From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, November 10, 1997


Board promotes, names two professors

At its quarterly meeting on November 1, the board of trustees promoted a member of the faculty to full professor, and appointed one new full professor.

Michael Celia

Michael Celia of Civil Engineering and Operations Research was promoted to professor as of July 1. A member of the faculty since 1989, Celia is a graduate of Lafayette College who earned his PhD at Princeton in 1983.

His research interests include subsurface hydrology and ground-water contamination, with an emphasis on computational methods for complex contamination problems. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on ground-water hydrology and computer simulation methods.

For 10 years editor of Advances in Water Resources, Celia chaired the 1996 Gordon Research Conference on Modeling of Flow in Permeable Media. He directs his department's Environmental Engineering and Water Resources Program.

Stephen Chou

The board of trustees also appointed one new full professor to the tenured faculty: Stephen Chou, Joseph C. Elgin Professor of Engineering.

Chou, who specializes in nano-technology, is currently professor of electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research involves the development of nanoscale electronic, optoelectronic and magnetic devices and the application of these devices in ultrafast and ultradense circuits and memories. He has developed a Pentium computer chip that reduces to one the number of electrons needed to store a bit of information.

A 1978 graduate of the University of Science and Technology of China, Chou earned a 1982 MS from the State University of New York, Stony Brook and a 1986 PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research associate at Stanford University in 1986-87 and a lecturer there in 1988, he joined the Minnesota faculty in 1989 as assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1992 and full professor in 1994.

Six patents

Since 1989, Chou has been principal investigator on grants totaling $6.7 million from five federal agencies and four private foundations and companies. He is the author or coauthor of more than 100 journal and conference papers and holds two U.S. patents and four patent applications.

He has been named a McKnight-Land Grant Professor, Packard Fellow and recipient of the IBM Faculty Development Award and the University of Minnesota's George Taylor Distinguished Research Award. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society, American Physical Society and Electron Devices Society.


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