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H ONORS F ACULTY M EMBERS R ECEIVING E MERITUS S TATUS May 2015
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Page 1: Princeton Universitymlovett/emeritus/PU-Emeritus-2015.pdf · Three years later, he was promoted to associate professor of industrial engineering. He left Northwestern University as

Princeton UniversityHONORS FACULTY MEMBERS

RECEIVING EMERITUS STATUS

��May 2015

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The biographical sketches were written by colleagues in the departments of those honored.

Copyright © 2015 by The Trustees of Princeton University550275

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CONTENTS

Faculty Members Receiving Emeritus Status 2015

Steven L. Bernasek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

David Botstein. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Erhan Çinlar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Caryl Emerson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Christodoulos A. Floudas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

James L. Gould . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Edward John Groth III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Philip John Holmes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Paul R. Krugman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Bede Liu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Alan Eugene Mann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Clarence Ernest Schutt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Lee Merrill Silver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Thomas James Trussell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Sigurd Wagner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

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STEVEN L. BERNASEk

��P rofessor of Chemistry Steven L. Bernasek will transfer to

emeritus status on July 1, 2015, after 40 years on the faculty at Princeton. Throughout his career, his work has focused on studies of the fundamental dynamics of chemical reactions that occur at solid surfaces and interfaces. He has made significant contributions to the understanding of the surface chemistry of transition metal oxides, the dynamics of catalytic reactions on platinum and iron surfaces, the structures and mechanisms of formation of self-assembled monolayers, and the functionalization and modification of the surfaces of electronic device materials.

Steve was born in Kansas and was raised on a farm near Holton, Kansas. His early interest in science, especially chemistry, was encouraged by his parents, who provided “laboratory space” in a shed on the farm, perhaps to reduce the smells emanating from experiments first conducted in the basement of the farmhouse. Steve earned his Bachelor of Science in chemistry at Kansas State University, where he received his first exposure to actual research; he experienced the pleasure of seeing the results of his work in his first publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society while still an undergraduate. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of California–Berkeley in the laboratory of Gabor Somorjai. His work there exposed him to the excitement and complexities of studying surface chemistry, which formed the basis for his long research career at Princeton.

Steve joined the faculty as an assistant professor of chemistry in July 1975, after completing his dissertation earlier that year and a brief postdoctoral stint at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was promoted through the ranks, becoming professor of chemistry in 1986. His work over the years has addressed fundamental questions of the structure and reactivity of surfaces. He was among the first to use the tools of gas phase reaction dynamics, such as molecular beam

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scattering and detailed molecular spectroscopic characterization, to learn about the dynamics of reactions involving surfaces. His early study of N atom recombination on iron surfaces showed evidence of significant vibrational excitation of the nitrogen molecules produced, which opened up the fields of state-resolved and state-specific studies of surface reaction processes.

Steve’s work at Princeton over the years has been highly collabora-tive. A long-standing project with colleague Jeffrey Schwartz exam-ined the organometallic chemistry of oxide surface modification and of interfaces important in electronic device construction, and has resulted in joint mentorship of over 20 Ph.D. students. This work led to pub-lication of several highly cited articles detailing the surface chemistry of indium tin oxide (ITO) and methods for controlling the electronic properties of this important transparent electrode material. Collabora-tions with colleagues Giacinto Scoles and Andrew Bocarsly are also characteristic of his research work. During his time at Princeton, Steve mentored over 50 Ph.D. students, 25 senior thesis students, and 35 postdoctoral associates.

Steve has also provided extensive service to the scientific com-munity through his work with the National Science Foundation. He served as a visiting scientist at the foundation’s office in Washington for the academic year 1991–92, during which he managed the research portfolio in analytical and surface chemistry. He continued to manage this program for the NSF as an off-site, part-time program officer until 2007; he returned to the foundation in the fall term of 2014 as interim division director in the chemistry division. This work expanded his interests and pushed him to think outside of the more narrow focus of his own research, which has benefited the careers of several young researchers who got their starts with first awards from the programs he managed.

Steve taught a number of different courses during his time at Princeton, ranging from first-year chemistry courses through advanced undergraduate laboratories, and from physical chemistry courses to the graduate kinetics course. He has especially enjoyed teaching honors freshman chemistry, fondly referred to as Turbo-Chem, to groups of very enthusiastic first-year students. He has been an academic adviser in Rockefeller College for over 25 years, has served several terms as

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director of graduate studies in chemistry, was associate chair of the chemistry department for 10 years, and served a brief term as interim chair of the department. He has also been an active member of the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials.

Steve was awarded the American Chemical Society (ACS) ExxonMobil Award in Solid State Chemistry and the ACS Arthur W. Adamson Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Surface Chemistry. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the American Vacuum Society. Steve served as a visiting professor in the Department of Chemistry at the National University of Singapore (NUS) several times over his career, and he has had a long-standing collaboration with researchers there on the molecular modification of semiconductor surfaces.

On his retirement from Princeton, Steve will become the director of the science division of Yale-NUS College. Founded by Yale and the National University of Singapore, this is a new liberal arts college that is adjacent to the NUS campus; it will allow Steve to continue and expand his interactions with his colleagues in that country.

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DAVID BOTSTEIN

��D avid Botstein was educated at Harvard (A.B. 1963) and the

University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1967). He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, rising through the ranks from instructor to professor of genetics. In 1987, he moved to Genentech, Inc. as vice president–science, and, in 1990, he joined Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where he was chairman of the Department of Genetics. In July, 2003 he became director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Anthony B. Evnin ’62 Professor of Genomics at Princeton University.

David’s research has centered on genetics, especially the use of genetic methods to understand biological functions. His early work in bacterial genetics contributed to the discovery of transposable elements in bacteria and an understanding of their physical structures and genetic properties. In the early 1970s, he turned to budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and devised novel genetic methods to study the functions of the actin and tubulin cytoskeletons. In 1980, he began his theoretical contributions on linkage mapping of the human genome by suggesting, with collaborators, that restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) could be used to produce a linkage map of the human genome and to map the genes that cause disease in humans. Linkage mapping of human disease genes became one of the foundations of the Human Genome Project. David also participated in the sequencing the genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the first eukaryotic genome to be sequenced.

In the 1990s, David’s research focused on the emerging science of genomics. With J. Michael Cherry, he founded the Saccharomyces Genome Database, which continues to be a major international resource that connects genomic sequences with biological functions; in this role he contributed to the founding of the Gene Ontology Consortium. With Patrick O. Brown, he contributed to the development of DNA microarray technology, notably analysis methods

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that connect gene expression data with the biological functions of genes. Together they adapted microarray technology to classify and study human tumors, resulting in discoveries of tumor subtypes with distinct biology and clinical consequences.

As director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute, David led a team of faculty to develop the innovative new Integrated Science Curriculum (ISC), where the basic ideas of physics, chemistry, computer science, and biology, along with the relevant mathematics, are taught together. David also directed one of the national Centers for Systems Biology established by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). Under his leadership, a new graduate program, the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology, was established, as well as the Lewis-Sigler Fellows program for early career scientists. David is now the chief scientific officer of Calico, a startup that aims to take innovative, interdisciplinary approaches toward anti-aging and increased lifespan.

David was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and to the Institute of Medicine in 1993. He served on many policymaking and peer-review committees, including the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council study on the Human Genome Project (1987–88), the National Institutes of Health Program Advisory Committee on the Human Genome (1989–90), the Advisory Council of the National Center for Human Genome Research (1990–1995) and the Advisory Committee to the Director, National Institutes of Health (2003–2008). He has won several awards, including the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology (1978), the Genetics Society of America Medal (shared with Ira Herskowitz, 1988), the Allen Award of the American Society of Human Genetics (1989), the Dickson Prize in Science (1991), the Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research (1992), the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2003), the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (shared with Eric Lander and Francis Collins, 2010), the Dan David Prize (shared with Eric Lander and J. Craig Venter, 2012), and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013).

