The University of Chicago Diversity & Inclusion

Her work also is a quest for solutions to social problems. Gilliam, chief of Family Planning and Contraceptive Research and head of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology at the University of Chicago Medical Center, believes attending to teens’ reproductive health issues can help overcome the barriers to education and careers that arise when teens have children.

“It’s the thing that takes a perfectly healthy adolescent and completely changes her life trajectory, and I became fascinated by that,” Gilliam says. “There are so many developmental milestones that have to be achieved during adolescence, and when they are interrupted by pregnancy and parenting, it is a disservice to the teen as well as the child.”

Gilliam has become a national leader on teen pregnancy reduction, including advising the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on preventive services for adolescents. Her research interests range from how adolescent girls can access high-quality health care, to the role of social perceptions in teen pregnancies. That includes the perceptions of doctors on how teens should behave, as well as how teens perceive pregnancy and their own potential in life. Often, she says, young men and women with few plans for the future choose not to use contraception.

Broad Training Spurs Multidisciplinary View

“Growing up in poverty and not having great expectations for your future make it so that some teens even desire pregnancy,” Gilliam says. Broad Training Spurs Multidisciplinary View

A native of Washington, D.C., Gilliam graduated from Yale University with a degree in English literature before getting a master’s in philosophy and politics from the University of Oxford. She earned her MD from Harvard Medical School in 1993, and finally a master’s in public health from the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in epidemiology and biostatistics. She recently received a Research Project Grant from the Office of Population Affairs and has worked in family planning for 10 years.

Her work often delves into the complex nature of teen pregnancy, recognizing that it has many social causes and effects. One of her research interests is the contraceptive and social behavior of first-time adolescent mothers after childbirth. She also studies the long-term effects of teens becoming parents.

“If you’re a child born to a teenage mother, you are more likely yourself to become a teenage mother, and you’re more likely to live in a resource-poor setting,” Gilliam says. “So there is a generational effect.”

Dr. David Meltzer, director of the University’s Center for Health and the Social Sciences, says Gilliam’s work charts an intriguing course by exploring how a host of biological and social forces affect young women’s reproductive health choices. The significance of social science for such situations is sometimes overlooked, he says.

A ‘Visionary’ Approach to Social Problems

“Some people think about contraception as a biological phenomenon, but the biology only works if the people want it to and let it,” Meltzer says. “Melissa’s work shows beautifully how the effectiveness of contraception and other reproductive choices that women make is affected by a broad array of social forces.” A ‘Visionary’ Approach to Social Problems

Dr. Debra Stulberg, an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine, calls Gilliam a “visionary” who approaches challenging problems from creative perspectives, which are often influenced by the diversity of thinkers she brings together to help create solutions. Stulberg described a recent workshop in which Gilliam included an economist who runs field experiments on social and behavioral interventions.

“That is not something that we typically do in the world of medical research,” Stulberg says. “Usually, we give people a medication or a drug or we give them a survey to see what they know about something. But to bring someone to the table who would look at, for example, is it better to pay people to take their birth control pills, just to think that way, is just amazing.”

Gilliam plans to take her research in even more innovative directions, including looking at the role new digital media can play in health promotion for young people, particularly urban youth. The new project is not simply about sex education, Gilliam says, but rather about collaborating with youth to create knowledge and tools for health decisions. That, in turn, will lead to better sexual health choices.

“Teaching young people about their health has many implications for some of the problems we see later in life, sexual assault, and problems in gender relationships,” Gilliam says. “I think we sometimes get overly caught up in the controversial aspects of [sex education], and we forget some of the basic aspects, such as teaching youth how to treat one another in a respectful way and to respect differences, which are very simple lessons, but I think kids need to hear them.”

In its shadow stands Wu Hung, a giant in the world of contemporary Chinese art, who inspired longtime friend Sui Jianguo—China’s most prominent sculptor—to create the piece for an exhibit of Chinese sculpture in Millennium Park.

A Beijing native who has deep roots in the city’s artistic avant-garde, Wu, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and East Asian Languages & Civilizations, has known many of his country’s most important artists for decades. He visited them in China and was crucial in bringing four monumental pieces by the country’s most famous sculptors to Chicago.

One of the foremost champions of Chinese modern art since the 1980s and a curator who has introduced China’s bold aesthetic to the West, Wu was the “obvious” choice when the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs needed an exhibit co-curator for a new downtown exhibit called “A Conversation with Chicago: Contemporary Sculptures from China.”

“He is the star curator of contemporary Chinese art,” says co-curator Lucas Cowan, Millennium Park’s visual arts coordinator. “It would have been shameful if I didn’t have him do this.”

A Passion for Chinese Contemporary Art

The son of a Shakespearean scholar, Wu studied art history at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. During the last years of the Cultural Revolution, he worked in the Palace Museum, more familiarly known as The Forbidden City, living in a small house against the outer wall.

“There was a strange contradiction,” says Wu. “Inside, I was dealing with ancient carvings and imperial artifacts, and outside there was the political environment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

Wu’s field is traditional Chinese art. His other passion, as becomes clear during an impromptu exhibit tour in Millennium Park, is the art of contemporary China.

Tall and with a shock of thick, dark hair, Wu stands amid the sculptures and speaks passionately about bringing to Chicago the kind of work that can draw the attention of the art world. He also talks about the ideas he hoped to convey through the installation.

