Six professors from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at U of I begin their appointments this fall as professors in the Center for Advanced Study (CAS)—one of the highest forms of recognition the campus bestows on faculty members for outstanding scholarship.
The new CAS professors are Renée Baillargeon, psychology; Bruce Berndt, mathematics; Martha Gillette, cell and developmental biology; Fred Hoxie, history; Brigit Pegeen Kelly, English; and Gene Robinson, entomology. They are joined by David Ceperley and Laura Greene, physics; Matthew Finkin, law; and Harris Lewin, animal sciences.
CAS professors, which number 27 with the recent additions, are drawn from throughout the campus. They continue to serve as full members of their home departments, while participating in a variety of formal and informal activities organized by the center, and also advising on the center’s future programs and direction.
Baillargeon, the University of Illinois Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology, is director of the U of I Infant Cognition lab. Her work on infants’ physical reasoning has challenged previous theories of infant development by demonstrating that even very young infants are able to differentiate events that are physically possible from those that appear to be physically impossible.
A mathematician, Berndt works primarily in analytic number theory and has devoted over three decades to providing proofs to the 3,904 formulas contained in the notebooks of Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of India’s—and the world’s—greatest mathematicians. This effort, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, has resulted in two published volumes of an anticipated total of five volumes.
Gillette, who studies the mechanisms that regulate the brain’s circadian clock, is the head of the Department of Cell and Structural Biology and a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at Illinois. An advocate of the study of sleep disorders, Gillette is the associate editor of the journal Sleep, vice president of the National Sleep Foundation, and president-elect of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. She also holds an appointment in the Institute for Genomic Biology.
Hoxie, a Swanlund Endowed Professor, is the author and editor of numerous books and scholarly articles on federal Indian policy, Plains Indians, and Native American history. He has maintained a prominent role as a public historian and has served as consultant and expert witness to the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the National Congress of American Indians, and the National Park Service.
Kelly is a poet whose first collection of poems, To The Place of Trumpets, was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her third collection of poems, The Orchard, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Circle Critics Award in Poetry. Her work has also appeared in several volumes of the Pushcart Prize Anthology and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.
Robinson is a Swanlund Endowed Professor of entomology and is the director of the Bee Research Facility and of the Neuroscience Program. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 publications, including pioneering research in the application of genomics to the study of social behavior, and he heads the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium. Robinson has been honored as a University Scholar, Fulbright Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and is a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society.