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ERHAN ÇINLAR

��E rhan Çinlar, the Norman J. Sollenberger Professor of

Engineering, and one of the pioneers in the field of stochastic processes, is transferring to emeritus status at the end of this academic year. Erhan is known for developing rigorous mathematical theories for stochastic models as well as for extensive service to Princeton and the probabilist community around the world.

Erhan was born in Divrigu, Turkey. His hometown did not have high school, but after a competition exam, he won a government scholarship that paid for a boarding school for his high school years. Afterward, Erhan won another scholarship and was sent to the University of Michigan in 1959. There, he studied industrial engineering and minored in engineering mathematics, taking BSE’s in both in 1963. He stayed there for graduate study, getting an M.A. in mathematics in 1964 and his Ph.D. in industrial engineering in 1965. Erhan was hired as an assistant professor at Northwestern University. Three years later, he was promoted to associate professor of industrial engineering. He left Northwestern University as a full professor to come to Princeton in 1985 as a professor of civil engineering. This was the time of the demise of the statistics department and Erhan transitioned from statistical science into the engineering school offerings.

Erhan’s early research focused on semi-Markov processes and renewal theory. He was one of the first to understand their importance in the analysis of queuing systems. He single-handedly developed the theory of Markov additive processes and Lévy systems. These have become mainstays of the modern theory of Markov processes. Later on, in the wake of the general theory of stochastic processes by the French probability school, Erhan uncovered the deep relationships between Markov processes and semimartingales in a series of three pathbreaking contributions published in 1981. Today, these results are taken for granted by young generations of probabilists. While Erhan’s

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research was laying the groundwork for some of the most theoretical developments at the forefront of research in probability, he was also contributing to the applications of stochastic modeling to practical engineering challenges such as the reliability of complex devices, fatigue crack growth, and mass transport by stochastic flows, to name a few. His uncanny ability to bring the beauty of the most abstract mathematical theories to bear on the solutions of practical engineering problems stood him apart throughout his long and successful career.

Erhan is also known for his extensive service to the probability community. He served on the board of directors of the Society of Engineering Science, and as associate editor of the leading peer review journals in applied probability and operations research. Also, Erhan served as editor-in-chief of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences’ journal Mathematics of Operations Research between 1987 and 1992, and as a member of the council of the Bernoulli Society, one of the field’s most prestigious international societies.

Erhan has authored several influential textbooks in the field of probability theory, including Introduction to Stochastic Processes, which was has been a classic in the field for over 40 years. His recent book on Probability and Stochastics is very well received, especially as a major text on Poisson random measures, Brownian motion, and Lévy processes. His recently coauthored book, with Robert Vanderbei, Real and Convex Analysis, is widely adopted as a required reading before graduate studies.

Erhan was elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1974 and of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences in 2003, and he received the Recognition for Eminent Research from the Bernoulli Society in 2012.

Over the years, Erhan organized many international conferences and research workshops. But his name will remain attached to the Seminar on Stochastic Processes, a yearly gathering of probabilists from around the world. Erhan initiated this seminar back in 1981. He controlled its destiny for more than 30 years. Being an invited speaker at one of these events is now an important landmark in the career of a probabilist, and a coveted recognition of success in the field. The list of past invited speakers is the Who’s Who of probability.

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Erhan’s vision, his organizational skills, his high standards, and his impeccable taste for quality made this event the prime showcase of research in probability. The tradition goes on and the seminar is, still to this day, a vibrant melting pot of research ideas: Erhan’s brain child will have a long lasting impact on generations of probabilists to come.

His University service includes being the director of the program of statistics and operations research, the chair of the Department of Civil Engineering and Operations Research, and the founding chair of the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering.

Students have repeatedly ranked Erhan’s undergraduate probability course, ORF 309, one the University’s most challenging. He is a highly skilled speaker, and his lectures are attended by students from all over the campus, as well as faculty eager to hone their skills in probability theory. He received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2010. On February 24, 2013, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Engineering Council in recognition of excellence in teaching, a distinction awarded only after five Excellence in Teaching Awards from the Engineering Student Council. He was made an honorary member of the Class of 2013. Erhan is an avid reader of ancient literature, especially Greek mythology, Chinese history, and Egyptian history. He also has a keen interest in the history of science and how it is reported. His prowess as a storyteller is enjoyed by students and colleagues alike.

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CARYL EMERSON

��C aryl Emerson grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, and then Rochester,

New York, where her father was a professor of theory and acoustics at the Eastman School of Music. When she was 11, her maternal grandmother brought her along on a visit to the Soviet Union, which had just opened up to tourism after Stalin’s death. That trip was to have an enormous influence on Caryl’s career; it was the first of 50 visits to a country that has never ceased to intrigue, inspire, and infuriate her.

As an undergraduate at Cornell, Caryl majored in Russian literature, graduating as valedictorian. She then received master’s degrees in Russian studies and Russian language teaching from Harvard. At that point, she felt that she could share her enthusiasm for the subject best by teaching on the secondary level and she took a job at the public high school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. After being reprimanded for organizing demonstrations against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, she left to teach Russian area studies at Windham College in Putney, Vermont.

Caryl spent two years in Putney, then decided to enroll in the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at the University of Texas in Austin, where she focused on Russian and German. Her dissertation, which became the basis for her first book, was a pioneering study of genre. She began with the historian Nikolai Karamzin’s account of the reign of Boris Godunov, then examined Alexander Pushkin’s play on this subject (for which Karamzin was his main source) and then Modest Musorgsky’s opera (which uses Pushkin’s drama as its libretto). The dissertation gives a sense of the far-reaching interests that would distinguish Caryl’s career: history and historiography, drama (both as text and performance), and music.

It was in graduate school that Caryl first encountered the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), a philosopher of language and imaginative literary scholar who had been ignored—when not actually

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repressed—in the Soviet Union. Caryl became an authority on his work. Her fluid translations of his dense prose (essays on the theory of the novel collected under the title The Dialogic Imagination, published in 1981, and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published in 1984) greatly facilitated the assimilation of Bakhtin’s work outside of Russia. Caryl’s translations and explications were major contributions in the “Bakhtin boom” in Western scholarship, which would extend beyond literary studies to fields as diverse as philosophy, theology, psychology, and anthropology.

After teaching for seven years at Cornell, Caryl came to Princeton in 1988 with a joint appointment in Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature. Since then, she has been a stalwart of both departments, directing at least 20 dissertations and countless undergraduate theses. She served as director of graduate studies and chair (for two terms) of Slavic. All the while she has managed to produce a steady stream of important books and essays. In 1990, she coauthored (with Gary Saul Morson) Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford University Press). In 1994, she co-authored (with Robert Oldani) Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations (Cambridge University Press). In 1997, Princeton University Press published her The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Two years later saw the appearance of her The Life of Musorgsky (Cambridge University Press). That same press then commissioned her to write The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature, which appeared in 2008. This was followed by a collected essays volume called All the Same the Words Don’t Go Away: Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition (Academic Studies Press, 2010). Her work has been translated into Russian, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean. She has also edited 10 volumes of essays or special issues of journals and written more than 100 scholarly articles, as well as hundreds of reviews and smaller pieces.

As a pedagogue, Caryl is remarkable for her energy, her detailed preparation, and her generous feedback. In addition to standard courses on individual writers on periods (including her legendary Tolstoy course), she has taught Russian language (!), Russian literary theory, the Eastern European novel, drama and dramaturgy

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of the early Soviet period, and Russian religious philosophy. Her fascination with the performing arts has led her to create numerous courses that were cross-listed with music and theater studies. These have twice been connected to University-wide initiatives comanaged with Simon Morrison (a former graduate student of Caryl’s, now professor of music): in 2006–07 a reconstruction of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s (aborted) 1936 production of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov with incidental music by Sergei Prokofiev, performed by an undergraduate cast of actors, singers, and instrumentalists on a modernist set designed in a Princeton School of Architecture graduate seminar, and in 2011–12 Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s stage adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (with the cooperation of the Program in Theater, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra). These productions were reviewed in The New York Times as well as in Russia and Japan.

