Four LAS faculty members appointed to Center for Advanced Study
The Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has appointed seven new members to its permanent faculty. CAS professors are selected based on their outstanding scholarship, and the appointments are one of the highest forms of campus recognition at the U of I.
Four of the new CAS professors are from the College of LAS, including Lisa Ainsworth, plant biology; Scott Denmark, chemistry; Peter Fritzsche, history; and Brent Roberts, psychology.
Jodi Flaw in comparative biosciences, Bill Gropp in computing and data science, and Helen Neville in educational psychology were also appointed.
They join 17 other CAS professors with permanent appointments. CAS professors deliver the annual lecture, serve on the committee that selects the CAS associates and fellows each year and are called upon for advice on matters related to the center.
Deans, directors, department heads, and current CAS professors submit nominations of the campus’s most productive faculty members for permanent appointment to the center.
Ainsworth is the Charles Adlai Ewing Chair of Crop Physiology. She directs the Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment facility, the longest-running open-air experiment for studying crop responses to global atmospheric change. Her research addresses crop responses to climate change and tests potential solutions for mitigation of climate change through agriculture. She has been the editor of seven peer-reviewed journals and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ainsworth was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences in 2019 and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
Denmark is the Reynold C. Fuson Professor in Chemistry. His research is focused on the invention of new synthetic reactions and elucidating the mechanisms and origins of stereocontrol in novel, asymmetric reactions. He pioneered the concept of chiral Lewis base activation of Lewis acids for catalysis in main group synthetic organic chemistry. In recent years, his group has investigated the use of chemoinformatics and machine learning to identify and optimize enantioselective catalysts and reaction conditions for a variety of organic and organometallic reactions. He has received numerous honors and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the founding associate editor of Organic Letters and currently serves on the advisory boards of Organic Letters, the Journal of Organic Chemistry and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Fritzsche is the W.D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of History and has appointments in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, Germanic Languages and Literature, the European Union Center, the Center for Global Studies, and the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center. His research has mainly focused on Germany in the 20th century, and he has published a number of books in that area, including “Life and Death in the Third Reich,” and “Hitler’s First Hundred Days.” He also has published works on cultural and intellectual history, including “Stranded in the Present: Modern Times and the Melancholy of History.” His work has received international recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Cundhill Prize.
Roberts holds the Gutsgell Endowed Professorship in Psychology. He also holds positions as a health innovation professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and a distinguished guest professor at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research focuses on continuity and change in personality traits across adulthood, the life experiences associated with changes in personality traits over time and whether personality traits can be changed through intervention. He has received multiple awards for his work including the Carol and Ed Diener Mid-Career Award in Personality Psychology, the Theodore Millon Mid-Career Award in Personality Psychology and the Henry Murray Award, the Jack Block Award for Distinguished Research in Personality. He served as the director of the Center for Social and Behavioral Science, associate editor for the Journal of Research in Personality and Psychological Science and is the past president for the Association for Research in Personality.
