Sterling Professor

Sterling Professor, the highest academic rank at Yale University, is awarded to a tenured faculty member considered the best in their field.

In addition to financing the university's largest construction projects throughout the 1920s, including the Sterling Memorial Library and flagship facilities for many of its professional schools, Sterling stipulated the bequest would allow "to some extent, the foundation of Scholarships, Fellowships or Lectureships, the endowment of new professorships and the establishment of special funds for prizes.

[1][4] The first Sterling Professor was chemist John Johnston, who was awarded the rank in 1920, and was joined later that year by school administrator Frank E. Spaulding, biochemist Lafayette Mendel, and astronomer Ernest William Brown.

[2] The first woman to be named Sterling Professor was cell biologist Marilyn Farquhar, in 1987.

[1] After Farquhar left Yale in 1989, Middle English scholar Marie Borroff and geneticist Carolyn Slayman were the next women appointed, in 1991.