Messages from Deans
- Conrad Gilliam - Dean for Research, Biological Sciences Division
- Margaret M. Mitchell - Dean, Divinity School
- Martha Roth - Dean, Humanities Division
- Robert Fefferman - Dean, Physical Sciences Division
- Mark Hansen - Dean, Social Sciences Divison
Conrad Gilliam
The Biological Sciences Division’s 18 graduate programs comprise approximately 450 students, organized into four broad areas.
Graduate students are an integral component of the BSD’s education and research mission: They play a central role in the generation of new knowledge through their independent thesis research, and in the classroom as students and as teaching assistants. Their rigorous, graduate-level education is delivered through a combination of formal didactic classes (currently the BSD requires each student to take a minimum of 9 courses); participation in seminars, journal clubs, retreats, and national meetings; and most importantly, through the specialized, lab-based training students receive in our research labs.
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Margaret M. Mitchell
Talking about religion, some would say, is playing with fire. At the University of Chicago Divinity School we play with fire for a living. We set up a clearing space within the research university for the analysis of religion, promote the scrutiny and exchange of ideas, and adhere to serious ground rules of good method, which require the testing of claims and judgments by the standards of evidence and argument.
The Divinity School, located in the heart of campus, is the graduate professional school for the academic study of religion at the University of Chicago. Our faculty and students engage in advanced research in pursuit of new knowledge about the human phenomenon of religion, as viewed from the broadest possible range of perspectives and commitments. The profession in which it trains students involves roles which require thinking and speaking about religion — in general and specific religious communities, traditions, texts, rituals and other realities — in a manner that is deeply informed, rigorously critical and honestly engaged. The ability and willingness to talk about religion in this way is dangerously rare. We think research and education at the highest level may change that.
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Martha Roth
Graduate students at the University of Chicago are at the heart of the mission of the institution. They have the unique opportunity of being seamlessly integrated into a rich environment of intellectual discourse, research, teaching, and scholarship. The Division of the Humanities offers doctorates and master's degrees in two dozen programs, with a total enrollment of more than one thousand students. All our programs of study encourage interdisciplinary work; indeed the faculty members of the Humanities Division hold appointments across departments and across divisions throughout the University, modeling the interdisciplinarity for which Chicago is celebrated. Graduate students research and study culture, literature, history, language, and the arts in a rich and dynamic environment of collaboration.
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Robert Fefferman
Graduate education in our Division means training the next generation of scientific leaders, many of whom will make extremely profound contributions to science and mathematics. When I think of such leaders, I think of Edwin Hubble, whose observations enabled us to realize that our galaxy is not the entire universe and that our universe is expanding. I think of Sherry Rowland, who discovered the mechanism of ozone depletion. I think of Jim Cronin, my colleague who discovered some of the most fundamental asymmetries of nature. And I think of Alberto Calderon, whose work with his thesis advisor shortly after his PhD. here established my own field of mathematics, and whose presence in our Mathematics Department was in large part the reason I came to Chicago as a young mathematician.
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John Mark Hansen
“The Chicago department was the cutting edge of development of the field.... The students who were graduate students when I was became the leaders of the profession.”
So the political scientist Herman Pritchett (PhD'37, professor in Political Science) recalled the influence of the University of Chicago on himself and his fellows. His comment can be multiplied many times over, in every program in the Social Sciences Division and in every era of its history.
Pritchett’s comment, and the many others like it, underscores the power of graduate education at the University of Chicago for the students who experience it. But it also neatly summarizes the place of graduate education in the life of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.
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