modern languages, including Turkish, French, Romanian, Russian and Greek. In 2019, he created the first academic podcast for his field, Byzantium & Friends . He has just published a new, comprehensive history of Byzantium, The New Roman Empire (2023), which embeds social, economic, religious and demographic developments within a lively narrative framework.

Gabriel Richardson Lear has been named as the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization in the Department of Philosophy, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College.

Lear is the chair of the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought. Her first book, Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton, 2004), is about the relationship between morally virtuous action and theoretical contemplation in the happiest life. She continues to publish on aspects of Aristotle’s ethics.

In addition, she has published a number of articles about the idea, pervasive in Ancient Greek ethics, that virtue is beautiful or splendidly good ( kalon ) and about the intersection of ethics and poetics in Plato’s philosophy. She co-edited Plato’s Philebus: A Philosophical Discussion (Oxford, 2019), which was the inaugural publication of the international Plato Dialogue Project.

Rochona Majumdar has been named the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College.

Majumdar is a historian of modern India with a focus on Bengal. Her writings span histories of gender and sexuality, Indian cinema and modern Indian intellectual history. Majumdar also writes on postcolonial history and theory.

Majumdar's first book, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. It was shortlisted by the International Convention of Asia Scholars (Social Science short-list) in 2011. Her second work, Writing Postcolonial History , analyzed the impact of postcolonial theory on historiography.

Her third book, Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony, is an analysis of global art cinema in independent India. It was awarded The Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial award for the best writing on Indian cinema in 2023, an Honorable Mention for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize 2022, and commended for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award 2022.

Majumdar is currently working on two projects. The first is a collaborative project funded by the University of Chicago Center in Delhi entitled A Global history of the Hindoo/ Presidency College: Excellence and Exclusion (under contract with Cambridge University Press) with Upal Chakrabarti and Sukanya Sarbadhikary. The second is an annotated translation of Fifty Years of Politics That I Have Witnessed ( Amar Dekha Rajnitir Panchansh Bachar ) by the Bangladeshi intellectual and nationalist thinker Abul Mansur Ahmad.

Sarah Nooter has been named the Edward Olson Professor in the Department of Classics and the College.

Nooter writes about Greek drama and modern reception, and also about poetry, the voice, embodiment, queer theory, and performance. Her first book, When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (2016), explores the lyrically powerful voices of Sophocles’ heroes. The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (2022) is on voice in Aeschylus and Greek poetry and thought more generally. Her most recent book, Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality (2023), consists of a series of essays on Greek poems, understood as attempts at embodiment through performance and objecthood in the face of the ephemerality of human life. Her volume of translations called How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (2024) has just been released.

She has co-edited a book called Sound and the Ancient Senses with Shane Butler (2019) and a volume with Mario Telò entitled Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory and the Boundaries of the Classical (2024). Finally, she is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Philology and has edited special issues on Poetry and Its Means , Athens: Stage, Page, Assembly , Tragedy: Reconstruction and Repair , and, most recently, Philology Transfigured .

Physical Sciences Division

David Archer has been named the first Allyse and Helmut Heydegger Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the College.

Archer uses computer simulations to understand the balance between carbon dioxide levels in the oceans and in the atmosphere in the past to better predict the impact that changing levels will have on future climate. He has worked on a wide range of topics pertaining to the global carbon cycle and its relation to global climate, as well as the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

He is the author of The Long Thaw: How humans are changing the next 100,000 years of Earth's climate (2008), which earned him the 2009 Walter P. Kistler Book Award; as well as The Global Carbon Cycle (Princeton Primers in Climate) (2010), The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast (2010) and an undergraduate textbook for non-science majors, titled Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast .

He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Benson Farb has been named the first Ann Gillian Sheldon Professor of Mathematics and the College.

Farb's work has spanned geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, dynamical systems, differential geometry, Teichmuller theory, cohomology of groups, representation theory, algebraic geometry and 4-manifold theory, as well as the connections among these topics.

