• Aizenman selected for Brouwer Prize
    <Posted 06/19/2001 14:30>
    Michael Aizenman, Princeton professor of physics and mathematics, has been selected to receive the Brouwer Prize by the Dutch Mathematical Society. The award is the Netherlands' most prestigious award in mathematics.

    Every three years, the society chooses a prominent mathematician to present a lecture on an important field in mathematics and to receive the Brouwer Memorial Medal. Aizenman will give the 2002 Brouwer lecture in mathematical physics during the annual Dutch Mathematical Congress April 4-5 at the Technical University Eindhoven.

  • Lerner stepping down as architecture dean
    <Posted 06/12/2001 16:06>
    Ralph Lerner, dean of the School of Architecture, has announced that he is stepping down as dean effective July 1, 2002, following an academic leave of absence that he has been granted during the the 2001-02 academic year. Architecture Professor Mario Gandelsonas will serve as acting dean while Lerner is on leave.

    Lerner, the George Dutton ’27 Professor of Architecture, has been dean since 1989. He came to Princeton in 1984 as a lecturer and was named an associate professor in 1987. After his leave, he will continue as a full-time member of the faculty.

    Gandelsonas joined the Princeton faculty as professor of architecture in 1991 and previously served as a visiting critic. He also has taught at Yale, Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Illinois and other institutions.

    Known as a leading urban designer, Gandelsonas’ work includes projects in the U.S. and abroad, including a prize-winning design of a parkway in Marseilles, France, and designs for several community centers in New York. Gandelsonas has lectured on urbanism and urban design around the world.

    He received a diploma from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires in 1960 and a certificate from the Centre de Recherche d’Urbanisme, Paris, in 1969.

  • Robeson Jr. to speak at U-Store
    <Posted 06/22/2001 10:42>
    Paul Robeson Jr., author of a new biography of his father, Paul Robeson, will speak at the Princeton University Store at 1 p.m. Saturday, June 23. He will be reading from and signing copies of his new book, "The Undiscovered Paul Robeson."

    An internationally known scholar, athlete, actor and activist, the elder Robeson grew up in Princeton only a few blocks from the University. He lettered in four sports at Rutgers and graduated as valedictorian in 1919.

    Robeson soon began a career in theater and music, winning over audiences worldwide with his oratorical skill and rich baritone voice. He campaigned tirelessly for human rights and freedom during World War II. Later blacklisted as a communist, he nevertheless continued to fight for racial equality and justice until his death in 1976.

    Robeson Jr., a journalist and translator, served as his father's aide and personal representative for more than 20 years. In his new book, Robeson Jr. uses diary excerpts, letters and other personal documents as well as his own observations to create an intimate view of his father's life. As a black man, Robeson Jr. writes, his father overcame numerous obstacles but could not face down the media campaign that wrongly labeled him a communist and eventually ruined his career.

    The biography covers the elder Robeson's life through 1939, and is the first of two parts.

  • Peebles awarded Harvey Prize
    <Posted 06/19/2001 09:25>
    James Peebles, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science, Emeritus, has been awarded the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology.

    The prize is given by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, a prominent research university in Israel, to recognize breakthroughs in science and technology.

    Peebles earned the award for his "seminal contributions to the understanding of the origin of our universe and for [his] leadership in defining the challenges of modern cosmology during the past 40 years," said Lawrence Jackier, president of the American Society for Technion, which helps fund the award.

    Peebles is a theoretical cosmologist whose studies of the evolution of matter in the earliest moments of the universe were critical in the establishment of the Big Bang theory as a widely accepted model.

    Peebles arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1958, received his Ph.D. in 1962 and spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow before joining the physics department faculty. He retired last year.

  • Lamont honored for book
    <Posted 06/29/2001 14:10>
    The Society for Comparative Research has named sociology professor Michele Lamont winner of the Mattei Dogan Award for the best comparativist book in 2001. The honor is for her book "The Dignity of Working Men," published by the Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press.

    The book is "an extraordinarily sensitive, highly original interview-based study of the lives and times of working men, both white and black, and American and French," according to the citation. "What it does, to excellent effect, is to explain the ways in which a moral economy, rather than material wealth, provides the currency in which success is measured among working men."

