Princeton Weekly Bulletin April 19, 1999
Trustees name nine to tenure
At their April 9 meeting, the trustees approved nine appointments to the tenured faculty.
David Srolovitz was named professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and eight current faculty members were promoted to the tenured position of associate professor: Albert Bendelac, Edward Felten, Olga Hasty, David Howell, Naomi Leonard, Jaswinder Singh, Sandra Troian and Christian Wildberg.
Srolovitz, who is currently at the University of Michigan, has been appointed to MAE and the Princeton Materials Institute. His research studies, he says, "center on defects in crystals and the formation and evolution of microstructure and morphology. A major focus of this work is understanding segregation to surfaces and internal interfaces and the effects of such segregation on structural properties, interfacial phase transitions and thermodynamics."
A 1978 graduate of Rutgers, Srolovitz earned his 1981 PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a staff member at Los Alamos National Lab for three years before joining the faculty at the University of Michigan as associate professor in 1987. Promoted to professor in 1991, he was named Edward DeMille Campbell Professor in 1997.
He is coeditor of four books, including Modeling and Simulation of Thin Film Processing (1995) and Evolution of Thin Film and Surface Microstructure (1991), as well as nearly 300 journal articles, book chapters and brief communications, and he serves as editor in chief of the journal Interface Science and editor of the Modelling of Materials Book Series. His research has been sponsored by the US Department of Energy, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Office of Naval Research, among other agencies.
In Molecular Biology, Bendelac studies a type of immune cell called T lymphocytes. He is interested in why these cells develop into certain subsets. As part of this work, he says, he is describing entirely new modes by which the immune system recognizes antigens, the bits and pieces of invading organisms that trigger immune responses.
Edward Felton
Bendelac, who received his PhD from the Université
Paris-VII in 1992, is also a medical doctor. He earned his MD in
1985 and completed residency programs in Assistance
Publique-Hopitaux de Paris; he also has French master's degrees in
statistics and biochemistry. Before coming to Princeton as
assistant professor in 1994, he was a visiting scientist at the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Author of numerous scientific papers, Bendelac is a recipient of the Cancer Research Institute Investigator Award as well as research grants from the National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society and Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
In Computer Science, Felten's research focuses on computer security, particularly having to do with the World Wide Web. He is director of the University's Secure Internet Programming Lab. He has also done research in the areas of operating systems and parallel and distributed computing.
At Princeton as assistant professor since 1993, Felten has identified security flaws in Internet software. This past year, he testified for the US Department of Justice in its antitrust suit against Microsoft. He and G. McGraw are the authors of Securing Java.
Olga Hasty
Felten received his 1985 BS degree in physics from California
Institute of Technology and his 1993 PhD in computer science and
engineering from the University of Washington. He won a National
Young Investigator Award in 1994.
In Slavic Languages and Literatures, Hasty focuses on Russian 19th-century poetry and post-Symbolist poetry. She also has interests in Formalism, the Russian avant-garde, Nabokov and émigré literature, Russian drama, and Russian women writers.
A 1973 graduate of Vassar College with a 1974 MA from Brown University, Hasty earned her PhD at Yale in 1980. She taught at Dickinson College and Trinity College and was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania for four years before coming to Princeton in 1993 as assistant professor. She holds the Charles H. McIlwain preceptorship.
She is the author of numerous articles and several books, including America Through Russian Eyes (1988), Tsvetaeva's Orphanic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word (1996) and the forthcoming "Pushkin's Tatiana."
David Howell
In East Asian Studies and History, Howell specializes
in the social and economic history of Japan during the Tokugawa
and Meiji periods (1600-1890). His current projects include a book
on social disorder and intellectual entrepreneurship in the 19th
century.
Howell received his BA in history from the University of Hawaii, Hilo in 1981 and his PhD in history from Princeton in 1989. Assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin from 1989, he returned to Princeton as assistant professor in 1993.