Beyond her prolific scholarship and inspired teaching, Caryl has been an indispensable citizen of Princeton University, serving on numerous committees (Committee on Appointments and Advancements, Priorities Committee) and executive boards and committees (Princeton University Press, University Center for Human Values, Society of Fellows, Council of the Humanities). As the chair of the ad-hoc committee on the status of lecturers at Princeton (2005), she was instrumental in improving the fate of that crucial segment of the University’s teaching staff. When President Shirley M. Tilghman initiated a series of University lectures by distinguished faculty, Caryl was invited to give the first one. Caryl has also led alumni courses (including “Princeton Journeys”), given keynote lectures for pre-freshmen, and spoken at Princeton alumni clubs across the country.

Caryl is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading Slavists. Her scholarship has earned her fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies. She has won lifetime awards for “outstanding contributions to the field” from both national Slavic organizations: the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (language and literature), and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (area studies), in addition to awards for her individual books. She has likewise won numerous prizes for humanities at Princeton,

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including the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (1992), the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities (1997) and the Graduate Mentoring Award (2012). In 1995, she was named the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

It is a typical of Caryl’s generosity that she chooses to retire at this time. She is still producing excellent scholarship at a rate that would make junior faculty envious, and she is exploring new areas. Indeed, for her final course this spring she elected to co-teach (with Tim Vasen of the Program in Theater) a one-time-only course dramatizing the prose of the neglected Soviet writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, whom she has been championing for the last decade. In short, Caryl is not retiring from scholarly activity. She is retiring because she feels that in non-growth fields like the Slavic humanities, senior faculty should make way for the many talented Ph.D.s who face a difficult job market. As Caryl has stated, graduate students in the Russian field have never been better; we cannot continue to train them and then not move on ourselves.

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CHRISTODOULOS A. FLOUDAS

��C hristodoulos Achilleus Floudas was born on August 31, 1959,

in Ioannina, Greece. Attending the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, he received his Diploma of Chemical Engineering in 1982, and subsequently matriculated at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1986, under the guidance of Ignacio Grossmann. Chris joined Princeton as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering in 1986, being promoted to associate professor in 1991 and to professor in 1994, and was named the Stephen C. Macaleer ’63 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science in 2007. Concurrently, Chris was a faculty member in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics starting in 1990, and was an associated faculty member in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering starting in 2000. He also served as chemical engineering’s director of graduate studies from 1994 to 1998.

Chris’ research area is global optimization: deriving the best solution to a mathematical problem, in contexts as diverse as efficient heat exchanger networks in chemical plants, the folding of proteins into their three-dimensional structures, and the best feed and product distributions for producing liquid transportation fuels from municipal waste, biomass, coal, and natural gas. In a discipline where writing books is already unusual, Chris produced a remarkable number in his time at Princeton, including authoring the textbooks Nonlinear and Mixed-Integer Optimization: Fundamentals and Applications (1995) and Deterministic Global Optimization: Theory, Methods and Applications (2000), and coediting two editions of the massive Encyclopedia of Optimization (2001, 6 volumes; 2008, 7 volumes). He has published well over 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, a figure which continues to grow rapidly. His former Ph.D. students and postdoctoral associates have gone on to distinction in both academia and industry; Chris was recognized with Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award in 2011.

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Chris served as an anchor of chemical and biological engineering’s undergraduate curriculum, through the capstone chemical process design course, “Design, Synthesis, and Optimization of Chemical Processes” (CBE 442). This demanding course, for which Chris received Princeton’s Engineering Council Teaching Award in 1995, impressed upon students the complexity of designing an operable and profitable plant for the production of chemicals or fuels from a range of available feedstocks—a task all the more important today, with the resurgence of chemical manufacturing in the United States.

For his scholarship, Chris has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Professional Progress Award (2001) and the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award (2006) from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers; the Bodossaki Foundation Award in Applied Sciences (1997); Fellowship in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2013); and the Gold Medal of the Hellenic Operations Research Society (2015). He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2011, and to the Academy of Athens in 2015, and received an honorary doctorate from Abo Akademi University in 2014.

Upon transferring to emeritus status on February 1, 2015, Chris embarked on a new phase of his career as the director of the Energy Institute at Texas A&M University, and as the Erle Nye ’59 Chair Professor for Engineering Excellence within Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering. While he will be sorely missed by his Princeton colleagues, we wish Chris and his wife Fotini the best for their future endeavors in College Station!

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JAMES L. GOULD

��T hroughout his career, James Gould has studied how animals

behave. His early work focused on navigation and communication in bees, especially how dances in the hive directed others to food sources. Later he showed that bees used cognitive maps to develop routes from novel locations, over unfamiliar territory, to proven feeding sites. Jim has always been fascinated with the mechanisms of behavior and how the animal mind works. As a creative experimentalist and gadgeteer, Jim could always design the perfect experiment and associated technical tools for unambiguously teasing apart competing hypotheses.

Jim was a precocious undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, where he studied molecular biology, before immersing himself in the study of animal behavior in graduate school at the Rockefeller University with an award for graduate study by the National Science Foundation. After earning his doctorate in 1975, he immediately came to Princeton as an assistant professor, declining a prestigious Harvard Junior Fellowship to do so. At Princeton, he established the first fully integrated research program at the Stony Ford Center for Ecological Studies in the late ’70s. There he pioneered the input of tracking data into computers for analysis and experimental manipulation. A Rube Goldberg apparatus with giant, clear, acrylic plastic pulleys over the comb of a beehive was linked to Apple II game paddles by lengths of dental floss to record the orientations and movements of dancing bees. In another groundbreaking experiment, Jim dynamically canceled changes in the Earth’s magnetic field around an entire beehive to test the improvement that magnetic sense could make in bee orientation.

When he developed a dangerous allergic reaction to bee stings, Jim switched his focus to fish behavior, particularly the study of how females choose mates. Charles Darwin’s ideas on sexual selection, especially the role of female choice, were controversial. Jim, never

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shying away from a good debate, dove in and did some of the pioneering research showing how behavior magnified morphological features that impressed females. Subsequently, he and his wife, Carol, have written synthetic books on sexual selection and animal communication, with an extraordinary combination of technical rigor and rhetorical flair that enlightens both the general public and academic researchers. Jim’s research accomplishments have been recognized by various awards, including election to fellowship by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Animal Behavior Society.

In addition to being a masterful experimentalist, Jim has been an exceptional teacher and dedicated mentor. In the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), Jim has taught extremely popular courses in “Animal Behavior” and “Introductory Biology,” a feat not matched by many. His introductory biology text and his definitive text on animal behavior were the envy of their respective fields. For these many pedagogical accomplishments, Jim received the Carnegie Foundation’s New Jersey Professor of the Year in 1996 and the Animal Behavior Society’s Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award in 1997. Subsequently, Jim initiated the summer program in marine biology at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science (BIOS), which has enabled students to study abroad in a rigorous and challenging way, and has served as an outstanding gateway introduction and enticement for some of these students to join the EEB department. For others, it provided a unique and lasting introduction to science and biology for those who would join the world of educated non-scientists. Jim mentored more undergraduates then any other EEB faculty member and could always be counted on to ask just the right question—“Why couldn’t you do a manipulative experiment of this or that type to settle that point?”—at just the right time during a presentation or an oral examination. He served as departmental representative for over two decades, during which time he shepherded thousands of students through the department’s curricular maze and performed some impressively thoughtful rescues when an occasional student froze along the senior thesis path during the final year. Jim also led the way in

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getting an inordinate number of senior theses published so that their work would become part of the mainstream literature.

Outside of the department, Jim was an icon of the Princeton Writing Program, a senior fellow at Mathey College, one of the most engaging professors involved with Alumni Colleges and Princeton Journeys, as well as annual Alumni and Parents Days. He has always been the consummate professor embodying the Princeton spirit of scholarship and teaching, touching numerous lives at so many levels.

