Nine Women Appointed to Named Professorships at the University of Chicago

Erika C. Claud has been named the first Stephen Family Professor in the department of pediatrics. Dr. Claud specializes in neonatology, providing care to critically ill infants. She has an interest in the diagnosis and treatment of preterm infants and conditions of the immature digestive tract. Professor Claud is co-director of the Basic Science Track within the Scholarship and Discovery Program of the Pritzker School of Medicine and Faculty Co-Chair of the Pritzker School of Medicine Summer Research Program. She is also director of neonatology research and a member of the Faculty Leadership Cabinet for the Duchossois Family Institute. She received her combined undergraduate and medical degree at Northwestern University through the six-year Honors Program in Medical Education.

Josephine McDonagh has been named the Randy L. and Melvin B. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor of the development of the novel in the department of English language and literature. As a scholar of nineteenth-century British literature, Professor McDonagh’s work ranges across authors, genres and print forms to explore questions about the types of knowledge that literature produces. She is the author of several books including  Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 (Oxford University Press, 2021). Since 2021, McDonagh has served as the director of the Nicolson Center for British Studies, which specializes in the multidisciplinary study of the history and culture of the British isles and its former colonies. From 2020‒2023, she was an editor of the journal Modern Philology. Dr. McDonagh holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southampton in England.

Y. Shirley Meng has been named the Liew Family Professor in the department of molecular engineering. Dr. Meng serves as the chief scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) at Argonne National Laboratory and the director of Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA), an innovation hub funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. She held the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at the Uniersity of California, San Diego from 2017-2022. She is an elected fellow of the Electrochemical Society, a fellow of the Materials Research Society, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is the author or co-author of more than 320 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters, and eight issued patents. Dr. Meng received her bachelor’s degree with first-class honor from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She holds a Ph.D. in advanced materials for micro and nano systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance.

Sianne Ngai has been named the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the department of English language and literature. A distinguished cultural theorist, Dr. Ngai uses philosophy, literature, art, economics, and humor to define American culture. She is the author of  Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Belknap Press 2020), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012), and Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005). Professor Ngai taps into American’s ordinary use of language to uncover political complexity and ambivalence. Currently, Dr. Ngai is working on a book project called “Inhabiting Error” about the affective dimensions of dialectical thinking and how it moves through negation. Professor Ngai holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Veronika Rockova has been named the first Bruce Lindsay Professor of Econometrics and Statistics in the Wallman Society of Fellows. Dr. Rockova has been internationally recognized for her broad research contributions at the intersection of statistics and machine learning. She specializes in Bayesian computation, variable selection, high-dimensional decision theory, and hierarchical modeling. Her current research agenda includes uncertainty quantification and inference for generative models underlying modern artificial intelligence platforms. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B). Dr. Rockova holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Charles University in Prague. She earned a Ph.D. in biostatistics from Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Jacqueline Najuma Stewart has been named the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the department of cinema and media studies. Professor Stewart is the author and editor of several influential books, including: Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California Press, 2005). Among her many honors, she received a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2023 Silver Light Award from the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and the 2024 Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This fall, Dr. Stewart returned to the university after serving for four years as the chief artistic and programming officer and then as director and president at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Currently, Dr. Stewart is working on a book focused on the South Side Home Movie Project and the alternate histories and archival practices it has developed during the last 20 years. Professor Stewart is a graduate of Stanford University. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago.

Rebecca Willett has been named the first Worah Family Professor in the Wallman Society of Fellows in the departments of statistics and computer science. Professor Willett is also the director of artificial intelligence in the Data Science Institute at the university. Her research is focused on the mathematical and statistical foundations of machine learning, scientific machine learning, and signal processing. Dr. Willett is the deputy director for research at the NSF-Simons Foundation National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, deputy director for research at the NSF-Simons Institute for AI in the Sky (SkAI), and a member of the NSF Institute for the Foundations of Data Science Executive Committee. She is the faculty director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship. Professor Willett completed her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in 2005. Before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago, she taught at Duke University and the University of Wisconsin.

Ming Xiang has been named the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor in the department of linguistics. Dr. Xiang’s research aims to better understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support the rapid, real-time construction of complex linguistic representations. As the director of the Language Processing Lab at the university, she uses behavioral and neurophysiological methods to investigate how structural representations are formed during language comprehension and production across different languages. Her research also examines how context influences semantic and pragmatic interpretations. Recently, her lab has started exploring how language processing contributes to language change in multilingual communities. Professor Xiang has received several awards from the National Science Foundation to study sentence processing mechanisms across languages. Professor Xiang earned a Ph.D. at Michigan State University.

Rong Grace Zhai has been named the Jack Miller Professor for the Study of Neurological Diseases in the department of neurology. Dr. Zhai is internationally recognized for her work in Drosophila genetics and human disease modeling that allows her to perform rapid in vivo functional and imaging analyses to understand genetic and biochemical causes of rare and common neurological diseases and discover new therapeutic approaches. Dr. Zhai is vice chair for research in the department of neurology. She is a Pew Scholar and has won numerous awards including the Snyder-Robinson Foundation Researcher of the Year Award, the Women in Academic Medicine Trailblazer Award, and the Safadi Faculty Scholar Award. She earned a Ph.D. in neurobiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.