The appointments of seven new faculty members have been approved by the Board of Trustees.

Howard Stone has been appointed professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Benjamin Morison has been named associate professor of philosophy, both effective Sept. 1, 2009.

The board also approved the appointment of five assistant professors: Sigrid Adriaenssens in civil and environmental engineering, for a three-and-a-half-year term, effective Feb. 1, 2009; Lisa Boulanger in molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, for a three-year term, effective July 1, 2009; Taryn Dinkelman in economics and public affairs, for a three-year term effective July 1, 2008; Germán Labrador Méndez in Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures, for a three-year term, effective Sept. 1, 2008; and Mala Murthy in molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, for a three-and-a-half-year term, effective Feb. 1, 2010.

Stone, whose research focuses on fluids and bioengineering, will come to Princeton from Harvard University, where he has been a faculty member since 1989. The author of more than 170 journal articles, in addition to other publications, he is a fellow and past chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics. He has received Harvard’s Joseph Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and Phi Beta Kappa Undergraduate Teaching Prize as well as a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.

Stone is a graduate of the University of California-Davis and holds a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.

Morison will join the Princeton faculty from the University of Oxford, where he has been a faculty fellow since 2001. He previously served for one year as a lecturer and three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford, where he also earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees.

Morison specializes in ancient philosophy and the philosophy of logic. He is the author of “On Location: Aristotle’s Concept of Place” and several other publications. Among his current projects are a monograph on the Roman philosopher Sextus Empiricus and a translation of Aristotle’s “Physics VI.”

Adriaenssens, who focuses on civil engineering, has been a faculty member at the Free University of Brussels since 2006. She previously was a senior project engineer at the Brussels-based consulting firm Ney and Partners, an engineer with London-based Jane Wernick Associates and a visiting fellow at the University of Mauritius. She earned her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

Boulanger will join the Princeton faculty from the University of California-San Diego, where she has been a faculty member since 2004 and where she earned her Ph.D. Previously she was a member of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and a postdoctoral associate at the University of California-Berkeley. A specialist in molecular mechanisms of circuit formation and modification in the mammalian brain, Boulanger holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a master’s degree from Wesleyan University.

Dinkelman focuses on development economics. She joined the Princeton faculty after earning her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. A graduate of Rhodes University in South Africa, she also holds a master’s degree from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Labrador arrived at Princeton after receiving a Ph.D. in a joint program of the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain and the Université Paris IV-La Sorbonne. A specialist in the literature and culture of modern and contemporary Spain, Labrador is a graduate of the Universidad de Salamanca.

Murthy, who focuses on sensory coding and learning in drosophila (fruit flies), has been a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology since 2004. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.