Robert K. Root Preceptor, Howell is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Award. His publications include Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and the forthcoming "Geographies of Japanese Identity: Polity, Status, and Civilization in the Nineteenth Century." He has also published essays on the history of the Ainu people of northern Japan.
Naomi Leonard
In Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Leonard's
research focuses on the automation of mechanical systems using
nonlinear and geometric methods, "work that lies at the
intersection of the fields of mechanics and control," she says,
"with applications to problems in robotics, manufacturing,
transportation, medical systems and others." A special interest is
control of autonomous underwater vehicles for use in deep sea
exploration, marine archeology, and commercial undersea
projects.
A 1985 BSE graduate of Princeton, Leonard worked as an engineer in the electric power industry for four years, and then went on to earn her PhD from the University of Maryland in 1994. Appointed assistant professor of MAE in 1994, she was the winner of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1995 and an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 1998. In 1998 she became an associate faculty member of the Program in Applied and Computational Math.
Author of many scientific papers, she is coauthor with W.S. Levine of Using MATLAB to Analyze and Design Control Systems (2nd edition, 1995).
Jaswinder Singh
In Computer Science, Singh's primary area of research
is applications and systems for parallel computing, the technique
of using multiple computers together to solve complex problems. In
addition, he has developed computational methods for biological
applications, including protein structure determination in the
presence of uncertainty and probabilistic inference for disease
diagnosis, and has begun research in computational immunology to
simulate how the immune system reacts to invading substances.
Singh received his BS in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton in 1987, then went on to earn his 1993 PhD at Stanford, where he was a research associate before returning to Princeton as assistant professor in 1995. In 1997 he received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and was named a Sloan Research Fellow.
Author of more than 50 refereed journal and conference articles, Singh is coauthor with D.E. Culler of Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware-Software Approach (1998).
Sandra Troian
In Chemical Engineering, Troian studies the dynamic
behavior of free surface and confined liquid films with very large
surface-to-volume ratio. She has researched the mechanisms
responsible for various interfacial instabilities that restrict
transport behavior and lubrication in boundary layer flows. Her
research has practical applications to flow control in MEMS as
well as the delivery of lung surfactants to pulmonary airways, she
notes.
Troian has published more than 40 scientific papers, including a 1997 article in Nature that describes a new liquid on solid boundary condition that affects flow in ultrasmall geometries. Her research has been supported by DARPA and the National Science Foundation through a 1994 Research Initiation Award and a 1996 CAREER award. She recently received an Engineering Council Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
After completing her PhD at Cornell University in 1987, Troian did postdoctoral work in France. She joined Exxon as a senior physicist in 1990 and was industrial consulting professor at Stanford before coming to Princeton in 1993.
Christian Wildberg
In Classics, Wildberg's interests include classical
philosophy (especially Neoplatonism, Plato and Aristotle),
intellectual history of the 5th century BCE, ancient science and
cosmology, and ancient Greek religion.
Now appointed to tenure, Wildberg joined the Princeton faculty as associate professor in 1996 after a year as a junior fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. A graduate of Philipps University, Marburg, he earned his PhD at Cambridge University in 1984 and a Master of Theology degree at Marburg in 1985. He has also taught at the University of Texas, Austin and the Free University of Berlin.
Wildberg is the author of several books, including the forthcoming "Hyperesie und Epiphanie. Zur Bedeutung und Funktion der Götter in den Dramen des Euripides," Simplicius against Philoponus on the Eternity of the World (1991), John Philoponus' Criticism of Aristotle's Theory of Aether (1986) and Philoponus against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World (1987), as well as numerous articles. He also translated G.C. Stead, Philosophie und Theologie I: Die Zeit der Alten Kirche (1990) into German. Among his projects in progress is a translation and commentary on Aristotele's De Caelo.
Active in his department, Wildberg has served on the Ancient Philosophy Program committee, among others, and he is currently director of graduate studies in Classics.
Photos by Denise Applewhite