The Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has appointed seven new members to its permanent faculty. CAS professors are selected based on their outstanding scholarship, and the appointments are one of the highest forms of campus recognition at the U. of I.
The new CAS professors are Lisa Ainsworth, plant biology; Scott Denmark, chemistry; Jodi Flaws, comparative biosciences; Peter Fritzsche, history; Bill Gropp, computing and data science; Helen Neville, educational psychology; and Brent Roberts, psychology.
They join 17 other CAS professors with permanent appointments. CAS professors deliver the annual lecture, serve on the committee that selects the CAS associates and fellows each year and are called upon for advice on matters related to the center.
Deans, directors, department heads and current CAS professors submit nominations of the campus’s most productive faculty members for permanent appointment to the center.
Ainsworth is the Charles Adlai Ewing Chair of Crop Physiology. She directs the Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment facility, the longest-running open-air experiment for studying crop responses to global atmospheric change. Her research addresses crop responses to climate change and tests potential solutions for mitigation of climate change through agriculture. She has been the editor of seven peer-reviewed journals and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ainsworth was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences in 2019 and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
Denmark is the Reynold C. Fuson Professor in Chemistry. His research is focused on the invention of new synthetic reactions and elucidating the mechanisms and origins of stereocontrol in novel, asymmetric reactions. He pioneered the concept of chiral Lewis base activation of Lewis acids for catalysis in main group synthetic organic chemistry. In recent years, his group has investigated the use of chemoinformatics and machine learning to identify and optimize enantioselective catalysts and reaction conditions for a variety of organic and organometallic reactions. He has received numerous honors and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the founding associate editor of Organic Letters and currently serves on the advisory boards of Organic Letters, the Journal of Organic Chemistry and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Flaws is a professor of comparative biosciences. Her research program focuses on determining the mechanisms by which environmental chemicals such as phthalates, neonicotinoid pesticides and water disinfection produces affect the development and function of the female reproductive system. She has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and served as an associate editor on a number of journals, including Biology of Reproduction and the Journal of the Endocrine Society. Her many awards and honors include the Lifetime Scientific Achievement Award from the Reproductive and Developmental Specialty Section of the Society of Toxicology and the Kenneth P. DuBois Award from the Midwest Regional Chapter of the Society of Toxicology. Flaws is a fellow of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences.
Fritzsche is the W.D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of History and has appointments in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, Germanic Languages and Literature, the European Union Center, the Center for Global Studies, and the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center. His research has mainly focused on Germany in the 20th century, and he has published a number of books in that area, including “Life and Death in the Third Reich,” and “Hitler’s First Hundred Days.” He also has published works on cultural and intellectual history, including “Stranded in the Present: Modern Times and the Melancholy of History.” His work has received international recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Cundhill Prize.
Gropp is the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. He holds a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering. His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing and numerical methods for partial differential equations. He is a fellow of AAAS, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Neville is a professor of educational psychology and African American studies. Historically, her research primarily focused on two interrelated areas in the study of racial beliefs: color-blind racial ideology or the systematic set of beliefs that serve to deny or minimize institutional racism and racial identity attitudes, particularly the influence of positive, internalized racial attitudes on well-being. More recently, her research has moved in the direction of healing, particularly healing from racial and other intersecting forms of trauma. She is the president-elect of the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race, a division of the American Psychological Association. She has co-edited eight books and co-authored nearly 90 journal articles and book chapters in the areas of race, racism and racial identity, and diversity issues related to well-being. Neville has been recognized for her research and mentoring efforts with numerous awards, including the Association of Black Psychologists’ Distinguished Psychologist of the Year award.
Roberts holds the Gutsgell Endowed Professorship in Psychology. He also holds positions as a health innovation professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and a distinguished guest professor at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research focuses on continuity and change in personality traits across adulthood, the life experiences associated with changes in personality traits over time and whether personality traits can be changed through intervention. He has received multiple awards for his work including the Carol and Ed Diener Mid-Career Award in Personality Psychology, the Theodore Millon Mid-Career Award in Personality Psychology and the Henry Murray Award, the Jack Block Award for Distinguished Research in Personality. He served as the director of the Center for Social and Behavioral Science, associate editor for the Journal of Research in Personality and Psychological Science and is the past president for the Association for Research in Personality.