CAS appoints two professors

By Andrea Lynn

Two UI faculty members were appointed professors in the university's Center
for Advanced Study by the UI Board of Trustees at its meeting last week in
Rockford, Ill.

The new CAS professors are May R. Berenbaum, entomology, and Jiri Jonas,
chemistry. Their appointments are effective Aug. 21.

Professors in the center are permanent members of the center community,
chosen for their outstanding scholarship. Appointment to a professorship in
the center is the highest recognition that the campus can bestow on a
member of its faculty.

The scholars were recommended for appointment to the center by Chancellor
Aiken, upon recommendation by the dean of the Graduate College and vice
chancellor for research in consultation with the director of the Center for
Advanced Study.

Berenbaum is a major figure in her field, the interaction and co-evolution
of insects and their plant hosts. As such, she calls on expertise in
entomology, botany, ecology, evolution and chemistry. Her works are viewed
by her peers to be of the highest quality, and often are trend setting.

For her pioneering studies, she was elected to the National Academy of
Sciences in 1994 at the age of 40.

At Illinois, Berenbaum also has distinguished herself as an outstanding
teacher of undergraduate and graduate students, as a campus leader and
administrator, and as an enthusiastic popular writer and speaker. She has
been head of the UI entomology department since 1992. She was named a
University Scholar in 1985, and a Jubilee Professor in 1993.

Jonas is a pioneer in the use of high-pressure nuclear magnetic resonance
and Raman spectroscopy to study structure and dynamics in liquids, modern
theories of reaction rates in liquids, the behavior of molecules in
confined geometries such as porous solids, and the changes of protein
conformation with pressure.

The impact of his work covers the vast area from pure chemical physics
through materials science to molecular chemistry.

Jonas received the first Joel Hildebrand Award for the study of the liquid
state, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to his outstanding and active
career as a research scientist, Jonas has made important contributions to
the campus as director of the School of Chemical Sciences (1983-1993) and
as director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
since 1993.