Farb was elected a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021 and spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014. Farb and his former student Dan Margalit were awarded the 2024 Steele Prize for their book “A Primer on Mapping Class Groups.” He has supervised 52 Ph.D. students and has been senior scientist for 15 NSF postdocs.

Young-Kee Kim has been named the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and the College.

Kim, special advisor to the provost, previously held the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and the College. She is an experimental particle physicist and devotes much of her research to understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles.

Kim co-led the Collider Detector at Fermilab experiment, a collaboration with more than 600 particle physicists from around the world. She is currently working on the ATLAS particle physics experiment at CERN, as well as on accelerator physics research. She was deputy director of Fermilab between 2006 and 2013 and has served on numerous national and international advisory committees and boards.

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Sloan Foundation, as well as the recipient of the Ho-Am Prize and the Arthur L. Kelly Faculty Prize.

Kim notes that Albert A. Michelson, the recipient of the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics, for whom the chair is named, was the first chair of the UChicago Department of Physics in 1892; Kim served as chair of that department between 2016 and 2022. Michelson also served as president of the American Physical Society in 1901-1902, and Kim is currently president of the American Physical Society.

Yamuna Krishnan has been named the Louis Block Professor of Chemistry and the College.

Krishnan is a groundbreaking chemist who crafts tiny “machines” out of DNA that can be used to monitor and explore how cells work at the microscopic level. Such knowledge can help us better understand diseases and disorders, develop drug targets, and check whether a drug is reaching its intended target in a cell. She investigates the structure and dynamics of nucleic acids, nucleic acid nanotechnology, cellular and subcellular technologies.

She has received numerous awards, including the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Infosys Prize for Physical Sciences, the Sun Pharma award for Basic Medical Sciences and the Bhatnagar Award for Chemical Sciences and the Scientific Innovations Award from the Brain Research Foundation. She has been named one of Lo Spazio Della Politica’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2014 and to research journal Cell Press’s “40 Under 40.”

Social Sciences Division

Paul Cheney has been named the Sorin and Imran Siddiqui Professor in the Department of History and the College, effective Aug. 1.

A historian of Europe with a specialization in old regime France and its colonial empire, Paul Cheney exemplifies the qualities recognized by this appointment: a brilliant scholar and a dedicated teacher with a demonstrated commitment to Core programs of the College. His scholarly work has significantly influenced several fields with an ambitious combination of economic, cultural, and intellectual historical approaches.

His first book, Revolutionary Commerce (Harvard, 2010), is a new history of economic and political culture in enlightenment France, resulting in a new understanding of the origins of the French Revolution. His second, prize-winning book, Cul de Sac (Chicago, 2017) delves into the practical history of colonial economic life in the form of a "global microhistory" of a sugar plantation on Saint Domingue. His work has appeared in Past & Present, The William and Mary Quarterly, Dix-huitième siècle, Les Annales historiques de la Révolution française , and Modern Intellectual History .

Cheney has advanced this bold and creative agenda in research while also making superior contributions to the University community and to the undergraduate curriculum, including service as Chair of multiple Core sequences since his appointment as Assistant Professor of European History in 2006.

Tom S. Clark has been named the David and Mary Winton Green Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College.

Clark joined the UChicago faculty on July 1 from Emory University. Recognized for his leadership in American politics as a scholar of the U.S. judiciary, his approach is distinctive for its attention to the judiciary as an institution that operates as part of the broader political processes of government.

In his research, Clark has investigated how federal judges respond to varying public support for their positions, and the ways in which Congress’s actions serve to signal public support to the courts. These issues were the focus of his first book The Limits of Judicial Independence (2011, Cambridge University Press). In his second book, The Supreme Court: An Analytic History of Constitutional Decision Making (2019, Cambridge University Press), he examines the ways in which social and political forces affect the cases that are brought to the Court, and ultimately shape judicial decisions and the evolution of constitutional law. In addition to his two monographs, Clark is the author of dozens of substantive journal articles in the field’s top outlets, a casebook, and a forthcoming book studying police shootings in U.S. cities.

