Ten Professors Appointed to Named Chairs

The appointments, which are effective July 1, 2024, were announced by Bowdoin President Safa Zaki in a letter sent to each of the candidates at the recommendation of Senior Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs Jennifer Scanlon and in consultation with senior members of the faculty Committee on Appointments, Promotion, and Tenure.

“Endowed chairs offer us the opportunity to honor and support individual faculty who contribute in powerful ways to the vibrant intellectual life of the College,” said Scanlon. 

“These chairs also honor the donors whose financial support makes this form of recognition possible. It has been my pleasure to review faculty accomplishments and recommend these ten faculty members from across the ranks and across the College to the president as endowed chair recipients.”

Aretha Aoki has been named the A. LeRoy Greason Chair in the Creative Arts. A choreographer and dancer specializing in experimental, somatic, and improvisatory performance, Aoki explores the ineffable within themes of lineage, ancestral memory, and marginalized histories through her artistic research. Her multimedia work in collaboration with sound designer Ryan MacDonald has been presented at venues nationally and internationally. For more than seven years, she both danced and contributed choreography to the work of Emily Johnson/Catalyst, and additional dancing credits include performing in work by acclaimed choreographers Heather Kravas, Juliette Mapp, robbinschilds, devynn emory, and many others.  The New York Times described Aoki as a “dancer with an open and generous presence” and her choreographed solos as “contemplative, probing.” Aoki’s current choreography, a hybrid dance/goth/synth reimagining of the female founder of kabuki, IzumonookunI, was awarded National Performance Network Creation and Development funds, the Kindling Fund, and support through the New England Foundation for the Arts and Maine Arts Commission. Her previous works have received funding through the Northampton Council for the Arts and the National Association of Japanese Canadians. She was a part of the 2021–2022 artist cohort for the Regional Dance Development Initiative: New England Now, whose showcase at the ICA/Boston was named one of the “Top Ten Dance Performances of 2022” by Boston Globe critics. Aoki’s writing has been published in Contact Quarterly, for which she spent four years as associate editor, and she was co-curator of the 2016 Movement Research Spring Festival in NYC. She earned a BFA at Simon Fraser University and an MFA at Smith College.

“The process and practice of embodiment through dance offers so many gifts that are desperately needed right now,” Aoki said. “Gifts such as the ability to listen deeply, to move with a shared purpose, to experience oneself as fully alive, multitudinous, always changing and in relationship. My goal is for students to experience these gifts regardless of whether they pursue dance as a profession, and to appreciate the vital work of dance artists in our cultural ecosystem.”

The A. LeRoy Greason Chair in the Creative Arts was established in 1987, in honor of the twelfth president of the College, to underwrite one or more positions in one or more fields of the creative arts, including creative writing, speech, dance, theater, studio art, and music performance.

Jack Bateman has been named Linnean Professor of Biology. Using the fruit fly as a model organism, Bateman's lab investigates gene regulation, or how clusters of genes are turned on and off. Over his career at Bowdoin, Bateman has received more than $1.8 million in grant funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health to pursue his genetics questions, as they could one day lead to advances in our understanding of disease. His 2014 NSF grant, an early-career development award, specifically recognized his gifts both as a scholar and an educator, and he has said it’s been a privilege to work with so many amazing students at Bowdoin. Bateman’s work has been published in leading academic journals, including Genetics (which has highlighted his findings several times), PLoS Genetics, Developmental Cell, and G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. Bateman is also a cofounder of the Personal Genetics Education Project, which raises public awareness about the ethical, legal, and social issues around personal genome sequencing. He arrived at Bowdoin in 2008 and was promoted to Samuel S. Butcher Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences in 2015 and to full professor in 2021. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and his doctorate at Harvard Medical School, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow in the department of genetics.

“I’m deeply grateful for Bowdoin’s unwavering support for curiosity-driven scientific research,” Bateman said. “It has been amazing to be part of a community that values the pursuit of knowledge simply for the sake of understanding the parameters of living systems. This support has allowed me to guide students in exploring, questioning, and learning without restraint, leading to a deeper appreciation of the world around us.”

