The College of Letters & Science re-invested in the future of its talented faculty in late September, hosting a first-ever investiture ceremony to honor 18 Letters & Science faculty members who received named faculty and chair positions.
Gathering at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the faculty members—seven from the Division of Social Sciences, four each from the divisions of Arts and Humanities and the Natural, Physical and Mathematical Sciences and three from the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences— received individual introductions listing their accomplishments from their associate dean as well as a medal.
“Investing in our people, our stars, is incredibly valuable,” said Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin, in her remarks acknowledging the endowed faculty members.
The 18 positions represent a commitment of more than $25 million from generous donors, such as longtime College of Letters & Science supporters John and Tashia Morgridge, whose gifts helped to fund 15 of the 18 endowed positions. This kind of donor support is critical for the college, as it helps L&S retain its top faculty talent and support their research and teaching. Most of the endowed positions are named for the individuals who donated to support them.
“This is a milestone for the College, and a milestone in the careers of every faculty member here tonight,” said Eric Wilcots, Dean of the College of Letters & Science. “These are not people who are typically interested in walking on stage to receive medals—they’re much more comfortable doing incredibly important work in the classroom or the research lab—but I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to support and honor them.”
The event was filled with plenty of pride, camaraderie and emotion. Greg Downey, Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, playfully joked that his division sported seven of the 18 professors, including five from the Department of Economics. Tom Erickson, Founding Director of the School for Computer, Data and Information Sciences, gave an emotional speech as he introduced Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and spoke about the professorship he endowed and named for his sister, Catherine, who passed away last year. Emily Stanley of the Center for Limnology was the only honored professor not in attendance.
In her closing remarks, Chancellor Mnookin quoted from the final lecture delivered by William Cronon, the legendary Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies, who retired last year.
“Part of the way great things happen is to have ambitious, maybe wildly ambitious goals that are almost un-doable,” she said. “When you create an intellectual community and environment that lets you thrive, you can do more than you thought you could.”
The College salutes the faculty members who received endowed chairs and professorships and thanks the donors that made them possible:
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Derek Johnson, Communication Arts Partners Professor
Johnson is a professor and the chair of Communication Arts, where his research has revealed how the media industries’ reliance on reproduction strategies can spark intense struggles over creativity, status and the inheritance of cultural power. His first book, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (NYU Press, 2014), drew from historical archives, trade press discourses, and interviews with contemporary media practitioners to conceptualize the economic and creative imperative to construct “franchises” that can be expanded across markets and renewed over time.
His current research extends these questions by investigating the potential for these future-oriented industrial processes to support activist struggles for (and against) social change through reproduction’s capacity for transformation, multiplication or status.
Jenny R. Saffran, Letters & Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor
Saffran is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Faculty Director of the L&S Honors Program. Her research is focused on understanding how babies learn language. She specializes in language acquisition and early cognitive development, and she also conducts research on music cognition. Professor Saffran views language acquisition based on general cognitive processes such as statistical learning and has conducted numerous empirical studies that support this view. She received a BA from Brown University and a PhD from the University of Rochester.
Panle Jia Barwick, Todd E. and Elizabeth H. Warnock Distinguished Chair in Economics
Barwick is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research interests are empirical industrial organization, the Chinese economy and applied econometrics. She co-founded Cornell Institute for China Economic Research (CICER) and now serves as its external director. She is an editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics, an associate editor of the Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Urban Economics and the International Journal of Industrial Organization. She also serves on the editorial board of VoxChina. Before her time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she was an assistant and associate professor in the Economics department at MIT from 2006 to 2013 and a professor in the Economics department at Cornell from 2013 to 2022. She received degrees in Economics from Fudan University (BA), Tufts University (MA) and Yale University (PhD).
Rasmus Lentz, Economics, Richard A. & Susan B. Strait Professor in Economics
Lentz was born and raised in Denmark. After he received his master’s degree in Economics from the University of Copenhagen, he moved to the United States to pursue his PhD in Economics at Northwestern University. Professor Lentz’s research is concerned with aggregate labor market outcomes, such as labor productivity, job creation, worker allocation and wage determination. He tends to adopt a frictional view of the labor market and approaches data with a parametric structure in mind, which must be solved numerically. His main tool set includes recursive dynamic programming, numerical methods and simulated minimum distance estimation. A significant part of his work uses the Danish micro-panel data that followed Danish individuals and firms over the past 30-40 years based on administrative records.
Ananth Seshadri, Economics, Mary Sue & Mike Shannon Chair in Economics
Seshadri is a Professor of Economics and a Research Associate at the NBER. His areas of expertise are macroeconomics and public finance. He has written on a wide variety of topics, including the causes and consequences of demographic change; the effects of technological change in accounting for various demographic patterns; and on policies that promote economic opportunity. His research has appeared in leading economics journals. He was also awarded the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2006. In 2007, Professor Seshadri and his colleagues John Karl Scholz and Surachai Khitatrakun, were awarded the twelfth annual TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security, and he has received several competitive research grants from the National Science Foundation and the A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security, and he has received several competitive research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Aging as well.
