Ten appointed to named professorships

Several faculty members at the University of Rochester have been awarded named professorships. An honor designed to recognize the national stature of a professor’s work, the named positions are part of a long-standing tradition to celebrate the work of Rochester’s faculty as researchers, scholars, and teachers.

Recent appointees include:

Michael Apostolakos, a professor of medicine, has been appointed as the Georgia and Thomas Gosnell Professor in Quality and Safety. He retains his joint appointments as a professor of public health sciences, as chief medical officer for Strong Memorial Hospital and Highland Hospital, and as vice president of the Medical Center.

Board-certified in pulmonary disease and critical care medicine, Apostolakos has served as president of the New York State Thoracic Society, as well as the New York State Chapter Representative to the American Thoracic Society. He is an active member of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and is course director for the Fundamentals of Critical Care Support Course. He is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.

Apostolakos won the Medical Center’s Arthur W. Bauman Teaching Award twice and received its Emergency Medicine Resident Teaching Award three times. In 2004, he received a URMC Board Excellence Award. He has been published in Critical Care: The Official Journal of the Critical Care Forum, Critical Care Medicine, and Case Reports in Infectious Diseases. 

Apostolakos received his MD from the State University of New York at Buffalo and completed his internal medicine residency and pulmonary and critical care fellowship at the University of Rochester.

Marjorie Arca, a professor of surgery, has been appointed as the Joseph M. Lobozzo II Professor in pediatric surgery and as chief of the Division of Pediatric Surgery. Arca retains her joint appointment as a professor of pediatrics.

Arca completed a fellowship in pediatric surgery at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan and a fellowship in advanced laparoscopic digestive surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

Arca specializes in treating pediatric surgical patients with diseases including congenital abnormalities that occur in the esophogus, intestines, and lungs.

She also cares for children with surgical problems, including hernias, appendicitis, inflammatory bowel disease, and pediatric cancers.

Arca is certified by the American Board of Surgery in surgery, pediatric surgery, and surgical critical care.

Michael Burritt, a professor of percussion, has been appointed as the Paul J. Burgett Distinguished Professor.

Burritt received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, as well as a performer’s certificate, from the Eastman School of Music. Prior to his appointment at Eastman in 2008, Burritt was a professor of percussion at Northwestern University.

Burritt has performed concert tours and master classes throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Canada. He has been a soloist with the United States Air Force Band, Dallas Wind Symphony, Omaha Symphony, among other noted ensembles. Burritt has been a featured artist at nine Percussive Arts Scoiety International Conventions. In 1992 he presented his New York solo debut at Carnegie Hall, and in 1998 performed his London debut at Queen Elizabeth Hall. Burritt is also active as a composer, with three concertos to his credit, as well as numerous solo and chamber works for marimba and percussion. His works for solo marimba have become standard repertoire for the instrument and are frequently required on international competitions.

Burritt is the president-elect of Percussive Arts Society and he was a member of its board of directors from 1996 to 2008. Burritt was a contributing editor for Percussive Notes magazine from 1991 to 2006, and was chairman of the society’s Keyboard Committee from 2004 to 2010.

Gilbert (Rip) Collins, a professor of mechanical engineering, has been appointed as the Tracy Hyde Harris Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Collins retains his joint appointment as a senior scientist in the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

Collins leads the High-Energy-Density Physics Team, whose research explores the most extreme states of matter achievable on Earth, including ultradense solids common to the deep interiors of giant planets and hot plasmas typical of stellar interiors.

He has chaired national and international conferences on research related to high pressure physics and plasma science, including the High Pressure Gordon Conference and the APS Shock Compression of Condensed Matter.

Collins received his PhD from Ohio State University. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has received the society’s award for Excellence in Plasma Physics and the US National Nuclear Security Administration Award for Excellence for the Stockpile Stewardship Program. He has appeared on the Discovery channel, the History channel, and the National Geographic channel series Cosmos, and others.

Before Rochester, Collins held appointments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was the director of the Center for High Energy Density Physics and a Distinguished Member of the lab’s technical staff. He also has held a visiting professorship at Imperial College and been a visiting scientist at the University of Edinburgh. His national service includes participation in advisory committees, such as the Stanford Linear Acceleration Center, Shock Physics Institute at Imperial College, and Washington State University Science Advisory Committee.

Diane Dalecki, a professor of biomedical engineering, has been appointed as the Kevin J. Parker Distinguished Professor in Biomedical Engineering. Dalecki retains her appointments as chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, director of the Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound, and a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Dalecki’s laboratory is dedicated to advancing the use of ultrasound in medicine and biology, to developing novel diagnostic ultrasound techniques, and to discovering and advancing new applications of ultrasound for therapy and tissue engineering. As director of the Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound, Dalecki brings together a group of nearly 100 researchers dedicated to advancing the use of ultrasound in diagnosis and discovering new therapeutic applications of ultrasound in medicine and biology.

