Reisler and Molina named University Professor and Distinguished Professor
Two USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences faculty members have been recognized by the university for their outstanding achievements. Hanna Reisler, professor of chemistry, has been named University Professor, and Natalia Molina, professor of American studies and ethnicity, has been named Distinguished Professor.
“These exceptional faculty members have brought great distinction to the university,” wrote USC Provost Charles Zukoski Zukoski in an April 5 email to the university community lauding Molina, Reisler and three other USC faculty members. “Recognizing each of them is an honor for President [Carol L.] Folt and me, and we look forward to celebrating their achievements at the annual Academic Honors Convocation this month.”
The distinction of University Professor is awarded selectively by the president based on multidisciplinary interests and significant accomplishments in several disciplines. Distinguished Professor is selectively awarded to those whose accomplishments have brought special renown to USC.
University Professor recognized globally
Reisler, who holds the Lloyd Armstrong Jr. Chair in Science and Engineering, is an internationally recognized chemist. She studies detailed mechanisms of chemical reactions in the gas and condensed phases by using laser and molecular-beam techniques, research which is relevant to environmental, atmospheric and combustion chemistry as well as to the fundamental chemistry of new energy sources.
She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. She has received numerous awards and honors, including an NSF CAREER Award, an NSF Faculty Award for Women Scientists, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Max Planck Research Award and the American Physical Society Herbert P. Broida Prize. She helped found the Women in Science and Engineering Program at USC.
Distinguished Professor, author, MacArthur Fellow
Molina is the author of two award-winning books, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 and How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, in which she coins the term “racial scripts” to demonstrate how ideas about race are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racialized groups. Her research continues to explore the themes of race, space, labor, immigration, gender and urban history.
In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Her work has further been supported by various organizations, including the Ford, Mellon and Rockefeller foundations, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library. She is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and in 2018 was the Organization of American Historians China Residency scholar. She has also been the recipient of various awards for her diversity work, including by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.
Exceptional scholars
In addition to Reisler and Molina, John Brooks Slaughter of the USC Rossier School of Education and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and Berislav Zlokovic of the Keck School of Medicine of USC were named University Professors, and Alan Willner of USC Viterbi was named a Distinguished Professor.