CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Ten professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign begin their appointments this fall as professors in the Center for Advanced Study – one of the highest forms of recognition the campus bestows on faculty members for outstanding scholarship.
The new CAS professors are Renée Baillargeon, psychology; Bruce Berndt, math; David Ceperley, physics; Matthew Finkin, law; Martha Gillette, cell and developmental biology; Laura Greene, physics; Fred Hoxie, history; Brigit Pegeen Kelly, English; Harris Lewin, animal sciences; and Gene Robinson, entomology. The permanent appointments were approved by the U. of I. Board of Trustees during its July 23 meeting in Chicago.
CAS professors, which number 27 with the recent additions, are drawn from throughout the campus. They continue to serve as full members of their home departments, while participating in a variety of formal and informal activities organized by the center, and also advising on the center’s future programs and direction.
Baillargeon, the University of Illinois Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology, is director of the U. of I. Infant Cognition lab. Her work on infants’ physical reasoning has challenged previous theories of infant development by demonstrating that even very young infants are able to differentiate events that are physically possible from those that appear to be physically impossible.
Mathematician Bruce Berndt works primarily in analytic number theory and has devoted over three decades to providing proofs to the 3,904 formulas contained in the notebooks of Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of India’s – and the world’s – greatest mathematicians. This effort, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, has resulted in 10 published volumes.
Ceperley, a professor of physics, is a staff scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory. His research interests include theoretical condensed matter physics and computational physics. Ceperly’s techniques have been used to predict the behavior of matter. In addition he was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Finkin, the Albert J. Harno and Edward W. Cleary Chair in Law and director of the Program in Comparative Labor and Employment Law & Policy at Illinois, conducts research on issues in labor and employment law, as well as legal issues in higher education. Finkin is the author, co-author or editor of nine books, including “For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom,” “Privacy in Employment Law,” “The Case for Tenure” and “Introduction to German Law.”
Gillette, who studies the mechanisms that regulate the brain’s circadian clock, is a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at Illinois. An advocate of the study of sleep disorders, Gillette is the associate editor of the journal Sleep, vice president of the National Sleep Foundation and president-elect of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. She also holds an appointment in the Institute for Genomic Biology.
Greene is a Swanlund Professor of physics and a researcher at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory. As a leading experimentalist in the physics of novel materials, Greene has performed pioneering experiments that elucidate how the electronic properties of low- and high-temperature superconductors interface with other materials. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Hoxie, a Swanlund Endowed Professor, is the author and editor of numerous books and scholarly articles on federal Indian policy, Plains Indians and Native American history. He has maintained a prominent role as a public historian and has served as consultant and expert witness to the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the National Congress of American Indians and the National Park Service.
Kelly is a poet whose first collection of poems, “To The Place of Trumpets,” was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her third collection of poems, “The Orchard,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Circle Critics Award in Poetry. Her work has also appeared in several volumes of the Pushcart Prize Anthology and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.
Lewin, the director of the Institute for Genomic Biology and the Gutgsell Endowed Chair in the department of animal sciences, is an animal geneticist who studies how genomes evolve and the role of chromosome rearrangements in adaptation and speciation. His research has resulted in the identification of the gene responsible for resistance and susceptibility to bovine leukemia virus infection, the development of high-density comparative maps for mammalian genomes, and co-discovery of a gene affecting the composition of milk fat.
Robinson,a Swanlund Endowed Professor, is the director of the Bee Research Facility and of the Neuroscience Program. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 publications, including pioneering research in the application of genomics to the study of social behavior, and he heads the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium. Robinson has been honored as a University Scholar, Fulbright Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow and is a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society. In addition he was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
