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Date: June 2, 1998
Four Princeton Faculty Receive President's Awards for Excellence in Teaching
Princeton, N.J. -- This year's President's Awards for Distinguished Teaching were presented to Angela Creager, assistant professor of history; John Gager, William H. Danforth Professor of Religion; J. Richard Gott III, professor of astrophysical sciences; and Nai-Ying Yuan Tang, lecturer in East Asian Studies. The President's Awards were established in 1991 by gifts from Lloyd Cotsen '50 and John Sherrerd '52.
At Princeton since 1994, Angela Creager has taught graduate students in history of science and undergraduates in history and women's studies, teaching Gender and Science, among other courses. A graduate of Rice University, she earned her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and spent two years at Harvard before joining the Princeton faculty.
John Gager, who has taught at Princeton since 1968, is a specialist in early Christianity. Among his courses are New Testament and Christian Origins, upper-level courses on religious life in the Greco-Roman Empire and graduate courses on the religions of Late Antiquity. Master of Forbes College since 1992, he is also a leader in Outdoor Action. He graduated from Yale and earned his PhD at Harvard.
J. Richard Gott III, a member of the faculty since 1976, developed one of the nation's first courses in general relativity for undergraduates and astrophysics courses for nonscience majors, as well as graduate courses in relativistic physics. A frequent commentator on television news and science programs, he runs the Peyton Observatory Open House program. A Harvard graduate, he earned his PhD at Princeton.
Nai-Ying Yuan Tang retires this year after 30 years of teaching modern and classical Chinese at Princeton, where she originated the technique of teaching classical Chinese through the medium of modern spoken Chinese. With degrees from Taiwan Normal University, she has spent many summers teaching in the Middlebury Summer School and other Chinese language programs.