2020-2021 Career Development Professorship Awardees
From Dr. Jean Morrison, University Provost and Chief Academic Officer
Each year, Boston University has the pleasure of recognizing a number of talented junior faculty who are emerging as future leaders within their respective fields with the awarding of Career Development Professorships.
Presented to promising junior faculty who have been at BU for less than two years and who have held no prior professorships, these awards are made possible through the generous support of BU Trustee Peter Paul; Trustee Ruth Moorman (CAS ’88, Wheelock ’89,’09) and her husband Sheldon Simon; Trustee Nathaniel Dalton (LAW ’91) and his wife Amy Gottlieb Dalton (LAW ’91); and proceeds from the University’s Office of Technology Development.
The awards highlight the caliber, potential, and continued vitality of Boston University’s dynamic faculty and include a three-year, non-renewable stipend designed to support research, scholarship, and creative work, as well as a portion of the recipients’ salaries. Nominations are submitted by the academic deans, and awardees are selected by the Provost.
- The Peter Paul Career Development Professorship this year recognizes a faculty member in the School of Medicine.
- The Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Professorship is awarded to faculty members who currently hold appointments in multiple schools and colleges or have the potential for a second appointment in the future.
- The David R. Dalton Career Development Professorship advances the participation and success of women in the natural sciences and computational and data sciences.
- The Innovation Career Development Professorship recognizes junior faculty whose translational research is likely to lead to future licensed technology.
This year’s Career Development Professorship recipients have been recognized for their extraordinary accomplishments in their areas of study, their passion for the creation and transmission of new knowledge, their efforts to enhance the student experience, and their potential to develop into outstanding faculty members. I am delighted to announce this year’s Career Development Professors:
Peter Paul Career Development Professorship
Jessica Petrick
Assistant Professor of Medicine, School of Medicine
Jessica Petrick is an epidemiologist at the Slone Epidemiology Center, whose research as part of the Black Women’s Health Study focuses on gastrointestinal cancers – including colorectal, liver, and esophageal – and on the nutritional and molecular factors that may contribute to racial disparities along the cancer continuum. She received her doctorate in epidemiology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her master’s in epidemiology and health policy and bachelor’s degree from Case Western Reserve University. She completed her postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health.
Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Professorship
David Horacio Colmenares
Assistant Professor of Spanish, College of Arts & Sciences
David Horacio Colmenares’s research bridges modern Iberian and Mesoamerican studies, incorporating Romance languages, linguistics, historical anthropology, reception studies, and material culture to connect the cultural production of Colonial Latin America to current social questions. He holds a doctorate, a master of philosophy, and a master of arts in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University, a master’s in philosophy from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and a bachelor’s degree from Universidad Iberoamericana de Puebla in Mexico.
David R. Dalton Career Development Professorship
Emma Lejeune
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering
Emma Lejeune works at the intersection of mechanics, computation, biology, and data science, leveraging state of the art computational tools to investigate multiscale emergent behavior in biological systems and inform patient-specific medical protocols. Current translational research includes developing software to help predict the mechanical behavior of highly heterogeneous soft tissue. She received her doctorate and master’s in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University and her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University. She completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin.
Innovation Career Development Professorship
Joseph Larkin
Assistant Professor of Biology and Physics, College of Arts & Sciences
Joe Larkin’s interdisciplinary work examines how the physical and chemical environment influences microbes (in particular, bacterial biofilms), and how those microbes, in turn, engineer that environment through extracellular matrix and cell-to-cell signals to perpetuate and evolve. His research holds important practical implications for, among other things, maintaining the safety and sanitation of medical devices and water lines. He holds a doctorate in physics from Northeastern University, a master’s in physics from Boston University, and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.
Please join me in congratulating these talented junior faculty for their achievements and in wishing them continued success in their teaching and research at Boston University in the years ahead.
2020-2021 Career Development Professorship Awardees – 9.16.20