The City University of New York has awarded the title of distinguished professor — its highest honor — to two Hunter College faculty members.
Professor Jillian Schwedler, an internationally renowned political scientist and Middle East expert, and Professor Rein Ulijn, a pioneering chemist and leader in bio-inspired nanoscience, also hold appointments at The CUNY Graduate Center. They assumed the new titles July 1.
Schwedler is best known for her innovative interpretive research in Jordan, Yemen, and Egypt, supported by the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the Fulbright Scholars Program (three times), the American Institute for Yemen Studies, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. Her work broadly engages questions of political geography, Islamist politics, policing, neoliberalism, and political dissent.
Schwedler has served as an elected member of the American Political Science Association’s Council, its highest governing body, and as an elected member of the board of directors of the Middle East Studies Association. She is co-founder and co-director of the Sidi Bou Said School of Critical Protest Studies and is a frequent press commentator on Middle East politics.
Schwedler’s most recent book is the award-winning Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (Stanford 2022). She is also author of the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge 2006) and editor (with Laleh Khalili) of Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (Columbia/Hurst 2010), among many other books and articles.
Rein Ulijn, Einstein Professor of Chemistry at CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center, is pioneering bio-inspired nanotechnology. His research asks a fundamental question: how can the molecular building blocks of life be repurposed and simplified to create new materials with properties beyond the reach of conventional design?
In a recent breakthrough, Ulijn’s team showed that simple peptides can mimic natural protective processes, shielding sensitive proteins such as vaccines and therapeutics from environmental stress — a strategy that could one day stabilize medicines during transport and storage.
In recognition of his high-risk, high-reward research, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded Ulijn the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship in 2021 — the agency’s most prestigious single-investigator award. The five-year, $3 million fellowship supports his efforts to decode how complex mixtures of molecules acquire functionality and to harness this understanding to create next-generation nanotechnologies inspired by biology.
Beyond the lab, Ulijn has built programs that connect discovery to innovation. As Director of the Nanoscience Initiative, the NSF-funded NanoBioNYC doctoral training program, and CUNY’s state-funded Center for Advanced Technologies, he fosters industry partnerships and entrepreneurship training for graduate students — ensuring that their scientific advances translate into real-world solutions in sustainability, healthcare, and beyond.
