Board approves seven faculty appointments

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointments of seven faculty members.

Professor

Ryan Adams, in computer science, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from Harvard University, where he has been an assistant professor since 2011 and leader of the Harvard Intelligent Probabilistic Systems group. A specialist in statistics and machine learning, Adams earned his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge and B.S. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He conducted his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto.

Gabriel Vecchi, in geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute, joins the faculty in winter 2017 after having served as a lecturer at Princeton since 2012 and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory since 2003. From 2001-03, Vecchi was a research scientist at the University of Washington, where he earlier was a postdoctoral research associate and completed his Ph.D. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers University. Vecchi's research foci include the impact of climate variability and change on hydroclimate and extreme events, and the predictability of climate and its regional impacts.

Giovanni Violante, in economics, joins the faculty in winter 2017 from New York University, where he was the William R. Berkley Term Professor of Economics and Business and has served on the faculty since 2002. From 1998 to 2003, Violante was a research associate at the Institute of Fiscal Studies in London and a lecturer at University College London from 1997 to 2002. An expert in macroeconomics and labor economics, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and Laurea from the University of Torino.

Assistant professor

Luc Deike, in mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute, will join the faculty in winter 2017 from the University of California-San Diego, where he has served as a postdoctoral researcher at the university's Scripps Institution of Oceanography since 2013. An expert in wave turbulence, Deike received his Ph.D. from the University Paris Diderot and his M.S. and B.S. from the École Normale Supérieure and Université Pierre et Marie Curie.

Florian Lionnet, in the Council of the Humanities and the program in linguistics, will join the faculty in winter 2017 from the University of California-Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in 2016. Lionnet, whose research expertise focuses on phonetically grounded phonology, did his undergraduate work at the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Ulm & University Paris 8.

Laure Resplandy, in geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute, will join the faculty in winter 2017 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego, where she has been a postdoctoral researcher since 2014. Resplandy also completed postdoctoral work at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, Paris and at the National Oceanography Center, Southampton. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and her M.A. and B.A. at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. Her research focuses on oceanography and biogeochemistry.

Xinning Zhang, in geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute, will join the faculty in winter 2017 after serving as an associate research scholar since 2014 and postdoctoral fellow at Princeton from 2011-14.  Zhang also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. An environmental microbiologist focusing on microbial nutrient and energy transfer in past and present environments, she earned her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and B.S. from Cornell University.