Young stars awarded professorships

The road to faculty recognition is often a long journey of late nights writing grant applications and articles for publication. For four promising new Boston University faculty members, this road just got much smoother: they were recently named Peter Paul Career Development Professors. Each professorship is funded with a $50,000 annual award for three years to support research that the top young recipients might not otherwise be able to pursue.

The professorships are named for Peter Paul (GSM’71), the president of the mortgage banking company Paul Financial, LLC, who pledged $1.5 million to establish 10 such professorships over the next five years. The first recipients of the gift were nominated by deans and department heads and chosen by President Robert Brown and Provost David Campbell.

Paul established the awards for promising young faculty who have been at BU no more than two years. “By recruiting and retaining some of the best and the brightest young professors and by attracting partners to financially support this endeavor in the future,” says Paul, “I’m confident that Boston University’s educational quality and stature as an institution will be significantly enhanced.”

Brooke Blower
A College of Arts and Sciences assistant professor of history, Brooke Blower is currently writing a book based on her doctoral dissertation, “The Paris of Americans: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars,” which deals with the conventional myths about the role of Americans in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.

“The story I tell is not about a postwar ‘Gay Paree,’ where Americans expatriates, African-American veterans, small town tourists, and others went to be free from the strictures of life back home and where Parisians left them alone,” she says. “Instead, I portray an international capital where Americans became implicated in some of the most pressing political conflicts and cultural debates of the day.”

Blower, who earned a Ph.D. in history from Princeton, says that the professorship will not only help her complete her manuscript, but will also enable her to investigate the transnational experiences of Americans in the years immediately following World War II.  

“Rather than looking at formal diplomatic connections, I am interested in understanding, from the bottom up, how Americans forged relationships to other cultures and regions of the world and how that engagement helped to reshape American thought and culture in the postwar period,” she says. “There are few, if any, funding possibilities for an Americanist — especially as a young faculty member — to do this kind of multi-archival, multinational research. This award will allow me to begin a project that otherwise I probably would not have the opportunity to write.”

Her manuscript should result in “a finely written book that will attract wide attention because of both its empirical findings and its methodological innovation,” says Charles Dellheim, CAS history department chairman.

Sucharita Chandran
Consumer behavior, including behavioral pricing and social marketing, is what fascinates Sucharita Chandran, a School of Management assistant professor of marketing. Since coming to BU in 2003, she has published three articles in the Journal of Consumer Research, one of the top publications in her field.

“This is a very impressive record for a young scholar at the beginning of her career,” says SMG Dean Louis Lataif (SMG’61, Hon.’90). “Her teaching has been equally outstanding, with a recent average rating of 4.77 — on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest — across three sections of the undergraduate program.”

Chandran sees the professorship as a vote of confidence in her work. “It’s extremely helpful to get recognition from your peers, particularly the research process,” she says. “In teaching, you’re in the classroom twice a week and you get instant feedback. But research is a long, exhausting, and sometimes frustrating process because you don’t always get feedback as quickly as you would like. An award like this is like getting a pat on the back and being told, ‘Good job; now keep going in that direction.’ ”

Chandran is also the 2003 recipient of SMG’s Broderick Prize for Research. She earned an M.A. in management studies from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, in India, and a Ph.D. in marketing from New York University. She has taught in NYU’s undergraduate business program and has worked in marketing at Unilever’s Indian subsidiary and ANZ Bank’s Indian operations.

John Connor
An expert in the translation of viral and cellular RNAs in cells that are infected with negative-strand RNA viruses, the School of Medicine assistant professor of microbiology’s research focuses on the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) as an antitumor agent.

As a postdoctoral student at the Wake Forest University Medical Center’s department of microbiology and immunology, Connor discovered that VSV can function and generate proteins effectively, even in the presence of oxygen. “Since low oxygen levels are characteristic of many solid tumor malignancies, VSV could be used as a novel therapeutic vector to deliver antitumor agents selectively to tumors,” says Karen Antman, MED dean and provost of the Medical Campus.

VSV is also a promising vector for the development of vaccines against certain emerging viruses because of its similarity to Marburg hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, and rabies. “VSV is a good model for a variety of other viruses,” says Connor, and recent research “has given us a better understanding of how viruses like these are able to do the nasty things that they do.”

Connor earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology and cell and molecular biology from Duke University. He has published 21 papers, including 10 as first author, in such publications as the Journal of Biology, the Journal of Virology, the Journal of Molecular Biology, and the Journal of Neuroscience.

Marah Curtis
Curtis, a School of Social Work assistant professor of social welfare policy, studies the effects of U.S. public policies on society’s most vulnerable citizens. “My research focuses on how income-conditioned public benefits such as subsidized housing and welfare affect families,” she says. “More specifically, I am interested in the interaction of the eligibility criteria of various subsidies and the family formation decisions of low-income parents.”

This kind of policy research requires careful modeling and the construction of measures from a number of different data sources. “This work is labor-intensive and complicated,” she says. “The Peter Paul Career Development Professorship will help my research by enabling me to hire and train research assistants, to travel to multidisciplinary conferences or data workshops, and to increase the time I can focus on current projects as well as develop grant proposals for new work. This professorship provides essential support to develop my research over time.”

Curtis came to BU last fall after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the New York City Human Resources Administration’s Social Indicators Survey Center at Columbia University. She earned an M.A. in social work at Hunter College and a Ph.D. in social policy and policy analysis at Columbia University, where she was also an adjunct assistant professor.

“I have been thoroughly impressed by her intelligence, energy, and constructively critical approach toward her own research and to our program and ways it can be improved,” says SSW Dean Gail Steketee. “Dr. Curtis is a scholar who will easily garner a national reputation.”