He has been a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences, Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics and the Institute for Advanced Study at the Toulouse School of Economics. Clark’s work has been recognized by major scholarly awards, including the William H. Riker Award, awarded for best book on political economy from the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association, the Joseph Bernd Award and the Neal Tate Award from the Southern Political Science Association and the Midwest Political Science Association’s Emerging Scholar Award.

Cathy J. Cohen has been named the D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and Political Science, and the College.

She was previously the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science. Cohen’s research has challenged her discipline to reimagine the boundaries of the political sphere, and to reevaluate conventional assumptions about the nature of political activity. She is the founder of GenForward, a nationally representative and intensive survey of young adults that pays special attention to how race and ethnicity shape how respondents experience and think about the world.

Cohen is the author of several books, including the award-winning and highly-cited  The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics  (1999, University of Chicago Press), and  Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics  (2010, Oxford University Press). She is also the co-editor of  Women Transforming Politics  (1997, NYU Press). Her articles have been published in numerous journals and edited volumes.

In addition to her scholarly contributions, Cohen has a distinguished record of service and leadership at the University and within the academy. She is currently the inaugural chair of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and has previously served as director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, as deputy provost for graduate education, and as chair of the Political Science Department. She is a member of the board of the Russell Sage Foundation and has served in advisory and leadership roles in the American Political Science Association, the Social Science Research Council and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Booth School of Business

Daniel Bartels has been named the Leon Carroll Marshall Professor of Marketing.

Bartels investigates the mental representations and processes underlying consumer financial decision-making, moral psychology, and intertemporal choice.

His research has been published in Journal of Consumer Research , Cognitive Psychology , Psychological Bulletin , Cognition, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , and Psychological Science and has been featured in The New York Times , The Economist , The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Time, US News and World Report, Money Magazine, among other outlets. He is associate editor at Cognition .

Prior to joining Booth as a faculty member, Bartels taught behavioral economics at Columbia Business School. He also had a previous affiliation with Booth as a postdoctoral fellow for the Center for Decision Research from 2007-2010. Bartels earned a PhD in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University and a BS in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Anna Costello has been named the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Accounting.

Before joining Booth, she previously served as an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Costello’s research investigates the role of information sharing between supply chain partners. Specifically, her work shows that information asymmetry between buyers and suppliers impacts the terms and restrictions in long-term supply contracts. She also studies how trade credit between supply chain partners influences firm-specific and market-wide risk. Her research has been published in the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, and The Accounting Review .

Costello was awarded the Best Dissertation Award from the Financial Accounting and Reporting Section of the American Accounting Association. She received the 2014-2015 MBA Teacher of the Year Award from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Ayelet Fishbach has been named the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing.

Fishbach studies social psychology, management, and consumer behavior. She is the past president of the Society for the Science of Motivation and the International Social Cognition Network, and the author of GET IT DONE: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation .

Fishbach is an expert on motivation and decision-making. Her groundbreaking research on human motivation has won the Society of Experimental Social Psychology’s Best Dissertation Award and Career Trajectory Award, the Society of Consumer Psychology’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution award, and the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award. She further received the Provost’s Teaching Award from the University of Chicago.

Fishbach’s work shows how people can live up to their highest aspirations. She’s written about exercising, healthy eating, working, studying, and saving money—the hard-but-worth-it challenges that occupy our lives. She studies self-control, intrinsic motivation, feedback, patience, and promoting a healthy lifestyle. 

Fishbach’s research has been published in many journals, including Nature , Psychological Review , Psychological Science, Journal of Consumer Research , Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , Journal of Marketing Research , and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . Her research is regularly featured in the media, including The New York Times, Financial Times , WSJ , CNN , and NPR .

Michael Minnis has been named the Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Accounting.

He studies the role of accounting information in allocating investment efficiently by both managers and capital providers. His recent research focuses on understanding the role of privately held companies in the U.S. economy and how these firms use financial reporting to access, deploy, and manage capital.

