Originally published in The University Record on June 25, 2026
John Jonides, an innovative architect of modern cognitive neuroscience, has been selected as the University of Michigan’s 2027 Henry Russel Lecturer.
The lectureship was announced at the June 25 Board of Regents meeting. Jonides will deliver his lecture in the winter term of 2027.
The Henry Russel Lectureship is the university’s highest honor for senior members of its active faculty. It is awarded annually to a faculty member with exceptional achievements in research, scholarship or creative endeavors, as well as an outstanding record of distinguished teaching, mentoring and service to U-M and the wider community.
Also at the meeting, it was announced that four faculty members will receive Henry Russel Awards, the university’s highest honor for faculty members at the early to mid-career stages of their careers.
Those recipients are:
- Mania Aghaei Meibodi, assistant professor of architecture, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
- Camille Avestruz, assistant professor of physics, LSA.
- Fangfei Miao, assistant professor of music, School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
- Cyrus Omar, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, College of Engineering.
Jonides is the Edward E. Smith Distinguished University Professor of psychology and neuroscience, and professor of radiology in the Medical School. His work illuminates how the mind supports attention, working memory, and cognitive control — core capacities that underlie learning, decision-making, and everyday functioning.
An early leader in the use of human brain imaging to address foundational questions about cognition, Jonides helped move the field beyond simply locating functions in the brain to building psychologically rich, mechanistic models of how cognitive processes are implemented in neural systems.
His scholarship has shaped both basic science and translational research that addresses pressing challenges in education, mental health, and the management of cognitive aging.
Jonides established that distinct regions of the frontal cortex contribute differentially to the maintenance versus manipulation of information in working memory and how these anatomical relationships have consequences for cognitive processing. Building on these empirical discoveries, he and his collaborators proposed a highly influential taxonomy of executive functions, which remains among the most widely cited frameworks in the field.
By applying his taxonomy of executive functions, he has advanced understanding of real-world cognitive challenges in conditions such as major depressive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Jonides’ prolific and wide-ranging scholarship appears in premier journals in psychology and in top scientific journals such as Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
His U-M honors include the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, the Distinguished Service Award, and the Excellence in Research Award.
Jonides earned his B.A. (1969) in psychology from Johns Hopkins University, followed by an M.Ed. (1971) in education from Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1975) in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the U-M faculty in 1975 as assistant professor of psychology and was promoted to associate professor in 1980 and professor in 1986.
In 2004, he was named Edward E. Smith Collegiate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and in 2025 he was named Edward E. Smith Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. He has served as co-director of the fMRI Center since 2001 and was appointed professor of radiology in the Medical School in 2024.
Aghaei Meibodi’s research integrates new robotic methods with novel computational design technologies — including machine learning and physics-based algorithms — to unlock the full potential of 3D printing for material, productivity and environmental efficiencies in both the construction process and the building in service, while prototyping the next generation of building elements that reduce material use, waste, construction time, and energy consumption.
In 2025, she received an NSF CAREER Award, a notable distinction for architecture. Her scholarship on 3D concrete printing methods has appeared in Automation in Construction, Additive Manufacturing, and Virtual and Physical Prototyping.
She earned her B.A.Sc. (2006) from Curtin University of Technology in Australia and her M.Arch. (2008) from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, followed by a Lic.Eng. (2012) in architectural engineering from Luleå University of Technology and a Ph.D. in architectural design and technology (2016) from KTH. She was a postdoctoral researcher and senior researcher at ETH Zürich. She joined U-M in 2019 as an assistant professor of architecture.
Avestruz has made innovative contributions to galaxy cluster science, specifically in applying artificial intelligence methods for object characterization in astronomical survey imaging. Her work directly addresses foundational questions in cosmology, such as the nature of dark energy, and she has helped shape the future of cosmological research through leadership in large collaborations connected to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
She spearheads an interdisciplinary collaboration between astronomers and statisticians to develop pioneering AI approaches for detecting and disentangling overlapping objects in crowded sky images, improving the reliability of galaxy catalogs.
Avestruz earned her B.A. (2009) in physics, mathematics, and dance from Barnard College and a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University (2015). She held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Chicago, including a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar appointment in Astronomy and Astrophysics, a Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics fellowship, and an Enrico Fermi Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship. She joined U-M in 2019 as an LSA Collegiate Fellow and is now an assistant professor of physics.
Miao is a leading scholar of Chinese dance studies and an innovative creator of contemporary Asian dances, bringing a distinctive scholar-artist profile to her discipline. Her scholarship reframes Chinese dance through culturally grounded, bilingual and transnational perspectives, challenging the dominant academic tradition of treating Asian dancers as the research subjects of Western scholars.
Her in-progress monograph is the first book-length study to examine U.S.-China relations from a dance studies perspective. She has presented widely on topics ranging from dance circulation and history to theorizing Chinese dance in the West and the role of dance in social connectivity.
Miao earned her B.A. with honors (2008) in dance history and theory from the Beijing Dance Academy, China’s premier conservatory, followed by an M.F.A. (2011) in choreography from the Beijing Dance Academy and a Ph.D. (2019) in culture and performance from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to joining U-M, she served as a visiting assistant professor of theatre and dance at Muhlenberg College. She was appointed assistant professor in dance at U-M in 2020.
Omar aspires to re-imagine the programming experience to make it more intuitive, accessible, and intelligent. As director of the Future of Programming Lab, his research engages in both rigorous theoretical developments and human-centered design for next-generation programming environments.
A major focus of his work has been the “structure editing problem” which has bedeviled researchers since the 1980s: Is there a way to create a source code editor that allows people to manipulate code without requiring expert knowledge of syntactic rules? A central thread in his scholarship is the use of “typed holes” and techniques to help programmers construct correct programs incrementally, with live, informative feedback rather than delayed and opaque errors.
Omar earned dual B.S. (2008) degrees in computer science and molecular & cellular biology, summa cum laude, from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, followed by a Ph.D. (2017) in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He held a postdoctoral appointment in computer science at the University of Chicago, joining U-M in 2019 as an assistant professor of computer science and engineering.