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Date: June 1, 1999
Four Faculty Members Receive President's Teaching Awards
Princeton, N.J. -- Recipients of the 1999 President's Awards for Distinguished Teaching were David Bernstein, assistant professor of Civil Engineering and Operations Research; Victor Brombert, Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature; John McPhee, lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Ferris Professor of Journalism; and Daniel Rubenstein, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Bernstein taught at MIT before joining the Princeton faculty in1994. A transportation modeler and expert in optimization, he received his BA from the State University of New York, Binghamton, his MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. At Princeton he has taught The Science and Technology of Decision Making, Electronic Commerce and Nonlinear Optimization.
Brombert, a specialist in French literature of the19 th and 20th centuries, teaches Modern European Authors, among other courses. At Princeton since 1975, Brombert has also directed the Gauss Seminars in Criticism for 10 years and is a past chair of the Council of the Humanities. Brombert earned his BA, MA and PhD at Yale University. He chaired the Department of Romance Languages at Yale before coming to Princeton.
McPhee has been a member of the Princeton faculty since 1975 and is known for his very popular course, The Literature of Fact. He won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Annals of the Former World, a study of North American geology, which is the most recent of some 25 works of nonfiction. A member of the Princeton Class of 1953, McPhee spent a postgraduate year at Magdalene College, Cambridge University.
Rubenstein, chair of his department, is a specialist in animal behavior. He received his BS from the University of Michigan, his PhD from Duke University and an MA from King's College, Cambridge. He was a research fellow at Cambridge before joining the Princeton faculty in 1980. He regularly teaches behavioral ecology and an introductory biology course to non-science majors.
The President's Awards were established in 1991 by gifts from Lloyd Cotsen '50 and John Sherrerd '52.