Four Professors Earn Highest Faculty Distinction

Four Carnegie Mellon University faculty members, Roberta Klatzky, Cindy Limauro, Lowell Taylor and Larry Wasserman have been named University Professors, the highest designation a faculty member can achieve. The faculty members were nominated and recommended for the title of University Professor by academic leaders and the community of CMU University Professors. Their appointments are effective immediately.

"The outstanding accomplishments of these faculty members bring honor to CMU. Please join me in congratulating Lowell, Cindy, Larry and Bobby on their appointments," said Laurie R. Weingart, CMU's interim provost and chief academic officer.

Roberta Klatzky is the Charles J. Queenan Jr. Professor of Psychology and is on the faculty of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. She is the author of hundreds of articles, chapters and books. Her research investigates perception, spatial thinking and action from the perspective of multiple modalities, sensory and symbolic, in real and virtual environments. Klatzky is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. She was elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award and the Kurt Koffka Medaille from Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen, Germany. She is a current or former member of the National Academy of Science's committees on International Psychology, Human Factors, Techniques for Enhancing Human Performance and Reducing Counterfeiting Using Behavioral Sciences.

Cindy Limauro, professor of lighting design, is also a design partner in C&C Lighting. She is a member of United Scenic Artists and International Association of Lighting Designers. She was named Fellow of the Institute by USITT for Outstanding Contribution to the Theatre. Limauro has served as the artistic leader of the Prague Quadrennial Scenofest and the U.S. representative on the Education Commission of OISTAT. In 2007, she received the Henry van de Velde Award for Architectural Education in Antwerp. She serves on the Advisory Board of Live Design Magazine and has presented at International Symposium on Lighting Design in China, Lightfair International, Lighting Dimensions International, USITT and the Prague Quadrennial. Her design work has been displayed in two international exhibits: the 2007 Prague Quadrennial and World Stage Design in Toronto in 2005 in addition to being published in a number of field journals and top national and international venues.

Lowell J. Taylor holds the H. John Heinz III Chaired Professorship of Economics in the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, where he has served on the faculty since 1990. He is also a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, where he serves as principal investigator on the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth. He served as a senior economist with President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors. In 2011, 2012 and 2017 he was a visiting professor at the Economics Department, University of California, Berkeley. Taylor's research is primarily in labor economics and economic demography, but his work also includes contributions in health economics and the economics of education. He has won the Health Care Research Award from the National Institute for Health Care Management and the Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association.

Larry Wasserman is the UPMC Professor of Statistics and Data Science in the Department of Statistics and Data Science and was among the first faculty to participate in what became the Machine Learning Department. His contributions range from definitive treatments of Bayesian robustness and modern nonparametric estimation, mixture models, multiple testing, privacy, and causal inference, and his collaborations with astrophysicists and statistical geneticists. He won a Pierre Robillard Award as a Canadian NSERC Fellow, was named a fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the IMS. He received the Presidents' Award of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies for the Outstanding Statistician Under the Age of 40 and the Centre de Recherches Mathematique de Montreal-Statistical Society of Canada Prize in Statistics. His textbook "All of Statistics" won the DeGroot Prize from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. He presented the prestigious IMS Rietz Lecture on topological inference. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.