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

Melissa Lane has been appointed professor of politics, effective Aug. 1, 2009. The board also approved the appointment of three assistant professors for three-year terms: Daniela Campello Da Costa Ribeiro in politics and international affairs, effective July 1, 2009; Rodney Priestley in chemical engineering, effective Sept. 1, 2009; and Blair Schoene in geosciences, effective July 1, 2009.

Lane will come to Princeton from the University of Cambridge, where she has been a faculty member since 1994. Lane focuses on a range of topics in political philosophy and the history of political thought, including questions of security, democracy and authority, and issues such as the role of corporations in democratic theory and the ethics of surrogate motherhood.

Lane, a graduate of Harvard University, has special expertise in Plato’s political thought, which was the subject of her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge. She is the author of “Plato’s Progeny: How Socrates and Plato Still Captivate the Modern Mind” and “Method and Politics in Plato’s ‘Statesman.’” She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Australian National University and the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. She also worked as an aide to and speechwriter for President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica.

Campello will join the Princeton faculty after having recently received her Ph.D. from the University of California-Los Angeles. She is a specialist in political science and Latin American politics. Campello earned a bachelor’s degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and holds a master’s degree from the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro.

Priestley, whose research focuses on polymer materials, will come to Princeton following his appointment as a Chateaubriand Fellow at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris. He is a graduate of Texas Tech University and received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

Schoene, a specialist in geochronology and structural geology, currently is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Geneva. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College and holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.