Overview
The William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorship was established in 2008 to recognize Boston University’s most distinguished faculty. Named in honor of BU’s first president, the award is the highest distinction bestowed upon senior faculty members who remain actively involved in research, scholarship, teaching, and the University’s civic life. Nominations for this award are traditionally due each October, with honorees selected and announced by the University President the following year.
William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professors
George J. Annas (2009)
School of Public Health, Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights
George Annas is Chair of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights in the Boston University School of Public Health, and Professor in the Boston University School of Medicine, and School of Law. A member of the BU faculty since 1972, and an internationally renowned expert on patient rights, he is the cofounder of Global Lawyers and Physicians, a transnational professional association of lawyers and physicians working together to promote human rights and health. He is the author or editor of 16 books on health law and bioethics and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Health Rights and Bioethics, and a member of the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academies.
Azer Bestavros (2017)
College of Arts & Sciences, Computer Science
Azer Bestavros is BU’s inaugural Associate Provost for Computing & Data Sciences and previously served as Founding Director of the Hariri Institute for Computing. His research in networking, distributed computing, cybersecurity, and high-assurance systems has produced seminal contributions, including pioneering web push caching through content distribution networks, the development of game-theoretic cloud resource management, and safety certification of networked software systems. His work has led to multiple patents, a successful start-up, and over $25 million in external funding. He has chaired several boards and initiatives, including the IEEE Technical Committee on the Internet, the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, the BU Council on Educational Technology & Learning Innovation, and the BU Data Science Initiative. His teaching and research have earned numerous distinctions, most notably ACM Sigmetrics’ inaugural Test of Time Award for research “whose impact is still felt 15 years after initial publication” and BU’s 2010 United Methodist Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award.
Christopher S. Chen (2019)
College of Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering
Christopher S. Chen is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering and Director of Boston University’s Tissue Microfabrication Laboratory. He has been an instrumental figure in the development of cellular therapies, tissue engineering, and 3D printing, providing leadership at the interface between engineering, biology, and medicine. Dr. Chen has made seminal contributions in understanding how cellular organization, mechanics, and their environment control cell function. His over 200 publications have been cited collectively more than 44,000 times. He has received numerous honors, including the Biomedical Engineering Society’s 2019 Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award (the group’s highest honor), and serves as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Bonnie Costello (2017); Professor Emerita 2018
College of Arts & Sciences, English
Bonnie Costello taught modern and contemporary American poetry, with a special interest in the relationship between poetry and visual arts, publishing books about still life and landscape in modern poetry. She is an internationally recognized literary critic and authority on modern American poetry and is known for her scholarship on poets Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her most recent book, The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others, was published in 2017. She is a fellow at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Cullman Center/ACLS fellowships, the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the United Methodist Teacher/Scholar of the Year Award. She has served as chair for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Jury, in addition to having multiple editorial and advisory board roles for academic journals such as Modernism/Modernity, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and Twentieth-Century Literature.
Catherine E. Costello (2013)
School of Medicine, Biochemistry, Physiology and Biophysics
Catherine Costello came to Boston University in 1994. That year she established the Center for Biomedical Mass Spectrometry, which has become an internationally recognized research center. She holds her primary appointment in the MED Biochemistry Department, with secondary appointments in the Department of Physiology & Biophysics and the Department of Chemistry. Her research, which focuses on determining the structures and functions of biologically important polymers, has revolutionized an important area of biochemistry by providing insights into the structures of molecules responsible for human disease. She is the author or co-author of more than 300 scientific papers, serves on a number of editorial boards of major journals, and has received numerous awards and honors, including the 2010 Field and Franklin Award from the American Chemical Society, one of the highest honors in her field.
