Board approves 20 appointments to Princeton faculty

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointments of 20 faculty members, including one full professor and 19 assistant professors.

Professor

Maria Chudnovsky, in mathematics and applied and computational mathematics, will join the faculty at the end of the fall term from Columbia University, where she has been teaching since 2006. She was an instructor at Princeton from 2003 to 2005 and earned her Ph.D. at the University, and she received undergraduate and master's degrees at the Israel Institute of Technology.

A 2012 MacArthur fellow, Chudnovsky specializes in graph theory and combinatorial optimization. She and several collaborators, including her Princeton adviser, Paul Seymour, in 2002 created the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, proving a conjecture first proposed in 1961.

Assistant professors

Mohamed Abou Donia, in molecular biology, joined the faculty this fall from the University of California-San Francisco, where he has been a postdoctoral fellow since 2010. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah and his bachelor's degree at Suez Canal University. Abou Donia studies host-pathogen interactions.

Nozomi Ando, in chemistry, joined the faculty this fall from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where she has been a postdoctoral fellow since 2009. Ando, who studies biophysics and proteins, earned her Ph.D. at Cornell University and her B.S. at MIT.

He Bian, in history and East Asian studies, joined the faculty this fall. A scholar of late imperial and early modern China, Bian earned her bachelor's degree at Peking University, a master's degree at the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Ian Bourg, in civil and environmental engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute, will join the faculty at the end of the fall term from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he has been since 2005. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Toulouse, France. Bourg specializes in environmental geochemistry and groundwater hydrology.

Donnacha Dennehy, in music, joined the faculty this fall. He specializes in music composition and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dennehy holds a bachelor's degree from Trinity College, Dublin.

Karen Emmerich, in comparative literature, will join the faculty in the spring from the University of Oregon, where she has been an assistant professor since 2012. She studies comparative literature and modern Greek literature. Emmerich was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton in 2010-11, and she was an undergraduate at Princeton. She also holds master's degrees from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Columbia, and she earned her Ph.D. at Columbia.

Barbara Engelhardt, in computer science, joined the faculty this fall from Duke University, where she has been an assistant professor since 2012. She previously was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, received a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley and earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Stanford University. Engelhardt studies bioinformatics and machine learning.

Maryam Farboodi, in economics, will join the faculty in the 2015 fall term. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, received master's degrees at the University of Texas-Austin and the University of Maryland-College Park, and got her bachelor's degree from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Farboodi studies finance.

Margaret Frye, in sociology, will join the faculty in the 2015 fall term from Harvard, where she has been a postdoctoral fellow since 2013. She earned master's and doctoral degrees at UC-Berkeley and received her B.A. from Brown University. Frye's research interests include sociology of the family, sociology of gender and quantitative methods.

Elad Hazan, in computer science, joined the faculty this fall from the Israel Institute of Technology, where he has been teaching since 2010. He previously was a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center. Hazan, who studies machine learning, earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and his bachelor's and master's degrees at Tel Aviv University.

Egemen Kolemen, in mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, joined the faculty this fall from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he has conducted research since 2009, specializing in control of plasmas in tokamaks. Kolemen also earned his Ph.D. from and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton. He earned a B.S. at Bogazici University in Istanbul.

Samory Kpotufe, in operations research and financial engineering, joined the faculty this fall from the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago, where he has been an assistant research professor since 2012. Previously a research scientist at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, he earned a B.S. at the University of Denver and a Ph.D. at the University of California-San Diego. Kpotufe studies statistics and machine learning.

Satyel Larson, in Near Eastern studies, will join the faculty in fall 2015 from the University of Chicago, where she has been a postdoctoral fellow since 2012. Larson's research focuses on women and gender in the Middle East. She earned her bachelor's and doctoral degrees at UC-Berkeley.

Carolina Mangone, in art and archaeology, will join the faculty in fall 2015 from Columbia, where she has been a postdoctoral fellow since 2013. A scholar of early modern European art history, Mangone earned her B.A. at the University of Calgary and her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto.

Carolyn McBride, in ecology and evolutionary biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, joined the faculty this fall from Rockefeller University, where she had been a postdoc since 2008. A graduate of Williams College, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California-Davis. McBride specializes in genetics and neurobiology.

Kinohi Nishikawa, in English and African American studies, joined the faculty this fall from the University of Notre Dame, where he has been an assistant professor since 2012. Specializing in African American studies and English, he previously was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Nishikawa earned his B.A. at Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. at Duke.

Jonathan Pillow, in psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, joined the faculty this fall from UT-Austin, where he has been an assistant professor since 2009. Previously a postdoctoral fellow at University College London, Pillow studies theoretical and computational neuroscience. He holds a B.A. from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. from New York University.

Christina Riehl, in ecology and evolutionary biology, will join the faculty in fall 2015 from Harvard, where she has been a junior fellow since 2012. A behavioral ecologist, she previously was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Riehl earned her B.A. at Harvard and her Ph.D. at Princeton.

Jared Toettcher, in molecular biology, will join the faculty at the end of the fall term from UC-San Francisco, where he has been a postdoctoral fellow since 2009. He earned his bachelor's degree at UC-Berkeley and his Ph.D. at MIT. Toettcher studies cellular dynamics.