The appointments of six faculty members to endowed chairs--four of them newly established--have been announced. The new chairs and the first holders are:
The Lee and Geraldine Martin Chair, Professor Mario J. Molina, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and Department of Chemistry.
The Rudge and Nancy Allen Chair, Professor Stephen A. Benton, head of the Media Arts and Sciences Program.
The Henry L. and Grace Doherty Chair in Ocean Science and Engineering, Professor Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, Department of Ocean Engineering and director, MIT Sea Grant College Program.
The Rose Chair in Urban Economics, Professor Frank Levy of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Endowed chairs established earlier and their holders are:
The Class of 1960 Fellow, Professor Thomas L. Magnanti of the Sloan School of Management, co-director of MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing Program.
John D. MacArthur Chair,Professor Paul R. Schimmel of the Department of Biology.
Professor Molina, a world leader in developing a scientific understanding of the chemistry of the stratospheric ozone layer, has been selected to be the first holder of a chair established by the Martin Foundation, Inc., to support research and education activities related to studies of the environment.
A member of the faculty since 1989, Professor Molina was the principal author on the 1974 paper that put forward the original fluorocarbon-ozone depletion theory.
His major interests are in atmospheric chemistry, gas phase kinetics and photochemistry, and heterogeneous chemistry. He holds the chemical engineer degree (1965) from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, a postgraduate degree (1967) from the University of Freiburg, West Germany, and the PhD (1972) from the University of California.,Berkeley.
Professor Benton's principal research interests are imaging physics, holography, three-dimensional imaging, optics and communication theory. In 1982, he founded and continues to direct the Spatial Imaging Group at the MIT Media Laboratory.
He holds the SB (1963) in electrical engineering from MIT, the MSc in engineering (1964) and the PhD in applied physics (1968), both from Harvard University.
The Allen Chair is named for Rudge Allen, a member of the MIT Corporation at the time of his death in January 1990. Mr. Allen received a degree from the Department of Chemical Engineering.
Professor Chryssostomidis, who holds a chair made possible by the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation, Inc., is a naval architect. His work since he came to MIT in 1970 has focused on the general area of design of marine structures. He has headed his department's Design Laboratory since 1973.
His most recent projects include the establishment of a new MIT laboratory for the development of technology and systems for advanced autonomous underwater vehicles. He is widely known for his work in developing computer-aided design systems for ships. He holds the BSc with honors (1965) from Newcastle Upon Tyne University, England; the SM (1967), the Naval Architect degree (1968) and the PhD (1970), all from MIT.
The chair Professor Levy holds, established with a gift from Daniel Rose, president of Rose Associates of New York City, a real estate development and management company, is the first at MIT for urban economics. Mr. Rose, a founding member of MIT's Center for Real Estate, has a long-standing interest in the healthy functioning of cities.
Dr. Levy, nationally known for his research in US income trends, focuses on how changes occur in the occupational structure and what the changes mean for the schools preparing students for the job market. He came to MIT last fall from the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs.
He holds the SB (1963) from MIT and the MA (1965) and the PhD (1969) from Yale. He was Clair Wilcox Lecturer in Economics at Swarthmore (1991).
Professor Magnanti, an expert on optimization of large-scale systems, is co-director of MIT's Operations Research Center and director of the Institute's Decision Sciences Program. He is noted for his fundamental contributions to optimal design of communication and transportation networks and for his work in manufacturing education. He joined MIT in 1971 and headed the Sloan School's Management Science Area from 1982 to 1988. Since 1985 he has held the George Eastman Professorship of Management Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1991. Professor Magnanti holds the BS in chemical engineering (1967) from Syracuse University and three degrees from Stanford University, the MS in statistics (1969), the MS in mathematics (1971) and the PhD in operations research (1972).
Professor Schimmel, widely known for his experimental work that revealed part of a "second genetic code" and for his substantial contributions to understanding protein and enzyme chemistry in the cell, has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1967.
Professor Schimmel and a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Ya-Ming Hou, published an article in 1988 in the journal Nature concerning the chemical mechanisms by which proteins are synthesized from information stored in a cell's genetic material, DNA. A commentary article in the same issue of Nature, by the 1974 Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, emphasized the significance of Professor Schimmel's work, referring to it as "the second genetic code."
Professor Schimmel, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds the AB from Ohio Wesleyan University (1962) and, after attending Tufts University School of Medicine (1962-63), received a PhD (1966) from MIT.
A version of this article appeared in the January 27, 1993 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 37, Number 20).
