MILTON S. EISENHOWER, widely regarded as a leader of great vision, holds the distinction of having served two nonconsecutive terms as president of The Johns Hopkins University. After serving from 1956 to 1967–a period in which the university’s income tripled and the endowment doubled–he retired and was named president emeritus. During his tenure, the medical institutions underwent major expansion and a new library and athletic center were added at Homewood. He returned to the presidency again, in 1971-72, and is credited with restoring a sense of unity to the university. The youngest brother of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Milton Eisenhower died in 1985.
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Krieger-Eisenhower Professorships
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Established in 1993 by Zanvyl Krieger in honor of Milton S. Eisenhower
Held by Michael J. Williams
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor MICHAEL J. WILLIAMS joined Hopkins’ Department of Philosophy in 2000 and now serves as its chair. While specializing in epistemology, with particular reference to skepticism, he also works in philosophy of language and the history of modern philosophy. He is the author of Groundless Belief: An Essay on the Possibility of Epistemology, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Skepticism, and Problems of Knowledge. Dr. Williams is working on a fourth book, Curious Researches: Reflections on Skepticism, Ancient and Modern.
Held by Michela Gallagher
MICHELA GALLAGHER, PH.D., a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, holds appointments in psychology and neuroscience and chaired the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences from 2000 to 2007. She has had a transformative influence on the intellectual direction of the department, including the development of new initiatives with the Krieger School’s Mind-Brain Institute and the School of Medicine’s Department of Neuroscience. She is a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, and the American Psychological Association. Widely recognized as one of the leaders of a reversal in the mid-1990s of a commonly held belief about the aging brain, Dr. Gallagher was able to show that non-pathological cognitive declines were not linked to significant loss of brain cells. She helped establish and is co-director of Hopkins’ Center for Neurogenetics and Behavior.
Held by William E. Connolly
WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of Political Science, is a scholar whose work has helped to reshape the field of political theory. He argues that political thinking cannot be divorced from the philosophy of being itself. He is the recipient of the Benjamin Evans Lippincott Award, given to the author of a book that is still considered ground-breaking after at least 15 years from the date of publication, for The Terms of Political Discourse. A professor at Hopkins since 1985, Dr. Connolly is the author of 13 books, among them The Ethos of Pluralization; Why I Am Not A Secularist; Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed; and, his most recent book, Pluralism (Duke, 2005).
Held by Robert A. Moffitt
ROBERT A. MOFFITT, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, joined Hopkins’ Department of Economics in 1995, and holds a joint appointment in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. He has served as chief editor of American Economic Review and received the Award for the Best Journal Article from the Society for Research on Adolescence Social Policy. He is also the recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health for his research on welfare and the family. He is best known for his research on the economic consequences of welfare and other anti-poverty programs on work effort, marriage and childbearing, and on trends in poverty in the U.S. and has published more than 100 research articles in scholarly journals. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Held by Paul Smolensky
PAUL SMOLENSKY, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, is internationally renowned for his work in formal theoretical approaches to linguistics, in particular for having developed, with Alan Prince of Rutgers, a novel formal characterization of the complex rule systems of grammar called Optimality Theory. This theory provides a new computational architecture for human language, based in mathematical theories of computation in the brain. Dr. Smolensky has been a member of the Cognitive Science Department since 1994, and served as chair between 1997 and 2000. Since 1994, he has been assistant director of the Center for Language and Speech Processing. The author or editor of more than 100 articles and seven books, his innovative formal contributions to cognitive science and linguistics have been recognized by the award of numerous prizes, most recently that of the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science in 2005.
Held by Robert Lieberman
ROBERT LIEBERMAN, Ph.D., is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He studies American political development, race and American politics, and public policy. He has also written extensively about the development of American democracy and the links between American and comparative politics.
His most recent book is Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy (St. Martin’s Press, 2020), co-authored with Suzanne Mettler. His first book, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 1998), won the Social Science History Association Presidential Book Award, the Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University Press, and Columbia University’s Lionel Trilling Award. Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Princeton University Press, 2005) was awarded the Best Book Prize by the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He is also the co-editor of Democratization in America: A Comparative-Historical Analysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in a Postracist Era (Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), and The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development (Oxford University Press, 2016).