Wendy Gordon (2011)
School of Law, Legal Instruction
Wendy Gordon has taught at the School of Law since 1993. Her work emphasizes that our legal environment must cultivate the exchange of ideas, expression and information for everyone – not only established players in various industries. Renowned for her application of philosophy and economics to copyright and related common-law areas and for her work on fair use, she has published on four continents, received numerous honors and grants and speaks to audiences all over the world. She has been a Fulbright scholar and a visiting senior research fellow at Oxford University and is a recipient of the New Jersey Governor’s Fellowship in the Humanities. Three U.S. Supreme Court opinions cite her scholarship, and Japan’s University of Hokkaido has taught a seminar devoted to her work.
Mark Grinstaff (2022)
College of Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering; College of Arts & Sciences, Chemistry
Mark Grinstaff is a Professor of Translational Research, Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and Medicine, as well as the Director of the NIH T32 Program in Biomaterials and the Director of the Nanotechnology Innovation Center at Boston University. His research activities encompass the synthesis of new macromolecules and biomaterials, self-assembly chemistry, imaging contrast agents, drug delivery, and wound repair. His eponymous research group conducts interdisciplinary research in the areas of biological and macromolecular chemistry. Professor Grinstaff is a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the winner of the 2018 Clemson Award for Applied Research from the Society of Biomaterials, and recipient of the 2015 Charles DeLisi Award among many others. He is the author or coauthor on more than 225 peer-reviewed manuscripts.
Michael E. Hasselmo (2019)
College of Arts & Sciences, Psychological & Brain Sciences
Michael E. Hasselmo is Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience. His research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the nature of memory and brain processes, from systems neuroscience and biochemistry to cognition and behavior. His research focuses on the physiological mechanisms of spatial navigation and memory function; he has explored important elements of the mechanisms of episodic memory, including examination of the mechanism for the coding of space and time in episodic memory by grid cells in the brain. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, and his book How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory was published by MIT Press in 2012. He serves on the editorial boards of Science, Hippocampus, and Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, among others. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the 2015 Hebb Award from the International Neural Network Society.
Keith N. Hylton (2013)
School of Law, Law and Economics
Keith Hylton has been a member of the LAW faculty since 1995, and previously was a tenured professor at Northwestern University School of Law. He is a prolific scholar who is widely recognized for his work across a broad spectrum of topics in law and economics, including labor law, tort law, antitrust, intellectual property, civil procedure, and empirical legal analysis. He has published four books and nearly 100 articles in numerous law journals, and serves as a contributing editor of the Antitrust Law Journal, co-editor of Competition Policy International and editor of the Social Science Research Network’s Torts, Products Liability and Insurance Law Abstracts. He has held a number of leadership positions in various legal organizations, and on campus he is highly respected for his dedication to teaching and advising.
Ha Jin (2019)
College of Arts & Sciences, English
A 1994 graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing Program, Xuefei Jin (pen name Ha Jin) returned to the Department of English in 2002 as a full professor. Born in China, he was a teenager when China entered the Cultural Revolution and he became a member of the People’s Liberation Army at the age of 14, an experience he would later revisit in his written work. He was studying in the United States at the time of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and suppression and realized at that time that he would be unable to return to China. His work examines themes of exile, immigration, and the now ever-present global experience of movement among cultures; his course “The Writer as Exile” is a key element of the international focus of the University’s Creative Writing Program. His novel Waiting, based on his experiences in the Red Army, was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize (as was his novel War Trash in 2005). His newest books are A Distant Center (2018) and his first nonfiction book, The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (2019). His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Nancy Kopell (2009)
College of Arts & Sciences, Mathematics
Nancy Kopell is co-founder and co-director of the Center for BioDynamics at the College of Engineering and co-director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology (CompNet). She joined the BU Mathematics faculty in 1986 and has applied her knowledge of nonlinear dynamics to fundamental problems in biology, chemistry, and neuroscience, helping to develop mathematical biology into a fertile and well-recognized field of research. She organized and today directs the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative (CRC), a group of more than 25 labs working on brain dynamics and their cognitive implications. An honorary member of the London Mathematical Society, she has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been named a Guggenheim fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and in 1990 received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award.”