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EDwARD JOHN GROTH III

��P rofessor Edward J. Groth is retiring after 46 years at Princeton.

Ed was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1946. In high school in Scottsdale, Arizona, he was on the varsity tennis team and was the winner of several state math contests. A school newspaper reported that “Ed, who has been accepted at Caltech on the early decision plan, hopes to be a physicist.” He received his B.S. in physics in 1968 from Caltech and then came to Princeton to pursue his doctorate, which he received just three years later. He was then an instructor for a year, joined the faculty in 1972, received tenure in 1978, and has been at Princeton since. He has taught almost all of the undergraduate courses in the physics department and a number of the graduate ones. He served eight years as associate chair in physics and has been on a good number of University committees. He has been a faculty adviser in Rockefeller College since 1987. He is the Princeton representative on the Universities Space Research Association (USRA).

Ed’s Ph.D. was on the absolute timing of the Crab Nebula pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star. His adviser was Dave Wilkinson, but Ed also worked quite closely with Bruce Partridge (professor of physics and astronomy emeritus, Haverford College) and Paul Boynton (professor of physics, University of Washington). The measurement was made at Princeton’s FitzRandolph Observatory near the athletic fields. The two primary goals were to establish a set of absolute time references for tests of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and to search for the emission of gravitational waves. It turned out that this particular pulsar was not stable enough and indeed had glitches, or star quakes, a discovery on its own. (In 1974, Princeton’s Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor, then at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, discovered the famous binary pulsar. They used it measure the emission of gravitational radiation, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1993.) The Crab pulsar measurement was state of the art. It blended high-speed electronics

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with fancy algorithms for taking Fourier transforms of long sections of data.

In 1971, Ed and his colleagues wrote a paper with Paul Horowitz of Harvard and many other colleagues on comparing the pulse arrival times of the Crab as determined by four different observatories. They all agreed. They could have no idea that many years later, starting in 1999, Ed, Paul Horowitz, Dave Wilkinson, and Norm Jarosik would collaborate on comparing the arrival times of pulses. At this later date, though, the group—part of “Optical SETI,” the optical search for extraterrestial intelligence—was looking for possible optical signals sent to us from an advanced civilization. To many, it makes more sense for an extraterrestrial to send signals at visible as opposed to radio wavelengths. Needless to say, they did not find extraterrestrial signals correlated between observatories but it did lead to a revival of the FitzRandolph Observatory that included many local amateur astronomers.

Around the same time in the 1970s, Ed and Jim Peebles began a program to make cosmological N-body simulations in which galaxies containing billons of stars are treated as massive though point-like particles that interact gravitationally. This is now a huge field of study.

In the mid-1970s, Ed began to work with Jim Peebles and other colleagues on characterizing the spatial distribution of galaxies as determined by large astronomical surveys. The research continued through the late 1980s. With Bernie Siebers and Mike Seldner, they made large-scale maps of the Lick Observatory’s galaxy catalog of Donald Shane and Carl Wirtanen. A version of this appeared on the inside back cover of Stewart Brand’s The Next Whole Earth Catalog. Such surveys are now a major scientific endeavor. For example, large swaths of sky have been mapped with exquisite accuracy and depth by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

In the late 1970s, Ed was selected as the data and operations team leader for what became the Hubble Space Telescope. After launch in 1990, he was appointed the deputy principal investigator for the Wide Field and Planetary Camera and became one of the core group of people figuring out Hubble’s initial difficulties. He designed a survey of the sky that is now called the “Extended Groth Strip.” It’s located just off the end of the handle of the Big Dipper.

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Some 50,000 galaxies have been identified in the strip, and many astronomers are studying what can be inferred from them about how galaxies formed.

In an early analysis of the Groth Strip, Ed, his student Jason Rhodes, and colleague Alexandre Refregier made the first space-based detection of the “weak gravitational lensing” of galaxies. This is an effect in which images of distant galaxies are distorted a small amount, or “lensed,” by large concentrations of mass between us and the galaxies. To understand the effect, one needs the general theory of relativity. There are now proposals for satellite missions that have a major component dedicated to measuring just the lensing signal Ed and colleagues detected.

Ed freely shared the fruits of his labors and expected others to do so. He was a widely respected computer programming whiz. He wrote one of the early plotting packages, GPLOT, for the Fortran programming language and made it freely available. He designed fonts before they were commonly available. He was instrumental in starting the digital archive for the Hubble Space Telescope as recalled by Tod Lauer at a recent celebration, and he wrote some of the first programs to deconvolve the initial distorted Hubble images. Ed was in the vanguard of scientific computation and kept the Princeton group ahead of the competition for years.

Behind a sometimes gruff exterior, he was quick to help anyone at any level most anytime. After a heart attack, Ed became an avid bicyclist. In addition to his frequent multiday rides, he organizes two bike trips for his colleagues in the department. He is an avid softball player and known to friends as “the Babe Ruth of the Degenerate Neutron Stars.”

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PHILIP JOHN HOLMES

��P hilip Holmes, an intellectual leader who works at the

intersections of applied mathematics, mechanical engineering, and neuroscience, is retiring after 42 years as a professor, including 20 years at Princeton. Before that he was on the faculty at Cornell University. Phil is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, a professor of applied and computational mathematics, and associated faculty in the Department of Mathematics and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. These affiliations are some indication of his magnificent intellectual breadth; he has made research contributions throughout his career to a wide variety of problems using the insights and tools, some of his own invention, from the mathematical fields of dynamical systems and nonlinear mechanics.

Phil was born in Lincolnshire, U.K. After completing his B.A. in engineering science at the University of Oxford, Phil took a long walk. He originally planned to travel from Salzburg, Austria, to India, but his trajectory detoured by chance to a kibbutz in Israel where he met his wife, Ruth.

After his return, Phil earned a Ph.D. in engineering at the University of Southampton in 1974. He obtained his first academic position in theoretical and applied mechanics at Cornell, where he began his long and impressive career making original contributions to dynamical systems and nonlinear mechanics, from bifurcation theory and chaos to applications in celestial mechanics and turbulence. Phil made a mid-career move to Princeton in 1994, where he continued to write seminal papers and break new ground, including in recent years making significant contributions in mathematical neuroscience and neuromechanics of biological locomotion. During Phil’s remarkable academic career, he supervised 37 Ph.D. and three M.S. theses and mentored 25 postdoctoral fellows.

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He has been recognized with fellowships in the American Mathematical Society, the American Physical Society, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2001 was elected an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Most recently he received an honorary degree (doctor honoris causa) from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics with the citation: “Philip Holmes is a scientist of outstanding authority and influence in applied mechanics and mathematics. He is a key figure of the field worldwide, and a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who has been in close connection with Hungarian scientists for three decades.”

The field of dynamical systems, or nonlinear dynamics, is concerned with the (time) evolution of systems, usually described by differential equations or difference equations. Although it may seem that the final goal of the study of such problems should focus on the detailed solution trajectory, Phil’s expertise was built around methods of analysis of the equations themselves that yield qualitative and quantitative insights even if the detailed solutions were not available. These ideas of nonlinear dynamics include the characterization of “chaos.” Phil’s early work focused on engineering systems and fluid and solid mechanics; his publications include research papers important to understanding instabilities, studies of turbulence, as well as other papers relevant to the buckling of beams. In fact, it is rare to find researchers who work on problems in both of these two classic field theories (fluid and solid mechanics)—one more way in which Phil stands out from the crowd.

Significantly, Phil’s research addressed problems for their applications as well as the opportunity for new, fundamental mathematical results. His curiosity led him to study problems on biological locomotion (e.g., legged insects) as well as neuroscience questions concerning cognitive processes. In fact, his first exposure to questions of mathematics applied to biological problems began early in his career at Cornell, when he had a chance meeting at a copy machine with a scientist studying the action potentials of motor neurons. Shortly after moving to Princeton, while out for a morning walk, he met a neighbor, neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen, which soon

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led to mathematical models in neuroscience and joint research papers in decision making and other topics of mutual interest. A little bit of uncertainty and chaos in trajectories, both in travel and conversations, can lead in interesting directions when it comes to the curiosity-driven Phil Holmes!

