Brooklyn College Announces Broeklundian, Tow Professors

Brooklyn College has honored four professors with named professorships, President Christoph M. Kimmich announced at the February Stated Meeting of the College's faculty. Professors Robert Cherry, Timothy Gura, and Gerald Oppenheimer were named Broeklundian professors, bringing the number of Broeklundians to ten, and Professor Roberto Sanchez-Delgado was named to a Tow professorship, bringing the number to four. The terms of the Broeklundian professors run through 2012. The Tow professorship runs through 2009.

Professor Robert Cherry, a former Murray Koppelman professor, received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Kansas in 1968. An associate of the Economics Policy Institute, he teaches in the Department of Economics at Brooklyn College and is a member of the permanent faculty at The Graduate Center of CUNY. His research interests focus on the economics of discrimination.  He has written or edited eight books and published sixty-seven research articles in journals and edited books. The subjects of these publications include race and gender disparities, economic theory, and his own innovative tax proposal. Among his recent publications are Who Gets the Good Jobs?: Combating Race and Gender Inequities (2001); "Sexual Coercion and Limited Choice," in Sex without Consent (2001); Welfare Transformed: Universalizing Family Policies That Work (2007); and Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future (2007).

Professor Timothy Gura received a B.S. in speech education from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English language and literature from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Returning to Northwestern, he completed his Ph.D. in oral interpretation in 1974 and joined the faculty of Brooklyn College the same year. He has also been a visiting professor at Western Michigan University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  Currently he serves as chair of the Department of Speech Communication Arts and Sciences.  The eleventh edition of Gura's highly regarded Oral Interpretation, which he coauthored with Charlotte Lee, is in wide use and is scheduled to be replaced by a twelfth edition sometime next year. Gura's own performances on campuses across the country, and his work as a critic of others' performances, have established his national reputation for distinguished creative work. His scholarly contributions to his field and his service to Brooklyn College have previously been honored through a Tow Award in 1993 and more recently by the Eric M. Steinberg Award for College Citizenship.

Professor Gerald Oppenheimer received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 1976 and a master of public health from Columbia University in 1979, where he held a three-year National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship in epidemiology. He has been a faculty member of the Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College since 1986 and is also a member of the Department of History and of the Doctoral Program in Public Health at the CUNY Graduate Center.  Professor Oppenheimer is a historian, health policy analyst, and epidemiologist whose work is recognized both nationally and internationally. His research interests have centered on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and have included analyses of health services for those with HIV/AIDS, ethical issues raised by the HIV/AIDS epidemic for the U.S. health care financing system, and the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and Africa, in South Africa in particular. In 2007, Professor Oppenheimer, with Ronald Bayer, coauthored Shattered Dreams? An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic. Oppenheimer is currently writing a social and intellectual history of the coronary heart disease epidemic in the U.S. during the second half of the twentieth century, part of a larger project in the history of epidemiology. His previous honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two National Library of Medicine Book Awards from the National Institutes of Health, funding from the American Legacy Foundation, and a Bellagio Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Professor Roberto Sanchez-Delgado, of the Brooklyn College Chemistry Department, was born in Caracas, Venezuela. He received his B.S. in chemistry in 1973 and his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1976, both from Imperial College London. This was followed by postdoctoral work in organometallic chemistry in 1977 at University Louis Pasteur, in Strasbourg, France. He joined the Brooklyn College faculty in 2004, after teaching at the Chemistry Center of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research in Caracas, a series of international visiting professorships, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989, and service as a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (1991-99). His publications include a book and more than one hundred articles. He also holds four patents. His current research interests include the development of new catalysts derived from transition metal complexes or nano-particles for reactions related to the production of cleaner fossil fuels in homogeneous, liquid-byphasic, or polymer-supported systems, and the discovery of novel metal-based drugs against parasitic diseases (malaria, Chagas) and cancer.