Sergei Mirkin, Howard Malchow and Mark Richard have recently been awarded endowed professorships.
Mirkin, a biology professor who came to Tufts in January, is the first person to be awarded the White Family Chair in Biology.
Prior to teaching here, he taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago and the Russian Academy of Sciences, of which he is a Ph.D. graduate. He also attended Moscow State University, where he earned a degree in genetics in 1978.
Mirkin's current project deals with abnormalities in DNA. "DNA contains simple repetitions in its structure - simple DNA repeats, which can occasionally lengthen or expand," he said. "This [can lead] to approximately thirty human diseases such as Huntington's Disease. The mechanisms leading to this expansion are unknown, and that's what we're working on."
He is also teaching a seminar on molecular biology and genetics for undergraduate students.
Malchow, the chair of the history department, is now the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History.
While he is primarily a historian of the nineteenth century, he said that during the past several years, "[I have] moved my interest to what you might call postwar contemporary cultural history."
In his current project, he is using pop culture to examine Anglo-American relations. Malchow finished his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1972, and has been teaching at Tufts since 1974.
Richard has been at Tufts since 1984 and is currently the chair of the philosophy department.
He is the first person to be awarded the Lenore Stern Professorship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He did not respond to requests for comment.
