The appointments of three faculty members to career development professorships have been announced by Provost Mark S. Wrighton. The appointments are for three-year terms.
S. Lael Brainard of the Sloan School of Management has been selected to be the next holder of the Class of 1956 Career Development Professorship.
David L. Trumper of the Department of Mechanical Engineering has been named the Rockwell International Career Development Professor.
Bernd Widdig of Foreign Languages and Literatures will be the next holder of the Class of 1958 Career Development Professorship.
Professor Brainard, an economist currently on leave from MIT, is concluding a term as a White House Fellow, a program that places exceptionally talented men and women in full-time paid positions for a year at the White House and Cabinet-level agencies, where they serve as special assistants to senior officers.
She joined MIT in 1990 as assistant professor of applied economics at the Sloan School. Her principal interests are international trade and investment. From 1989-90 she was a staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, working on international finance and trade policy, including market-oriented reform in Eastern Europe.
Professor Brainard holds the BA degree from Wesleyan University (1983) and the MA and PhD in economics (1989) from Harvard University.
Professor Trumper holds a chair endowed in 1985 by the Rockwell International Corporation Trust to recognize junior faculty with special promise. He holds the SB (1980), SM (1984) and PhD (1990) degrees from MIT.
He joined MIT in August 1993 after three years on the electrical engineering faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He also has extensive experience in industry. Following his bachelor's degree, he worked for Hewlett Packard Co. for two years, designing pressure control systems. After obtaining his master's degree, he worked for two years at Waters Chromatography Division of Millipore, designing precision pumping systems for liquid chromatography.
His research interests include applications of continuous- and discrete-time control; electromechanics and electric machines; control of electromechanical systems and magnetic suspensions and bearings. He holds four patents in the areas of flow control and magnetic bearings.
Professor Widdig has been at MIT since 1989, first as a visitor and from 1992 as assistant professor of German studies. His fields of interest are 19th- and 20th-century German literature, German cultural studies, the German cinema and literary theory.
He holds the Staatsexamen from the University of Bonn (1983) in political science/sociology and German literature, and the PhD (1989) in German Studies from Stanford University.
Professor Widdig is especially interested in cultural politics during the Weimar Republic. His 1992 book, Maennerbuende und Massen.:Zur Krise Maennlicher Identitaet in der Literatur der Moderne (Male Bonding and the Masses: On the Crisis of Male Identity in Modernism), offers an approach hailed as innovative to the representation of masses and crowds in German modernist theory and literature. He is currently working on a book project entitled Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany.
Since 1992 he has been an affiliate scholar and co-chair of a study group on German cultural history at Harvard University's Center for European Studies.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 26, 1995.
