Gifts Fund New Career Development Professorships in Data Sciences and Linguistics
Kate Lindsey is a linguistics detective, researching vanishing global languages that include Ende, spoken by only about 600 people in Papua New Guinea. Her research has earned her one of two new Career Development Professorships, given annually by the Office of the Provost to junior faculty nominated by their deans and colleagues as promising scholars in their fields. Lindsey is the inaugural Wetherill-Bloom Career Development Professor in the Humanities.
The second new professorship will give BU’s new, stand-alone Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences its first full-time hire. Krzysztof Onak, formerly of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, will hold the inaugural Shibulal Family Career Development Professorship, becoming an assistant professor of computing and data sciences. He is an expert on algorithms for big data and artificial intelligence.
Two Shibulal Family Career Development Professorships will be awarded each year (the next one in September) to support research of rising faculty within the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. The professorships are named for BU trustee S. D. Shibulal (MET’88). The Wetherill-Bloom Professorship, to be given annually, recognizes exceptional humanities scholarship and is named for, and endowed by, the estates of Virginia Wetherill (CAS’52) and Laurence A. Bloom (CGS’66, CAS’68).
Career Development Professorships, variously named for the donors and alumni who fund them, are tied to specific BU schools; all are awarded for a period of three years and provide stipends that cover the recipients’ salaries and scholarship.