BU Social Scientists on CRC Promoted to Full Professor
On April 29, 2025, BU President Melissa Gilliam and Provost Gloria Waters announced the promotion of 23 members of the Charles River Campus faculty to the rank of full professor at Boston University.
At the heart of great universities are outstanding faculty, whose scholarship and teaching advance our understanding of the world around us, produce research discoveries that improve our quality of life, and prepare new generations for success and leadership in the workforce. The individuals we recognize today are leaders in their respective disciplines and in their classrooms. As the world and institutions like BU navigate daily change that impacts our communities and missions, they are rising to the challenge by pursuing new areas of inquiry, employing innovative approaches, and helping launch entirely new fields of study through exciting collaborations with colleagues across departments, schools, and campuses. In doing so, they exemplify each day the depth and excellence of Boston University’s talented academic community.
Congratulations to the newly promoted faculty, including the following social scientists.
Evan Apfelbaum, Questrom, Management & Organizations, investigates widely accepted assumptions about diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizational contexts, focusing on organizational transparency and diversity, behavioral change in organizations, and developmental psychology and intergroup relations. A recipient of Questrom’s Molly McCombe and T.J. Callahan Faculty Research Award and the Best Symposium Award (Management, Education, and Development Division) from the Academy of Management in 2023, he has been named one of the Top 40 Business Professors Under 40 by Poets & Quants and is an elected fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He has published numerous book chapters and articles in leading journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Management Science, and Organization Science.
Brooke L. Blower, CAS, 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.
Patricia Cortes, Questrom, Markets, Public Policy & Law, is a labor economist with expertise in the effects of immigration on labor market activity and gender disparities in the workforce. Her immigration research has been cited extensively in presidential and congressional economic forecasting models, with recent work on gender disparities and their causes being utilized by policymakers and private industry. She has published numerous articles in top economics journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, and the Journal of Labor Economics. She is currently a Dean’s Research Scholar at Questrom and received the school’s McCombe and Callahan Faculty Research Award in 2023.
Daniel P. Miller, SSW, Human Behavior, Research, and Policy, is a social policy researcher whose work focuses primarily on poverty, food insecurity and food and nutrition assistance programs, and the determinants and effects of fathers’ involvement in families. He has published two book chapters and 48 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals, including Child Development, The American Journal of Public Health, Pediatrics, and Social Service Review. A fellow of the Society of Social Work and Research, he has garnered several major awards, including the Excellence in Research Award from the Society for Social Work and Research, the John M. Eisenberg Article-of-the-Year Award, and the Best Research Article Award from the Men in Families Focus Group of the National Council on Family Relations. He additionally serves as a lead researcher for the Philadelphia Economic Equity Project, a regional study of poverty and economic well-being.
Jordana Muroff, SSW, Clinical Practice, is a researcher-clinician who focuses on the development of mental health interventions that are more easily accessible and culturally and linguistically responsive. She is particularly interested in health technology innovations that help reduce health inequities and stigma and improve access to mental health services for underserved populations. She has led federal, state, and foundation funded research studies in collaboration with community agencies and was lead author of the book, Group Treatment for Hoarding Disorder: Therapist Guide (2014). Her research has been featured in leading journals such as the American Journal of Public Health and Depression and Anxiety, and she is editor of the Oxford University Press ABCT Clinical Practice Series.
Juan Ortner, CAS, 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 Economy and 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.
Shelly Rambo, STH, is a constructive theologian whose research connects theology to trauma theories, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, ethnography, feminist philosophy, literary analysis, and chaplaincy studies. A recipient of the Yale Alumni Award for Distinction in Theological Education, she is supported by several major grants, including a $1 million Lilly Endowment grant for “Trauma Responsive Congregations” and a Luce Foundation grant for “Educating Effective Chaplains.” She has authored two monographs, including 2018’s Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma, and co-edited two volumes, along with dozens of book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, and papers in leading theological and religious journals. Her most recent work has positioned Howard Thurman as a vital resource for chaplaincy, spiritual care, and understanding the intersections of trauma and theology.
Chris Wells, COM, Emerging Media Studies, studies digital media, public opinion and political culture, focusing on how news media coverage takes shape, how citizens learn about politics, and how they choose to participate. He is a founding member of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences and affiliate faculty with the Institute of Global Sustainability. His most recent projects – supported by the Hariri Institute for Computing, the Institute for Global Sustainability, and the Knight Foundation – examine the veracity of online information about climate change and the sociopolitical roots of our country’s epistemic crisis. He has published two books, including 2015’s The Civic Organization and the Digital Citizen: Communicating Engagement in a Networked Age, along with 45 academic articles and proceedings and 16 book chapters. He is associate dean for faculty development at COM.