What makes a SuperAger?
August 7, 2025
Northwestern University professors Stephanie Edgerly and Sergio Rebelo have received the 20th annual Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship Award.
The Ver Steeg Fellowship supports the research of a tenured Northwestern faculty member whose work enhances the reputation of Northwestern nationally and internationally and comes with a one-time research grant of $45,000.
“Through their high-impact and innovative work, Professor Edgerly and Professor Rebelo make significant contributions to their fields, while enhancing Northwestern’s global eminence in research and education,” Provost Kathleen Hagerty said.
Stephanie Edgerly studies audience insight
A professor with a specialization in audience insight, Edgerly also is associate dean of research at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. She explores how features of new media alter the way audiences consume news and impact engagement. She is particularly interested in the mixing of news and entertainment content, how individuals and groups create and share news over social media, and how audiences selectively consume media. Recent projects have explored why people don't consume news and the varied ways that people make sense of the larger media environment.
Edgerly’s work has garnered several recent honors. In 2020, her article “Deciding What’s News: News-ness as an Audience Concept for the Hybrid Media Environment” won the outstanding article award in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. In 2018, her publication about patterns of news consumption among U.S. teenagers was a finalist for the same award. In 2019, she was awarded the inaugural Sharon Dunwoody Early Career Award from the University of Wisconsin.
In 2020, she was named the 19th recipient of the Walder Award for Research Excellence at Northwestern. She is the only journalism faculty member to receive the honor.
Sergio Rebelo focuses on how economic policy impacts growth
As MUFG Distinguished Professor of International Finance at the Kellogg School of Management, Rebelo focuses on macroeconomics and international finance, addressing topics such as the causes of business cycles, the impact of economic policy on growth and the sources of exchange rate fluctuations.
He previously served as chair of Kellogg’s finance department. He also is co-director of the Center for International Macroeconomics at Northwestern.
Rebelo’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the World Bank, the Sloan Foundation and the Olin Foundation. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research. He also has served on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the European Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Journal of Economic Growth.
