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09/23/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 09/23/2026 11:32

William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships Awarded to Five Senior Faculty

William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships Awarded to Five Senior Faculty

Recipients of the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorship (left to right): David Boas, Ji-Xin Cheng, Lindsay Farrer, Ed Kearns, and Xin Zhang.

University News

William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships Awarded to Five Senior Faculty

David Boas, Ji-Xin Cheng, Lindsay Farrer, Ed Kearns, and Xin Zhang join a select group that represents BU's global leadership in research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration

September 23, 2026
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When Lindsay Farrer received a cryptic email asking if he was available for a meeting with Boston University President Melissa Gilliam and Provost Colin Duckett, the only thing that saved him from a panic attack was a short caveat at the end: Don't worry.

Once he arrived at the meeting, Farrer, a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine distinguished professor of genetics and professor of medicine, neurology, and ophthalmology and School of Public Health professor of epidemiology, and biostatistics who has been at BU for more than 40 years, quickly realized the reason for the secrecy. He had been named a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor.

There are few groups at BU as exclusive as this collection of esteemed senior faculty members. To date, only 16 professors have been named to the professorship, the highest distinction for BU senior faculty. Only 10 remain active.

"[The president] put the news out there, and I was a little bit in awe for a moment," Farrer says. "It makes me feel recognized, welcomed, and really part of the entire University."

Farrer is one of five professors newly named to the Warren Professorship. The others are David Boas, a College of Engineering professor of biomedical, electrical, and computer engineering; Ji-Xin Cheng, an ENG distinguished professor of electrical, computer, biomedical, and materials science engineering; Ed Kearns, a College of Arts & Sciences professor and interim chair of physicsi; and Xin Zhang, an ENG Distinguished Professor of Engineering.

"Our founding president William Fairfield Warren said that a University is a society dedicated to 'realizing the highest known ideals in individual and social character and life and propagating these ideals from one generation to another,'" Gilliam says. "This year's Warren Professors embody these ideals. Throughout their careers, each has made an immense contribution to their fields and to society through groundbreaking discoveries and mentorship. These professors were nominated by their peers and endorsed by colleagues from around the world. We are honored to recognize Professors Boas, Cheng, Farrer, Kearns, and Zhang, as representatives of Boston University's excellent faculty."

Established in 2008, the professorship, named after the University's first president, is awarded to senior faculty members who remain actively involved in research, scholarship, teaching, and BU civic life. The professorship comes with an annual allowance of $50,000 for research, travel, and other scholarly work.

Faculty are nominated by their peers and receive recommendations from a committee made up of faculty from across the University and representative of the University's broad range of disciplines. This year's nomination process was "exceptionally competitive," Gilliam noted in a letter sent to BU faculty and staff on Wednesday. Among this year's five-member cohort is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a contributor to Nobel Prize-winning research, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

"These five new Warren Professors have made significant and enduring contributions to their fields, to the BU community, and to society at large," says Colin Duckett, provost and chief academic officer. "Recognized by their peers at BU and beyond, these faculty members and their storied careers are exemplary of the outstanding research, scholarship, and teaching that characterize this university."

Whether they are delving into genes to better understand Alzheimer's disease, discovering new truths about cosmic particles, or creating new methods to decipher the nature of life itself, all five of this year's Warren Professors have broken new ground and pushed their respective fields forward into new frontiers.

David Boas

BU has increasingly emphasized convergent research, the kind of interdisciplinary scholarship that pushes boundaries and fosters collaboration to solve the world's most significant challenges. At every turn, David Boas has been there.

David Boas

Boas finds interdisciplinary collaboration not only helpful but necessary for his work. As director of Boston University's Neurophotonics Center, he uses light to better image, monitor, and understand the brain. It's a field that jumps between computer and electrical engineering and neuroscience.

His lab built a wearable, functional near-infrared imaging interface that allows researchers and medical professionals to look at the brain in new levels of detail. Boas recently collaborated with Kamal Sen, a professor of engineering and director of the Natural Sounds and Neural Coding Laboratory, to better understand how the human brain sifts through different noises, work that could lead to the development of better hearing aids.

