Two Endowed Professors Named in Penn Arts and Sciences
Dean Steven J. Fluharty is pleased to name two faculty members in the Department of Physics and Astronomy to endowed chairs in Penn Arts and Sciences.
Bhuvnesh Jain, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has been named the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Professor Jain is a world-renowned cosmologist whose expertise in gravitational lensing—the shearing and magnification of light from distant galaxies—is forging new insights into some of the least-understood phenomena in the universe, such as dark matter, cosmic acceleration, and dark energy. He is currently leading the Gravitational Lensing Group of the ongoing Dark Energy Survey which will map the images of 300 million galaxies. He has helped set the research agenda for next generation experiments as well, including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the space telescopes Euclid and WFIRST. Professor Jain’s service to the University includes his work as co-Director of the Center for Particle Cosmology and his past membership on the Faculty Senate’s Senate Executive Committee.
This chair was established through the generosity of the late Walter Annenberg, W’31, Hon’66, and his wife Leonore, Hon’85. The Annenbergs were extremely generous philanthropists not only to the University of Pennsylvania, but to other cultural institutions in Philadelphia. At Penn, the Annenberg’s giving was transformative. They endowed 24 chairs across the University, most of them in Penn Arts and Sciences. They also founded the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn in 1958, and made countless other generous contributions to the University. The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts was named after them in 1970. Both the Honorable Leonore Annenberg and her husband Ambassador Walter Annenberg were emeritus trustees, and Ambassador Annenberg received Penn’s Alumni Award of Merit in 1991.
Charles Kane has been appointed Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics. He is an eminent condensed matter theorist, whose verified, groundbreaking discoveries—most notably in predicting and discovering topological insulators which conduct electricity on surfaces that are indestructible by impurities or imperfections—have influenced the course of quantum electronic phenomena research in solids and garnered external recognition at the highest levels. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he is also a Physics Frontier Prize Laureate; a Thomson-Reuters Citation Laureate; a recipient of the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Dirac Prize, and the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society Condensed Matter Division; and he has received a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.
This chair is one of 10 created by an exceptionally generous gift from the late Christopher H. Browne, C’69, who served Penn as a trustee and chairman of the Board of Overseers in Penn Arts and Sciences. The Browne chairs recognize faculty members who have achieved an extraordinary reputation for scholarly contributions, who have demonstrated great distinction in teaching, and who have demonstrated intellectual integrity and unquestioned commitment to free and open discussion of ideas.
