Stephen J. Benkovic the Evan Pugh professor and Ebery Chair in Chemistry. Benkovic is known for his biochemistry research, especially his work on the mechanisms of enzymic reactions. His research has led to the development of a new generation of antifolates for cancer therapy, to an understanding of how the HIV-1 virus develops mutations that contribute to its resistance to AIDS drugs, to insights into how the protein machinery for DNA replication is organized, and to the creation of catalytic antibodies for potential medical applications.

Moses H. W. Chan, the Evan Pugh Professor of physics.
He is distinguished in his work on phase transitions--the conditions under which a material changes from one phase to another--in quantum fluids, in reduced dimensions, and in the presence of disorder. The principles he and his research group have helped to establish have proven to be useful in understanding a wide variety of problems in condensed-matter systems undergoing phase transitions.

Joanna Floros (cellular and molecular physiology).
Floros is a founder and an important contributor to the surfactant protein field. Pulmonary surfactant is a lipoprotein complex that prevents lung collapse and is essential for life. Surfactant deficiency can lead to respiratory distress syndrome in prematurely born infants. Floros was the first to identify, characterize and clone the precursor molecules to human surfactant protein A. Her recent research also focuses on the impact of environmental pollution on pulmonary disease susceptibility.

Robert D. Hume, Evan Pugh Professor of English in the College of the Liberal Arts.
He is widely recognized as the foremost living historian of Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre with an international reputation in the history of literary criticism, opera, and drama. He has rediscovered lost manuscripts, plays, and theatre rosters of importance to scholars both here and abroad.

Masatoshi Nei, the Evan Pugh Professor of Biology.
Nei has been a major contributor to population and evolutionary genetics theory throughout his career. By developing various statistical methods and applying them to molecular data, he pioneered new ways of studying the genetic diversity of populations, evolutionary relationships among organisms, the times of species divergence from common ancestors, the location of gene regions in which natural selection is operating, and related areas.

Elliot S. Vesell, the Evan Pugh professor of pharmacology.
Vesell is considered a founding father of pharmacogenetics, a field devoted to problems of patients' large variations in drug response.

Alan Walker the Evan Pugh Professor of anthropology and biology.
Walker is one of the world's foremost experts on the evolution of primates and humans. His research involves searching for primate and human fossils in rocks dated from about 30 million to 1 million years ago. He has made many important discoveries during the past three decades at paleontological digs in Africa with his collaborators Richard and Meave Leakey.

James B. Anderson the Evan Pugh Professor of chemistry.
Anderson has made important breakthroughs in such fields as surface science, supersonic molecular beams, crossed-beam reactive scattering, the rare event approach to molecular dynamics, and quantum mechanics. Among other research efforts, he pioneered the application of the quantum Monte Carlo method to the calculation of the energies of atomic interactions, resulting in a series of exact predictions for small molecules and highly accurate predictions for larger systems.

Nigel Higson, the Evan Pugh Professor of mathematics.

Higson is a specialist in noncommutative geometry, particularly the operator-algebra theory, a subject that has roots in the mathematical foundations of quantum theory and in Fourier analysis and that has powerful consequences in the fields of topology and geometry. His recent work focuses on the Baum-Connes conjecture, a broad program that connects operator-algebra theory to problems in other areas of mathematics.