Ashley Swanson, Economics, Douglas W. & Sherry A. Caves Professor in Economics
Swanson’s research focuses primarily on the industrial organization of health care markets. In particular, she studies how complex incentives, imperfect information, and evolving organizational structure impact health care costs, quality and welfare. Her recent research examined a range of topics of interest, including in academics, firms and policy-making. Her research focuses on physician-hospital integration, payments from industry to physicians, price transparency, consumer inertia, insurance benefit design and network contracting. Professor Swanson also studies the factors affecting high achievement in secondary education. Recent work includes studies on gender disparities and school quality. Her work has been published in top economic and policy journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and Health Affairs. Her work has also been funded through leading institutions such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health Care Management.
Marek Weretka, Economics, Stuart & Brenda McCroskey Professor in Economics
Weretka received his BA in Quantitative Methods from the Warsaw School of Economics in 1999, his MA in Economics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2001, and his PhD in Economics from Yale University in 2006. In 2018, Professor Weretka became affiliated with the GRAPE | FAME institute in Warsaw, Poland. He has also been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, the European University Institute, the National Bank of Poland and New York University. His research focuses on micro-economic theory, finance and behavioral economics. He was awarded the Carl Avid Anderson Fellowship by the Cowles Foundation at Yale in 2006 and the McKenzie Prize for Excellence in Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. Weretka is a recipient of NSF and NCN grants and is an associate editor for the Review of Economic Design and Journal of Mathematical Economics. He has published in top economics and finance journals as well.
ARTS & HUMANITIES
Steffani Bennett, Joan B. Mirviss Professor in Japanese Art History
Bennett is a historian of Japanese art with expertise in medieval painting and cross-cultural exchange in the East Asian region. Professor Bennett first developed an interest in interregional art history during her childhood in Asia. As an undergraduate, she pursued the study of art history and Japanese language at the University of Washington. In 2020, she received her PhD from Harvard University for her dissertation titled The other shore: Sesshū Tōyō (1420–ca. 1506) and the Sino- Japanese cultural sphere in the fifteenth century. For her doctoral research, Professor Bennett spent three years abroad, during which time she was affiliated with Gakushūin University in Tokyo and Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Her research has centered on fifteenth-century ink painting, particularly the life and work of the monk-painter Sesshū Tōyō, who is one of Japan’s most celebrated artists.
Thomas E. A. Dale, Art History, Simona & Jerome Chazen Distinguished Chair in Art History
A graduate of the University of Toronto and Johns Hopkins University, Dale taught at Columbia University in New York before joining the Art History faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. Through his research and teaching, he explores how medieval art and architecture of Europe and the Mediterranean basin offer primary sources for understanding religion, politics, rituals and cultural interaction. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious research awards and honors, including fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in New York. He has also served as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociale in Paris. During the past academic year, he served as the president of the Medieval Academy of America.
Beth Nguyen, English, Dorothy Puestow Draheim Professor
Nguyen is a professor of creative writing and the Director of the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl. Her next book, Owner of a Lonely Heart, is a memoir in essays forthcoming in 2023. She has received an American Book Award and a PEN/Jerard Award. Her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Paris Review, Time Magazine, The New York Times, and Best American Essays. Her work explores the complexities of refugee narratives and representations, including post-war-in-Vietnam diaspora, refugee experiences in the United States, oral histories and family stories, and how Vietnamese and Southeast Asian identities often get overlooked – especially in the Midwest and within the umbrella term “Asian American.”
Christa J. Olson, English, Marjorie & Lorin Tiefenthaler Chair in English
Olson is the chair of the Department of English and a rhetorical historian whose work focuses on trans American visual cultures and public discourse. In her research, she returns repeatedly to the rhetorical sources and consequences of nationalism. Her articles on historical methods, visual rhetoric and rhetorical history have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and the Journal for the History of Rhetoric, among others. Professor Olson’s institutional leadership includes service as chair and associate chair of the English department, faculty director of UW-Madison’s intermediate writing program and chair of the UW-Madison program in composition and rhetoric. She has also served on the Board of Directors for the Rhetoric Society of America and the Steering Committee of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. She has chaired both Societies’ awards committee and helped shepherd major revisions to awards policies in order to bring them in line with goals for anti-racism, inclusion, equity and access.
NATURAL, PHYSICAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES
Larissa E. Back, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Ned P. Smith Distinguished Chair of Meteorology
Back is a Professor of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences who teaches courses on climate processes, tropical meteorology, and the atmospheric overturning circulations known as convection. She conducts research on tropical rainfall and the associated circulations. She recently participated in the planning, scientific steering and execution of an NSF-funded field campaign with a modified Gulfstream V aircraft. The campaign was based out of Costa Rica and took airborne measurements over the surrounding tropical oceans. Using this unique dataset, Professor Back’s group is studying environmental controls on vertical motion profiles and the levels at which rain occurs, as well as the implications of these vertical circulations. These circulations are important to study because they are not well simulated by existing weather and climate models, and yet they play a critical role in the intensification of tropical systems with rainfall in them, including tropical cyclones.