The Linnean Professorship was established in 1995 to support the compensation, start-up research expenses, and sabbatical leaves for a biology faculty member.

Mark Battle has been named the Norma L. and Roland G. Ware Jr. Endowed Professor of Physics. Here at Bowdoin since 2000, Battle is a physicist whose primary research interest is atmospheric composition and how it changes, with a particular focus on the carbon cycle and its connection to global warming and climate change. Battle collects air samples directly from the atmosphere and also from the snowpack in Antarctica and Greenland using equipment of his own construction.  Measuring the air’s oxygen content, Battle uses simple models to interpret the biogeochemical significance of the oxygen measurements. His research appointments have taken him to the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography (1994–1997) and Princeton University’s Department of Geosciences (1997­–1999). Most recently, Battle has taught Introductory Physics, Statistical and Thermal Physics, and Atmosphere and Ocean Dynamics. A classically trained musician, Battle completed a five-year undergraduate double-degree program, earning bachelor’s degrees in physics from Tufts University and in clarinet performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. He then earned a master’s and doctorate in physics from the University of Rochester. Though he chose to pursue a career in science, Battle says music is still a major part of his life, and he performs regularly.

“When I was finishing my PhD in 1994, I realized the profound importance of addressing global warming, one way or another. Thirty years later, I hope my research publications have added in some way to our collective understanding of the problem. That said, I think that educating and energizing Bowdoin’s phenomenal students about climate change is the way I may have best contributed to the common good.”

The Norma L. and Roland G. Ware Jr. Endowed Professorship, first established in 2009 and funded through the estates of Norma Ware and Roland Ware '54, supports compensation and sabbatic leaves for faculty members specializing in the discipline of chemistry, biochemistry, or any other natural science.

Meryem Belkaïd, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures, has been appointed the Harriet Sarah Walker and Mary Sophia Walker Associate Professor.

Belkaïd’s research, which focuses on contemporary North African cinema and literature, questions and challenges official discourses and versions of the past and imposed interpretations of the present. “Narratives and history are often the fruit of power, and we can be hostages of discourses that power has created,” she said. “What I am passionate about is how literature and cinema produce alternative narratives, especially by giving voice to the silenced and the marginalized—those who have been dominated by colonialism, authoritarianism, and patriarchy. My main goal is to keep looking for these voices and to make them heard.” She is currently working on a new book, under contract with the French publishing house La Découverte, that examines the representations and narrations of colonial crimes. In her classes, she aims to teach students to engage competing views critically and deal with ambiguity and texts from different cultures. “We often study francophone texts that are very familiar to me, but sometimes create a feeling of estrangement among the students,” she said. “This often requires us to step aside together and find a common place of discussion.” Belkaïd earned her PhD in French literature from Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and two master’s degrees in politics and French literature from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and Paris IV-Sorbonne. She started as an associate professor at Bowdoin in 2015 after teaching at Bates College, the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, and La Faculté des Sciences Humaines et Sociales in Tunis.

“Bowdoin has always supported and encouraged my interdisciplinary work, and it’s a great honor to have my scholarship and teaching being recognized in this way by the College,” she said.

The Harriet Sarah Walker and Mary Sophia Walker Associate Professorship was established in 2022 in support of an associate-level faculty member whose interdisciplinary or collaborative work furthers the humanities at the College.

David Byrd has been named Marvin H. Green Jr. Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Byrd, who arrived at Bowdoin in 2021, studies machine learning with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) responsibility, simulation, and financial markets. After an initial career in the internet and telecom startup space, Byrd earned his PhD in computer science at Georgia Tech, where he developed the ABIDES simulation engine, a tool now widely used in financial market applications. For his work in responsible AI in finance, Byrd was awarded a faculty fellowship by JP Morgan’s AI Research program and a research support gift from US Bank. “My research focuses on the accelerating deployment of autonomous agents in the world of finance,” Byrd said. “There is relatively little literature concerning the avoidance of subtle nonnormative behaviors that may inadvertently emerge even when AI actors are trained in good faith. Such behavior may violate legal or regulatory rather than practical or monetary constraints, and it is not yet clear how to reliably detect and prevent such emergence.” Byrd’s initial foray to the area revealed that autonomous stock trading agents, tasked with profit maximization, may discover spoofing (a form of market manipulation) as an optimal strategy. He introduced measures to help prevent that discovery while still producing a successful agent. For this work, he was awarded best paper at the peer-reviewed ACM conference for AI and finance. Byrd teaches courses in artificial intelligence and financial machine learning and says he primarily thrives on student engagement. 

