Nine new full professors named to facultyPrinceton NJ -- The appointments of nine new faculty members as full professors have been approved by the Board of Trustees. They are: William Bialek, professor of physics, effective Sept. 1, 2001; Marina Brownlee, professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures, effective Jan. 1, 2002; Benjamin Elman, professor of East Asian studies and history, effective Sept. 1, 2002; Bjorn Engquist, the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Mathematics and Applied and Computational Mathematics, effective Sept. 1, 2001; David Gabai, professor of mathematics, effective Sept. 1, 2001; Philip Pettit, professor of politics, effective July 1, 2002; Ricardo Piglia, the Walter Carpenter Professor of Language, Literature and Civilization of Spain and professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures, effective Sept. 1, 2001; Valerie Smith, the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and professor of English, effective July 1, 2001; and David Tank, professor of molecular biology and physics, effective Aug. 1, 2001. Bialek has worked at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, which conducts long-term, fundamental research in the computer and physical sciences, since 1990. He started there as a senior research scientist, and became a fellow in 1999. Previously he was an assistant professor of physics and biophysics at the University of California-Berkeley from 1986 to 1991. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands and at the University of California-Santa Barbara's Institute for Theoretical Physics. The focus of Bialek's research is the interface between physics and biology, broadly interpreted. A central theme of that research is an appreciation for how well things "work" in biological systems. Bialek has published numerous papers in professional journals such as Science and Nature. Bialek was a visiting lecturer in Princeton's physics department in 1991, 1993 and 1998. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of California-Berkeley. Brownlee returns to Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1978. She has been a professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988, and served as chair of that department for three years. From 1977 to 1988, she taught in Dartmouth College's Department of Spanish and Portuguese and in its comparative literature program. She has written four books, among them "The Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas," published in 2000 by the University of Pennsylvania Press and "The Severed Word: Ovid's 'Heroides' and the 'Novela Sentimental,'" published in 1990 by Princeton University Press. Brownlee's fields of interest are medieval and golden age Spanish literature and medieval and Renaissance comparative literature. She earned her B.A. at Smith College. Elman has been a Mellon Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Historical Studies since 1999. He also is a professor in Chinese history at the University of California-Los Angeles, where he has been since 1986. Previously, he taught at Colby College and Rice University, and he was a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in 1994 and 1995. Elman's field of specialization is pre-modern Chinese history. He has written several books, including "A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China" and "Classicism, Politics, & Kinship: The Ch'ang-chou New Text School of Confucianism in Late Imperial China," published by the University of California Press in 2000 and 1990, respectively. Elman received his B.A. from Hamilton College and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Engquist arrived at Princeton from UCLA, where he had been teaching since 1977. He had been a full professor there since 1980. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Uppsala University and returned there as a professor from 1981 to 1985. He also has been a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm since 1992. Engquist's research interests are numerical analysis, scientific computing and applied differential equations. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and of the Swedish Academy of Engineering Science. Engquist has written numerous articles for scholarly journals, including the Journal of Computational Physics and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal on Numerical Analysis. Gabai earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1980. He has taught at the California Institute of Technology since 1986, becoming a full professor there in 1988. Previously he taught at the University of Pennsylvania for three years and Harvard University for two years. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1982, 1983 and 1989. His field of interest is low-dimensional topology and geometry. Gabai has written numerous articles for scholarly journals. He received his B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pettit will come to Princeton from Australian National University in Canberra, where he has been a professor since 1983. In addition, he has been a visiting professor at Columbia University since 1997. From 1977 to 1983, he was a professor at the University of Bradford and chair of the School of Interdisciplinary Human Studies. Previously he was a lecturer at University College in Dublin for two years. Pettit, whose fields of interest are social and political theory and philosophy, is a fellow of Australia's Academy of Social Sciences and its Academy of the Humanities. Co-editor of the Journal of Philosophy since 1999, Pettit also has written 11 books. "Three Methods of Ethics," written with Marcia Baron and Michael Slote, was published in 1997 by Blackwell. "The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society and Politics" was published in 1993 by Oxford University Press. He received his B.A. degree from the National University of Ireland and his Ph.D. from Queen's University of Belfast. Piglia arrived from the University of Buenos Aires, where he had been a professor since 1990 and the faculty research director since 1994. Piglia was a visiting professor at Princeton from 1988 to 1989 and from 1997 to 1999, and a senior fellow in the Council of the Humanities in 1987. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University in 1990. He is the author of four collections of short stories, two books of essays and three novels. Three of his works have been translated into English: "Artificial Respiration," "Assumed Name" and "The Absent City." Several of his works have been adapted as films. Piglia was educated at the Universi-dad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina. Smith previously was a Princeton faculty member from 1980 to 1989, holding positions in English and Afro-American studies. She joined the UCLA faculty in 1989, and had been a full professor there since 1994. She was chair of the interdepartmental program in African-American studies from 1997 to 2001 and co-director of cultural studies in the African Diaspora Project from 1996 to 1999. Smith's field of interest is African-American literature. She is the author of "Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings," published by Routledge in 1998 and "Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative," published by Harvard University Press in 1987. Smith earned her B.A. degree from Bates College and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Tank arrived at Princeton from Bell Laboratories at Lucent Technologies, where he had been director of the Biological Computation Research Department since 1991. He had been a member of the technical staff there since 1983. He also was co-director of methods in computational neuroscience at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., from 1992 to 1997. Tank's field of interest is computational neurobiology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals. Tank received his B.S. degree from Case Western Reserve University and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. |
 
December 10, 2001 Contents In the news Faculty Inside Sections
Editor: Ruth Stevens |