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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.