Minnis joined the Booth faculty in 2010 and has served as the director of the Chookaszian Accounting Research Center since 2022. As launch committee co-chair, he has played an integral role in the development of the school’s new Master in Management and Master in Finance Programs.

From 2018-2023, he served two terms as a member of the Private Company Council, the primary advisory council to the Financial Accounting Standards Board on private company issues. He has also been engaged in a variety consulting projects outside of academia.

Before pursuing his PhD, Minnis worked in a variety of professional roles. He first started in corporate finance at Eli Lilly and Company, Inc. and later at Fitzgerald | Isaac, p.c. as a certified public accountant. He went on to found Controller Associates LLC. His firm provided part-time controller and Chief Financial Officer services to start-ups, small companies, and non-profit organizations, as well as a variety of financial statement analysis and consulting services.

Minnis received his PhD from the University of Michigan and his BS from the University of Illinois.

Sanjog Misra has been named the Charles H. Kellstadt Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing and Applied AI.

His research focuses on the use of AI, machine learning, deep learning, and structural econometric methods to study consumer, firm, and policy decisions. In particular, his research involves building data-driven intelligent models aimed at understanding how individuals make choices and investigating private and public policies that might influence those choices. More broadly, Misra is interested in the development of scalable algorithms, calibrated on large-scale data, and the implementation of such algorithms in real world decision environments.

Misra’s research has been published in Econometrica , The Journal of Marketing Research, The Journal of Political Economy, Marketing Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, the Journal of Law and Economics , among others. He has served as the co-editor of Quantitative Marketing and Economics and as area editor at Management Science , the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics , Marketing Science , Quantitative Marketing and Economics , the International Journal of Research in Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research.

Prior to joining Booth, Misra was professor of marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management and professor at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. In addition, he has been visiting faculty at the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

Joseph L. Pagliari has been named the first John Mazarakis and Chicago Atlantic Clinical Professor, effective Feb. 1. He focuses his research and teaching efforts (based on over 40 years of industry experience) on issues broadly surrounding institutional real estate investment, attempting to answer important questions from a rigorous theoretical and empirical perspective. These issues include: the risk-adjusted performance of core and non-core funds; principal/agent issues in incentive fees; a comparison of REITs and private real estate; real estate’s pricing and return-generating process; real estate’s role in a mixed-asset portfolio; analysis of high-yield (or mezzanine) financing; and the strategic uses of leverage.

 He has authored (or co-authored) numerous papers on a variety of these topics. He has also co-authored several chapters in the Handbook of Real Estate Portfolio Management, of which he is also the editor. He has presented these papers and thoughts on other topics at a variety of industry events (including ARES, AREUEA, NCREIF, NAREIM, PREA and ULI) as well as the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and testimony before a subcommittee of the House of Representatives. His views on these and other topics have also been published in the popular press, including Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal.

Alexander Todorov has been named the Walter David “Bud” Fackler Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science.

Todorov studies perception, judgment, and decision-making. As an alternative to standard theory-driven experiments to study perception and judgment, Todorov’s lab pioneered data-driven computational methods. These methods model and visualize the perceptual basis of judgments (e.g., what makes an object beautiful) without prior assumptions, and can be used as a discovery tool. Building on this past work, his current research uses generative AI to model individual human preferences. Another line of research is on the incompleteness of human statistical intuitions and the conditions under which these intuitions impair decision-making.

Todorov’s research has been published in many journals, including Science , PNAS , Nature Human Behavior , Trends in Cognitive Sciences , Psychological Science , Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Vision , and Journal of Neuroscience . Media coverage of his research has spanned internationally. Among the outlets in the US that have covered his research are PBS, NBC Today Show, NPR, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Todorov was awarded the 2008 SAGE Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the 2019 Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. His most recent book is Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions .

Prior to joining Booth, Todorov was a professor of psychology at Princeton University from 2002 to 2020.

