Emeriti Regents Professors

A Regents’ Professorship shall be awarded by the Board only upon the unanimous recommendation of the University president, the academic Provost, the appropriate academic dean, and three (3) other members of the faculty to be named by the president, and upon the approval of the Chancellor and the Committee on Academic Affairs (Board of Regents Minutes, October 2008). A Regents’ Professorship shall be granted by the Board of Regents for a period of three (3) years.

Consideration of the renewal of the professorship for a second three-year period shall be given by the Board of Regents upon recommendation of the president of the institution, the Chancellor, and the Committee on Academic Affairs. After a period of six (6) years the Regents’ Professorship shall be renewed at the discretion of the president of the institution (Board of Regents Minutes, August 2011).

Lauren Adamson

Each year, two Emeriti Regents’ Professors will be introduced through a brief bio.

Lauren Adamson

Dr. Lauren Adamson (died 2021) was Regents’ Professor Emerita of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences, Georgia State University. Dr. Adamson received her BA from Swarthmore College (1970) and her PhD from University of California, Berkeley (1977).

Her primary research focused on communication and language development, parent-child interactions, and early social cognition. Dr. Adamson continued to be an active researcher as a GSU Emerita. She and three colleagues were funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD/NIH) to describe how auditory joint engagement typically develops from twelve to thirty months and how developmental disorders including autism spectrum disorder affect this developmental process.

Dr. Adamson advised research groups adopting the Joint Engagement Rating Inventory and the Play Protocol (systematic observational methods) that she and Roger Bakeman jointly developed. These techniques are being used to generate reliable data in several cultural contexts and to assess parent effectiveness as they interact with children at risk for communication difficulty and language delay.

Hal McAlister

Hal McAlister

Hal McAlister is Regents Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Georgia State University where he founded the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) in 1983 and served as its director until he retired in 2015. He led the team that turned a dream for an astronomical interferometer into the reality of the CHARA Array, currently producing the world’s highest resolution images of the surfaces and close environs of stars.

During 2002–2014 he also served pro-bono as CEO of the Mount
Wilson Institute and Director of Mount Wilson Observatory, the site of the CHARA Array. In 2017, Hal was given the Michelson Prize by the International Astronomical Union for Lifetime Achievement in his field. He was named as a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society for 2022. During Hal’s academic studies at University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, Hal served as student assistant for the famous Czech astronomer, Karel Hujer, who became Hal’s lifetime mentor. At Hujer’s death, Hal inherited Hujer’s papers and in 2023, Hal, and a Czech physicist, co-edited a book about Karl Huger.