News Release

Three faculty members in The Johns Hopkins University's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences have been awarded named professorships in recognition of their distinguished scholarship and devotion to the university's academic life.

Astronomer and Nobel Prize winner Riccardo Giacconi was named a University Professor. Economist Robert A. Moffitt and biophysicist George D. Rose were named to Krieger-Eisenhower Professorships.

University Professorships are honorary titles awarded by the president to recognize exceptional achievements made by select members of the senior faculty from across Johns Hopkins. Krieger-Eisenhower Professorships recognize outstanding members of the Arts and Sciences faculty and honor prominent Baltimorean Zanvyl Krieger's close friendship with Milton Eisenhower, the university's ninth president. The professorships were established in 1992, at the time of Krieger's $50 million commitment to the School of Arts and Sciences.

"Named professorships are a university's way of recognizing the ideal academic, who engages in meaningful research of the highest quality while enriching the intellectual lives of students and colleagues, both inside the university and out," said Daniel Weiss, the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

Giacconi, a member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and president of Associated Universities Inc. in Washington, is known as the father of X-ray astronomy. His pioneering work is credited with opening a new window on the universe, an accomplishment that earned him the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics. Between 1981 and 1992, Giacconi served as founding director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, and between 1993 and 1999, he was director of the European Southern Observatory. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Milan in 1954.

Moffitt, a member of the Department of Economics, is best known for his research on the economic consequences of welfare and other anti-poverty programs on work effort, marriage and childbearing. He has published important work on the economics of labor, population and demography and has formulated and tested economic models of marriage, cohabitation, female headship and fertility. This spring, he was appointed editor-in- chief of American Economic Review, and he recently chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel of experts on welfare reform to review current research on the topic. Moffitt is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a national associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He graduated from Rice University in 1970 and received his Ph.D from Brown University in 1975.

Rose, a member of the Thomas C. Jenkins Department of Biophysics, has transformed human understanding of how proteins fold, and has led the way in determining the essential role that conformational entropy plays in determining the structure and function of all proteins. Rose is credited with the fundamental insight that proteins fold hierarchically. He graduated from Bard College in 1963 and received his Ph.D. from Oregon State University in 1976.