Lucas K. Zoet, Geoscience, Dean L. Morgridge Chair in Geoscience
Zoet received a BS from Michigan State University followed by an MS and PhD from Pennsylvania State University. Upon receiving his PhD, he completed a postdoctoral program at Iowa State University before beginning his faculty position in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. His work largely focuses on understanding the physical processes that shape Earth’s surface and sits at the intersection of glaciology and glacial geology. Professor Zoet conducts research aimed at understanding the physics of glacier motion through field observation, laboratory experiments, numerical modeling and theoretical analysis. He uses a variety of geophysical and geological methods to explore glacial processes in modern glaciers as well as landforms left behind by Pleistocene glaciers. He also works on Wisconsin coastal processes using a range of instruments for field and modeling techniques to estimate coastal stability and near-shore sediment transport.
Emily H. Stanley, Limnology, Wayland E. Noland Distinguished Chair in Limnology
Stanley’s research examines ecosystem dynamics of rivers and lakes, with an emphasis on water quality and carbon and nitrogen cycling and how they are affected by human activities. She is the lead principal investigator of the NSF-supported North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research program, and she is also involved in projects examining long-term and large-scale water quality patterns in lakes across the U.S. and the global emissions impact of greenhouse gases from rivers and streams. Professor Stanley was named an Aldo Leopold Fellow in 2006, an Ecological Society of America Fellow and a Society for Freshwater Science Fellow in 2018. She also received the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography’s G.E. Hutchinson award in 2018 in recognition of her synthetic contributions toward the understanding of hydrology and the biogeochemistry of nitrogen and carbon in lake and stream ecology.
Roman Kuzmin, Physics, Dunson K. Cheng Chair in Physics
Kuzmin is an expert in condensed matter physics with an emphasis on experiments with superconducting quantum devices. He received his PhD in Condensed Matter Physics from the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2016 he joined the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland as a postdoc and as a postdoctoral scholar was promoted to Assistant Research Scientist in 2020. Professor Kuzmin brings tremendous expertise and energy to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fast-moving area of quantum computing and quantum simulation. He will join the Physics faculty in January 2023.
COMPUTER DATA AND INFORMATION SCIENCES
Patrick McDaniel, Computer Sciences, Tsun-Ming Shih Chair in the College of Letters & Science
McDaniel is the Tsun-Ming Shih Professor of Computer Sciences in the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM and AAAS, a recipient of the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award and SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, and the director of the NSF Frontier Center for Trustworthy Machine Learning. He also served as the program manager and lead scientist for the Army Research Laboratory’s Cyber-Security Collaborative Research Alliance from 2013 to 2018. Professor McDaniel’s research focuses on a wide range of topics, from computer and network security to technical public policy. Prior to joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022, he was the William L. Weiss Professor of Information and Communications Technology and Director of the Institute for Networking and Security Research at Pennsylvania State University.
Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, Computer Sciences, Mark D. Hill & David A. Wood Professorship in Computer Sciences
Sankaralingam is a Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences, an entrepreneur and inventor. He has published more than 100 research papers, has graduated nine Ph.D. students, is an inventor on 21 patents and nine award papers. His work has been featured in industry forums of Mentor and Synopsys and has been covered by the New York Times, Wired and IEEE Spectrum. He also founded a chip startup called SimpleMachines in 2017 that built a revolutionary type of AI chip. In his research he has pioneered the principles of dataflow computing, focusing on the role of architecture, microarchitecture and the compiler. His research breakthroughs include constraint-theory based compilation for spatial architectures, specialized datapaths that can be dynamically configured, hybrid dataflow von-Neumann execution, modularizing specialization principles to allow programmability while retaining specialization benefits, new dataflow execution models that combine streaming and dataflow, and sampling theory applied to reliable computing.
Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Computer Sciences, Catherine A. Erickson Professorship in the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences
Arpaci-Dusseau works in computer systems; she has primarily focused on file and storage systems but has also made significant contributions in distributed systems, virtualization and scheduling. Professor Arpaci-Dusseau has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since January 2000. In that time, she has won 12 best-paper awards. In 2018, she and her colleague and husband, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, received the highest honor in the field of systems, the SIGOPS Mark Weiser award for “outstanding leadership, innovation, and impact in storage and computer systems research.” She has co-advised 28 Ph.D. students from UW-Madison and has co-chaired USENIX ATC ’04, FAST ’07, and OSDI ’18. She also cares deeply about education and outreach and has helped hundreds of UW-Madison undergraduate and graduate students connect with thousands of children in the Madison community through weekly after-school computer science clubs. She was awarded the UW-Madison Van Hise Outreach Teaching Award in 2017.