Phil’s ability to synthesize the main ideas of the field led him to write several books. He is coauthor, with John Guckenheimer, of an enormously influential textbook, Nonlinear Oscillations, Dynamical Systems, and Bifurcations of Vector Fields, which, at the time of the writing of this essay, had been cited more than 16,000 times according to Google Scholar. This book was honored with the 2013 American Mathematical Society’s Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. In addition, he coauthored with John L. Lumley and Gal Berkooz a monograph on low dimensional models of turbulence titled Turbulence, Coherent Structures, Dynamical Systems, and Symmetry (Phil’s departmental colleague Clancy Rowley joined the team for the second edition); with Florin Diacu the book Celestial Encounters, which provides a historical account of the people and ideas at the roots of “chaos theory”; and, with Robert Ghrist and Michael Sullivan the monograph Knots and Links in Three-dimensional Flows. These books highlight Phil’s interest in the mathematical structure of the many aspects of nonlinear dynamics, his desire to describe the historical roots of ideas, and his ability to apply mathematical ideas to a wide range of practical problems in engineering and the sciences.

It will come as no surprise that Phil is an extraordinary teacher. He is famous for his ability to sketch exquisite pictures of intersecting manifolds and the dynamics they orchestrate; these concepts are central to understanding nonlinear systems, and developing the intuition one gets from geometry. It is common to hear compliments about his “masterful expositions” and his “delightful turn of phrase.”

Phil is also an accomplished poet. He has published four collections of poetry; the second won an Eric Gregory Award (U.K. Society of Authors) in 1975 and the third, The Green Road, was a Poetry Book Society recommendation for 1986. His fourth collection, Lighting the Steps, was published by Anvil Press in 2002. Those

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familiar with his mathematics will also recognize the poetry of his insights in nonlinear dynamics.

The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, as well as his colleagues in other departments and programs at Princeton, have benefited from Phil’s intellectual depth and breadth and his community spirit. We look forward to his continued engagement with our activities.

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PAUL R. kRUGMAN

��P aul Krugman will transfer to emeritus status at the end of the

current academic year, after spending 15 years on the Princeton faculty. It is no exaggeration to say that Paul is one of the leading economists and one of the leading public intellectuals of his generation.

Paul grew up on Long Island, earned his B.A. at Yale, and received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. After teaching at Yale for three years, he returned to MIT, where he revolutionized the field of international trade theory. A short stint at Stanford and a return engagement with MIT were followed by the longest stretch of his academic career, which he spent at Princeton with a joint appointment in the economics department and the Woodrow Wilson School. Of course, Paul is equally well known for his “other career,” as an outspoken opinion writer for The New York Times.

Paul was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008 for his work on international trade with increasing returns to scale. When Paul came to the field, the traditional theory of trade based on the 19th-century writings of David Ricardo explained trade by differences between countries that generated a comparative advantage for each. But Paul (and others) noticed the tension in the fact that a majority of trade took place between similar countries, with similar factor endowments and access to similar technologies. Surely, something else besides comparative advantage must be at the root of such trade. Moreover, traditional trade theory emphasized interindustry trade, with countries specializing in the production of some goods and exporting them in exchange for others. In fact, much of actual trade was intra-industry; countries imported and exported different varieties of relatively similar goods that fell into the same industry classification. Paul developed an elegant theory of international trade based on economies of scale and product differentiation. The existence of scale economies internal to the firm limited the extent of product differentiation that the market

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could support. But trade allowed countries to consume varieties that were not produced locally. Countries trade in order to take advantage of a larger world market and all gained from the greater diversity in consumption and potentially from longer production runs. Soon, Paul’s models formed the core of the “new trade theory,” which rapidly generated a paradigm shift in thinking about trade that persists today.

Paul’s work on “new trade” led relatively quickly and naturally to his 1991 monograph Geography and Trade, which soon spawned the “new economic geography.” In his monograph and a nearly contemporary paper in the Journal of Political Economy on “Increasing Returns and Economic Geography,” Paul developed a now-famous “core-periphery model” in which economies of scale in manufacturing interact with transport costs to generate the agglomeration of economic activities in a few large markets, leaving the periphery with the residual, constant-returns-to-scale activities. He demonstrated the possibility for cumulative causation in which the core grows large, because a large market is attractive to businesses, which want to locate near to their customers. In the process, the periphery can be left behind, even if the periphery is no different from the core at the beginning of the process. Soon, an army of regional and urban economists were running with his ideas, much as had been true in the trade field just a decade earlier.

Although Paul is probably best known among economists for his work on trade and geography, several of his papers on issues in international macroeconomics are equally elegant and influential. His 1979 paper on balance of payments crises was an instant classic. Here Paul modeled the dynamics of collapse of an overvalued fixed exchange rate. He recognized that forward-looking speculators would anticipate the eventual depletion of foreign exchange reserves, and in the process of seeking capital gains, would attack the currency and hasten its revaluation. Another beautiful piece is his paper on exchange rate target zones. When a government seeks to keep the exchange rate within a band, it becomes more likely to intervene as the rate moves closer to the edge of the band. Anticipating the government’s intervention, speculators will reduce their holdings near the top of the band, thereby stabilizing the currency and obviating the need for

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government intervention. Here, as elsewhere, Paul combined amazing intuition with parsimonious modeling that clarified events in the real world and that inspired much further research by others.

In 1996, Paul began to write extensively for a wider audience, publishing a monthly column for the online magazine Slate. So cogent were his discussions of economic issues for non-economists that soon he was appearing in Fortune, The New Republic, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine. Then, in 1999, he joined the editorial page of The New York Times, where he has published two articles per week ever since. His columns, often controversial and never boring, have energized the intellectual left and appear regularly on The New York Times list of most emailed articles.

Paul has written 22 books, ranging from undergraduate textbooks such as Economics (with Robin Wells) and International Economics: Theory and Policy (with Maurice Obstfeld and Marc Melitz) to popular treatises such as Pop Internationalism, The Conscience of a Liberal, and, most recently, End This Depression Now!, to monographs aimed at a professional audience, such as Market Structure and Foreign Trade (with Elhanan Helpman) and The Spatial Economy (with Masahisa Fujita and Anthony Venables). His seminal research papers appeared in the leading economics journals, as well as in Science and Scientific American. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association, awarded to “that American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge,” the Adam Smith Award, awarded by the National Association of Business Economics for “leadership in the profession and the application of economic principles and knowledge in the workplace and policy arenas,” as well as numerous other professional accolades.

At Princeton, Paul has taught a wide variety of courses, including “Introductory Macroeconomics” and “International Monetary Theory and Policy” in the economics department and “International Trade Policy” and “The Economics of the Welfare State” in the Woodrow Wilson School. His latest course, “The Great Recession: Causes and Consequences” is a tour de force that

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has attracted more than 100 students in each of the last two years and provided them with a lasting memory of impressions from one of the most erudite commentators on the topic.

Paul leaves Princeton with emeritus status to join the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the Center’s Luxembourg Income Study Center. There, he will continue to study income inequality and other concerns about the modern economy and to contribute to the public discourse on these and other matters.

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BEDE LIU

��A fter 53 years at Princeton, Bede Liu, professor of electrical

engineering, is transferring to emeritus status on July 1, 2015.Born in Shanghai, China, in 1934, Bede Liu studied at the National

Taiwan University (Taipei, B.S.E.E. 1954) and at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (M.E.E. 1956, D.E.E. 1960). Bede’s father, Henry Liu, also attended Poly and received his M.E.E. in 1956 at the same commencement as Bede.

After brief stints at the Western Electric Co., DuMont Laboratories, and Bell Laboratories, Bede joined Princeton University in 1962 and was one of the first occupants of the new Engineering Quadrangle. He and John Thomas built the information sciences and systems group, which, to this day, is one of the crown jewels in electrical engineering.

