Nominations will only be accepted from collegiate deans. Complete nominations should be submitted to faculty@uiowa.edu as a single pdf file.

Nominations of women, underrepresented minorities, and other groups historically underrepresented in their discipline are encouraged.

Completed nominations must include: 

From the nominee (submitted to the collegiate dean):

• Current CV
• A statement of no more than two pages describing the nominee’s contributions to the field and how their research, teaching, and/or scholarship has contributed to the institution, the State and the discipline. 
• Three examples of scholarly products. 
• Names and contact information of three to five faculty, both internal and external, who can provide letters of support. 

From the collegiate dean: 

• A nomination letter from the collegiate dean highlighting the nominee’s qualifications and describing the candidate’s scholarship, teaching, and/or service excellence and evidence of the potential for continued extraordinary productivity. 
• Three letters of support from faculty who are familiar with the candidate’s contributions are to be solicited by the dean. One letter must be external to the university. The letter should include the following: 
  • A brief explanation of the professional relationship to the nominee. 
  • Evidence of the quality of the candidate’s work and impact on the field. 
  • Evidence of the candidate’s substantial recognition nationally and internationally among their peers. 
• The materials supplied by the candidate.

Nominations will be reviewed by the University Chair committee, which is composed of three tenured full professors, the president of Faculty Senate or their designee, and the associate provost for faculty. The selection committee will recommend awardees to the executive vice president and provost for final approval. 

Professors Peter Thorne and Lea VanderVelde have been named recipients of the University of Iowa Distinguished Chair in spring 2022.

Peter Thorne, College of Public Health

Thorne, who also serves as the director of the Human Toxicology Program within the Graduate College, joined the Iowa faculty in 1988. His pioneering research is focused on environmental risk factors for inflammatory lung diseases, the toxicity of engineered nanomaterials and persistent chemical pollutants, and the health effects of climate change. Thorne is working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Academy of Sciences in translating complex environmental health science to public policy. He is serving a third, three-year term on the EPA’s Science Advisory Board and served two years as chair. Thorne was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology for six years. He is the current chair of the academy’s Committee on Toxicology. At Iowa, Thorne directed the Environmental Health Sciences Research Center for 20 years and served as head of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health for 12 years. He has led the Pulmonary Toxicology Facility core since 1993. Thorne was awarded the 2017 UI Scholar of the Year and the 2018 Iowa Board of Regents Award for Faculty Excellence. He teaches courses on health effects of climate change, global environmental health, and human toxicology. He has mentored 25 PhD students, 30 master’s students, and 18 postdoctoral fellows. With his students and staff, he has published more than 290 peer-reviewed publications.

Lea VanderVelde, College of Law

VanderVelde—one of the first women ever tenured in the College of Law—joined Iowa as a visiting faculty member in 1978. Her research focuses on how American civil rights and civil liberties law was formed during Reconstruction, bringing to light the 13th Amendment’s potential for addressing current issues. VanderVelde has been involved in initiatives to advance civil liberties and end modern slavery, authoring several amicus briefs and successfully nominating her friend Kailash Satyarthi, for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. She has pursued digital research technology through the Reconstruction Amendment Optical Scanning (RAOS) project, which she founded more than 20 years ago. She successfully digitized the Congressional debates from 1863 to 1873, which will be useful for legislative histories. In cooperation with state historical societies, she has made discoveries about the territorial histories of Iowa and all of the surrounding states of the Northwest Territory. She is the author of five major books, two history monographs, two leading casebooks, and a primer for text analysis. One of her books, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier, reveals the previously untold story of the enslaved mother and family at the center of the nation’s most infamous lawsuit. VanderVelde was the Guggenheim fellow in Constitutional Studies for 2011, the recipient of the May Brodbeck Humanities fellowship for 2019, the 2020 winner of the Brophy prize for best article in legal history published in the American Journal of Legal History, and the 2022 UI Scholar of the Year. She is a life fellow of the American Law Institute, where she was active in the Restatement of Employment Law and the Restatement of Agency. She has been a member of the Wisconsin State Bar since 1978 and has lectured at universities around the world.