This technology is 20 years in the making and only came about through the collaborations between faculty he helped foster in his research center.

"Just through the center, I love all the new collaborations that I see and the successful outcomes they're having and knowing that I had some hand in connecting them," Boas says. "That is very rewarding."

He also served on the University's convergent research committee and cochaired the ENG committee for convergent research. The Warren Professorship only compels Boas to commit more time, energy, and resources to this work.

"With this professorship, my interpretation of it is to keep doing that but now at the University level," he says. The professorship) "isn't just about the research, but making BU better and the world around us better."

Ji-Xin Cheng

"I've spent my whole career tackling a question that is almost impossible to answer," Ji-Xin Cheng says.

Ji-Xin Cheng

Cheng's "mission impossible" is deciphering the molecular machinery of life itself for use in precision medicine. After decades, he has come closer than almost anyone to achieving that goal, an accomplishment for which he has received the Warren Professorship.

In the past, there have been a few methods of using microscopes to study cell chemistry-a science known as microscopy-but they all have their limits. These techniques use light or fluorescent dyes to highlight information at the cellular level while obstructing other elements. Over 20 years, Cheng has developed the most sensitive method for imaging these chemical bonds, known as photothermal microscopy, which measures molecules as they produce heat.

"Twenty-five years ago, this [chemical imaging field] was…a very small field, and people thought the sensitivity was not enough and it was not promising," Cheng says. "If you chase something people don't believe in, that's harder. But it can be an opportunity. I took the harder way."

Using its imaging method, Cheng's lab was also able to discover biomarkers for aggressive prostate cancer that could lead to the development of treatments for late-stage cancer and even ways of suppressing cancer stem cells.

He hasn't kept his work restricted to the lab either. Through a company he cofounded, Photothermal Spec Corp., Cheng transformed this technique into mIRage, commercially available chemical microscopes that are now used in labs across the world for early detection of everything from Alzheimer's disease to microplastics.

Cheng says the funding he'll receive through the Warren Professorship will go toward more of this "high-risk, high-impact research."

Working on the same problem over decades has required him to both embrace change and remain relentlessly focused. It's a philosophy he says is poetically captured in his name. In Chinese, "ji" means "continuity" and "xin" means innovation or change.

"I continue using different methods to reach the same goal," Cheng says. "That's my whole career."

Lindsay Farrer

Once Farrer left his meeting with Gilliam, and the "awe" of having received the Warren Professorship abated, he found it hard not to reflect on his 40-year career at BU.

Lindsay Farrer

"I hope that it represents recognition of a body of work that I've done or my overall service within the University," he says, "not just my research but my efforts through collaboration and teaching, mentoring, which I have very willingly and lovingly been doing for a very long time."

In his time at the University, he has learned just as much as he's taught, he says. Farrer arrived at BU in 1986 with a "narrow set of skills" in human medical genetics, but over the years he picked up expertise in neurology, neuroscience, ophthalmology, and epidemiology by collaborating with others.

"As I tell others, science is a team sport," he says.

Although he's branched out into other fields, everything Farrer does comes back to genetics. He and his team have identified genes that cause several diseases, including Alzheimer's, substance use disorders, and age-related macular degeneration. These genetic markers could be used to predict how prone people are to certain diseases. Given that most of the diseases Farrer studies don't develop until adulthood, catching them early could be potentially lifesaving. He hopes his work will be used to produce not only predictive risk assessments but better diagnoses and even new drugs.

"With the genetics approach, we go far upstream in the pathway leading to disease," Farrer says. "If we could develop and first understand how those upstream events influence the downstream, then we can act before it's too late [and] develop therapies that can be administered well before irreversible damage occurs."

Farrer's leadership of the MIRAGE Project, a decades-long, multicenter study of Alzheimer's funded by the National Institute on Aging, has also advanced the understanding of how genetic and environmental factors might make certain populations more at risk to Alzheimer's. Specifically, his lab has identified a rare genetic mutation associated with the disease in African Americans. He is working on a similar genome-wide study of Koreans to find potential Alzheimer's risk and protective genes. Farrer says the money and high profile nature of the Warren Professorship will allow him to continue this work.

