Professors and associate professors
A faculty member's title reflects his or her status in the process of seeking tenure—a six-year probationary period in which the candidate's skills as a scholar, instructor, and researcher are evaluated by colleagues and department administrators.

Instructors who have been granted tenure include some 1,300 professors and associate professors at Iowa. Because the tenure process is so demanding, we count these individuals among our most distinguished instructors. They lead courses at the undergraduate and graduate level and allow students to help with research projects. Typically, these individuals are nationally or internationally recognized in their area of expertise.

Meet Some of Our Top Professors
Watch Faculty Video: Another Look at Iowa

UI faculty achievements
Iowa's faculty includes three Pulitzer Prize winners (journalism professor Steve Berry and Writers' Workshop faculty members Marilynne Robinson and James Alan McPherson), a Guggenheim Fellowship winner, and two National Medal of Science winners.

The faculty also is well represented in the nation's most prestigious scholarly institutes and academies:

• American Association for the Advancement of Science (34 members)
• American Academy of Nursing (24 fellows)
• Institute of Medicine (17 members)
• American Academy of Arts & Sciences (12 members)
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute (4 investigators)
• National Academy of Sciences (4 members)
• National Academy of Engineering (1 member)

A few recent accomplishments include:

• Tim Barrett, an adjunct professor and researcher in the UI Center for the Book won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship (commonly known as a "genius" grant) in 2009.
• Mathematics professor Philip Kutzko received a Presidential Award of Excelence in 2009 for his mentoring of minority students in mathematics, science, or engineering.
• Finance Professor Erik Lie was named one of 2007's most influential people in the world by Time magazine for his groundbreaking research on executive stock option backdating.

Assistant professors
Assistant professors are instructors in the process of seeking tenure. To become an assistant professor, an individual must show promising ability as a teacher and hold a doctoral degree or its equivalent in his or her chosen field. There are approximately 400 assistant professors on Iowa's faculty, teaching in virtually every academic area.