Board approves seven new faculty appointments
The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of seven faculty members, including one full professor, two associate professors and four assistant professors.
Professor
Jianping Fu, in mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, specializes in mechanical and bioengineering. His appointment to be the Class of 1995 Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Bioengineering is effective July 1, 2027.
Fu comes to Princeton from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where he has taught since 2009, most recently as a professor of mechanical engineering with courtesy appointments in the school’s departments of biomedical engineering and cell and developmental biology. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow with the American Heart Association at the University of Pennsylvania from 2007 to 2009.
His fundamental research on human development uses stem cells to bioengineer synthetic embryo and organ models in a transdisciplinary approach that combines bioengineering, stem cell biology and developmental biology to study development and disease.
Fu has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.
He was elected a member of the board of directors at the International Society for Stem Cell Research earlier this year, where he also serves as chair of its scientific programs committee and previously served on its guidelines working group and publication committee.
He is a member of the governing council at the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineers, treasurer of the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Special Interest Group, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Tissue and Cellular Engineering Committee.
Fu is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineers, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Among his many honors and awards, he received the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award in 2022, the American Chemical Society’s Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award in 2020, the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Rising Star Award in 2016 and an NSF CAREER award in 2012.
He was also a visiting professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine and Freie Universität Berlin's Institute of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Fu has served as an associate editor at npj Regenerative Medicine and a founding member of the EMBO Journal Catalysts Program since 2021. He serves on the editorial or advisory boards of the journals Cell Stem Cell, Biophysical Journal, Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Mechanobiology in Medicine, and Cell Regeneration.
He is the author or co-author of nine book chapters and more than 150 articles in journals including Nature, Biomaterials, Cell, and Scientific Reports. He holds nine patents.
Fu earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.E. from the University of Science and Technology of China.
Associate professor
Siwei Cheng, in sociology, specializes in social stratification and social demography. Her appointment is effective Jan. 16, 2027.
She comes to Princeton from New York University, where she has taught since 2016, most recently as an associate professor. From 2015 to 2016, she was an assistant professor at the University of California-Los Angeles.
Cheng earned a B.A. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Yuke Zhu, in computer science, specializes in robotics. His appointment is effective July 1, 2027.
He comes to Princeton from the University of Texas-Austin, where he has taught since 2020, most recently as an associate professor. He is also a director and distinguished research scientist at NVIDIA Research, where he co-leads the Generalist Embodied Agent Research (GEAR) group focused on embodied AI.
Zhu earned a B.E. from Zhejiang University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Assistant professor
Jason Altschuler, in operations research and financial engineering, joined the faculty on July 1. Altschuler specializes in optimization and data science and comes to Princeton from the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been an assistant professor since 2023. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S.E. from Princeton.
Elena Shadrina, in history, joined the faculty on Sept. 1. Shadrina, who specializes in medieval history, holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, as well as an M.A. and B.A. from the University of Toronto.
Joshua Wang, in mathematics, joined the faculty on July 1. Wang specializes in low-dimensional topology and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an A.B. from Princeton. Wang is a Veblen Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was previously a Veblen Research Instructor from 2024 to earlier this year.
Taylor Webb, in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and psychology, joined the faculty on Aug. 1. Webb specializes in cognitive neuroscience and comes to Princeton from the University of Montreal, where he has been an assistant professor since 2025. Webb holds a Ph.D. from Princeton and a B.A. and B.M. from the University of Southern California.
