The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation has approved promotion for 14 faculty members to the rank of full professor. MIT Tech Talk will run them in two installments. Below are those from three of the four schools with promoted faculty (architecture and planning; humanities, arts and social sciences; and science). Promotions in the School of Engineering will appear in the May 14 issue. All appointments are effective July 1.
School of Architecture and Planning
Leslie K. Norford
Architecture
Education: B.S. 1973 (Cornell), M.A. 1982, Ph.D. 1984 (both from Princeton)
Joined MIT faculty: 1988
Tenured: 1996
Norford has worked to improve the energy performance of buildings worldwide. In the United States, he has focused on advanced electrical monitoring techniques and the performance of electronic office equipment. He carried out the first in-depth energy monitoring of Russian buildings and developed innovative insulation materials for Pakistan as well as energy-efficient designs and technologies for residential buildings in China.
School of Humanties, Arts and Social Sciences
Dora Costa
Economics
Education: B.A. 1985 (University of California at Berkeley), M.A. 1988, Ph.D. 1993 (both from the University of Chicago)
Joined MIT faculty: 1993
Tenured: 2000
Costa studies American economic history, labor and economic demography. She has focused on the economics of aging, with particular emphasis on factors that have affected retirement rates and labor force participation over time. Recent research topics include health economics and "social capital."
Deborah Fitzgerald
Science, Technology and Society
Education: B.A. 1978 (Iowa State University), M.A. 1981. Ph.D. 1985 (both from the University of Pennsylvania)
Joined MIT faculty: 1988
Tenured: 1995
Fitzgerald is an expert in the history of agricultural modernization, particularly in 20th-century America. Her most recent book is "Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture" (Yale, 2003). She is currently working on the industrial history of food.
School of Science
Stephen P. Bell
Biology
Education: B.A. 1985 (Northwestern University), Ph.D. 1990 (University of California at Berkeley)
Joined MIT faculty: 1994
Tenured: 1998
Bell's research addresses the mechanisms controlling chromosome duplication in eukaryotic cells. As a postdoc, he discovered ORC, a protein complex that selects specific DNA sequences as start sites of DNA replication. At MIT, he has dissected the role of ORC and other proteins in the assembly of the protein machines that replicate the eukaryotic genome.
Uwe-Jens Wiese
Physics
Education: Diplom 1984, Ph.D. 1986 (both from Hannover University, Germany), Habilitation 1993 (Aachen University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1994
Tenured: 2001
Wiese does research on physical systems with many strongly interacting degrees of freedom using theoretical insights into field theory. He constructs and applies new computational techniques to solve formerly intractable problems in both high-energy and condensed matter physics.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 7, 2003.
