From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, February 3, 1997
Politics, Chemistry gain faculty
At the quarterly meeting on January 24, the trustees approved the following faculty appointments.
Tenured faculty
Stephen Holmes was appointed professor of politics and Michael Hecht was promoted to associate professor of chemistry, effective July 1.
Holmes, a specialist in political theory, graduated from Denison University in 1969 and earned MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from Yale University. After teaching at Yale and at Wesleyan University, he joined Harvard's Department of Government faculty in 1979. In 1985 he became associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago and in 1989 professor of political science and law.
Holmes is author of Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1984), The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993) and Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (1995), as well as many articles. Editor in chief of East European Constitutional Review , he is also a director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe at the University of Chicago Law School.
Hecht came to Princeton as associate professor in 1990. He studies protein design, using combinatorial methods to make new proteins. This means, he says, "We can make entire libraries of de novo proteins and then look among them for individuals with particular properties."
His research has been supported by, among others, the Whitaker Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He won a Beckman Young Investigator Award in 1993.
A 1977 graduate of Cornell University, Hecht earned his PhD from Massachuetts Institute of Technology in 1984 and did postdoctoral work at Duke University before joining the University faculty as assistant professor in 1990.
He is the author or coauthor of numerous book chapters and scientific articles. Among his contributions to the study of protein design is "Protein Design by Binary Patterning of Polar and Non-Polar Amino Acids," written with S. Kamtekar et al., which appeared in Science in 1993.
At Princeton he teaches Physical Chemistry and a graduate course in Principles of Macromolecular Structure.
Promoted to professor
Promoted to professor are Jeremy Goodman and David Spergel in Astrophysical Sciences, Beatrice Longuenesse in Philosophy and Christina Paxson in the Woodrow Wilson School.
Goodman, who earned his PhD from Princeton in 1983, teaches Structure of the Stars (for undergraduate and graduate students) and a graduate seminar in Theoretical Astrophysics, among other courses. A student of stellar dynamics, he is particuarly interested in the nuclei of nearby galaxies. His current interests center on waves and turbulence in accretion disks and in close binary stars.
Goodman joined the faculty in 1987 as assistant professor, becoming associate professor in 1990. He was a David and Lucille Packard Fellow from 1988 to 1993.
Spergel is a theoretical astrophysicist whose research interests include galactic structure, dark matter, the origin of large-scale structure and the physics of the microwave background radiation. A member of the Class of 1982, he earned his PhD at Harvard in 1985. He came to the University as assistant professor in 1987 and became associate professor in 1992.
Spergel is part of a team of scientists at Princeton and Goddard Space Flight Center who are building the Microwave Anisotropy Probe scheduled for launch in the fall of 2000. Among the courses he teaches at Princeton are Topics in Modern Astronomy, and Interstellar Matter and Star Formation. He is a faculty fellow and undergraduate adviser at Forbes College.
Longuenesse studies and teaches Kant and post-Kantian Continental philosophy. A visiting associate professor in 1993, she was appointed associate professor at Princeton in 1994. Author of two books on Kant
and one on Hegel, she is at work on a commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason , to appear in German and English; a study of modal categories in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy; and an analysis of the notions of "subject" and "subjectivity" in recent continental philosophy.
Her doctorate is from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.
Paxson, who earned her PhD from Columbia University in 1987, studies economic development and applied microeconomics. Her research includes such topics as household savings, consumption and income inequality, and poverty.
Appointed lecturer at Princeton in 1986, Paxson became assistant professor of economics and international affairs in 1987 and associate professor in 1994. She teaches, among other courses, Population and Development.
The appointments of Longuenesse and Spergel are effective February 1; those of Goodman and Paxson are effective July 1.