“I have been delighted by the enthusiasm with which my students pursue a challenging and rigorous education in the technical and mathematical details of artificial intelligence, and especially in its responsible application to real-world problems.” 

The Marvin H. Green Jr. Assistant Professorship was established in 1990 by Marvin H. Green Jr. of the Class of 1957.

Danielle Dube has been appointed Norma L. and Roland G. Ware Jr. Professor of Chemistry. Professor Dube is a chemical biologist who seeks to develop and apply chemical tools to ease the study of sugars that coat the surface of disease-causing bacteria. She teaches classes in biochemistry, chemical biology, general chemistry, and drug discovery with an aim to teach students how to think about chemistry and how they can contribute to the field in ways that are personally meaningful. Dube, who earned her bachelor’s degree in biology at Cornell University and her PhD in chemistry at the University of California–Berkeley, came to Bowdoin in 2007. She was promoted to full professor in 2020. She has received external research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and other organizations, and her research at Bowdoin has resulted in twenty-three peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters with twenty-eight unique undergraduate coauthors. Among other awards, Dube received the Andrew W. Mellon Award for faculty research at Bowdoin in 2015 and has held elected positions on the Executive Committee of the American Chemical Society Carbohydrate Division since 2020.

“Being a professor at Bowdoin resonates with my values on so many levels,” says Dube. “I have the privilege of teaching, mentoring, guiding, and learning from students at a formative stage in their lives. I have autonomy over how I teach and what I research—I can experiment, learn from iterative rounds of improvement, refinement, and discovery, and constantly explore the unknown. And I am part of a community filled with outstanding and engaged faculty, staff, and students who care about and support one another.”

The Norma L. and Roland G. Ware Jr. Endowed Professorship, first established in 2009 and funded through the estates of Norma Ware and Roland Ware '54, supports compensation and sabbatic leaves for faculty members specializing in the discipline of chemistry, biochemistry, or any other natural science.

Hadley Horch has been appointed Norma L. and Roland G. Ware Jr. Professor of Biology and Neuroscience. Professor Horch's research focuses on how neurons in adult invertebrates recover from injury. Unlike many neuronal systems, the auditory system of the cricket demonstrates robust neuronal growth in response to injury. Students in Horch’s lab use molecular biology techniques to assess how various candidate molecules are involved in this unusually flexible response to injury. Horch earned her bachelor’s degree in biology at Swarthmore College and her PhD in neurobiology at Duke University, and she did postdoctoral work at Cornell University. She edited the book Cricket as a Model Organism: Development, Regeneration, and Behavior(Heidelberg, 2017) and her research has been published in dozens of journals, including Developmental Neuroscience, Nature Communications, and the Journal of Comparative Neurology. She co-organized and hosted the Non-Traditional Arthropod Model Systems meeting in 2023, an international meeting of approximately sixty scientists. Recently, she has mentored eight to ten, or more, research students each year in her lab. She teaches classes that focus on neurobiology, molecular neuroscience, and neuronal regeneration.

“I am deeply honored to receive this recognition. This additional support will help me continue to grow as a scholar, which will in turn enrich my teaching. I am grateful to everyone at Bowdoin, in the administration and on the faculty, who supported me in building a lab where I can learn side-by-side with my students; I look forward to many more years of joyful exploration.”

The Norma L. and Roland G. Ware Jr. Endowed Professorship, first established in 2009 and funded through the estates of Norma Ware and Roland Ware '54, supports compensation and sabbatic leaves for faculty members specializing in the discipline of chemistry, biochemistry, or any other natural science.