    The scholarly society described the book as "a study which impresses with its methodological sophistication at a time when qualitative methodologies are deeply in question; with its theoretical originality at a time when 'theory' sui generis is increasingly the object of skepticism; with its subtle treatment of race at a time when the persistence of racism...is in sore need of explanation; with its capacity to hit one with striking insights and ideas at a time when the social sciences are badly in need of them."

  • Witherspoon statue unveiled
    <Posted 06/22/2001 11:21>
    Former President Harold T. Shapiro and Vivian Shapiro represented Princeton Friday at the unveiling of a statue of John Witherspoon at Scotland’s University of Paisley. A twin copy of the 9-foot-tall, bronze statue will be erected on the Princeton campus in the fall.

    Among the other participants at the dedication were Princess Anne, internationally renowned sculptor Alexander Stoddart, and officials from the American consulate and the University of Paisley.

    Witherspoon, the sixth president of Princeton, was a clergyman in Paisley in the mid-1700s. The only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon was a leading member of the Continental Congress.

    He arrived from Scotland to become president of Princeton in 1768 and served for a quarter of a century until his death in 1794.

    The statue will follow Witherspoon’s path when it comes to Princeton in the fall, traveling by boat to Philadelphia and over land to Princeton. It will be installed near Firestone Library and dedicated in November.

  • Evans named to Royal Society
    <Posted 06/19/2001 09:26>
    Anthony Evans, director of the Princeton Materials Institute and the Gordon Wu Professor of Engineering, has been named a fellow of the Royal Society.

    Each year up to 42 new fellows are elected to the Royal Society, which was founded in England in 1660. Being awarded a fellowship is widely recognized as a sign of the highest regard in science.

    Fellows are asked to complete a broad range of tasks for the society in the interest of advancing science and technology. There are currently more than 1,300 fellows and foreign members, selected from citizens of British Commonwealth countries and the Irish Republic.

    A native of Wales, Evans received a Ph.D. in metallurgy at Imperial College, London University. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1998 from Harvard University, where he had been the Gordon McKay Professor of Materials Engineering since 1994. Previously, he was the Alcoa Professor and co-director of the High Performance Composites Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He originated Santa Barbara's materials department and served as its chair for six years.

  • Chemistry workshop, June 15-18
    <Posted 06/15/2001 14:27>
    An international workshop on "Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Algorithms" is being held June 15-18 in McDonnell Hall.

    The workshop, organized by the Department of Chemistry and is being sponsored by the Department of Physics, the Princeton Materials Institute and the Office of Naval Research.

    For more information about registration, visit ES2001 Workshop.

  • Princeton selected for "Responsive Ph.D." program
    <Posted 06/15/2001 11:08>
    Princeton is one of 14 universities selected by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to participate in a program to develop innovative approaches to graduate education.

    The program, called the "Responsive Ph.D." initiative, aims to improve teaching preparation, encourage more minority students to obtain a doctorate, foster interdisciplinary collaborations and connect intellectual work more closely to society.

    "There is a growing need to develop in doctoral students a dramatically greater versatility and a more generous perspective on the value of their deep learning," said Robert Weisbuch, the foundation's president.

    The universities were chosen to serve as demonstration sites at which to model practices the foundation eventually plans to disseminate nationally. The other universities are: Arizona State University, University of California-Irvine, University of Colorado-Boulder, Duke University, Howard University, Indiana University, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas-Austin, University of Washington, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale University.

  • Komunyakaa wins Lilly Poetry Prize
    <Posted 06/15/2001 11:07>
    Yusef Komunyakaa, professor of the Council of the Humanities and creative writing, has been awarded this year's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The $100,000 award is one of the largest poetry prizes in the United States and recognizes extraordinary literary accomplishment.

    Joseph Parisi, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee for the prize, said, "In a period when many writers of narrow focus have coasted along by composing variations on one or two themes - and some have even built careers with barely a single new idea to speak of - Yusef Komunyakaa has impressed us again and again by his breadth of vision and the originality of his ever-evolving style. From the start, he dazzled the cognoscenti with his prodigious gifts for image-making and story-telling in poems of unusually dramatic, or rather, cinematic impact."

    Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for "Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems." His most recent work, published this year, is titled "Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-99."

  • Neumeyer named Engineer of the Year
    <Posted 06/15/2001 11:06>
    Charles Neumeyer, who works at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, was named Engineer of the Year by the New Jersey Society of Professional Engineers.

