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Date: March 24, 1997
Princeton Appoints Nobel-Prize Winning Physicist
Dean of Faculty
Princeton, N.J.--Princeton President Harold T. Shapiro announced
today that Joseph H. Taylor, James S. McDonnell Distinguished
University Professor of Physics, will become Princeton's dean of the
faculty effective July 1. Taylor, who has been a member of the
Princeton faculty since 1980, shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in
Physics.
"We are very fortunate to have attracted such an eminent scientist
and respected teacher to serve as our next dean of the faculty," said
Shapiro. "Professor Taylor is widely admired among his colleagues for
his long-term commitment to the University and its programs. I look
forward to this opportunity to work with him to continue to support
and strengthen Princeton's faculty and academic programs."
Said Taylor, "Princeton has been very good to me, and for me, over
the years. I believe that we have developed an extraordinary
intellectual environment here, and I'm looking forward to making a
serious personal re-investment toward strengthening it further. I'm
especially attracted by the challenges of keeping Princeton the very
best, in fields where it already is, and of working to make it that
way where it is not."
Taylor, who enjoys teaching undergraduate as well as graduate
students, says that his favorite course to teach is the freshman
physics course for prospective majors. He has used some of his prize
money to make a contribution to Princeton to set up a fund to support
graduate students in physics.
Taylor was recommended by a faculty search committee, which consisted
of the members of the faculty committee on appointments and
advancements and was chaired by Provost Jeremiah P. Ostriker. Taylor
succeeds Amy Gutmann, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of
Politics, as dean. Gutmann announced her decision last November to
return to her work in the Politics Department and the University
Center for Human Values.
Taylor has devoted his life's work to making the ingenious and
painstaking measurements that have provided spectacular experimental
confirmation of general relativity theory using the first binary
pulsar system discovered in 1974 and several others, which Taylor's
group subsequently discovered.
Born in Philadelphia, Pa., on March 29, 1941, Taylor received his
1963 B.A. in physics from Haverford College and his 1968 Ph.D. in
astronomy from Harvard University. He joined the University of
Massachusetts faculty as an assistant professor in 1969 and was
promoted to associate professor in 1973 and professor in 1977. He
became a professor of physics at Princeton in 1980 and was named to
the McDonnell chair in 1986. From 1977 to 1981 he served as associate
director of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory based in
western Massachusetts.
Taylor received the Dannie Heineman Prize of the American
Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics in 1980, a
MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1992.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the
American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
He has been active for years in the Princeton area Religious Society
of Friends (Quakers), and has served several terms on the board of
trustees of Princeton Friends School.