Madeleine Msall has been named Josiah Little Professor of Natural Sciences. Msall joined the Bowdoin faculty in 1995 after earning her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is currently on academic leave working as a guest scientist at the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics, a Leibniz Association research center in Berlin, Germany. Msall’s research work at Bowdoin and abroad has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Max Planck Gesellschaft, German Academic Exchange Service, Fletcher Family Fund, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Bowdoin’s Faculty Leave Program.  Since 2017, Msall has applied her expertise on the impact of crystal symmetry on vibrational energy in collaborations with researchers in the Paul Drude Institute. Vibrational energy travels as sound waves, explains Msall, and can control electrons in materials by direct transfer of energy quanta called phonons or by reshaping the local energy landscape. Msall uses her expertise to design hybrid systems she describes as an exciting frontier in semiconductor technology, with potential applications as components in quantum computers, magnetic memory devices, and light modulators.

“Bowdoin has been unwavering in its support of my research, and I’m very grateful. From a physics perspective, it’s interesting to note that the Little Professorship began at a time before the discovery of the electron, when steam power was the dominant technology. Bowdoin College made an early and strong commitment to the natural sciences as part of liberal arts education. A twenty-first-century interpretation of the mechanic arts easily extends to the principles of quantum engineering, where we seek to manipulate and control the nanoscale environment of the electron in order to create new electronic devices. I’m honored to be the next Josiah Little Professor.”  

The Josiah Little Professorship of Natural Sciences was established in 1864 to support a member or members of the faculty teaching the principles of science as they relate to agriculture and the mechanic arts.

Sam Putnam has been named the A. Myrick Freeman Chair in Social Sciences. A specialist in social development, Putnam explores interactions between nature and nurture in the development of sensation seeking, negative emotionality, and attentional control. Putnam arrived at Bowdoin in 2001 and teaches a survey course in child development, a lab in developmental research methods, introduction to psychology, and a seminar in social development. He has recently completed two large-scale projects exploring the role of culture in the formation of early aspects of personality. Results from the first were published in the book Toddlers, Parents, and Culture: Findings from the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium (Routledge Publishing, 2018), which describes relations among parents' goals for socializing their children, the daily activities in which children participate, and children's social and emotional behavior. His more recent effort coordinated data on over 80,000 children gathered from nearly 500 researchers around the world. The first paper from this endeavor, “The Global Temperament Project: Parent-Reported Temperament in Infants, Toddlers, and Children From 59 Nations” was recently published in Developmental Psychology. He earned his bachelor of science degree in psychology at the University of Iowa and then went on to Pennsylvania State University for his master’s and doctorate, both in human development and family studies.

“It is a true pleasure to spend my career at an institution that inspires excellence in teaching while supporting faculty in their scholarly pursuits,” said Putnam. “I’m honored to receive this recognition and look forward to using the funds provided to build connections among the global community of temperament researchers as we learn together how societies, families, and our own biology combine to make each of us unique individuals.”

The A. Myrick Freeman Chair in Social Sciences was established in 2000 to support the compensation, research and teaching expenses, and sabbatic leaves of a faculty member in the social sciences.

Kana Takematsu has been appointed Viola Ward Brinning and Elbert Calhoun Brinning Professor. Takematsu’s research is centered on harnessing light to move the tiniest charged particles that drive many chemical and biochemical reactions. In 2019, Takematsu was named a Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, an award that recognizes the nation’s most innovative young professors in the fields of chemistry, physics, and astronomy. In 2022, she was awarded the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award, the NSF CAREER Award, to continue her work on developing new classes of molecules that are designed to undergo the exchange of protons in response to light. Takematsu works with a team of undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds on this project with the specific goal of supporting an inclusive research culture that fosters science identity and belonging in students.

“Teaching chemistry, especially physical chemistry with all its mathematical and conceptual intricacies, can be challenging; yet there is so much joy in working with our brilliant and kind students and so much growth for both the students and me. I am grateful that I get to work with colleagues who continue to inspire me, both faculty and staff, in my department, program, campus, and beyond and for the communities that have helped shape who I am today as a professor.” Takematsu earned three bachelor’s degrees—in chemistry, math, and physics—from the University of Chicago and her PhD at the California Institute of Technology.

The Viola Ward Brinning and Elbert Calhoun Brinning Professorship was established in 2024 to recognize a faculty member in the sciences or mathematics.