Princeton Weekly Bulletin May 11, 1998
Eight full professors join tenured faculty
At their April 25 meeting, the University trustees appointed the following faculty members to the tenured position of professor: Jonathan Cohen in Psychology; Anthony Evans in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Larry Peterson in Computer Science; Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe in Civil Engineering and Operations Research; Paul Steinhardt, Erik Verlinde and Herman Verlinde in Physics; and Bess Ward in Geosciences.
Cohen's field is cognitive neuroscience. His current research, he says, "focuses on the biological mechanisms underlying attention, working memory and language processing, and disturbances of these in schizophrenia. Our work involves both the development of computer simulation models and their use to explore the influence of biological variables on behavior, and the testing of normal subjects and psychiatric patients using cognitive tasks as well as measures of brain function such as PET and functional MRI."
Cohen earned his 1977 BA in biology and philosophy at Yale University and his 1983 MD at the University of Pennsylvania; he did his internship and residency in psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990 and was appointed assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1989 and at Carnegie Mellon in 1990. He became director of the joint Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in 1992 and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1995 and at Carnegie Mellon in 1996.
Coauthor of many journal articles and papers, Cohen currently has a book on "Methods in Cognitive Neuroscience" under contract.
Evans, a specialist in solid mechanics and materials, is interested in "the mechanical properties and processing of advanced structural materials, including fracture, deformation, creep, fatigue, erosion, wear, impact damage and reliability, as well as sintering, consolidation and thin films."
He has been Gordon McKay Professor at Harvard since 1994, holding a joint appointment as Alcoa Professor and codirector of the High Performance Composites Center in the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1985.
Evans earned his 1964 BSc and his 1967 PhD in metallurgy at Imperial College, London. He was a project leader at AERE Harwell from 1968 to 1971 and at the National Bureau of Standards from 1971 to 1974 and a group leader and principal scientist at Rockwell International Science Center from 1974 to 1978. He then spent seven years as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley before going to Santa Barbara.
Author of nearly 400 publications in technical journals, Evans is a member of the Materials Research Council and a fellow of the American Ceramic Society. He has won numerous awards, including the 1994 Griffith medal and Prize of the UK Institute of Materials.
Peterson works in the areas of computer networking, operating systems and computer architecture.
A 1979 graduate of Kearney State College in Nebraska, Peterson received his MS in 1981 and his PhD in 1985 from Purdue University. He joined the faculty of the University of Arizona as assistant professor, was promoted to associate in 1991 and full professor in 1995. Since 1996 he has been head of his department. In 1995 he received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the university.
Associate editor of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems since 1990, Peterson is coauthor with B. Davie of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (1996) and of several book chapters, in addition to some three dozen published articles and papers. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Rodriguez-Iturbe specializes in hydrologic engineering, including analysis, synthesis and sampling of hydrologic processes; stochastic modeling of natural phenomena; hydrogeomorphology; and hydroclimatology. He has been Gregory Professor of Engineering and head of civil engineering and operations research at Texas A&M University since 1993. He was previously professor at Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela for 20 years, serving terms as dean of research and dean of graduate studies.
Rodriguez-Iturbe earned his certificate in engineering at the University of Zulia in 1963, his MS at California Institute of Technology in 1965 and his PhD at Colorado State University in 1967. Appointed associate professor at Colorado State, he went to Zulia a few months later as associate professor and then joined the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Investigations as associate researcher in 1969. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was associate professor from 1971 to 1973 and associate head of the Water Resources Division from 1973 to 1975.
Among his publications are Fractal River Basins: Chance and Self-Organization (coauthored with A. Rinaldo, 1996) and Random Functioning and Hydrology (with R. L. Bras, 1985, 1993), coedited volumes on Scale Problems in Hydrology (1983, 1986); Rainfall Fields: Estimation Analysis and Prediction (1987); and nearly 150 journal articles and papers.
Steinhardt, a cosmologist, has been Mary Amanda Wood Professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1989. His work, he says, spans problems in particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology and condensed matter physics, with a major focus on the inflationary model of the universe, ranging from "highly theoretical work on the properties of elementary particles and super strings related to cosmology to the study of astrophysical observations that test cosmological models." In the area of condensed matter physics, he studies glassy solids and quasicrystals.
Steinhardt joined the Penn faculty in 1981 as assistant professor, was promoted to associate in 1983 and full professor in 1986. He earned his 1974 BS at Caltech and his 1975 MA and 1978 PhD at Harvard University. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Institute for Advance Study three times.
Author of four books, including Quasicrystals: The State of the Art (1991, with a new edition in preparation for 1998), Steinhardt has also published some 130 journal articles, as well as articles for popular science books and magazines. He holds three patents on methods and apparatus for eliminating moiré interference using quasiperiodic patterns.
Particle theorists Erik and Herman Verlinde, who are twins, both earned their PhDs at the University of Utrecht in 1988. Their specialty is string theory.
At the Institute for Advanced Study from 1988 to 1993, E. Verlinde was as postdoctoral researcher for one year and then a researcher. He returned to the University of Utrecht as associated researcher in 1993 and became professor there in 1996.
Named a permanent staff member of the European Center of Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1993, E. Verlinde has held fellowships from the Sloan Foundation and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. He is the author or coauthor of 35 articles in professional journals.
