Faculty Recognition: Giants in Their Fields

From Guggenheim fellows studying space to early-career award winners aiming for equitable special education access, our faculty are one of a kind:

Six faculty were named 2025 Guggenheim fellows: artist Lynne Allen, writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei, astrophysicist Merav Opher, physicist Anders W. Sandvik, and historians Bruce J. Schulman and Quinn Slobodian. This honor will advance their stellar—and, in one case, interstellar—research.

Elizabeth Bettini, Michelle Sander, and Zeba Wunderlich have all received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for their respective areas of study: inequitable access to special education teachers, ultrafast lasers and optical imaging systems, and how gene activation is encoded in DNA.

Biologist Lynne Chantranupong has been named a 2025 Sloan Research Fellow for her work investigating how brain cells remain healthy over a lifetime, as well as how neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disrupt them.

Professor Denise M. Sloan received the Robert S. Laufer Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies for her work on the development of new therapies for people with PTSD.

Engineer Alexander A. Green has received the National Institutes of Health’s Director’s Transformative Research Award for his study of the forces cells enact on one another, which may someday transform cell-based cancer treatment.