BU Social Scientists Promoted to Full Professor in 2025
Among the nearly two dozen faculty on Boston University’s Charles River Campus recently promoted to full professor are a computer scientist who studies methods to make computer programs more secure; an expert in the physics of droplets and bubbles, with applications that include disease transmission; a leader in the field of music education; a researcher studying the veracity of online information about climate change; and a social policy expert whose work is primarily focused on poverty, food insecurity, and food and nutrition assistance programs.
The social science faculty promoted to the rank of full professor in 2025 include:
Brooke L. Blower, College of Arts & Sciences professor of 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’ Stuart L. 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.
Juan Ortner, CAS professor of 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; 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.
To read more, visit BU Today where this article originally appeared on May 21, 2025.