    Neumeyer is the lead project engineer for the National Spherical Torus Experiment, a fusion energy research device that began operating at PPPL in 1999.

    The award cites Neumeyer for his outstanding achievements in engineering, his contributions to the development of fusion as a long-term energy source, and his service in enhancing the prestige of the engineering profession.

  • Young receives Department of Energy award
    <Posted 06/15/2001 11:04>
    The U.S. Department of Energy has selected Ken Young, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, as the recipient of its Distinguished Associate Award.

    The award cites Young for his role as "the leader of diagnostics development for the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, his subsequent contributions to the breakthrough measurements which are the TFTR legacy, and his very real efforts in behalf of collaborative fusion physics research, both within the U.S. and abroad. His dedicated efforts have had a major impact on the diagnostics systems that bind theory and experiment together in advancing fusion."

    Young, who holds his Ph.D. from Princeton, was head of the lab's international off-site research division until he retired this year. During his more than three decades at the PPPL as a fusion researcher and plasma diagnostics specialist, he was involved in moving forward the concept of how diagnostics are used on fusion experiments.

  • Morgan awarded national fellowship
    <Posted 06/15/2001 11:03>
    John Morgan, assistant professor of economics and public affairs, is one of 12 scholars awarded a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship for the 2001-02 academic year.

    The fellowships provide junior scholars with a year free from teaching to advance their careers. The fellows work on an original research project at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Morgan's research topic is "The Art of Conversation: How the Flow of Information in Organizations Affects the Quality of Decision Making and Expert Advice."

  • Postdoctoral Fellowships announced
    <Posted 06/13/2001 12:15>
    The Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation has awarded Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities to two Princeton Graduate School alumni. Kristi Copeland *01 and Daniel Tanaka *01 will begin full-time appointments this fall. According to Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, "The fellowships are designed to enlarge the pedagogical experiences of our next generation of scholar-teachers, offer undergraduates the cutting-edge intelligence of the best young faculty, encourage interdisciplinarity, and jump-start the most promising academic careers."

    For more information visit Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

  • Kripke to receive Schock Prize
    <Posted 06/13/2001 11:12>
    Saul Kripke, the McCosh Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, has been selected to receive the 2001 Rolf Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy.

    The prize is being given to Kripke "for his creation of the modal-logical semantics that bear his name and for his associated original and profound investigations of identity, reference and necessity," according to a news release from the Schock Foundation.

    The release further states, "Kripke's revolutionizing work in (modal logic) meant that we for the first time gained access to a simple and very far-reaching mathematical theory that was consonant with our philosophical intuitions."

    As announced earlier, Elliott Lieb, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and professor of mathematical physics at Princeton, will be awarded the Schock Prize for Mathematics. The two were selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. They will be honored in a ceremony Oct. 25 in Stockholm.

  • Heinz Foundation awardees
    <Posted 06/12/2001 13:42>
    Two Princeton doctoral candidates, Ricardo Holdo and Joshua Plotkin, are among 16 people chosen to be 2001 Teresa Heinz Scholars for Environmental Research. Each will receive a $10,000 award to conduct research on emerging environmental problems. For more information, please visit Heinz.

  • Rally for graduate alumnus, June 2
    <Posted 06/01/2001 18:12>
    Princeton University Amnesty International and Friends of Li Shaomin are sponsoring a rally to secure Li Shaomin's release from detention in China. The event will be held 5:30 p.m. Saturday, June 2 at Firestone Plaza.

    A U.S. citizen, Li was arrested Feb. 25 upon his entry to Shenzhen, China. Li received a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton in 1988 and currently is an associate professor of marketing at the City University of Hong Kong. The Chinese government charged Li with spying for Taiwan on May 15.

  • Lieb to receive Schock Prize in Mathematics
    <Posted 06/01/2001 12:12>
    Elliott Lieb, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and professor of mathematical physics, has been selected to receive the 2001 Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics.

    The prize, which will be presented in a ceremony Oct. 25 in Stockholm, is being given to Lieb for his "contribution to the mathematical understanding of the quantum-mechanical many-body theory" and for his work on "exact solutions of models in statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics," according to a letter from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which chooses the award winners.

    A news release from the Schock Foundation cited Lieb for his "pioneering contributions in many areas of mathematics, particularly mathematical analysis and mathematical physics." It said, "Lieb's scientific production is characterized by clarity and originality."