Hariri Institute Affiliates Catherine Espaillat and Traci Hong Promoted to Full Professor

Recognized as Leaders in Their Fields & Classrooms

Professors Catherine Espaillat  and Traci Hong have been promoted to full professor at Boston University. They were among 22 faculty from the Charles River Campus who were promoted to the rank of full professor in an announcement by President Kenneth Freeman and Provost Kenneth Lutchen.

“The individuals we recognize today have emerged as leaders in their respective fields of research and in their classrooms,” says Lutchen. “At a time of transition and challenge in the world, they are meeting the moment by pursuing highly relevant new areas of inquiry, employing innovative new approaches, and entering boundary-pushing collaborations across dozens of disciplines.” 

Catherine Espaillat is a Professor of Astronomy (CAS) who studies the physical nature and evolution of disks of gas and dust that surround young stars and the protoplanets that form within those disks. Her work has been supported by NSF and NASA, including the James Webb Space Telescope, and she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is the director of BU’s Institute for Astrophysical Research and additionally serves as her department’s director of undergraduate studies. She has published numerous refereed articles in leading scientific journals, including Nature and Science.

Traci Hong is a Professor of Mass Communication, Advertising & Public Relations (COM) who advances health communication theory by leveraging new and social media to promote behavioral change that can lead to beneficial health outcomes. Her work specifically examines how people cognitively process and are persuaded by mediated health messages around vaping, tobacco, alcohol consumption and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a co-investigator on an NSF grant that seeks to thwart epidemics from becoming pandemics by, in part, using social media to promote early preventative behavioral practices. Her research has additionally been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.