The Yale Corporation has approved the appointments of Anton Bennett, PhD; Katarzyna Chawarska, PhD; and Barbara Kazmierczak, MD, PhD, to endowed professorships.
Bennett becomes Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Pharmacology. He also is a professor of comparative medicine and director of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Minority Affairs. He joined the Yale faculty in 1998, and became a full professor in 2013. Honors he has received include the Blavatnik Innovation Award (2017), the Burroughs Wellcome New Investigators Award in Pharmacological Sciences (2001), and the American Cancer Society Institutional Award (1998). His research is focused on understanding how protein tyrosine phosphatases function in the control of normal cellular physiology, with a goal of establishing whether protein tyrosine phosphatases participate in such disease processes as cancer, diabetes, and neuromuscular diseases.
Chawarska becomes Emily Fraser Beede Professor of Child Psychiatry. She has been a professor in the Child Study Center and director of the Yale Toddler Developmental Disabilities Clinic. She is a leading expert in research on identifying markers of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and novel treatment targets in infancy. In her clinical practice, she specializes in early diagnosis of ASD as well as developmental follow-up of infants at risk for ASD due to familiar factors, genetic factors, or such prenatal or perinatal factors as premature birth.
Kazmierczak becomes Gustavus and Louise Pfeiffer Research Foundation MD-PhD Program Director, a position she will hold while she serves in that directorship. She also is professor of medicine (infectious diseases) and of microbial pathogenesis. She sees hospitalized patients as an attending physician on the infectious diseases consult service, and her laboratory studies the bacterial and host factors that enable such environmental and host factors as Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus, to cause opportunistic infections. Kazmierczak has directed the MD-PhD Program since 2014.