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Three are named to professorships

The appointments of three faculty members to endowed chairs have been announced by Provost Mark S. Wrighton.

Professor Olivier Blanchard of the Department of Economics has been selected to be the Class of 1941 Professor for a five-year renewable term.

Assistant Professor Hazel L. Sive of the Department of Biology and Whitehead Institute has been named the Latham Family Career Development Professor.

Assistant Professor Mitchell D. Trott of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been named to the KDD Career Development Professorship in Communications and Technology.

The career-development appointments are for three-year terms.

Professor Blanchard, considered one of the leading macroeconomists of his generation, is recognized for important contributions to the role of expectations in economic fluctuations, the role of fiscal policy and the theory of unemployment.

He is also recognized for his recent work on socialist economies in transition, where he has been at the forefront of developing analytical models to better understand transitions, and guide policy in those countries.

For more than 10 years, he has been the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, one of the most prestigious journals in the field.

Professor Blanchard received the PhD in economics from MIT in 1977 and taught at Harvard University until 1983, when he joined MIT as an associate professor. He became professor of economics in 1985.

Professor Sive, who has been at MIT and Whitehead since 1991, holds undergraduate degrees from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and the PhD (1986) from Rockefeller University.

From 1986 until she came to MIT, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, doing molecular embryology research.

Professor Trott specializes in theories of coding, systems and information, and mobile radio communication. He seeks to construct new types of error-correcting codes through characterization of fundamental properties of structured dynamical systems. In 1993 he was co-organizer of the IEEE Workshop on Coding Theory, System Theory and Symbolic Dynamics.

He received the BS (1987) and the MS (1988) from Case Western Reserve University and the PhD (1992) from Stanford University. He joined MIT in July 1992.

A version of this article appeared in the October 19, 1994 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 39, Number 8).

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