March 10, 2026
Dear USC Community,
On behalf of President Kim and myself, I am thrilled to announce this year’s University and Distinguished professorships, USC’s highest academic honors. These distinctions are awarded annually to exceptional 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.
While the distinctions of University and Distinguished professors carry equal weight, University Professors are recognized for their exceptional interdisciplinary work, and Distinguished Professors are recognized for exceptional work in a specific discipline.
It is my pleasure to announce that this year we have appointed Darius Lakdawalla and Heinz-Josef Lenz as University Professors, and Maria Aranda, David Hirshleifer, and Chanita Hughes-Halbert as Distinguished Professors.
Please join President Kim 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 13th.
For an updated list of all USC University and Distinguished Professors, please visit the Office of the Provost website.
Sincerely,
Andrew T. Guzman
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
University Professors
Darius N. Lakdawalla is a widely published, award-winning researcher and a leading authority in both health economics and health policy who sits on the faculties of the Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Sol Price School of Public Policy. He is also the Chief Scientific Officer at the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, one of the nation’s premier health policy research centers. With his work published in leading journals of economics, medicine, and health policy, Dr. Lakdawalla’s research focuses primarily on the economics of health risks, the value and determinants of medical innovation, the economics of health insurance markets, and the industrial organization of healthcare markets. He is currently a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and associate editor for the Review of Economics and Statistics, The American Journal of Health Economics, and The Journal of Health Economics. He is also an editorial board member at the American Journal of Managed Care: Evidence-Based Diabetes and the American Journal of Managed Care: Evidence-Based Oncology.
Heinz-Josef Lenz is a pioneer in the field of precision medicine. His international translational research and clinical trials in the field of gastrointestinal (GI) cancer have been practice-changing for the delivery of precision oncology care across the globe and have led to the approval of multiple novel therapies for patients with colon cancer as well as changed national/international guidelines. Through his extensive international collaborations and his role as PI/MPI on two national clinical trials networks (National Clinical Trials Network and the Experimental Therapeutics Clinical Trials Network) and a National Cancer Institute (NCI) Moonshot grant focused on genomic characterization among Hispanics, he will advance global precision medicine to ensure equitable access to these advances for all patients. As a researcher, he is man of many firsts: He was the first to identify germline SNPs to be predictive and prognostic in GI Cancer, which now are included in many testing panels; the first to measure intratumoral RNA levels associated with the efficacy of 5-FU and oxaliplatin; and the first to show that the primary tumor location of colon cancer is an independent predictive and prognostic marker now included in all international guidelines. He played a critical role in the FDA approvals of Cetuximab, Regorafenib, TAS-102, Nivolumab, and Ipilimumab for colorectal cancer. In addition to his many prestigious awards from American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and NCI, Dr. Lenz is a member of the NCI Investigational Drug Steering Committee.
Distinguished Professors
María P. Aranda is an internationally recognized social worker and sociobehavioral scholar in the fields of social work, geriatrics, and gerontology. As a scientist highly steeped in principles of equity and inclusion, Dr. Aranda decided early on that her scholarship had to have high impact and applicability for the populations with lived experience who were represented in her work. Towards this end, she elucidates disparities in health and health outcomes and develops culturally-attuned, evidence-based interventions for diverse adults and families living with dementia, depression, multiple comorbidities, and other life-altering conditions that exert a significant public health burden, as well as social- and place-based determinants of brain health and mortality. Dr. Aranda has been awarded research grants from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Patient-Centered Outcome Research Institute, and the California Department of Public Health, among many others. She has also served on several consensus committees of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the geriatric workforce in mental health and substance use service sectors, family caregiving to older adults with functional limitations, financial capacity determination among social security beneficiaries, functional assessment for adults with disabilities, and evidence-based care for persons living with dementia and their care partners.
David A. Hirshleifer has fundamentally shaped modern finance. His pioneering work on information cascades, investor overconfidence, and, more recently, his creation of the emerging field of “social finance” have had transformative effects across economics, finance, and the behavioral sciences. He is a Fellow and former-President of the American Finance Association, as well as a Fellow of the Financial Management Association, the Finance Theory Group, and the Asian Bureau of Economic Research. He has served as Executive Editor of the Review of Financial Studies, director of the American and Western Finance Associations, and as an editor at other leading finance, economics, and business journals. With over 80 peer-reviewed articles, garnering over 69,000 Google Scholar citations and counting, Prof. Hirshleifer’s pathbreaking research has also won distinguished awards, including the Hillcrest Behavioral Finance Award and the Smith Breeden Award for an outstanding paper in the Journal of Finance.
Chanita Hughes-Halbert is a nationally recognized leader in cancer prevention and minority health research and the Associate Director for Cancer Health Disparities. She has dedicated her career to reducing the disparities in cancer outcomes that affect patients. Among her many achievements, she has identified sociocultural, psychological, genetic, and environmental determinants of cancer health disparities and translates this information into interventions to improve the health of multi-cultural populations. For her many contributions, Dr. Hughes-Halbert was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and received the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Control Award in 2010. Former President Barack Obama appointed her to the National Cancer Institute’s Board of Scientific Advisors in 2012 and, in 2014, she joined the National Advisory Council of the National Human Genome Research Institute. The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) named Dr. Hughes-Halbert chair of its Minorities in Cancer Research Council the same year, and she received the AACR Distinguished Lecture Award on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities, funded by the Susan G. Komen Foundation, in 2018.