Oleg Urminsky has been named the Theodore O. Yntema Professor of Marketing.

Urminsky studies decision-making and the implications for consumers, policymakers and firms. He studies how information, incentives, goals, temporal horizons, identity, emotions and the decision environment interact to shape individual decision-making. He teaches experimental research methods for MBA and PhD students.

Urminsky’s research has been published in Cognition , Journal of Consumer Research , Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Marketing Research , Marketing Science , Nature Human Behavior and Psychological Science as well as other journals. His paper, “The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected: Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention” was a finalist for the 2007 Paul Green award and 2011 O’Dell award. His recent research investigates how the relationships between emotions and economic decisions vary around the world, how planning and anticipated interpersonal interactions impact patience, how language impacts online engagement, and the importance of field experiments for testing policies.

Urminsky’s past experience includes political polling and advertising research, including working on the largest worldwide study of brands, the Brand Asset Valuator, as well as presidential and senate campaigns.

Divinity School

Dwight N. Hopkins has been named the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor.

Hopkins is a constructive social impact theologian (his first Ph.D. degree) with emphasis on wealth ownership informed by history, politics, and religion (his second Ph.D. degree). He asks: how does faith plus wealth equal freedom? — which is the content and goal of human liberation. Wealth means the ownership of earth, air, and water. Faith underscores humans having collective visions beyond the individual self. And freedom points to humans not owing anything to anyone. In this way of life, people are free fully to pursue living.

His MBA degree complements this path to relate the humanities/theology with wealth/business to expand being fully human for people whose traditions pursue faith plus wealth equals freedom. For him, educational technology and ethics in Artificial Intelligence represent a door opening to such a visionary and practical freedom, especially for younger generations.

Hopkins’ research begins with how people have always had agency and opportunity. For example, he developed three courses on Black Ownership of Wealth, from 1619 to the present.

Like John D. Rockefeller (the founder of the University of Chicago), Hopkins comes out of the Baptist tradition, but framed by Episcopalian impacts.

Harris School

Steven Durlauf has been named the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor.

The director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, Durlauf conducts research that spans topics in economics, including poverty, inequality and economic growth. He helped pioneer the application of statistical mechanics techniques to the modeling of socioeconomic behavior and has also developed identification analyses for these models. Durlauf is also known as a critic of the use of the concept of social capital by social scientists and has also challenged the ways that agent-based modeling and complexity theory have been employed by social and natural scientists to study socioeconomic phenomena.

Durlauf is currently a general editor of the Elsevier Handbooks in Economics series. He was a general editor of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2008), the most extensive compendium of economic knowledge in the world. He was also the editor of the Journal of Economic Literature from 2013 to 2022.

He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, a fellow of the International Association of Applied Econometrics and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.

Curtis A. Bradley has been named the Allen M. Singer Distinguished Service Professor of Law.

A foreign relations law expert, Bradley has research interests that include international law, constitutional law and federal court jurisdiction. His latest book, Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs: Constitutional Authority in Practice —due out in October—examines how the constitutional law governing the conduct of foreign affairs has evolved significantly throughout history, positing that these changes were developed through the practices of presidents and Congress rather than by Supreme Court rulings or formal constitutional amendments.

He is also the author of International Law in the US Legal System (3d ed. 2020), the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Foreign Relations Law (2019), and the coauthor of two casebooks: Foreign Relations Law: Cases and Materials (8th ed. 2024) and Federal Courts and the Law of Federal-State Relations (10th ed. 2022).

From 2012-2018, Bradley served as a reporter on the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, and in 2023, began serving as a reporter on the latest phase of this Restatement. Early in his career, Bradley clerked for Judge David Ebel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and Justice Byron White on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2004, he served as counselor on international law in the Legal Adviser’s Office of the U.S. State Department.

Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

Nadya Mason has been named the first Robert J. Zimmer Professor of Molecular Engineering, effective Feb. 1.  

The dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Mason focuses her research on nanoscale electronic properties in systems such as nano-scale wires, atomically thin membranes, and nanostructured superconductors, with applications in nanoscale and quantum computing.

Before joining UChicago in 2023, Mason was the Rosalyn S. Yalow Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois and directed the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Dedicated to advancing diversity in the physical sciences and mentoring, Mason is the former chair of the American Physical Society Committee on Minorities, where she helped initiate the “National Mentoring Community.” She regularly contributes to science outreach through local TV appearances, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and a TED talk on "Scientific Curiosity."

Mason is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2009 Denise Denton Emerging Leader Award, the 2012 APS Maria Goeppert Mayer Award and the 2019 APS Bouchet Award.

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More From Forbes

A writing room: the new marketplace of writer classes, retreats, and collectives.

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A Writing Room is one of the fast-growing writer collectives. The four co-founders (left to right): ... [+] Reese Zecchin, Director of Production; Jacob Nordby, Director of Writer Development; A. Ashe, Creative Director; Claire Giovino, Community Director.

The past decade has brought an explosion in the number of books published each year in the United States (an estimated three to four million annually). In turn, this explosion is bringing a growing and evolving marketplace of writer classes, retreats and collectives. It is a marketplace creating new jobs and entrepreneurship opportunities—both for mainstream tech, marketing and managerial workers, as well as for writer/artist denizens of America’s bohemia.

The Drivers of Growth in Book Publishing

The number of book sales in the United States remains healthy, though it has leveled off in the past four years. In 2020, 756.82 million book unit sales were made in the US alone. This number climbed to 837.66 million in 2021, before falling slightly to 787.65 million units in 2022 and 767.36 million units in 2023.

What has changed dramatically has been the number of books published. Steve Piersanti of Berrett-Koehler Publishers estimates that three million books were published in the US, up 10 times from the number only 16 years ago . Other estimates put the number of published books annually at closer to four million .

The main driver of this growth in books published has been self-publishing. According to Bowker , which provides tools for self-publishing, an estimated 2.3 million books were self-published in 2021. Up through the 1990s (now the distant past in publishing), writers of all types of books, fiction and nonfiction, were dependent on convincing publishing houses to publish their work. As the technology for self-publishing and print on demand grew in the early 2000s, writers could publish on their own, and a very large number of Americans began to do so.

Fueling growth also is the level of affluence and discretionary income that an increasing segment of American society is reaching. For centuries, theorists across the political spectrum have envisioned a society, freed from basic economic needs, pursuing creative activities, with writing as a primary activity. In The German Ideology , Karl Marx could write about the economy of abundance in which individuals pursue writing as one of a series of daily activities—hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, write criticism in the evening. John Maynard Keynes in a 1930 essay, “ Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” , envisions a time a hundred years forward (2030) in which writing is no longer the province of the upper classes. Contemporary theorists on the future of work, such as John Tamny, similarly see a blooming of creative and artistic activities by the average citizen.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, a writing room, and the emerging marketplace of writer training.

A marketplace of writing coaches, classes and retreats expanded throughout the late twentieth century and first years of the twentieth century. Published authors and even recently-minted graduates of MFA programs hung out shingles for individual coaching and small classes. Colleges expanded their writing programs and certifications, and writer retreats multiplied. Co-working and literary event spaces were established in major cities ( The Writers Room in New York, The Writers Grotto in San Francisco). But the marketplace continued to bump up against geographic and logistical limitations.

Then, along the came the internet, and its evolution.

Today, hundreds of businesses throughout the country offer assistance to aspiring writers. Many continue to offer some in-person assistance through coaching, classes or retreats. But as in other fields, the internet has allowed for a nationwide (worldwide) reach that these businesses are taking advantage of to scale. The major pre-internet writer assistance companies, such as The Writers Studio , added online courses and instruction, and the early internet-based companies from the 1990s, such as Writers.com (a pioneer in the internet field), steadily expanded their offerings. New enterprises are springing up on a regular basis, including the writer collectives.

