Nineteen new faculty members approved
By Karin Dienst
Princeton NJ — The appointments of 19 new faculty members, three as full professors and 16 as assistant professors, have been approved by the Board of Trustees.
The full professors are: Wallace Best, professor of religion and African American studies; Tera Hunter, professor of history and African American studies; and Maria Mavroudi, professor of history and Hellenic studies. Their appointments were effective July 1, 2007.
The assistant professors are: Elie Bou-Zeid in civil and environmental engineering, effective Feb. 1, 2008; Vera Candiani in history, effective Sept. 1, 2007; Kelly Caylor in civil and environmental engineering, effective Sept. 1, 2007; Sylvain Chassang in economics and public affairs, effective July 1, 2007; Ileana Cristea in molecular biology, effective Feb. 1, 2008; Benjamin Garcia in molecular biology, effective Jan. 1, 2008; Angel Harris in sociology and African American studies, effective Aug. 1, 2007; Christopher Herzog in physics, effective Sept. 1, 2007; William Jones in physics, effective Sept. 1, 2008; Ilyana Kuziemko in economics and public affairs, effective July 1, 2007; Sarah McGrath in philosophy, effective July 1, 2007; Andriy Norets in economics, effective July 1, 2007; Bhavani Raman in history, effective Sept. 1, 2007; Samuel Schulhofer-Wohl in economics and public affairs, effective July 1, 2007; Satoru Takahashi in economics, effective July 1, 2007; and Gerard Wysocki in electrical engineering, effective Feb. 1, 2008.
Candiani, Caylor, Chassang, Harris, Herzog, Jones, Kuziemko, McGrath, Norets, Raman, Schulhofer-Wohl and Takahashi have three-year appointments; Bou-Zeid, Cristea, Garcia and Wysocki have appointments for three and a half years.
Best joined the Princeton faculty from Harvard Divinity School, where he taught from 2004 to 2007, becoming an associate professor in 2006. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the University of Virginia for four years.
His research and teaching focus on African American religious history. His book “Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion in Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2005 and won that year’s Illinois State Historical Society Award for publications. He also has published numerous journal articles and book chapters.
A graduate of Washington Bible College, Best received a master’s degree from Wheaton College and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University.
Hunter specializes in African American history. Her recent research has focused on slave and free black marriages in the 19th century. She is the author of “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War,” which has received several awards, including the H.L. Mitchell Award in 1998 from the Southern Historical Association and the Letitia Brown Memorial Book Prize in 1997 from the Association of Black Women Historians.
Hunter came to Princeton from Carnegie Mellon University, where she had been an associate professor since 1996 and had served as the associate director of the Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy since 2000. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for six years, becoming an associate professor in 1996.
She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her Ph.D. from Yale University.
Mavroudi received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004 for her work on Byzantine history and philology. She joined the Princeton faculty from the University of California-Berkeley, where she had been an associate professor since 2005, after three years as an assistant professor. From 2001 to 2002 she was a postdoctoral fellow in Hellenic studies at Prince-ton, and prior to that, a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks research center in Washington, D.C., for one year.
Mavroudi’s interests in Byzantium — an empire spanning A.D. 395 to 1453 — include intellectual history, the recycling of ancient tradition between Byzantium and Islam, bilinguals and the Middle Ages, occult science in Byzantium and the survival and transformation of Byzantine culture after 1453. She is the author of “A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of ‘Achmet’ and Its Arabic Sources,” and has translated a second-century A.D. manual on dream interpretation from classical into modern Greek.
She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Thessaloniki in Greece and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Bou-Zeid, who specializes in hydrology, will come to Princeton from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he is a postdoctoral researcher. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the American University of Beirut and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
Candiani, a specialist in colonial Latin America, earned her bachelor’s degree and her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. She was a lecturer at California State University-Hayward from 2005 to 2006.
Caylor, whose field of specialization is ecohydrology, came to Princeton from Indiana University, where he had been an assistant professor since 2005. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. From 2003 to 2005 he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton.
Chassang, who specializes in microeconomic theory and game theory, earned his bachelor’s degree from Ecole Normale Supérieure, two master’s degrees from Paris XI University and the Paris School of Economics, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cristea studies mass spectrometry. She will come to Princeton from Rockefeller University, where she is a postdoctoral fellow. She earned her diploma from Spiru-Haret University of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania, and her master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, England.
Garcia, whose field is mass spectrometry, will come to Princeton from the University of Illinois, where he is a postdoctoral fellow. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California-Davis and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.
Harris specializes in public policy analysis and race and ethnicity. Since 2006 he has been an assistant professor at the University of Texas-Austin and, a year before that, a research fellow at the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. His bachelor’s degree is from Grambling State University, and his master’s degree is from Kansas State University.
Herzog, whose field is particle theory, joined Princeton from the University of Washington, where he had been a research associate since 2005. For three years prior, he was a research fellow at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in 2002.
Jones, who specializes in cosmology, is a 1998 Princeton graduate. He received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, where he was a postdoctoral scholar from 2005 to 2006. Currently, he is a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Kuziemko studies public finance and labor economics. She received two bachelor’s degrees — one from Harvard University and one from Oxford University. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard.
McGrath specializes in ethics and metaphysics. She joined the Princeton faculty from Brandeis University, where she had been an assistant professor since 2005. For three years before that, she was an assistant professor at the College of the Holy Cross. McGrath earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, her master’s degree from Tufts University and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Norets studies econometrics and microeconomics. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the National Technical University of Ukraine, his master’s degree from the Kiev-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine and his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.
Raman specializes in modern South Asia. She has a bachelor’s degree from Delhi University and two master’s degrees from Jawaharlal University, India, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Schulhofer-Wohl specializes in macroeconomics and applied econometrics. He received his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Takahashi studies microeconomic theory and game theory. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tokyo and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Wysocki, whose field of specialization is laser-based systems and sensors, will come to Princeton from Rice University, where he has been a postdoctoral fellow and a lecturer since 2003. He received his master’s degree from Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland, and his Ph.D. from Johannes Kepler University, Austria.