He is a co-convenor of the American Democracy Collaborative and chaired the American Political Science Association Task Force on New Partnerships. He has received fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation and the American Philosophical Society. In 2021, he will be the John G. Winant Visiting Professor of Government at the University of Oxford.
Lieberman previously served as provost and senior vice president of academic affairs of Johns Hopkins from 2013-2016. As provost, he oversaw implementation of the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships; the Catalyst and Discovery awards, which reward innovative early-career research and distinguished cross-divisional collaboration, and the President’s Frontier Award, given annually to a faculty member who demonstrates significant scholarly achievement and exceptional promise for important future work. He also led the development of the university’s Faculty Diversity Initiative and worked to enhance the university’s practices and accountabilities around equity issues. Before coming to Johns Hopkins, he was on the faculty of Columbia University, where he served from 2012-13 as interim dean of the School of International and Public Affairs.
Held by Peter Achinstein
PETER ACHINSTEIN, Ph.D., is a Krieger-Eisenhower professor of philosophy. He specializes in philosophy of science and has interests in the history of science as well. In addition to numerous articles and reviews in these fields, he is the author of Concepts of Science (1968), Law and Explanation (1971), The Nature of Explanation (1983), and Particles and Waves (1991). The latter, which received the Lakatos Award, is a study of methodological problems arising from three episodes in 19th-century physics: the wave-particle debate about light, the development of the kinetic-molecular theory, and the discovery of the electron. Recent publications include The Book of Evidence (2001), which develops a theory of scientific evidence and applies it to cases in the history of science, Science Rules: A Historical Introduction to Scientific Methods (2004), Scientific Evidence (2005), and Evidence, Explanation, and Realism (2010), which is a collection of his essays. In 2011, he was honored by a festschrift, Philosophy of Science Matters: The Philosophy of Peter Achinstein. This contains 20 papers on his work by former students and other important writers. Evidence and Method (2013) discusses the scientific methods of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. In 2018 he published Speculation: Within and About Science, which raises the question of what a scientific speculation is, and whether and when speculating is ever legitimate in science. He has held Guggenheim, NEH, and NSF fellowships, and has served as a visiting professor at MIT, Stanford, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for History and Philosophy of Science.
Held by Yingyao Hu
YINGYAO HU, Ph.D., is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics and chair of the economics department at Johns Hopkins University where he has worked as a professor of economics since 2007.
Before joining Hopkins, Dr. Hu was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin for four years. He is a Hopkins alumnus with an MSE in mathematical science and an MA in economics in 2001, and a PhD in economics in 2003. He also studied at Michigan State University, Fudan University in Shanghai, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Dr. Hu’s research interests include micro-econometrics, empirical industrial organization, and labor economics. In micro-econometrics, his research has focused on the nonparametric identification and estimation of measurement error models, mixture models, panel data model with fixed effects or unobserved covariates, and, generally, microeconomic models with latent variables. He is particularly interested in application-oriented econometrics, where the econometric methods are closely integrated with the economic theory or story. In empirical industrial organization, Dr. Hu work on unobserved heterogeneity in auction models, dynamic models with unobserved state variables, belief updating in learning models, estimation of production functions, and dynamic discrete choice with subjective belief. In labor economics, his research has concerned the US unemployment rates after correcting the self-reporting errors in the Current Population Survey, reliable estimates of China’s unemployment rates in a long period, and the impact of hurricanes on the fertility on the east coast of the United States.
Dr. Hu has published in many leading journals in economics and statistics, such as American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Econometrics, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Population Economics, and Journal of Comparative Economics. He is a fellow of the Journal of Econometrics and have served on the editorial boards of several journals. He was also a co-editor of a Journal of Econometrics special issue on measurement errors.
Held by Mark Christian Thompson
MARK CHRISTIAN THOMPSON, Ph.D., is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, professor of English, and chair of the English department at Johns Hopkins. His research and teaching concentrate in African American literature and philosophy, twentieth-century German philosophy, Kafka, the philosophy of race, and jazz studies. He is the author of five books: Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars (2007); Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic (2016); Anti-Music: Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought between the Wars (2019); Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (2022); and The Critique of Nonviolence: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Philosophy (2022).