BU President Melissa L. Gilliam and University Provost and Chief Academic Officer Gloria Waters announced the promotion of four Arts & Scienecs faculty members to the rank of full professor in April 2025.
Brooke L. Blower, History, studies modern American political culture, travel, and war in urban and transnational contexts, examining assumptions about US exceptionalism. She has authored and edited numerous award-winning books and articles, including most recently, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper (2023). A frequent keynote speaker and winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Bernath Lecture Prize, she has received several major awards supporting her work, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies’ Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship.
Marco Gaboardi, Computer Science, studies foundational methods to make computer programs more trustworthy and secure. His recent efforts have focused on developing formal techniques, using ideas from mathematical logic and probabilities to guarantee that computer programs respect data privacy. His work has been consistently published in top-tier journals and supported by several grants from the NSF and the US Census Bureau. He is a past recipient of an EU Marie Curie Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and a Google Research Award.
Pinghua Liu, Chemistry, is a bioorganic chemist researching natural product biosynthesis and the chemical basis of the biological clock. Supported by grants from the NIH and NSF, including an NSF CAREER award, he has been recognized for contributions towards mechanistic studies of metalloenzymes and their potential in the development of novel therapeutics for chronic aging-associated diseases. He has published 67 papers in distinguished chemistry journals and obtained four patents.
Juan Ortner, Economics, is a microeconomic theorist with research interests in pure and applied theory. His research covers collusion, bargaining, and dynamic contracting, with recent work focused on developing statistical screens to detect collusive behavior in markets and designing mechanisms to mitigate its effects. He has published extensively in top economic journals, including Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economyand the Review of Economic Studies. In 2022, he was awarded the American Antitrust Institute’s Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award for Best Antitrust Article on Collusion in Auctions, and in 2024 he won the Best Paper Award of the Association of Competition Economics. He is currently an editorial board member at the American Economic Review.