Board approves 11 faculty appointments

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 11 faculty members, including four full professors, one associate professor and six assistant professors.

Professor

Steven Cowley, in astrophysical sciences and as director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), will join the faculty in fall 2018. A renowned leader in plasma physics, Cowley joins the University from Oxford University, where he is president and a professor.

From 2009-2016, he was CEO of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority; he also began his career there as a senior scientific officer from 1985-1987. Cowley moved on to work at PPPL as a staff and research physicist from 1987-1993. His academic positions include roles on the faculties of the University of California-Los Angeles from 1993-2008 and Imperial College London from 2001-16.

Cowley received his B.A. from Oxford and Ph.D. from Princeton.

Katherine Ho, in economics, will join the faculty in summer 2018 from Columbia University, where she has been on the faculty since 2005. Ho earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University.

Ho’s research expertise is in the industrial organization of the medical care market. Prior to her academic career, she spent four years as private secretary to the Minister of State for Health in the United Kingdom.  

Sanyu Mojola, in sociology and the Woodrow Wilson School, will join the faculty this summer from the University of Michigan, where she is an assistant professor. Mojola earlier spent nine years teaching at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Focusing on the sociology of health, Mojola examines the social processes, mechanisms and patterns of social organization that lead to health inequality tied to gender, race/ethnicity, life course stage and socio-economic status. She was granted a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. from the University of Durham.

James Raymond Vreeland, in the Woodrow Wilson School and politics, will join the faculty this summer from Georgetown University, where he has taught since 2009. From 1999-2008, he was on the faculty of Yale University. Vreeland did his undergraduate studies at Manhattan College and received his Ph.D. from New York University.

His research focuses on international political economy, specializing in international institutions. Specifically, Vreeland explores how globalization, particularly as it is embodied in international institutions, affects politics in the developing world.

Associate Professor

Marshall Brown, in architecture, will join the faculty this summer. He comes to Princeton from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 2008. Since 2011, he also has been the principal at Marshall Brown, a Chicago-based architecture and urban design consultancy. He brings expertise in the integration of architecture, infrastructure and landscape.

Brown also founded and was a director at Atlantic Yards Development WorkShop from 2004-09 and earlier was a project designer at Pentagram Architecture and Davis Brody Bond LLP. He earned his M.A. from Harvard and B.A. from Washington University.

Assistant Professor

Erin Besler, in architecture, will join the faculty in fall 2018 from her post as a lecturer at the University of California-Los Angeles. She also is co-founder of the multidisciplinary studio Besler & Sons. An M.A. graduate of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and B.A. graduate of Yale, Besler specializes in design and construction.

Caroline Cheung, in classics, will join the faculty this summer from the Ph.D. program at the University of California-Berkeley. During the 2016-17 academic year, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. An expert in the art and archaeology of Roman and pre-Roman Italy, Cheung earned her M.A. from Florida State University and B.A. from the University of California-Los Angeles.

Arun Hendi, in the Woodrow Wilson School and sociology, will join the faculty this summer from the University of Southern California, where he has been an assistant professor since 2017. His research focuses on racial and socioeconomic inequalities in health and mortality, and the demography of marriage and family. Hendi earned his B.A., dual M.A. degrees and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ryo Morimoto, in anthropology, will join the faculty in fall 2018 from Harvard, where he has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. He completed his Ph.D. at Brandeis University and B.A. at the University of Colorado. Morimoto studies anthropology and disaster, culture and sudden change, memory and material objects, and the selective remembrance of the nuclear in Japan.

Ludovic Tangpi Ndounkeu, in operations research and financial engineering, will join the faculty in fall 2018. He comes to Princeton from a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vienna. An expert in mathematical finance, Tangpi Ndounkeu received his Ph.D. from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Universität Konstanz, and M.A. and postgraduate diploma from Stellenbosch University and African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

Iryna Vushko, in history, will join the faculty this summer from Hunter College, where she has been an assistant professor since 2012. Specializing in the history of modern Europe, Vushko was granted a doctoral degree from Yale, M.A. from Central European University and B.A. from L’viv National University.