"No single discovery is the answer, but it's providing another building block toward better understanding and, ultimately, developing efficacious strategies for treating or preventing disease," Farrer says.

Ed Kearns

Ask Ed Kearns about receiving the Warren Professorship, and he is quick to make big news into a small statement.

"I'm honored, simply speaking," he says.

Ed Kearns

It's fitting for a professor who has dedicated his career to making a big deal out of some of the smallest particles in the universe.

For 30 years, Kearns has studied the cosmos and the fundamental laws that govern it. But neutrinos-miniscule subatomic particles that, due to their neutral charge, can pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected-are his primary focus. He has largely worked on a single project: Super-Kamiokande, or Super-K, an observatory 3,300 feet under Japan's Mount Ikeno and operated by an international team led by the University of Tokyo's Institute for Cosmic Ray Research. The Super-K, which was constructed in 1983, aims to detect high-energy neutrinos. With Super-K, scientists have also tested proton decay, studied neutrinos originating from the core of the sun, and hunted for exploding stars in the Milky Way and in dark matter.

Kearns' singular focus has led to some of the most groundbreaking physics discoveries of the modern era.

Through Super-K, he is deeply involved in the study of neutrino oscillation, the process by which neutrinos travel through space and change between three varieties, or flavors. Kearns and the researchers with the Super-K experiment helped discover this process in 1998. The work shed new light on the core properties of neutrinos, including that they have a miniscule amount of mass, and changed the standard model of particle physics. The discovery would lead to work that later would be recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015.

"When we discovered [neutrino oscillation] in 1998, it opened up an entire field of study," Kearns says. "I'm grateful to my collaborators and the good fortune that outstanding physics discoveries were possible at the time in my career when they had a big impact on science and physics and…for myself."

Kearns is about to enter a new era of his career, as Super-K comes to a close and the experiment's next phase, Hyper-K, starts up with a neutrino detector eight times the size of its predecessor. He has high hopes the project will be able to answer some of the lingering questions around neutrinos. He also hopes the Warren Professorship funding will give him the financial "breathing room" he needs to send himself and some of his students to Japan.

"What really keeps me going is I like working with students on science," Kearns says. "I'm very glad to bring this good science along with me for them to experience."

Xin Zhang

Receiving the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorship was particularly meaningful for Xin Zhang. The University has been her academic home for more than 20 years, and in that time it has given her just as much as she has given to it.

Xin Zhang

What I'm probably most grateful for is that BU has given me room to grow, to keep learning, take risks, move into completely new areas, and reinvent myself scientifically," Zhang says. "That freedom or room to remain curious, to cross boundaries, and sometimes to pursue an idea before you know exactly where it will lead has really shaped my career."

Zhang's work with metamaterials, engineered substances that have special qualities designed to solve specific engineering problems, has been as far-ranging as her curiosity.

She designed 3D-printed sound shields that can block noise without limiting airflow. By overcoming a tradeoff that was once thought necessary in the engineering world, the technology could help make fans, engines, and other kinds of everyday noise generators quieter.

Meanwhile, the lightweight, wireless MRI coils that she invented were named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2025 list. The coils, which weigh less than an AA battery and cost just $50, could revolutionize the work of first responders, letting them assess injuries using portable MRIs while still at the scene of an accident or crisis.

Zhang celebrates the fact that her work isn't bound by a specific discipline. But whether she's working on sound silencing or medical imaging, she has a singular motivation.

"[I want] to look at important problems differently, challenge limitations that may not be as fundamental as they appear, and explore how engineering can create possibilities that were not there before," Zhang says. "Ultimately, it's not technology for technology's sake. What makes this exciting to me is the possibility that this idea can eventually move beyond the laboratory to create quieter and more sustainable environments, improve healthcare, and, more broadly, make a meaningful difference in peoples' lives."

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