Seven professors elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Princeton faculty members Mark Aguiar, Adele Goldberg, Noreen Goldman, Jenny Greene, Melissa Lane, Atif Mian and Mansour Shayegan have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for distinguished work in their disciplines.
They are among leaders in academia, the arts, industry, policy, research and science who were elected to the academy this year. They will be inducted at a ceremony in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“We celebrate the achievement of each new member and the collective breadth and depth of their excellence — this is a fitting commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary,” said Academy President Laurie Patton in the academy's 2026 announcement of new members yesterday. “The founding of the nation and the Academy are rooted in the inextricable links between a vibrant democracy, the free pursuit of knowledge and the expansion of the public good.”
From left: Mark Aguiar, Adele Goldberg, Noreen Goldman and Jenny Greene
Mark Aguiar
Aguiar is the Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance and co-director of the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies. His research in macroeconomics focuses on models of consumption and savings, emerging market business cycles, sovereign debt and capital taxation. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he serves as co-director of its Program on International Finance and Macroeconomics.
Aguiar earned his bachelor’s from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An elected fellow of the Econometric Society, he has also served on the board of editors for the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Dynamics and AEJ: Macroeconomics.
Adele Goldberg
Goldberg, the Moses Taylor Pyne Professor of Psychology, is a psychologist and linguist who studies how the brain acquires language — both in children and adults. Her work uses metaphor, statistics and sentence structure to explore language production and comprehension.
She received her bachelor’s from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. Goldberg is a former president of the Cognitive Science Society, received an honorary doctorate from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen, Germany, and has had fellowships with many prominent organizations. Her 2019 book, “Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions,” has been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
Noreen Goldman
Goldman, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Demography and Public Affairs, is a specialist in demography and social epidemiology. Her research focuses on the impact of social and economic factors on health and the physiological pathways through which these factors operate. Her current project centers on assessing cardiovascular health among disadvantaged young adults in the U.S. through demographic, clinical and molecular data.
She earned her bachelor’s from New York University and a D.Sc., M.Sc. and M.A. from Harvard University. Goldman is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a recipient of Princeton's Graduate Mentoring Award and the former vice president of the Population Association of America, among other honors.
Jenny Greene
Greene, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, studies massive black holes and the galaxies that house them, using telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum. She also teaches pre-algebra and algebra as part of the Prison Teaching Initiative, which she co-founded in 2005 and directs. Under her leadership, PTI has grown into one of the largest prison educational programs in the country, offering almost 50 courses per year in several correctional institutions.
Greene earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her honors include the 2025 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the Hubble Fellowship, among many others.
From left: Melissa Lane, Atif Mian and Mansour Shayegan
Melissa Lane
Lane, the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton and the former director of the University Center for Human Values, is a specialist in ancient Greek political thought and the ethics and politics of climate change. She is currently giving a multiyear series of distinguished public lectures at Gresham College in London, focused on how ancient Greek ideas shape the modern political imagination. Her most recent book, “Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political,” won the 2024 Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize.
She received her bachelor’s from Harvard University and her Ph.D. and MPhil from the University of Cambridge. Her previous honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ancient Studies Residency at the American Academy in Rome, a visiting professorship at the École Normale Supérieure, and Princeton’s Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize, among others.
Atif Mian
Mian is the John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 Professor in Public Policy and Finance, professor of economics and public affairs, and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance. His research focuses on connections between financial markets and the macroeconomy, emphasizing the role played by political, governance and organizational constraints in shaping the effectiveness and scope of financial markets.
Mian holds a bachelor’s and Ph.D. from MIT. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, co-director of Economics for Inclusive Prosperity and co-author of “House of Debt,” which examines the role of household debt in the Great Recession and its implications for economic policy. He was selected by the International Monetary Fund in 2014 as one of the world’s top young economists.
Mansour Shayegan
Shayegan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, focuses on the physics of semiconductors, especially their electronic properties. His research includes the fabrication and measurement of very clean quantum-confined carrier systems.
He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has received Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Humboldt Prize and a Fulbright Fellowship, among others. Shayegan is a Gordon and Betty Moore Materials Synthesis Investigator and an elected fellow of the American Physical Society.
