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Doolan
Name: Nancy Doolan.
Position: Administrator for the Center for Migration and Development in the Department of Sociology. Handling the travel plans and housing needs of visiting scholars. Submitting funding proposals to outside agencies and managing grants. Coordinating colloquiums, dinners, receptions and lectures.
Quote: ''I really enjoy working with the scholars who come here, helping them to get settled in and to navigate the resources on campus. Most of our visitors are from Latin America and Mexico, so I get to practice my Spanish with them.''
Other interests: Enjoying the theaters and art galleries in New Hope, Pa., where she lives. Studying for her master's degree in higher education administration at Villanova University. Attending soccer games with her husband, Dan, to watch their children -- Daniel, 8, and Maeve, 10 -- participate.
Briefs
Edgar Choueiri, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has been awarded the Medal of the Order of the Cedars, Rank of Knight, in his native country of Lebanon.
The president of Lebanon, Emile Lahoud, bestowed the honor at a ceremony in Beirut on Oct. 11 in recognition of Choueiri's contributions to the fields of astronautics and spacecraft propulsion. The ceremony, at which Choueiri was the sole honoree, was attended by more than 800 people and was followed by intensive media coverage in Lebanon.
In accepting the award, Choueiri said the honor carries a responsibility to play an active role in ''helping the youth of this rising nation to better appreciate the excitement, promise and rewards of careers in science and technology.'' Choueiri also emphasized the importance of values that are beyond the scope of science and ''are most critical to our humanness: compassion, ethics, charity, tolerance, justice and integrity.''
In addition to many newspaper, radio and television interviews, Choueiri gave technical talks on the use of plasma propulsion systems for the exploration of Mars. Choueiri joined the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor in 1996 and was promoted to tenure in 2002. He also directs the Program in Engineering Physics.
Emre Aksay, a visiting research fellow in molecular biology, has received a $500,000 grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to support his research on ''neural mechanisms for control of eye position.''
Aksay was among 11 early-career scientists selected by Burroughs Wellcome to receive grants under its ''Career Awards at the Scientific Interface'' program, which is designed to encourage research that bridges the physical or computational sciences and the biological sciences. Aksay, who received a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1997, is a member of the lab of professor David Tank in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.
The scientific journal Naval Research Logistics has established an annual ''best paper'' award in honor of Princeton mathematician Harold Kuhn and has given the first of the awards to Kuhn for a paper published in 1955.
The award was announced Oct. 25 at the annual meeting of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences in Denver.
In creating the award, the publishers and editors of the journal sought the paper best representing the journal since its founding in 1954. Kuhn, professor of mathematical economics emeritus, was selected for his classic paper ''The Hungarian Method for the Assignment Problem.''
According to the journal's citation, ''This pioneering paper set a style for both the content and exposition of many other algorithms in combinatorial optimization and also directly inspired the primal-dual algorithm for more general linear optimization problems.
''Professor Kuhn's enduring contributions to optimization, discrete and continuous, linear and nonlinear, from its earliest days in the 1950s, are legendary,'' the citation continues. ''He is a man who was in the right place at the right time, with the right stuff.''
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