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Four faculty members appointed to chairs

Two faculty members have recently been selected as Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professors, and new holders of the Whitehead and the Laurance S. Rockefeller chairs have also been announced by Provost Joel Moses.

The new three-year Edgerton Professors are David Wallace of mechanical engineering and Patricia J. Culligan-Hensley of civil and environmental engineering. Robert D. Rosenberg of biology was named to a five-year term as Whitehead Professor, and Robert Stalnaker of linguistics and philosophy will be the Rockefeller Professor in Philosophy for five years.

The Edgerton professorships were established in 1973 by the Corporation to honor Professor and Mrs. Harold E. Edgerton. Professor Wallace, a native of Canada, has been an assistant professor at MIT since 1994. His research interests include environmentally conscious product design and computer-aided industrial design, as well as Web-based design education. He received the MS (1991) and PhD (1994) in mechanical engineering design from MIT, and the bachelor of industrial design (1986) and bachelor of mechanical engineering (1989) from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Professor Culligan-Hensley holds the BSc (1982) from the University of Leeds and the MPhil (1985) and PhD (1989) from Cambridge University in England. She came to MIT as an assistant professor in 1994 after serving in research capacities at universities including the University of Western Australia and the City University, London. Her research focuses on environmental geotechnics, subsurface contaminant flow and transport, and hazardous waste site remediation.

Dr. Rosenberg, in addition to his posts since 1981 as professor of biology at MIT and as William B. Castle Professor of Med-icine at Harvard Medical School, is chief of molecular medicine at Beth Israel Hospital. A physician and researcher in the field of blood clotting, he holds the MD (1961) from George Washington University and the PhD in biophysics (1969) from MIT.

Professor Stalnaker is the latest holder of the Rockefeller chair, the first endowed professorship in philosophy at MIT. He holds the BA (1962) from Wesleyan University and the PhD (1965) from Princeton. Before coming to MIT as a professor of philosophy in 1988, he was an associate professor, professor and department chair in philosophy at Cornell. He has also taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana and at Yale. His research interests include the philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, and the foundations of decision and game theories.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 20, 1996.

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