Dalecki completed her BS in chemical engineering and MS and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester. She is a fellow of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine, the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

Before biomedical engineering became a department, Dalecki wrote the curriculum for what was then a fledgling interdepartmental program for undergraduates. She was one of the department’s first faculty members, oversaw its first ABET accreditation visit, and created an introductory biomedical engineering course that served as a model for similar courses now offered by all departments in the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.

Her research has been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Cell Science, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine, and the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering.

Jack Downey, an associate professor of religion and classics, has been appointed as the John Henry Newman Professor in Roman Catholic Studies.

Downey teaches courses on contemporary justice movements, liberation theologies, North American religious history, Christianity, Buddhism, and contemplative traditions. His current research projects examine self-immolation, forms of protest, violence, Roman Catholicism in Alaska and Québec, and asceticism.

Downey is the author of The Bread of the Strong. His work has been published in American Catholic Studies, Religion and Politics, The Journal of Jesuit Studies, The Baffler, Axis, Journal of Buddhist-Christian Studies, The Journal of Religion and Violence, and Union Seminary Quarterly Review, among other journals.

Before joining the Rochester faculty in 2019, Downey was an associate professor of religion and theology at La Salle University. He received his PhD from Fordham University.

Richard Kaeuper, a professor of history, has been appointed as the Franklin W. and Gladys I. Clark Professor of History.

A scholar of medieval history, Kaeuper has earned international recognition for his teaching and research on Western Europe between the 11th and 15th centuries, focusing on chivalry and on justice and public order. In 2015, he was selected as a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

Kaeuper has authored or coauthored numerous books, including Bankers to the Crown; War, Justice and Public Order; Law, Governance and Justice; The Book of Chivalry; A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry; and Medieval Chivalry.

Kaeuper earned his PhD at Princeton University and has a long record of teaching success at Rochester. He is a two-time recipient of the Student Association’s Award for Teaching Excellence (1986, 1999), and a 1990 recipient of the Edward Peck Curtis Teaching Award. In 2012, he was honored with a Goergen Award for Undergraduate Teaching.

Kevin McFarland, a professor of physics and astronomy, has been appointed as the Dr. Steven Chu Professor in Physics.

McFarland conducts research in experimental high-energy physics. His primary interest is subatomic particles, particularly neutrinos, and the forces that govern the particles’ interactions.

McFarland, who received his PhD from the University of Chicago, was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellow, a Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator, a Cottrell Scholar, and received a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He is also a fellow of the American Physical Society. He and his collaborators on the T2K neutrino collaboration, a physics experiment based in Japan that studies neutrinos, are recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2015.

His research has been published in Physical Review Letters, Physics Letters, Physical Review, and the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, among other publications.

Mical Raz, an associate professor of history and of clinical medicine, has been appointed the Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor in Public Health and Policy.

Raz, a historian of American psychiatry, explores the intersection of psychiatry, poverty, and politics. Her latest book, a study of child abuse policy in the United States from the 1970s and onward, is forthcoming with UNC Press in the fall of 2020.

Raz, who earned her MD and PhD at Tel Aviv University, joined the Rochester faculty last summer from the Sentara Medical Group in Norfolk, Virginia, where she was a hospitalist since 2017. Before that, she was an advanced fellow at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center and a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery, which was awarded the Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award. Her second book, What’s Wrong with the Poor? Race, Psychiatry and the War on Poverty, was a 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

Ying Xue, an associate professor of nursing, has been appointed to the Loretta C. Ford Professorship in Primary Care Nursing.

Xue’s research has helped guide national policies to optimize the nursing workforce and to improve health care delivery and outcomes. Her current work focuses on examining the role of nurse practitioners in improving primary care delivery for vulnerable populations. Her research has been funded nationally and been published in top journals, including Health Affairs and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Xue earned her doctoral degree in nursing at Yale University and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania. She joined Rochester’s nursing faculty in 2006 and was awarded the school’s Promising New Investigator Award in 2007. In 2008, she was one of only 15 junior faculty members nationwide selected to receive an inaugural Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Faculty Scholar award.

A former faculty diversity officer and cochair of the Council for Diversity and Inclusiveness at the School of Nursing, Xue has demonstrated a commitment to issues of diversity and inclusiveness University-wide. She was recognized for her leadership in 2015 with the Mary Dombeck Diversity Enhancement Faculty Award.

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