Two Assistant Professors Appointed to SAS Chairs

Projit Mukharji of the Department of History and Sociology of Science has been named the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences. Mukharji’s research focuses on postcolonial technoscience, colonial medicine, indigenous medical traditions, and subaltern science; he has a special interest in the intersection of Western medicine and indigenous healing traditions in South Asia.

He is the author of Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, and the co-editor of Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics (Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories) and Crossing Colonial Historiographies: Histories of Colonial and Indigenous Medicines in Transnational Perspective. He has also contributed book chapters and journal articles to publications including South Asian History and Culture, Indian Economic and Social History Review and Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

Mukharji teaches courses in the Department of History and Sociology of Science and the Department of Religious Studies. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of London.

This chair was endowed by Margy Ellin Meyerson, G’93, the widow of Penn President Emeritus Martin Meyerson, HON’70. Mr. Meyerson was a distinguished teacher, administrator and urban planner who served as University president from 1970-81. The chair is specifically designated for an outstanding faculty member whose pursuits exemplify the integration of knowledge.

Joseph Kable has been named the Baird Term Assistant Professor of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences. Kable’s research focuses on psychological and neural mechanisms of choice behavior, to understand how people make decisions. Other research themes of interest include behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, decision processes and individual differences, and behavior genetics.

He is the author of multiple articles in publications including the Journal of Neuroscience; Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics; Neuron; and the Journal of Neurophysiology. Kable served on the Department of Psychology’s chair’s advisory committee in 2009 and 2010, and has been a representative on the Institutional Review Board since 2010. He has also been a member of the Society for Neuroscience since 1999 and a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society since 2001.

Kable’s work has earned him honors such as the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Fellowship from 2005 to 2007, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship from 2000 to 2003, and a Lucius Lamar McMullan Award in 1996.

The Baird chair was established in 2005 by anonymous donors to recruit or retain a preeminent scholar and teacher in Penn Arts and Sciences, with a preference for a scholar in the field of behavioral economics.