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The past academic year was one of many changes in our department. Foremost among them was the hiring of five new faculty (two with deferred arrivals). Cynthia Wu joins our department as the inaugural Paul W. and Catherine A. Boltz Chair Professor in History of Monetary Policy. Cynthia started her career at the University of Chicago before moving to the University of Notre Dame. She is a major contributor in empirical macroeconomics, plays a leading role in the profession, and her work has strong impact on the formation of U.S. monetary policy. Drew Creal also joins us from the University of Notre Dame. Drew is an accomplished econometrician and has developed one of the most widely used tools in empirical fnance. At the junior level, HoYoung Yoo, a University of Wisconsin PhD, specializes in labor economics; Jingnan Liu, also from University of Wisconsin, specializes in macroeconomics; and Marcos Sora, from the University of Chicago, specializes in international economics and macroeconomics. Jingnan and Marcos will spend the 2024-2025 academic year completing post-doctoral research at MIT and at Lisbon, respectively. We welcome all of them to the department!
Our department is also hosting two professors from Ukraine, who are hired under the auspices of the Scholars at Risk Program: Pavlo Dziuba and Tetyana Dubovyk. We are very happy to have them here and provide an environment for them to continue their research and teaching during these difficult times for their homeland.
There were also the inevitable departures: Rebecca Thornton (to Baylor University), Ben Marx (to Georgia State), and Pooyan Amir Ahmadi (to Amazon). All were important members of our department, and they leave holes that will need to filled. We will miss them and the contributions they were making while here.
We celebrated three promotions, continuing the decade-long unbroken string of successes on the tenure track. Mark Borgschulte and Eliza Forsythe have been promoted to the rank of associate professor and JiHyun Lee to the rank of full professor. Congratulations to all!
Our undergraduate program resumed its growth, welcoming the single largest freshman cohort ever in Fall 2023. Our three undergraduate majors are all prospering, with the collaborative major with computer science experiencing the steepest increase in enrollment. New coursework is planned that will benefit all majors and raise the exposure of undergrads to data analysis. There have been no changes in our graduate programs, but many are planned, both for at the masters and doctoral levels. Stay tuned!
Our May 2024 graduation ceremony moved to a new venue, the Virginia Theatre. This was a nice change from Huff Hall, which some of you may remember for being rather steamy in mid-May! Though we enjoyed the convocation at Virginia Theatre, we hope to move to a larger venue next year to accommodate the ever-increasing number of our graduates and their guests.
Looking forward to reconnecting with you in a year,
George Deltas