“This show is a conversation between the artists in China and the people of Chicago,” says Wu. “We are trying to capture the excitement and reflect a society in transition.”

As he planned the show with Cowan, Wu says he tried to identify sculptures of great artistic merit that were, at the same time, visually accessible and would have broad public appeal. He looked for works that also had a seriousness of content and meaning that would contribute to the “conversation” that he wanted to have with Chicago.

The sculptors were all very taken with the physical context of Millennium Park as a prominent public space, Wu says.

“Chinese artists work especially well in Millennium Park,” says Wu, who is also a consulting curator at the Smart Museum of Art. “They are known for very bold, very public kinds of statements.”

Back to Beijing

The Chicago exhibit includes Chen Wenling’s “Valiant Struggle No. 11,” which portrays cartoonish—“but not benign,” Wu points out—figures that illustrate the grotesqueness of unbridled greed and commerce. Zhan Wang’s “Jia Shan Shi No. 46” reimagines the Chinese scholar’s stone, a traditional symbol of contemplation and restraint, in nearly 30 feet of blindingly bright stainless steel. "Kowtow Pump," by Shen Shaomin, replicates working oil rigs from three eras, in a commentary on modern anxiety and the oil industry.

This summer, Wu is having a conversation of a different kind. He is back in Beijing with his wife, Judith Zeitlin, who is Professor in East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University. He is working with art critics to come up with critical standards for judging contemporary Chinese art.

“The art market was so strong it began to dictate artistic evaluation and criticism,” says Wu. “Now we are developing other criteria to define the concept of contemporary art and how in China to talk about its creativity and value.”

He spent a summer interning at a prestigious bank, where some colleagues based foreign exchange rates on a system they called “cholesterol pricing.” Their first quote to a client would be absurdly high, intended to see what the customer would tolerate.

“If the client didn’t immediately have a heart attack, that was the rate he got,” Rajan recalls. If the client objected, the agent would make a show of trying to procure a lower price. “It wasn’t the norm,” Rajan says, “but there was a sense that this was acceptable.”

Improving Financial Systems

Figuring out how to make financial systems work better has become a research mission for Rajan, now the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is widely regarded as one of the few economists who foresaw the financial crisis of 2008, identifying as early as 2005 the unsustainable banking practices that led to economic collapse. His latest book, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, warns that reforms have not addressed the underlying income inequality that helped cause the meltdown.

Rajan’s approach, shaped by his conviction that markets need oversight to make them fair, might seem at odds with a purely free-market outlook. Yet he says preserving the unique virtues of free markets is his true goal; an earlier book that Rajan co-authored with Chicago Booth professor Luigi Zingales was titled Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.

“Competition is central to the free enterprise system, but getting access to things like education, health care, and finance is also critical,” Rajan says. “We take for granted that everybody has the same opportunities, but they haven’t. And when people start out at very different levels and don’t have the same ability to take advantage of opportunities, they could turn against opportunity and try to shut things down for others.”

Forecasting the Crash

Many economists did not react warmly when Rajan first predicted that the financial system could be headed for a massive crisis.

In 2005 Rajan was on leave from Chicago Booth, when as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, he was among those invited to celebrate the legacy of the Alan Greenspan era. For his presentation, he asked his staff to gather data on the widespread use of new financial instruments, and the results took him by surprise: The new tools meant that banks had become riskier, not safer, over the past decade. The paper he delivered questioned the expansion of financial markets and warned of a “catastrophic meltdown,” drawing a storm of criticism.

When the market collapsed three years later, dragged down by some of those same risky financial instruments, it became clear that Rajan had been right. He says the real source of the problem went beyond reckless bankers and lax regulators—though those factors also played a role. Rather, the entire financial sector had come to rely on skewed incentives, without proper concern over pervasive risk-taking.

As Rajan told The New York Times in an interview earlier this year, “The signals were stuck on green when they should have been red, and the Ferrari of a financial system accelerated rapidly in the wrong direction.”

The Three Causes

Widening income inequality in the United States is one of three root causes behind the crash, Rajan writes in Fault Lines. With middle-class earnings stagnating, politicians who wanted to lessen the pain helped make borrowing and buying homes easier— particularly for low-income households—so people could afford to keep shopping. In addition, the fears engendered by the thin U.S. unemployment safety net ensure that job creation becomes priority one in downturns. But when private firms have other constraints holding them back, government and Federal Reserve stimulus can be excessive, as was the case from 2001 to 2004, Rajan contends.

Emerging markets like China readily supplied the goods, exacerbating already high trade imbalances, the second cause Rajan cites. The third is that the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an over-stimulated America and an under-consuming world.

Economists and political analysts alike have praised Rajan’s book. In October it won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award for 2010. Esquire called the book “especially fascinating because it mixes free-market Chicago School economics with good-government ideas straight out of Obamaland.”

In Chicago, Rajan’s colleagues welcome his success. Luigi Zingales, the Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at Chicago Booth, calls him “the best financial economist of our generation.”

In reviewing the book, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, senior lecturer in the Law School, said, “Rajan’s book stands out for several reasons: the author’s intellectual distinction, his academic and real-world involvement in the problems of finance and the macroeconomy, his global perspective, his search for the roots of the financial crisis in America’s growing economic inequality, and also his prescience.”

Rajan modestly says others also saw it coming. His concern now is how to make society more equitable and sustainable over the long term. “That’s what we should be thinking about,” he says, “because we can’t afford another collapse.”