Laurence Kotlikoff (2009)
College of Arts & Sciences, Economics
Laurence Kotlikoff joined the Department of Economics at BU in 1984. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. A former senior economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisors from 1981 to 1982, he is one of higher education’s top experts in deficits, generational accounting, tax structure, public health finance and personal finance, among a host of issues. He is the author or coauthor of 16 books and hundreds of journal articles and has been a consultant to numerous corporations and government authorities around the world, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Office of Management and Budget, Merrill Lynch, AT&T and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Gary Lawson (2022)
School of Law, Law
Gary Lawson is the Philip S. Beck Professor of Law at the School of Law and the Associate Dean for Intellectual Life. His areas of research and teaching interests are administrative law, constitutional law, and jurisprudence. He has authored eight editions of a textbook on administrative law and coauthored a textbook on constitutional law. He has authored or coauthored nearly one hundred scholarly articles. He is a founding member of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. In 2017 he was awarded the University’s Metcalf Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Professor Lawson twice clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia.
Ann McKee (2019)
School of Medicine, Neurology and Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Ann McKee is Professor of Neurology and Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the BU School of Medicine, Director of the BU Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center, and Associate Director of the BU Alzheimer’s Disease Center. She serves as Director of Neuropathology for the VA Boston Healthcare System and Chief Neuropathologist for the National VA ALS Brain Bank. Dr. McKee was the first scientist to report a link between motor neuron disease and CTE, and her research has been critical in establishing the clinical and pathological spectrum of trauma-induced neurodegenerative disease. Much of her current research is focused on mild traumatic brain injury from contact sports and military service and its long-term consequences. She has also written widely on many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body disease, and Parkinson’s disease, and has received the Henry Wisniewski Lifetime Achievement Award in Alzheimer’s Research from the Alzheimer’s Association. She was named Bostonian of the Year in 2017 and one of TIME Magazine‘s 100 Most Influential People in 2018 and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Robert Pinsky (2015)
College of Arts & Sciences, English and Creative Writing
Robert Pinsky is Professor of English in the College of Arts & Sciences and teaches creative writing in the CAS’s Creative Writing MFA program. He joined the BU faculty in 1988. The nation’s Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, Professor Pinsky created the widely recognized Favorite Poem Project to document, promote, and celebrate poetry’s place in American culture. His poetry collections have won a host of national and international prizes, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, Theodore Roethke Prize, and the Howard Morton Landon Translation Prize for his best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Professor Pinsky currently serves as poetry editor for Slate magazine.
Dana Robert (2022)
School of Theology, World Christianity and Mission
Dana L. Robert joined the faculty of Boston University in 1984. Widely-known as a founder of the field of World Christianity, Robert has mentored over 85 doctoral students who hold ecclesiastical and academic positions around the world. Her research and teaching interests include mission history, World Christianity, and missiology, and she has published extensively on these subjects. In 2001, Professor Robert launched the Center for Global Christianity and Mission. The Center hosts the oldest digital humanities projects at Boston University, including the award-winning Dictionary of African Christian Biography. Robert is an editor of the journal Church History and she serves on numerous editorial boards. In 2016–2017 she held a Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology and was also Senior Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. In 2017 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Missiology. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
H. Eugene Stanley (2011); Professor Emeritus (2021)
College of Arts & Sciences, Physics
Gene Stanley joined the BU Physics faculty in 1976. An internationally-renowned statistical physicist, his research attempts to understand puzzles of interdisciplinary science, from the study of water’s structure and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, to common statistical patterns governing disparate phenomena, such as the distribution of stock price fluctuations and the speeds of air molecules. His numerous books and articles have received nearly 40,000 citations, and he is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, which awarded him the Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach in 2003. A recipient of the “Distinguished Teaching Scholar” Director’s Award from the National Science Foundation and the Massachusetts Professor of the Year award from Council for Advancement and Support of Education, he has been thesis advisor to nearly 100 PhD candidates throughout his career.