USC names 5 University and Distinguished Professors

Five faculty members, recognized as leaders in their respective fields, have been appointed University Professors and Distinguished Professors, among USC’s highest faculty honors. Appointed annually, this select group of academics at USC shows outstanding scholarly success, as nominated by their faculty colleagues.

“Each year, we are privileged to recognize exceptional faculty who make remarkable contributions to USC, the community and the world,” said Andrew T. Guzman, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “This year’s honorees have made a significant impact on research and society that extends far beyond our campus. It’s an honor to celebrate these faculty members’ profound achievements.”

The title of University Professor is selectively awarded based on multidisciplinary interests and significant accomplishments in several disciplines. The Distinguished Professor title is awarded to those whose accomplishments have brought special renown to USC.

University Professors

ADAM LEVENTHAL

Adam Leventhal is a clinical psychologist, public health scientist, educator, policy advisor and university administrator specializing in addiction. He is founding director of the USC Institute for Addiction Science, the nation’s first universitywide comprehensive academic unit devoted to understanding, reducing and preventing addiction epidemics.

Leventhal is the principal investigator of a research program that has received $60 million in grants addressing youth use of tobacco, cannabis and opioids; health disparities in addiction; science to inform public policies for regulating tobacco and other addictive consumer products; and cancer and cardiovascular disease prevention. He has authored or co-authored over 400 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including publications in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine and other widely disseminated journals. Research led by Leventhal and his collaborators has informed numerous federal and global policies to protect youth from the dangers of tobacco and nicotine. His work has been covered by The Associated Press, NBC Nightly News, The New York Times and other media outlets. In addition to science and academic administration leadership, Leventhal is an active mentor and educator to early-career professionals across the spectrum from high school students to faculty. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Health Behavior and American Psychological Association and recipient of awards for contributions to science and mentoring, including the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology.

Leventhal is active in translating addiction science to federal and global policy actions, having served in roles for the U.S. Surgeon General Report Series, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the World Health Organization and the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

ARTHUR STONE

Arthur Stone is a professor of psychology, economics and public policy, and is the director of the Center for Self-Report Science at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. A clinical psychologist by training, Stone’s early work concerned the measurement of life events and coping to understand how they affected susceptibility to somatic illnesses. This led to his research examining how environmental events affect biological processes relevant to health, especially the endocrine and immune systems.

His second major line of work is the development of patient-reported outcomes, where he sought to understand processes underlying self-reporting. He developed patient-reported outcomes in the areas of stress, coping, affect, well-being, pain and fatigue using a variety of data collection technologies. He was also a member of the group that developed an extensive battery of patient-reported outcomes for use in clinical trials — the PROMIS instruments. He has studied hedonic well-being using large-scale surveys from the Gallup Organization and has investigated the measurement of subjective well-being and its application for public policy working with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the National Academy of Sciences.

Stone has been the editor-in-chief of two major health psychology journals, received fellow status in several organizations, has been the recipient of many academic awards, chaired a National Institutes of Health study section and has been continuously funded since 1978 by the NIH, the National Science Foundation and other national organizations.

Distinguished Professors

DAVID ARMSTRONG

David Armstrong is a professor of surgery and neurological surgery with tenure at USC. Armstrong holds a Master of Science degree in tissue repair and wound healing from the University of Wales College of Medicine and a doctorate from the University of Manchester College of Medicine, where he was appointed Visiting Professor of Medicine. He is founder and co-director of the Southwestern Academic Limb Salvage Alliance.

Armstrong has produced more than 710 peer-reviewed research papers in dozens of scholarly medical journals as well as over 120 books or book chapters. He is the founding co-editor of the American Diabetes Association’s Clinical Care of the Diabetic Foot, now in its fourth edition. He is also the director of USC’s NSF-funded Center to Stream Healthcare in Place, which places him at the nexus of the merger of consumer electronics, wearables and medical devices in an effort to maximize hospital-free and activity-rich days.

Selected as one of the first six International Wound Care Ambassadors, Armstrong is the recipient of numerous awards and degrees by universities and international medical organizations including the inaugural Georgetown Distinguished Award for Diabetic Limb Salvage. In 2008, he was the 25th and youngest-ever member elected to the Podiatric Medicine Hall of Fame. He was the first surgeon to be appointed University Distinguished Outreach Professor at the University of Arizona. He was also the first podiatric surgeon to be selected as president of faculty at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. He also was the first podiatric surgeon to become a member of the Society of Vascular Surgery, and the first U.S. podiatric surgeon named fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Glasgow.

HELEN BERMAN

Helen Berman is a professor (research) of quantitative and computational biology. She received her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in 1964. She trained in crystallography at the University of Pittsburgh, where she received her doctorate in 1967. After her postdoctoral training, she went to the Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase Cancer Center, where she rose through the ranks from research associate to senior member. In 1989, she joined the faculty of Rutgers University, where she is currently a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emerita of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in addition to her research professor appointment at USC. Her research has focused on nucleic acids, protein-nucleic acid interactions and collagen. She has published more than 320 scholarly articles.

Berman was a co-founder of the Protein Data Bank archive that was launched in 1971, and she has been committed to the continued development and maintenance of this community resource. She is also working on ways to use film and digital arts to communicate to a broader audience about the importance of structural biology in medicine and health. She was the executive producer of Target Zero, a documentary about HIV prevention in which high-quality molecular animations illustrate how the anti-HIV drugs work. As part of ongoing collaborations between the USC Bridge Institute and the USC School of Cinematic Arts, she is working on the Inner Space: World in a Cell VR experience that provides a view of the inside of a pancreatic beta cell.

Berman is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Biophysical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Crystallographic Association and the International Society for Computational Biology. She is the recipient of several awards including the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences, the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences, the ACA Martin Buerger and David Rognlie awards, the Distinguished Service Award from the Biophysical Society and the Carl Brändén Award from the Protein Society.

MAGGIE NELSON

Maggie Nelson is a professor of English and the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the essay collection Like Love: Essays and Conversations, the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes and Jane: A Murder (finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir).

In addition to a 2016 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, she has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She holds a doctorate in English literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, Wesleyan University, CalArts and USC.