While at Princeton, Bede has conducted pioneering research on signal processing, video coding, digital watermarking, and multimedia technology. He is recognized as one of the fathers of the technology of digital signal processing. His research has consistently been at the cutting edge, with key contributions in both theory and applications, which have had lasting impacts on further developments. His milestone works include signal processor implementation without hardware multipliers, one-bit signal processing, analyzing accuracy limitations of basic signal processing algorithms, a highly efficient way for motion compensated video coding, a graph approach to analyzing the content of videos, and multimedia data hiding.

Bede often commented on the rich rewards that he had enjoyed from interacting with the many brilliant, creative students, both undergraduates and graduates, whom Princeton managed to attract, and the joy to hear graduates relating their work and accomplishments. He has supervised and co-supervised 53 Ph.D.’s at Princeton. The majority of them have been successful in their continuing research relating to signal processing, video coding,

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and multimedia. Among them are two members of U.S. National Academy of Engineering (one of them, Robert E. Kahn, widely acknowledged as one of the fathers of the Internet), 25 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) fellows, several fellows of various learned societies, two past presidents of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, one IEEE Centennial Medalist, and four IEEE Millennium Medalists. Twenty-six of them are or have been professors at major universities in U.S. and abroad, two deans of engineering, a chief scientist of the Federal Communications Commission, and several rising executives in industry.

At Princeton, Bede served as the electrical engineering department chair from 1994 to 1997. In addition to his research and teaching, he consulted at United Technologies on low-flying terrain-following radar and on the reliability of signal multiplexers of supersonic passenger plane. He also consulted at RCA on digital synthetic aperture radar and at Siemens Corporate Research on image processing.

He has been active in IEEE, holding the office of the president of its Circuit and Systems Society in 1982 and as a director on the board of IEEE in 1984 and 1985. He is a life fellow of IEEE.

Bede coauthored two books: an introductory textbook on digital signal processing and a research monograph on multimedia data hiding. He also published 250 technical papers and received 12 U.S. patents. In recognition of his contributions, he received the highest awards from two IEEE societies, Circuits and Systems, and Signal Processing. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, an academician of Academia Sinica (Taipei, ROC), and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing). He also holds the title of honorary professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) and of the Chinese University of Electronics Science and Technology (Chengdu, China).

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ALAN EUGENE MANN

��A lan Mann’s distinguished career in anthropology germinated

during his student years at the University of Pittsburgh (B.A., 1961), Columbia, and the University of California–Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D. 1968). Alan took up his post as assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, moving up through the ranks to associate and then full professor, and advancing to emeritus status in 2001. He also served as curator of the physical anthropology section at the Penn Museum, and was a member of the graduate group in Penn’s Department of Geology. He is a global scholar, having held visiting professorships at the University of Cape Town, the College de France, the Catholic University at Leuven, and, as a longstanding association, the University of Bordeaux. Meanwhile, his scholarship and legendary qualities as a teacher and mentor caught the attention of Princeton colleagues. Alan taught human evolution at Princeton as visiting professor of anthropology each spring for 13 years before joining the regular faculty in 2001. At Princeton, Alan is also affiliated with the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and with the Program in Neuroscience.

Alan Mann is a bioanthropologist whose interests and honors cover the fields of paleoanthropology and human evolution. He is the author of what are benchmark reference works: Some Paleodemographic Aspects of the South African Australopithecines and (with Mark L. Weiss) of multiple editions of Human Biology and Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective; also (with J. Monge, M. Kricun, J. Radovc ic), he is the author The Krapina Hominids: A Radiographic Atlas of the Skeletal Collection. In addition to these classics, he has authored scores of articles, book chapters, and monographs—even a children’s book—on issues of hominid development and ongoing processes of human adaptation. In the latter regard, his remarkable exhibit at the Penn Museum,

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Surviving: The Body of Evidence (co-curated with Janet Monge) demonstrated the pan-human heritage of vulnerabilities as artifacts of evolution. At the end of its run at Penn, the exhibit went on the road as a traveling exhibition. Alan has conducted extensive field research in Africa and Europe, and serves on several research foundation advisory boards.

Renowned for his teaching, Alan taught hugely popular courses on human adaptation and evolution, nutrition and foodways, and other topics at the cusp of biology and culture. For many years, he taught a summer field course on modern human origins in the Bordeaux region of France. In collaboration with colleagues at the University of Bordeaux, Alan and his students excavated a Neandertal site in the region of Les Pradelles. Those summers in Bordeaux were periods of intense discovery, and the pathbreaking analysis of their finds are the subject of Alan’s current book project.

For the generations of students who accompanied Alan and his wife Gaile to Bordeaux, those summers were also seasons of unforgettable personal discovery. When the Bordeaux program closed—with the government-mandated closure of the site (to allow it to “rest” for future scholars)—the alumni/ae of the summer course made an album of photos and reminiscences for Alan. The book is an archive of respect, gratitude, and affection for a gifted and cherished teacher and mentor. Alan was departmental representative for many years, and in that context, too, was deeply appreciated by his colleagues and beloved by our majors. When he stepped down from that role, the students presented him with a scroll on Class Day, listing every student he had advised as dept rep—by then, numbering in the hundreds.

In 2013–14, Alan received high recognition for his distinguished scholarship by the French government, when he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre de palmes academiques. Since then, he has been honored with special sessions at professional conferences in his field, and these bring great joy to his grateful colleagues. Alan has contributed significantly to our scientific understanding of human evolution and the human condition. But evolution does not stop with the present, and one suspects that the greater joy for Alan himself might be the knowledge that he has helped shape the

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lives of his students in their own personal evolution. The testimony of one student alumnus of the Bordeaux program speaks for many more:

“His course was challenging academically, but also in a much broader sense, it challenged the way I conceptualize our world. … He always pushed us to look beyond what is apparent and to think through our prejudices. … In the end there are such important questions behind this work of studying human origins. … Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we where and what are meant to do? Big questions. Deep questions. Questions that demand answers that go beyond cognitive understanding, beyond textbooks and lectures and scientific evidence, into the realm of the heart. And that, above all, is the unique quality that you brought to every lesson that you taught me. The quality of the heart.”

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JOYCE CAROL OATES

��S urely, one of the names most associated with Princeton University

over the last four decades is that of Joyce Carol Oates, the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of the Humanities. Back before there was a Lewis Center for the Arts, she gave the University whatever profile it had as a place interested in nourishing artists and in teaching the making of art. She continues to be among our most visible, celebrated, and hard-working artists-teachers.

Growing up in a rural community in upstate New York, Joyce attended grade school in a one-room schoolhouse. While attending Syracuse University, she won the coveted Mademoiselle “college short story” contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith, her husband until his death in 2008. In 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, where she began teaching at the University of Detroit. In 1963, she published her first book, a short story collection titled By the North Gate. Between 1968 and 1978, Joyce taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, before moving to Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing in 1978 upon the invitation of Mike Keeley. During their years together in Princeton, she and Ray also operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific writers in American literary history. Unusually, she has worked in a wide variety of genres—novel, short story, children’s fiction, detective fiction, horror fiction, drama, poetry, literary criticism, nonfiction, diary, and memoir. If there’s a “Joyce Carol Oates” whose work you don’t like, you need only pick up another volume or two to find a “Joyce Carol Oates” you do. Our colleague Anthony Grafton once noted that Joyce “has produced an extraordinary body of work—one that rivals those of the 19th-century greats like Balzac and Dickens in its extent, and demands comparison with them in depth, range, and power.”

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For most critics in most parts of the world, no canon of American literature would be complete without the inclusion of something by Joyce Carol Oates. Besides, it’s very easy to get into a conversation with a stranger on a train, bus, or plane on the way anywhere by simply mentioning the title of her 1966 story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

The list of awards Joyce has received is almost as long as her bibliography. In 1970, she won the National Book Award for one of her masterpieces, them. (She’s been nominated for this prize no less than five times!) In 1990, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story and, in 1996, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In 2002, she won the Carl Sandburg Award for Lifetime Achievement. The following year, she won the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. In 2007, she received the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year Award. In 2010, she received the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011, President Barack Obama presented her with the National Humanities Medal “for her contributions to American letters.” And in 2012, Princeton University bestowed on her the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.

