On September 23, Boston University President Melissa Gilliam and Provost Colin Duckett announced five new William Fairfield Warren professorships, three of whom are ENG faculty: David Boas, Ji-Xin Cheng, and Xin Zhang.
Established in 2008, the professorship, named after the University’s first president, is awarded to senior faculty members who remain actively involved in research, scholarship, teaching, and BU civic life. The professorship comes with an annual allowance of $50,000 for research, travel, and other scholarly work.
There are few groups at BU as exclusive as this collection of esteemed senior faculty members. To date, only 16 professors have been named to the professorship, the highest distinction for BU senior faculty.
Distinguished Professor Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE)
One funny thing about receiving a senior-faculty honor is that it makes you sound as though you are supposed to have figured everything out. In some ways, more than twenty years of being a professor have taught me almost the opposite. I have become more comfortable with uncertainty, more interested in questions I don’t know how to answer, and more aware of how much we continue to learn from the people around us, including our own students.
That is certainly true in research. An important direction can begin with an unexpected conversation, an experiment that doesn’t work, or an idea that failed at what it was originally supposed to do but turns out to be useful years later for something completely different. Research requires rigor, patience, and hard work, but it is also a creative process. You need room for something you didn’t plan.
That is what makes the flexibility of the Warren Professorship particularly meaningful to me. At this stage of my career, I want to take bigger intellectual risks, not simply for the sake of risk, but because important problems sometimes require us to question things we have learned to accept. Some of my favorite research has started with very simple questions: Does this limitation really have to exist? Is there another way?
The College of Engineering is much more than the ideas or technologies we produce. Almost everything meaningful in my own career has been shaped by other people—mentors who showed me what was possible, colleagues and collaborators who introduced me to worlds I knew little about, and students in our classrooms and labs who challenged my assumptions and pushed me to think bigger. We are educating people who will eventually ask their own questions, make their own discoveries, and contribute in ways we cannot predict.
I don’t see this recognition as a period at the end of a sentence. I would rather treat it as permission, and responsibility, to keep asking questions, help other people ask theirs, and hopefully leave a few more possibilities open than I found.