February 20, 2025
Dear USC Community,
We are excited to honor this year’s exceptional members of our faculty with University and Distinguished professorships, USC’s highest academic honors. We present these annually to select outstanding faculty who have brought great distinction and honor to our university through their work. Their research enlightens and enriches collective understandings outside of USC and contributes to the advancement of society.
It is my pleasure to announce that this year we have appointed Adam Leventhal and Arthur Stone as University Professors, and Helen Berman, David Armstrong, and Maggie Nelson as Distinguished Professors.
Please join President Folt and me in congratulating these extraordinary individuals on this well-deserved recognition. We look forward to celebrating their achievements at the Faculty Academic Honors Convocation on April 16th.
As we do every year, we will seek nominations from the USC community for next year’s honorees at the start of the Fall semester. For an updated list of all USC University and Distinguished Professors, please visit the Provost Website.
Sincerely,
Andrew T. Guzman
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
University Professors
Adam Leventhal, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, public health scientist, educator, policy advisor, and university administrator specializing in addiction. He is Founding Director of the USC Institute for Addiction Science (IAS; ias.usc.edu)–the nation’s first university-wide comprehensive academic unit devoted to understanding, reducing, and preventing addiction epidemics. IAS is a matrixed institute of 80 faculty from 10 schools and colleges across USC that provides critical infrastructure supporting the incubation and implementation of trans-discipline addiction research, education, and community engagement activities.
Dr. Leventhal is the principal investigator of a research program that has received $60M in grants addressing: (1) youth use of tobacco, cannabis, and opioids; (2) health disparities in addiction; (3) science to inform public policies for regulating tobacco and other addictive consumer products; and (4) cancer and cardiovascular disease prevention. He has (co-)authored over 400 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including publications in JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and other widely-disseminated journals. Research led by Dr. Leventhal and his collaborators have informed numerous federal and global policies to protect youth from the dangers of tobacco and nicotine. His work has been covered by the Associated Press, NBC Nightly News, New York Times, and other media outlets. In addition to science and academic administration leadership, Dr. Leventhal is an active mentor and educator to early-career professionals across the spectrum from high school students to faculty. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Health Behavior and American Psychological Association and recipient of awards for contributions to science and mentoring, including the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology.
Dr. Leventhal is active in translating addiction science to federal and global policy actions, having served in roles for the US Surgeon General Report Series, US Food and Drug Administration, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and World Health Organization.
Arthur A. Stone is a Professor of Psychology, Economics, and Public Policy, and is the Director of the Dornsife Center for Self-Report Science. His prior position was Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Stony Brook University. A clinical psychologist by training, Stone’s early work concerned the measurement of life events and coping to understand how they impacted susceptibility to somatic illnesses. This led to his research examining how environmental events affect biological processes relevant to health, especially the endocrine and immune systems.
His second major line of work is the development of Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs), where he sought to understand processes underlying self-reporting. He developed PROs in the areas of stress, coping, affect, well-being, pain, and fatigue using a variety of data collection technologies (including momentary [Ecological Momentary Assessment], end-of-day, and yesterday recall [the Day Reconstruction Method]). He was also a member of the group that developed an extensive battery of PROs for use in clinical trials — the PROMIS instruments. He has studied hedonic well-being using large-scale surveys from the Gallup Organization and has investigated the measurement of subjective well-being and its application for public policy working with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Stone has been the editor-in-chief of two major health psychology journals, received fellow status in several organizations, has been the recipient of many academic awards, chaired an NIH study section, and has been continuously funded since 1978 by the NIH, NSF, and other national organizations.
Distinguished Professors
David Armstrong is a Professor of Surgery and Neurological Surgery with Tenure at the University of Southern California. Dr. Armstrong holds a Master of Science in Tissue Repair and Wound Healing from the University of Wales College of Medicine and a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester College of Medicine, where he was appointed Visiting Professor of Medicine. He is founder and co-Director of the Southwestern Academic Limb Salvage Alliance (SALSA).
Dr. Armstrong has produced more than 710 peer-reviewed research papers in dozens of scholarly medical journals as well as over 120 books or book chapters. He is the founding co-editor of the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) Clinical Care of the Diabetic Foot, now in its fourth edition. He is also the Director of USC’s National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Center to Stream Healthcare in Place (C2SHiP) which places him at the nexus of the merger of consumer electronics, wearables, and medical devices in an effort to maximize hospital-free and activity-rich days.
Selected as one of the first six International Wound Care Ambassadors, Dr. Armstrong is the recipient of numerous awards and degrees by universities and international medical organizations including the inaugural Georgetown Distinguished Award for Diabetic Limb Salvage. In 2008, he was the 25th and youngest-ever member elected to the Podiatric Medicine Hall of Fame. He was the first surgeon to be appointed University Distinguished Outreach Professor at the University of Arizona. He was also the first podiatric surgeon to be selected as President of Faculty at Keck School of Medicine of USC. Furthermore, he was the first podiatric surgeon to become a member of the Society of Vascular Surgery and the first US podiatric surgeon named fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Glasgow. Dr. Armstrong has been the recipient of two of the highest awards in his field, including the 2010 ADA’s Roger Pecoraro Award – in which he was the youngest award recipient in its two decade history – and the 2023 ISDF’s Karel Bakker Award.
Dr. Armstrong is a past Chair of Scientific Sessions for the ADA’s Foot Care Council, and a past member of the National Board of Directors of the American Diabetes Association. He sits on the Infectious Disease Society of America’s (IDSA) Diabetic Foot Infection Advisory Committee and is the US appointed delegate to the International Working Group on the Diabetic Foot (IWGDF). Dr. Armstrong is the founder and co-chair of the International Diabetic Foot Conference (DF-Con), the largest annual international symposium on the diabetic foot in the world. He is also the Founding President of the American Limb Preservation Society (ALPS), a medical and surgical society dedicated to building interdisciplinary teams to eliminate preventable amputation in the USA and worldwide.
Helen Berman is a Professor (Research) of Quantitative and Computational Biology. She received her AB from Barnard College in 1964. She trained in crystallography with George Jeffrey at the University of Pittsburgh where she received her Ph.D. in 1967. After her postdoctoral training, she went to the Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase Cancer Center where she rose through the ranks from Research Associate to Senior Member. In 1989, she joined the faculty of Rutgers University, where she is currently a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emerita of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in addition to her Research Professor appointment at the University of Southern California. Her research has focused on nucleic acids, protein-nucleic acid interactions, and collagen. She has published more than 320 scholarly articles.
Helen was a co-founder of the Protein Data Bank (PDB) archive that was launched in 1971 and has been committed to the continued development and maintenance of this community resource. She is also working on ways to use film and digital arts to communicate to a broader audience about the importance of structural biology in medicine and health. She was the Executive Producer of Target Zero – a documentary about HIV prevention in which high quality molecular animations illustrate how the anti-HIV drugs work. As part of ongoing collaborations between the USC Bridge Institute and USC School of Cinematic Arts, she is working on the Inner Space: World in a Cell VR experience that provides a view of the inside of a pancreatic beta cell.
Helen is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy for Arts and Sciences, the Biophysical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Crystallographic Association, and the International Society for Computational Biology. She is the recipient of several awards including the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences, the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences, the ACA Martin Buerger and David Rognlie Awards, the Distinguished Service Award from the Biophysical Society, and the Carl Brändén Award from the Protein Society.
Maggie Nelson is a Professor of English and the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the forthcoming essay collection Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (2007, reissue 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005; Finalist, the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir).
In addition to a 2016 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, she has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, Wesleyan University, CalArts, and the University of Southern California.