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Aronson Assistant Professorship

Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

Established in 2017 by Jeff and Shari Aronson

JEFFREY H. ARONSON is co-founder and managing principal of Centerbridge Partners, L.P., a private investment firm based in New York City with approximately $25 billion of capital under management. The firm is focused on private equity, distressed securities and credit investing. Mr. Aronson has been an active investor in distressed securities for 25 years and has been deeply involved in many U.S. and overseas restructurings. Prior to co-founding Centerbridge with Mark T. Gallogly in October 2005, Mr. Aronson was a partner at Angelo, Gordon & Co., where he led all of the firm’s distressed securities and leveraged loan efforts. Before joining Angelo, Gordon in 1989, Mr. Aronson served as senior corporate counsel at L.F. Rothschild & Co. and he began his career as a securities attorney with the law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan.

Mr. Aronson is chair of the Johns Hopkins Board of Trustees. In addition, he serves as a member of the Krieger School Dean’s Advisory Board and the Center for Financial Economics Advisory Board. He also is a member of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Board and its Executive Committee. Mr. Aronson graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins University in 1980. He has a JD from New York University School of Law and serves as a member of their Board of Trustees. His daughters Marni and Nicole graduated from Johns Hopkins as members of the class of 2013 and 2015, respectively. He is married to Shari Aronson.

In 2015, Mrs. and Mrs. Aronson established the Aronson Center for International Studies, designed to promote closer ties between the university’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The center will include two professors who will teach students and collaborate with faculty in both schools. It also will oversee funding for undergraduates who want to do research or study abroad, including at SAIS’s international campuses in Europe and China.

Held by Sarah E. Parkinson

SARAH E. PARKINSON received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013 and joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 2016 as the Aronson Assistant Professor. Her research examines organizational behavior and social change during and following war. Focusing predominantly on the Middle East and North Africa, she uses social network analysis and ethnographic methods to study the ways that actors such as militant organizations, political parties, and humanitarian groups cope with crisis, disruption, and fragmentation. She has conducted extensive fieldwork among Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Lebanon and with humanitarian organizations in Iraqi Kurdistan. Parkinson’s work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Social Science and Medicine, The Middle East Report, and the Monkey Cage.

Parkinson holds a PhD and MA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University. She was recently awarded a Berman Institute of Bioethics Exploration of Practical Ethics Research Grant to conduct research on ethical communities of practice in conflict zones. Previously, Parkinson has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University and at Yale University’s Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence.

Parkinson serves on the Steering Committee of the Project on Middle East Political Science.