While producing “her own work” (and winning prizes for it), Joyce has fully engaged in the teaching mission of the University, regularly leading four creative writing workshops per year and advising untold numbers of senior theses—many of which soon found themselves in print. Some of you may have been at the interview Joyce did with her former student Jonathan Safran Foer, whose thesis, an early version of his celebrated novel Everything is Illuminated, she had advised. This wickedly funny and deeply public conversation was emblematic of the attention Joyce has always paid to her undergraduates and of the close ties she maintains with her former students. Jonathan remembered being amazed when “the professor” commented after a reading that she admired his “work”; this was well before he thought of himself as having “work.” Like many of Joyce’s comments on student writing over the years, it was one that made him take himself more seriously. Joyce herself never seems to think of herself as having what the rest of us refer

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to as “a workload.” When a reporter labeled her a “workaholic,” she replied, “I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of ‘working’ at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don’t think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.”

Joyce’s richly rewarding journey continues. In 2009, she married Charles Gross, professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, emeritus. And, for many autumns to come, the Lewis Center’s Program in Creative Writing looks forward to welcoming her return to Princeton to teach new generations of students just what it means to be a writer and teacher of substance.

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CLARENCE ERNEST SCHUTT

��C larence Schutt, professor of chemistry, will be retiring this

summer after 30 years of teaching and conducting research at Princeton University.

Clarence received his B.S. in physics at the University of Michigan in 1967 then went on to obtain an M.S. in physics at Michigan State University. He did his graduate studies at Harvard University in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Under the direction of Stephen Harrison, Clarence’s thesis work was the first to reveal the structure of an intact virus using X-ray crystallography. Published in Nature, this landmark study depended on methods developed by Clarence that are at the core of all modern crystallographic data collection programs used for large biological structures.

Upon completing his Ph.D. in 1976, Clarence relocated to Cambridge, England, to conduct postdoctoral research at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which is considered the birthplace of molecular biology. His research advisers were the late Dr. Hugh Huxley and Nobel laureate Sir Aaron Klug, both of whom were eminent structural biologists. During his time in Cambridge, Clarence studied the higher order structure of chromatin, and actin, a key protein in the microfilament system responsible for muscle movement.

After spending almost a decade at the Medical Research Council Laboratory, Clarence returned to the United States in 1985 with his wife and four children to accept an associate professorship at Princeton University. In the Department of Chemistry, a major theme of Clarence’s research has centered on investigating how nature converts chemical energy into movement. In 1993, his laboratory solved the structure of crystalline profilin-beta-actin to 2.55Å resolution by X-ray crystallography. Published in Nature, the results were coauthored by longtime collaborator Uno Lindberg, a professor of cell biology at

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Stockholm University. Their collaboration spanned almost 30 years, with Uno spending about a month every year visiting Princeton and frequent visits by Clarence to Stockholm University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1988. Using biophysical techniques such as X-ray crystallography and selected-site mutagenesis, Clarence continued to examine the structure and dynamics of actin and the family of proteins that bind it.

His colleagues describe Clarence as extremely positive and funny, which has made him a popular teacher. He was the first senior faculty member to teach a freshman seminar, offering a course he named “architectonics,” which referred to theories about structural change under tension in science and art. Clarence said he was most proud of his graduate students’ scientific accomplishments, many of whom have gone on to become professors in higher education and leaders in industry, but also of their personal commitments to leading fulfilling family lives.

After his son Alex was diagnosed with autism, Clarence wrote insightful and compassionate posts about his family’s journey as part of an effort to raise public awareness and funding for research. Philanthropy became very important to Clarence, who was a founding trustee and chairman of the board of the National Alliance for Autism Research (NAAR), now part of Autism Speaks, the largest public fundraising and advocacy organization in the world. At Princeton, he taught courses on the structural biology of neuro-developmental disorders such as autism, and on public policy relating to the discovery and licensing of treatments by the pharmaceutical industry (in the Woodrow Wilson School). After retiring from Princeton, Clarence will continue as the director and chief scientific officer of the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation (in Wellesley, Massachusetts), one of the largest private research foundations committed to helping autistic people lead rewarding lives.

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LEE MERRILL SILVER

��L ee Silver did his graduate work with Sarah Elgin at Harvard

University in the early day of the molecular revolution that transformed biology by the introduction of recombinant DNA techniques. His thesis work focused on proteins that associate with DNA and seemed to play a potential role in regulating gene activity. It is easy to imagine that those molecular studies sparked his interest in development, especially to the extent that individual steps and processes in the developing embryo might be associated with expression of specific genes. The problem faced by all developmental biologists at the time was how to identify the relevant genes and understand their roles in development. The only possible approach seemed to be genetics. Lee’s next big step was to move from relatively crude and general molecular approaches to a focused analysis of a specific genetic lesion in mouse, an organism that has provide fundamental insights into genetics and development since the early 1900s.

The T/t complex gene that Lee chose for his studies was one of the best characterized mouse genes, known for its interesting developmental phenotypes (truncations of the tail and embryonic lethality) and for its complex, somewhat confusing inheritance patterns. Lee initiated his work on the T complex with one of the great mouse geneticists at the time, Dorothea Bennett, at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and continued his work on the T locus at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in his own lab at Princeton, after joining the Department of Molecular Biology in 1984. The 1980s were a heady time in molecular biology, and Lee’s papers from this period document his steady progress, from the mapping of the T locus to a particular region of chromosome 17, to his characterization of the phenotypes on mutant embryos, to his final identification of the gene product itself, an analysis carried out by an international team centered in Hans Lehrach’s lab at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory

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in Heidelberg. The resultant molecular characterization indicated the importance of the gene and supported Lee’s insightful choice 10 years earlier in making it the focus of his research program. Subsequent work has shown that the T gene product (called Brachyury or T box) plays a fundamental role in development in all vertebrate embryos, establishing both a general body plan and controlling cell differentiation during organogenesis.

In the years that followed, Lee maintained a lab focused on T-box genes, investigating their effects on sperm development and their unusual inheritance patterns in mice. He also assumed an increasingly important leadership position in mouse genetics, serving on the governing boards of the Genetics Society of America and the International Mammalian Genome Society, as well as authoring and coauthoring textbooks and other resources for genetics education.

It was during this period that he took on a more public role, explaining the impact of modern molecular biology on society. By 1998, public policy and social issues had come to represent the largest fraction of his published scholarly work and, unlike many of his contemporaries in molecular biology, Lee willingly tackled complex social and ethical questions in his writings. He joined the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1999, and in that venue he has continued to offer undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in public policy and bioethics. In 2006 and 2007, Lee produced his two major books on bioethics intended for the general public: Challenging Nature: The Clash between Biotechnology and Spirituality and Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family. The transition to emeritus status will probably reduce the time he can spend on those activities somewhat, but it is hard to imagine a totally silent Lee Silver, given his active involvement and continued interest in the impact of molecular biology on social issues.

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THOMAS JAMES TRUSSELL

��J ames Trussell first came to Princeton as a graduate student in the

Department of Economics in 1973 and completed his Ph.D. in 1975. He was immediately hired as assistant professor of economics and spent his entire academic career on the Princeton faculty. In 1978, he was jointly appointed in the Woodrow Wilson School as assistant professor of economics and public affairs and achieved the rank of associate professor in 1980 and professor in 1983.

Throughout his career, James has been devoted to the Office of Population Research (OPR), serving as a faculty research associate from 1975 to 2015 and as OPR director from 1992 to 1998 and again from 2002 to 2011. He also made many administrative contributions to the Woodrow Wilson School, with more than a dozen years of service as associate dean, two separate stints as acting dean, and multiple directorships of the school’s MPA and Ph.D. programs.

