Goldman, Muir and Rouse elected to National Academy of Sciences
Three Princeton faculty members — Noreen Goldman, Tom Muir and Cecelia Rouse — and 12 Princeton alumni have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year. They are among the 120 new members and 24 international members chosen in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, according to the academy's announcement.
Membership in the Academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States. Established in 1863, the Academy now has 2,617 active members and 537 international members, who are nonvoting members of the Academy with citizenship outside the United States.
Noreen Goldman, Tom Muir, Cecilia Rouse
Noreen Goldman is Princeton's Hughes-Rogers Professor of Demography and Public Affairs and a faculty associate at the Office of Population Research in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA).
Goldman, a specialist in demography and social epidemiology, researches the impact of social and economic factors on health and the physiological pathways through which these factors operate. She has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting professor at the University of California-Los Angeles and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Goldman joined the Princeton faculty in 1987. She holds a D.Sc., an M.Sc., and an M.A. from Harvard and a B.A. from New York University.
Tom Muir, the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of ’65 Professor of Chemistry, chaired the Department of Chemistry from 2014 to 2020.
Muir's research focuses on the development and application of chemical biology approaches to various processes, including epigenetics and bacterial quorum sensing. The methods developed in his lab are used worldwide to address fundamental problems in protein biochemistry. Muir holds a B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Edinburgh, and he did his postdoctoral work at the Scripps Research Institute. He was on the faculty at Rockefeller University from 1996 until coming to Princeton in 2010.
Cecilia Elena Rouse is Princeton's Lawrence and Shirley Katzman and Lewis and Anna Ernst Professor in the Economics of Education and a professor of economics and public affairs at SPIA.
Rouse, a labor economist with a focus on the economics of education, is currently serving as president of the Brookings Institution. She was dean of SPIA from 2012 until she was confirmed (with 95 votes in the U.S. Senate) as the chair of President Joseph Biden's Council of Economic Advisors in 2021. From 2009 to 2011, Rouse served as a member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also worked at the National Economic Council in the Clinton administration as a Special Assistant to the President from 1998 to 1999. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Education. Rouse joined the Princeton faculty in 1992 after earning her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where she also completed her undergraduate work.
New alumni members
In addition to Goldman, Muir and Rouse, 12 Princeton alumni are new members of the National Academy of Sciences:
- Edward Glaeser, an economics major in the Class of 1988, now the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
- Michael Greenstone, a 1998 Ph.D. alumnus in economics, now the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
- Harold Hwang, a 1997 Ph.D. graduate in physics, now professor and director of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at Stanford University.
- Stanley Lemon, a 1968 biology major who is now a professor of medicine, infectious diseases, and microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
- Chen-Yu Liu, a 2002 Ph.D. alumna in physics who is now a professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
- Aaron Naber, a 2009 Ph.D. alumnus in math who is now the Kenneth F. Burgess Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University.
- Diane O'Brien, a 1998 Ph.D. alumna in ecology and evolutionary biology who is now a professor and the interim director of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
- Nipam Patel, a biology major in the Class of 1984 who is now a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and the director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
- Duong Phong, a member of the Class of 1973 and a Ph.D. graduate in 1977, both in mathematics, now a professor of mathematics at Columbia University.
- Steven Strogatz, a math major in the Class of 1980 who is now the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University.
- Ashvin Vishwanath, a 2001 Ph.D. graduate in physics who is now the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics at Harvard University.
- Sandra Wolin, a 1978 biochemical sciences major who is now the senior investigator and head of the National Cancer Institute RNA Biology Initiative at the National Institutes of Health.
The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.
Information from a National Academy of Sciences news release and stories published on the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Department of Chemistry websites was used in this article.
