Newswise — Johns Hopkins University has appointed three scholars to Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships, new faculty positions created to foster collaboration across the institution’s many divisions and to help address major world problems.
The new appointees are Patricia H. Janak, a neuroscientist specializing in associative learning and addiction; Stephen Morgan, a sociologist with expertise in education and inequality; and Kathleen Sutcliffe, an organizational sociologist focused on organizational reliability and safety. Janak, Morgan and Sutcliffe begin their new roles July 1.
Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels and Robert C. Lieberman, university provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, announced the appointments.
“We congratulate Patricia Janak, Stephen Morgan, and Kathleen Sutcliffe on their selection,” Daniels and Lieberman said in a message to the Johns Hopkins community. “We are excited to work with them as we marshal the creativity and expertise of our faculty in disparate fields to solve our greatest global challenges.”
Janak will participate in the science of learning initiative, an interdisciplinary effort dedicated to improving how people think and learn. She will have appointments in both the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Psychological and Brian Sciences and in the School of Medicine. She has been a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco, where she researched potential treatments for addiction. At UCSF, she was also the Howard J. Weinberger Endowed Chair in Addiction Research. She is known for research on behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms of associative learning to better understand how stimuli associated with drugs and alcohol can cause addicts to relapse.
Sutcliffe will participate in the individualized health care delivery initiative, a university-wide effort to make world-class, affordable healthcare a reality. She will have appointments in the Carey Business School and the School of Medicine’s Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety. She comes to Johns Hopkins from the University of Michigan where she was a professor of business administration and a professor of management and organizations. She has studied how top executives can influence a firm’s performance and ways to prevent medical mishaps in the health care field. She is internationally recognized for her research in management and healthcare.
Morgan will have appointments in both the Krieger School’s Sociology Department and the School of Education. He comes to Johns Hopkins from Cornell University where he was a professor of social sciences and director of the Center for the Study of Inequality. His research focuses on education, inequality, demography and methodology. He is the author of On the Edge of Commitment: Educational Attainment and Race in the United States (2005). At Johns Hopkins, he will have a lead role in the Institute for the American City.
The appointments were made possible by a $350 million gift made in January 2013 by Johns Hopkins alumnus and New York City mayor from 2002-2013, Michael R. Bloomberg. The majority of this gift is dedicated to creating 50 new professorships and is part of a larger effort to raise $1 billion to facilitate cross-disciplinary work across the university, galvanizing people, resources, research, and educational opportunities around complex global challenges. Among those challenges are issues related to water resource sustainability, individualized health care delivery, global health, the science of learning, and urban revitalization.
Earlier this year, university officials announced the first Bloomberg Distinguished professors. They are Peter Agre, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology and a co-winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Kathryn Edin, a noted sociologist who studies families in poverty; and Carol Greider, a professor of molecular biology and genetics and a co-winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
“Johns Hopkins remains truly grateful for Michael R. Bloomberg’s ongoing support of our mission and our efforts to deepen our capacity for collaboration,” Daniels and Lieberman said. “Without his exceptional generosity, we wouldn’t be able to welcome such wonderful talent to our community of scholars.”
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