Indiana University has named four faculty members as Distinguished Professors, the most prestigious appointment offered to honor faculty whose outstanding scholarship, artistic or literary distinction, or other achievements have won significant recognition by peers.

Since its creation in 1953, 254 IU faculty members have been appointed as Distinguished Professor, including 93 current and 77 emeritus faculty.

Distinguished Professor appointees for 2023 are:

Stephen A. Burns

Stephen Burns is a professor and associate dean for graduate programs in the IU School of Optometry at IU Bloomington. He is a world-recognized expert in nearly a half-dozen topical areas.

His work has uncovered the essential understandings of color vision, optimized vision correction and more recently optimized methods of detecting critical signs of disease in advance of clinical diagnoses.

The approaches Burns helped develop have become the benchmark for many other labs around the globe. His patents for devices related to optical aberrations in retinal imaging have been widely utilized over the past two decades in both scientific research and in the clinical setting.

Mauricio Fuks

Mauricio Fuks is Rudy Professor of Violin in the Jacobs School of Music at IU Bloomington. He has performed extensively throughout North and South America as a soloist, leading orchestral violinist and chamber musician.

Throughout his countless performances, Fuks has performed in top orchestra venues, recital halls, broadcasts and radio stations, and has performed alongside musical giants such as Pablo Casals, Zubin Mehta, Paul Rosenthal, Efrain Guigui, Andre Gagnon, Daniel Barenboim and Sir John Barbirolli. He has given nearly 200 masterclasses or other teachings as a resident across five continents at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions and festivals.

Bruce T. Lamb

Bruce Lamb is executive director of the Paul and Carole Stark Neurosciences Research Institute and Roberts Family Professor of Alzheimer’s Disease Research at the IU School of Medicine. His research has spanned a wide range of areas in neurodegeneration, including the development and use of animal models to study the biology of Alzheimer’s disease and the role of neuroinflammation and microglia in Alzheimer’s disease.

During his tenure, the institute has become a highly productive research program, garnered international recognition for Indiana University and advanced our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease. Lamb has successfully taken on critical leadership roles at both Indiana University and at the international level.

Rebecca L. Spang

Rebecca Spang is Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History and director of the Liberal Arts + Management Program, known as LAMP, in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.

Recognized as the leading American historian of her generation working on the history of 18th- and 19th-century France and the French Revolution, she has led the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies to become a nationally recognized scholarly hub for the study of that period.

Spang is a prolific scholar whose powerful prose reaches a wide audience beyond fellow historians, and even the United States. Most recently, she was selected as a 2023 New America National Fellow and a 2022-23 Guggenheim Fellow.