Board of Trustees approves 18 faculty appointments

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 18 faculty members, including five full professors and 13 assistant professors.

Professors

Noga Alon, in mathematics and applied and computational mathematics, will join the faculty in winter 2018 from Tel Aviv University, where he has served as Baumritter Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science since 1993. He began his faculty career there as a senior lecturer in 1985 and the next year became an associate professor. Alon completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after earning his Ph.D. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, M.S. from Tel Aviv University and B.S. from the Technion. His research expertise encompasses combinatorics, graph theory and their applications in theoretical computer science.

Matthew Desmond, in sociology, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from Harvard University, where he is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Justice and Poverty Project. He has taught at Harvard since 2012, where he completed his postdoctoral fellowship, and earlier received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his B.S. from Arizona State University. Desmond's primary teaching and research interests include urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory, and ethnography.

Jennifer Jennings, in the Woodrow Wilson School and sociology, will join the faculty in summer 2017. An associate professor at New York University, where she has taught since 2011, Jennings was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University, M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and A.B. from Princeton. Jennings specializes in analyzing racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in educational and health outcomes.

Henrik Kleven, in the Woodrow Wilson School and economics, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from the London School of Economics, where he has taught since 2007. Previously, Kleven was on the faculty of the University of Copenhagen, from which he also received his Ph.D. Kleven's research combines empirical evidence and economic theory to show ways of designing more effective government policies.

Frederick Wherry, in sociology, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from Yale University, where he has been a professor since 2013 and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. Wherry was an associate professor at Columbia University from 2012-13 and faculty member at the University of Michigan from 2006-12. He also served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. A Ph.D. graduate from Princeton, Wherry completed his B.A. at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. An economic and cultural sociologist, his research explores domestic and global investigations of money, value and social life.

Assistant professors

Reena Goldthree, in African American studies, will join the faculty in fall 2017 from Dartmouth College, where she has been an assistant professor since 2011. An expert on the history of modern Latin America and the Caribbean, Goldthree received her Ph.D. from Duke University and B.A. from Columbia.

Jonathan Hanselman, in mathematics, will join the faculty in fall 2017 from the University of Texas-Austin, where he has been an instructor since 2014. Hanselman earned his Ph.D. from Columbia and B.S. from MIT. His research interests center on low-dimensional topology, with particular focus on the topology of 3-manifolds and knots.

Grace Helton, in philosophy, will join the faculty in summer 2018 after completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton. She previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Antwerp. Helton is a Ph.D. graduate of New York University and earned her B.A. from the University of Nebraska.

Adam Kapor, in the Woodrow Wilson School and economics, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from his position as an assistant professor at Columbia. Specializing in industrial organization and the economics of education, Kapor was granted a Ph.D. from Yale and B.A. from Harvard.

Harvey Lederman, in philosophy, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from the University of Pittsburgh, where he has been an assistant professor since 2016. Earlier, Lederman was on the faculty of New York University from 2014-16. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and B.A. degrees from the University of Cambridge and from Princeton.

Anirudha Majumdar, in mechanical and aerospace engineering, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from Stanford University, where he is a postdoctoral scholar within the Autonomous Systems Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from MIT and B.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ricardo Mallarino, in molecular biology, will join the faculty in winter 2018 from Harvard, where he is pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship. A specialist in the molecular basis of morphological change, Mallarino received his B.Sc. from Universidad de los Andes and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard.

Velma Mitch McEwen, in architecture, will join the faculty in fall 2017 from the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, where she has been an assistant professor since 2014. She has also served as co-founder and partner of A(n) Office, an architecture firm based in Detroit, and principal of McEwen Studio. Her earlier work was at Bernard Tschumi Architects, SUPERFRONT, and the New York City Department of City Planning. McEwen earned her M.Arch. at Columbia and B.A. at Harvard.

Laura Quick, in religion and Judaic studies, will join the faculty in summer 2017. She comes to Princeton from the University of Oxford, where she received her Ph.D. and has been a college lecturer since 2016. Quick earned her M.A. from the University of Durham and B.A. from Cardiff University.

Miklós Rácz, in operations research and financial engineering, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from his role as postdoctoral researcher with Microsoft Research. Rácz received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and M.S. from Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

Leslie Schoop, in chemistry, will join the faculty in fall 2017 from the Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research, where she is conducting a postdoctoral fellowship. A 2014 Ph.D. graduate from Princeton, Schoop earned her Diploma from Johannes Gutenberg University.

Johannes Wankhammer, in German, will join the faculty in fall 2017 from Reed College, where he has been a visiting assistant professor. Wankhammer was awarded a Ph.D. from Cornell University, M.A. from Binghamton University and B.A. from University of Graz.

Natasha Wheatley, in history, will join the faculty in fall 2017 from the University of Sydney, where she has been a postdoctoral research fellow since 2016. Wheatley received her Ph.D. from Columbia and B.A. from the University of Sydney.