James was born in Columbus, Georgia. After completing his B.A. in mathematics at Davidson College in 1971, he entered the economics program at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford, where he published two books before completing his B.Phil. in economics in 1973. The Loving Book, coauthored with Steve Chandler and published by World Publishing in 1972, sought to develop a new understanding of birth control and human sexuality. Women in Need, also published in 1972 and coauthored with Robert A. Hatcher, proposed a then-revolutionary plan for family planning to subdue the proliferation of unwanted childbearing. Other work conducted while at Oxford includes publications on the effects of abortion policy and the cost-effectiveness of different birth control methods.

After arriving at Princeton, James began his long record of contribution to the study of demographic methods and mathematical models of population, first under the direction of Ansley Coale, then director of the Office of Population Research, and later as a collaborator, publishing a series of seminal papers that developed

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model schedules of fertility and techniques for the indirect estimation of birth rates given incomplete data. He went on to publish widely cited papers on methods for estimating mortality, age at first marriage, the economic consequences of teenage childbearing, spline interpolation of demographic data, natural fertility, and contraceptive failure. He also contributed importantly to substantive work on the demography of Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Panama, and the Philippines; the physiology of menarche; patterns of marital dissolution; sterility; birth spacing; stable population theory; and historical demography.

Over time, James focused his interests more squarely on the topics of emergency contraception, contraceptive failure, and the cost-effectiveness of contraception, publishing a series of impactful papers in leading scientific journals such as Family Planning Perspectives, Studies in Family Planning, International Family Planning Perspectives, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Contraception, American Journal of Public Health, Advances in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He is the author of more than 350 scientific publications in the areas of reproductive health and demographic methodology and is a fellow of the Population Council, the Guttmacher Institute, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. He is also an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a visiting professor at the Hull York Medical School in England.

In the course of his long career, James has made many public contributions to the nation’s service and the service of all nations. At the National Academy of Sciences, he contributed to the work of the Committee on HIV Prevention Strategies in the United States, the Committee on Antiprogestins, the Committee on National Statistics, and the Committee on Population, as well as the Panel on Data and Research Priorities for Arresting AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, Panel on Monitoring the Social Impact of the AIDS Epidemic, Panel on Census Methodology, the Panel on Census Requirements in the Year 2000 and Beyond, Panel on the 1990 Census, Panel on Immigration Statistics, Panel on Small Area Estimation, Panel on the 1980 Census, and the Panel on Latin America. He also served for

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seven years on the Council of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (1998–2005).

In addition to his professional service and research accomplishments, James has played a leading role in promoting the wider accessibility of emergency contraception to women as an important step in helping them reduce the risk of unintended pregnancy. He maintains an emergency contraception website (not-2-late.com) and designed and launched a toll-free emergency contraception hotline (1-888-NOT-2-LATE). He is a member of the National Medical Committee of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and a member of the board of directors of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Society of Family Planning, the International Federation of Professional Abortion and Contraception Associates, and the Women on Web Foundation.

James retires from Princeton as the Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of Public and International Affairs but continues to remain active in the field of reproductive health, serving as deputy editor of Contraception and continuing to publish widely in that journal and other journals of family planning and reproductive health. In 2012, James was honored with the Felicia Stewart Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Consortium for Emergency Contraception and the American Society for Emergency Contraception.

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SIGURD wAGNER

��F rom childhood on, Sigurd Wagner, professor of electrical

engineering, has been fascinated by how things work, and how to make them work. His passion made him a pioneer in photovoltaics and flexible electronics. He conveyed this passion to the more than a hundred undergraduate researchers and over 40 Ph.D. students who worked in his laboratory. He has been instrumental in building Princeton’s strength and reputation in solid-state electronics. Sigurd will retire on September 1, 2015.

At the age of 16, Sigurd had a brush with electrical engineering when he made a miniature radio of an earphone and a germanium diode, for prohibited post-bedtime listening in boarding school. But it was an extracurricular chemistry laboratory in high school that got him hooked on experiments. The laboratory, installed in a vaulted room of a baroque monastery, made him decide to study chemistry at the University of Vienna instead of accepting a fellowship for studying nuclear physics in Moscow. In 1968, he earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry with research on gas molecules in vapors produced at very high temperature. Skipping a special award ceremony for top academic performance, he left Austria for a postdoctoral fellowship in the New World, at Ohio State University, where he continued doing research with high-temperature mass spectrometry.

A chance encounter with a recruiter from the Bell Telephone Laboratories led Sigurd to join its location at Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1970. That began his transformation into an electrical engineer, which he considers incomplete, and a habit of getting into a new research field in each fresh decade. At Bell Labs, he first worked on the now all-important interface between silicon and silicon dioxide, and soon on its application to the development of a kilobit semiconductor memory. After moving to Bell Lab’s Holmdel location, he became interested in making devices of chalcopyrite-type semiconductors. That led to the invention of several solar cells, notably

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the copper indium selenide solar cell, a now-prominent thin-film solar cell. At the time, he was proud of having invented two of the world’s four efficient solar cells.

Interested in the opportunity of building a new research organization from scratch, in 1978 he accepted the offer to become the chief of the photovoltaics research branch of the newly founded Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) in Golden, Colorado. There he helped convert a horse pasture to a national laboratory. While he enjoyed the challenges of building a new organization and managing it, a workshop with a dozen eminent researchers reminded him of his first love: figuring out how things work, and how to make them work. Having experienced industrial and government laboratories, he resolved to explore an academic position.

In 1980, Sigurd arrived at Princeton. He was attracted by Princeton’s reputation as a republic of scholar-teachers. He was persuaded by Princeton’s singular attributes over alternatives: private, small, enabling a short commute. He was, and still is, impressed by Princeton’s speed in making intelligent decisions, and by its lack of administrative barriers. What he did not fully appreciate was the immense pleasure of working with outstanding colleagues and students, and the astonishing ease of entering productive collaborations. These attributes of Princeton made him stay.

While Sigurd came to conduct research and to teach, he also took up the mission of rebuilding Princeton’s strength in solid-state electronics. He helped this section of the Department of Electrical Engineering attain an outstanding national and international reputation. A hands-on semiconductor fabrication lab that he developed has for 25 years been taken by every sophomore in electrical engineering at Princeton, and by many undergraduate summer researchers and Ph.D. students. Alumni rate the lab as the best in their entire curriculum. He has a long history of encouraging women to pursue careers in science and engineering. Over the past decade, his research group, from undergraduate research advisees to postdocs, has been about 50 percent women, at least double the department average, and former members are now themselves faculty on three continents.

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When working on hydrogenated amorphous silicon in the 1980s, Sigurd discovered the defect pool, a subtle but conceptually important manifestation of thermodynamic equilibration in an amorphous material. Later on, with fundamental experiments conducted in the 1990s, he helped lay the foundations of flexible electronics. By wrapping thin-film transistors of amorphous silicon on a metal foil around a pencil, he presented the forerunner of today’s curved display screens. The discovery of elastically stretchable electrical conductors, made in his laboratory in the early 2000s, enabled making skin-like electronics. By virtue of their mechanical and electrical biocompatibility, such devices are beginning to add a new research dimension to neuroscience, and they raise hopes for clinical advances in the restoration of neural functions. In the current decade, the 2010s, he has enjoyed unique research collaborations with his colleagues James Sturm and Naveen Verma. By ranging from materials to systems, this joint enterprise is laying the broad foundation for advanced high-performance electronic surfaces.

Sigurd Wagner is widely considered the father of the field of flexible and stretchable electronics. Award citations speak of “groundbreaking research, both fundamental and applied, on amorphous semiconductors as well as chalcopyrites” (2009 Sir Nevill F. Mott Lecture Award, 23rd International Conference on Amorphous and Nanocrystalline Semiconductors) and “pioneering research on flexible and stretchable large-area electronics, and comprehensive study of the mechanical behavior of the same, which will be applied to various products in the near future” (2014 International Thin-Film Transistor Conference, 10th Anniversary Prize). Sigurd is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Fellow. From Princeton, he received a 2014 Graduate Mentoring Award.

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