H. Verlinde was a research associate at Princeton from 1988 to 1990 and assistant professor from 1990 to 1996. Since 1995 he has been professor at the University of Amsterdam.
He was the organizer of the Trieste Spring School on Strings and Quantum Gravity for three years and a lecturer there for five.
His work has been supported by fellowships from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Sloan Foundation and the Dutch Academy of Sciences. He currently holds a PIONIER Fellowship from the Netherlands NWO.
Biological oceanographer Ward is a 1976 graduate of Michigan State University who earned her 1979 MS and 1982 PhD at the University of Washington. Her areas of expertise include marine and global nitrogen cycle, molecular and immunological probes for marine bacteria and bacterial processes, microbial ecology, and xenobiotic transformations by bacterial communities.
Since 1989 she has been at the University of California, Santa Cruz, first as assistant professor, then as associate professor starting in 1991 and finally as professor and department chair, starting in 1995. Previously at the University of California, San Diego, she was a postgraduate research biologist for two years and assistant research oceanographer for five years at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She was also an associate member of the Center for Molecular Genetics at San Diego for four years.
Ward has participated in more than 30 research cruises and expeditions, serving as chief scientist on 10 of them; destinations have included the Arabian Sea, the Black Sea and Antarctica, as well as various regions of the Pacific Ocean. She is the author of some 50 articles in professional journals. Her research has received the support of the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research and U.S. Department of Energy. In 1997 she won the G. Evelyn Hutchinson medal of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography.
Appointments are effective July 1, except those of H. Verlinde, which began April 1; Cohen and Steinhardt, which begin September 1; Rodriguez-Iturbe, which begins February 1999; and E. Verlinde, which begins July 1999.
Promoted to the rank of associate professor
Four members of the faculty have been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure, as of July 1, 1998: Suzanne Marchand in history, Gideon Rosen in philosophy, Cecilia Rouse in economics and the Woodrow Wilson School, and Allan Rubin in geosciences.
Marchand, who specializes in the history of modern France, Germany and Austria, and European intellectual history, joined the Princeton faculty in 1992. She received her 1984 BA from the University of California, Berkeley and her 1986 MA and 1991 PhD from the University of Chicago.
Marchand is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and the Fate of Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (1996) as well as numerous articles and reviews. Currently David L. Rike Preceptor, she was James B. Conant Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard in 1994-95. She is in Berlin this semester.
Rosen, who is Jonathan Dickinson Bicentennial Preceptor, was a recipient of the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1997. His special ties are metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics.
After earning a 1984 BA from Columbia University, Rosen received his 1992 PhD from Princeton and was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan for a year before returning to Princeton in 1993. He is coauthor of A Subject with No Object: Strategies for Nominalist Reconstrual in Mathematics (with J. Burgess, 1997), and many articles and papers.
Rouse's fields are labor economics and public finance. She has written extensively about the links between education and income in the marketplace. Her 1996 study of the Milwaukee school-choice program and her study, with Claudia Goldin of Harvard, on the increase of women in symphony orchestras due to the introduction of blind auditions received considerable attention.
Rouse earned her AB in 1986 and her PhD in 1992, both at Harvard. Currently Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptor, she has been a Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and faculty research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research's Labor Studies Program.
Rubin's research combines field observations and theoretical analysis to understand the physical processes operating within the earth, particularly those concerning the movement of magma and crustal deformation. He has embarked on a study to obtain precise locations for the more than 10,000 microearthquakes that occur each year in Hawaii, research supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Dusenbury Preceptor in Geological and Geophysical Sciences from 1994 to 1997, Rubin earned his 1982 BA at Dartmouth College and his 1988 PhD at Stanford University. Forthcoming articles include "A reexamination of seismicity associated with the 1983 dike intrusion at Kilauea volcano, Hawaii" (with D. Gillard and J.-L. Got) and "Dike-induced earthquakes: Theoretical considerations" (with Gillard) in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Faculty reappointments
The following assistant professors have been reappointed for three years beginning July 1:
In Chemistry, Sonny Lee; in Computer Science, Jaswinder Singh; in English, Martin Harries; in History, Angela Creager, Mary Henninger-Voss and Tia Kolbaba; in Physics, Lydia Sohn, Shivaji Sondhi and Larus Thorlacius; and in Religion, Mark Larrimore.
The following senior lecturers have been reappointed, effective July 1:
In Romance Languages and Literatures, Margarita Navarro and Fiorenza Weinapple for five years; in Near Eastern Studies, Erika Gilson for three years; and in Molecular Biology, Edith Postel for one year.
Resignations
The following faculty members have submitted their resignations.
Effective April 16: Assistant Professor of Physics Alan Schwartz, to accept a position at the University of Cincinnati.
Effective July 1: Assistant Professor of Mathematics Cynthia Curtis-Budka, to go to the College of New Jersey; Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures Thomas Pavel, to accept a position at the University of Chicago; Assistant Professor of Mathematics Fernando Rodriguez-Villegas, to go to the University of Texas, Austin; and Professor of Anthropology Kay Warren, to go to Harvard University.
Effective September 1: Senior Lecturer in Romance Languages and Literatures Karen McPherson, to accept a position at the University of Oregon; and Assistant Professor of Mathematics Daniel Sanders, to go to Renaissance Technologies.