A Writing Room is one of the fastest growing of the writer collectives, and its suite of services illustrate the how the field is evolving.

A Writing Room has its roots in the writing classes that novelist Anne Lamott had been teaching for some years, and her interest by the early 2020s in creating a larger on-going community of writers. Lamott connected with a team of four entrepreneurs who had experience with previous start-ups and expertise in online tools. In early 2023 they set out to develop A Writing Room.

Novelist Anne Lamott, one of the partners in A Writing Room.

A Writing Room launched in June 2023, and followed a few months later with an inaugural writers retreat in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Though hastily arranged, the retreat attracted more than 400 in person attendees and over 1600 attendees online. In the first half of 2024, the company set up a membership structure of monthly and annual memberships. Within months, over 550 writers had joined.

The products that members can access are aimed in part at teaching the craft of writing. In a recent author discussion (with close to 400 participants joining online) Lamott discussed the craft of writing with novelist Donna Levin . Both started publishing in the 1980s. They noted how much publishing and the role of the writer have changed, but emphasized the fundamentals that have remained over their forty years, related to craft and the responsibility of the writer: the daily commitment, the careful development of plot and characters, the numerous rewrites (as many as you think you need, and one more).

A Writing Room offers a series of on-demand courses, online discussions with authors and publishing professionals, and daily writing prompts, built around writing as craft. It further offers instruction on the paths to and options for publication, building a following of readers.

At its center, A Writing Room is about being part of a community of writers, giving and receiving regular feedback from other members, as well as feedback from writing mentors and coaches. In an interview earlier this year, Lamott explained:

The great myth about writing is that it's an entirely solitary activity. This really isn't true. Every book I've ever written has been with a lot of help from my community. I wouldn't be the writer I am today — and wouldn't even want to write — without people to share the process and finished work. Writing is a process, but it doesn't have to (and really shouldn't be) done in total isolation.

The writing process can feel overwhelming. It often does for me. Believe me, a trusted writing friend is a secret to life.

Other emerging writing collectives also emphasize community and cooperation. Levin underscored this point in the recent online discussion: “Writing can be such an isolated activity, and to some extent needs to be. You want to seek out a community that can give you the support you need and also the honest feedback.”

How the New Marketplace Is Evolving And Jobs Created

The founders of A Writing Room know that the marketplace for writer assistance is fast changing, and they need to be quick to adapt to increased competition. Already, several developments are driving change in the field:

· The entrance of major online education companies (i.e. Masters Class , Coursera, Udemy ).

· Faculty recruitment of writers with built-in audiences of sizable twitter and other social media followings.

· Partnerships with the major publishers and agencies, who hold out the promise of publication to participants of the classes, retreats and collectives.

· Specializations by race and ethnicity, gender, geography and genre.

· Market segmentation, and attention to higher income consumers.

A number of these developments reflect the changes in the broader publishing world and are likely to continue. Overall, the marketplace itself will be expanding, as publishing technology advances, along with discretionary income.

The jobs being generated by this new marketplace are a mix of tech, administrative, and writing coach positions. At A Writing Room, recent hires include a community liaison, video editor, customer support, and a “beta reader” providing feedback to writers on their drafts. The hiring process is sweeping up into jobs not only workers who have been in the regular economy, but also residents of America’s bohemia: writers and artists who previously were outside of (and often scornful of) the market system. What can be better than that.

In his 2023 book, The Novel, Who Needs It , Joseph Epstein, former editor of American Scholar , offers a paean to fiction as above all other intellectual endeavors that seek to understand human behavior. But what he says of fiction is true of other writing (memoir, history, even forms of self-help) that arouses the mind.

Yes, there are way too many books published each year, and yes only a very small percentage of writers will earn any significant income from their writing. But who knows what individual book will succeed commercially or critically, or add to our shared knowledge or wisdom. And really, why not encourage the craft of writing. How much does America benefit from most of the paper-pushing, meetings and e-mails that now pass for work in our economy of affluence.

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