From the Princeton Weeklyn Bulletin, June 9, 1997
Eight join tenured faculty
On June 2, the trustees appointed five full professors to the faculty: Dilip Abreu and Wolfgang Pesendorfer in Economics, Zhigang Suo in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Claudia Tate in English, as of July 1; and T. Kyle Vanderlick in Chemical Engineering as of February 1, 1998. The trustees also promoted three to the tenured rank of associate professor: Bernhard Keimer in Physics, and Michael Orchard and Mordechai Segev in Electrical Engineering.
Full professors
Abreu, a specialist in microeconomic theory, was previously a member of the Princeton faculty from 1990 to 1995, when he became a professor at Yale. He has worked extensively on the theory of repeated games, as well as problems of incentives and implementation and the pure theory of bargaining.
A 1975 graduate of Bombay University, Abreu received an MA in economics with a specialty in econometrics from the Delhi School of Economics in 1978 and then earned an MPhil in economics and mathematical economics at Oxford University in 1980. He was awarded a PhD in economics at Princeton in 1983. Appointed assistant professor at Harvard University in 1984, he became associate professor in 1987. He was promoted to full professor at Princeton in 1993.
Abreu has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and was a Sloan Foundation Fellow from 1988 to 1990. In addition, he has held fellowships at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota; Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley; Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and Russell Sage Foundation. In 1991 he was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society .
Pesendorfer, an expert in applied economic theory, is currently associate professor at Northwestern University. His research "applies game theory to strategic problems such as defining the conditions under which a player might establish a reputation that advantages his position in the market," he says. He also studies voting behavior, "particularly such questions as how information is aggregated in an election and how the availability of information affects strategic decisions about whether and how to vote."
A 1987 graduate of the University of Vienna, Pesendorfer earned his 1990 MA and his 1992 PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined the faculty at Northwestern in 1992 and was promoted to tenure in 1996.
He held a fellowship from the Austrian Ministry of Science in 1989-90 and currently holds a National Science Foundation research grant. He serves on the editorial board of the American Economic Review .
Suo, an expert in solid mechanics and materials, is professor of mechanical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on basic concepts in solid mechanics at several time and length scales, and their consequences in materials in technologies. Much of his work has centered on the elasticity of composite and layered materials, and on the mechanics of fracturing and decohesion.
He earned his 1985 BS at Xi'an Jiaotong University in China and his 1987 MS and 1989 PhD at Harvard. He joined UCSB as an assistant professor in 1989, became associate professor in 1992, received a joint appointment in the materials department in 1993, and was promoted to full professor in 1995. He has held visiting appointments at Brown University and the Max Planck Institute.
Suo has won research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Advanced Research Project Agency and the Office of Naval Research. He has held Research Initiation and Young Investigator awards from the NSF and was honored with the Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1994.
Tate, a specialist in African American literature, has been a full professor at George Washington University since 1989.
After earning her AB at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1968, she received her 1971 AM and 1977 PhD in English and American literature and language from Harvard. She became assistant professor of English at Howard University in 1977 and was promoted to tenure in 1983.
Tate is the author of Domestic Allegories of Black Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century (1992) and a forthcoming book on "Desire and the Protocols of Race: Black Novels and Psychoanalytic Theory." She has edited volumes of the writing of Katherine Tillman and Georgia Douglas Johnson, as well as an anthology, Black Women Writers at Work (1983), which has been republished in Great Britain, Mexico and Japan.
She has won postdoctoral fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, and held visiting appointments at the University of Delaware and the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University.
Vanderlick, a chemical engineer specializing in interfaces and complex fluids, has been associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1995. His interests include the molecular engineering of structured surfaces and coatings; adhesion and colloidal interactions; shapes, textures, and pattern formation; and phase behavior of insoluble monolayers.
Vanderlick earned a 1981 BS and 1983 MS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before receiving his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1988. After a year as a NATO postdoctoral fellow at the University of Mainz in West Germany, he joined the faculty at Penn as assistant professor in 1989.
He has been honored with Penn's Class of 1942 Endowed Term Chair, S. Reid Warren Jr. Award for Distinguished Teaching and Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has also held a fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, as well as a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the NSF.
Associate professors
Keimer, a condensed matter physicist, joined the faculty as assistant professor in 1992 after earning his 1991 PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spending a year there as a postdoctoral associate. Born in Germany, he received his vordiplom from the Technical University of Munich in 1985.
His research on quantum magnetism in yttrium barium cuprate semiconductors is supported by a fellowship from the Packard Foundation.
Orchard, whose field is signal and image processing, was a member of the faculty at the University of Illinois and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology for five years before coming to Princeton as associate professor without tenure in 1995.
A 1981 graduate of San Diego State University, he earned his 1990 PhD in electrical engineering at Princeton. In 1993 he received a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.
Segev came to Princeton as assistant professor in 1994. Named a Sloan Foundation fellow in 1995, he was recently elected a fellow of the Optical Society of America, which cited him for "the discoveries of photorefractive spatial solitons, self-trapping of spatially-incoherent and incoherent white light beams, and establishing the relation between nonlinear self-oscillation and order-disorder phase transition."
In the past three years Segev has taught classes in Optical Electronics, Nonlinear Optics and Electromagnetism, and participated in instructing an undergraduate lab course in Materials Science.
He is the author of more than 75 publications in refereed journals and four book chapters.