The following faculty members' elections to named professorships were approved during the past year by the Cornell Board of Trustees.
John M. Abowd, professor of labor economics in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), was named the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations. Abowd is the first Cornell professor to hold the chair named for Day, who was the fifth president of the university, from 1937 to 1949, and who helped establish Cornell's ILR School and business school programs.
Abowd is a distinguished senior research fellow at the United States Bureau of the Census and the principal investigator of a five-year project, "Dynamic Employer-Household Data and the Social Data Infrastructure," that was among a handful of proposals funded in 2000 through a National Science Foundation initiative. The project, which is co-sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau, integrates a wide range of census-related longitudinal data on American social and economic life, such as welfare-to-work and aging, and makes it available to researchers while protecting the anonymity of the people surveyed and the confidentiality of their responses. The project is opening new vistas for labor economists and is likely to reshape the field.
Abowd is the principal or co-principal investigator on several other multiyear grants, from such groups as the National Institute on Aging, the Sloan Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. He analyzes labor markets using econometric tools and is interested in wage-setting institutions and in international comparisons of labor market outcomes and executive compensation. He is an associate or affiliate at key economic research institutions in the United States and France. He is the co-editor (with Francis Kramarz) of The Microeconometrics of Human Resource Management (ADRES, 1996) and Immigration, Trade and the Labor Market (University of Chicago Press, 1991), has published articles in the major economic and statistics journals and has been associate editor of several.
Abowd joined the ILR School faculty in 1987 as a tenured associate professor and was promoted to professor in 1990. From 1987 to 1995, he also was an adjunct professor at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. Before coming to Cornell, he was on the faculty at Princeton University, the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned an A.B. at the University of Notre Dame in 1973, majoring in economics, and went on to the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. in 1975 and a Ph.D. in 1977, both in economics.
The Day professorship was established in Sept. 2001 by the Executive Committee of the Cornell Board of Trustees to honor the contributions of Cornell's fifth president and is funded by the school or college where the faculty member who holds the professorship resides.
Vinay Ambegaokar, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was named a Goldwin Smith Professor of physics.
Ambegaokar's research focuses on condensed matter and low temperature physics. Most recently he has been studying the destruction of superconductivity by disorder in homogeneous films and wires, the low temperature conductivity of metallic films and the transport of electrons through quantum dots.
His book Reasoning about Luck: probability and its uses in physics (Cambridge University Press 1996), introduces statistical reasoning and its use in physics to serious general readers.
Ambegaokar received his B.S. and master's degrees in the Mechanical Engineering Honors Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, finishing in 1956. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960, where he worked with Walter Kohn, the 1998 Nobel laureate in chemistry. From 1960 to 1962 Ambegaokar was a Ford Foundation research associate at the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1962 as assistant professor of physics and became a full professor in 1968.
From 1969 to 1971, he served as director of the Research Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has held visiting appointments at: Bell Laboratories, North American-Rockwell Science Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, IBM Watson Research Center, Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara; Collège de France; University of Karlsruhe; NORDITA, Copenhagen; University of Florida; All Souls College, Oxford, and Bohr Institute, Copenhagen. Honors he has received include: A.P. Sloan Foundation fellow, 1965-1967; Medal of the University of Helsinki, 1971; American Physical Society fellow, 1979; J.S. Guggenheim Foundation fellow, 1983-84; Medal of the Collège de France, 1986; and Humboldt Foundation Senior U.S. Scientist, 1986 and 1990.
The first Goldwin Smith professorships were established in 1912 in the fields of Latin, English literature, American history, political science and English. Since that time they have been awarded in a number of other fields, including physics and mathematics. There currently are 15 Goldwin Smith professorships.
Jan A. deRoos, associate professor in the School of Hotel Administration, was named the HVS International Professor of Hotel Finance and Real Estate. The professorship is granted for a five-year term. DeRoos succeeds Professor Emeritus James Eyster in the position.
DeRoos studies real estate and real estate finance, with a focus on returns to hospitality assets, market dynamics in the lodging industry and lodging valuation. He hopes to produce new knowledge that is useful to the hospitality industry, capital market participants and the consulting industry.
He earned three degrees at Cornell, a B.S. in 1978, an M.S. in 1980 and a Ph.D. in 1994. In studying returns to hospitality assets, he employs a Lodging Property Index that he developed with colleagues. The index offers a more accurate picture of lodging property values than the leading non-lodging real estate index, which is subject to such data distortions as "appraisal smoothing," said deRoos. He also has developed a software-based set of valuation tools for the lodging industry.
DeRoos teaches hospitality real estate finance, real estate management as well as a real estate project workshop to undergraduate and graduate students at the Hotel School. In addition he offers summer courses in advanced hotel investments and computerized hotel market studies and valuations to hospitality professionals.
He was voted Teacher of the Year by the Hotel School's graduate students in 1998 and 1999 and by its freshmen and sophomores in 1995. In 1992, he was named by Cornell Merrill Presidential Scholar Shiela Bauer as the university professor whose teaching and support had the greatest influence on her life and studies.
DeRoos has consulted for Nikko, Loews and other lodging corporations on valuation and market feasibility projects and has researched lodging and timeshare markets for PricewaterhouseCoopers and the American Hotel and Motel Association. The second edition of deRoos' Hospitality Valuation Software: Hotel Market Studies, Financial Projections & Valuations (co-written with Stephen Rushmore) was recently issued. DeRoos worked eight years with the Sheraton and Remington Hotel corporations before entering academia.
The professorship was established several years ago by Stephen Rushmore '67 and Judith Kellner Rushmore '65 on behalf of HVS International, to further the study of hotel finance and valuation. The Rushmores are co-owners and founders of HVS International, an economic consulting firm for the hospitality industry. They have served on the Cornell University Council and have been recognized as Foremost Benefactors of Cornell.
Timothy J. Fahey, professor in the Department of Natural Resources in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, was named a Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor.
Fahey's research interests center on the use of water and nutrients by forests. He leads a long-term, multi-university project, funded by the National Science Foundation, in ecosystem biogeochemistry, with research locations in Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire and in the Dominican Republic. He also has investigated the effects of freezing damage and earthworm invasions on forest ecosystems.
Fahey divides his time evenly between research and teaching and currently teaches four courses. He has received the 1995 Gamma Sigma Delta Award of Merit for Teaching, the 1996 National Association of Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture Teaching Award of Merit and the 1997 State University of New York Chancellor's Award for Teaching. He has been his department's director of undergraduate advising since 1991. In October of 2001, he was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell.
Fahey received his B.A. in biology from Dartmouth College in 1974, graduating cum laude with high honors. He earned his M.S. in 1977 and Ph.D. in 1979 at the University of Wyoming, in botany. In 1982 he came to Cornell as an assistant professor. He was named associate professor in 1988 and a full professor in 1996. During sabbaticals he has studied and conducted research at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology in Cumbria in the United Kingdom and at the Center for Study of Pinus Occidentalis in Monabao in the Dominican Republic.
In 1972 the Cornell Board of Trustees approved the establishment of Liberty Hyde Bailey professorships, of which there are now 10, to recognize distinguished achievement in agriculture and related sciences. The professorships are named after Liberty Hyde Bailey, the former professor of practical and experimental horticulture at Cornell, who led the drive to secure state funding to establish the New York State College of Agriculture. He became the second dean of the college in 1903, and he established a system of spreading information to farmers that was the precursor of today's cooperative extension system.
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