Fifteen Princeton University faculty members were transferred to emeritus status in recent action by the Board of Trustees. Transfers are effective July 1, 2018, except where noted.
They are:
- Frank Calaprice, professor of physics;
- Sarah Jane Flint, professor of molecular biology;
- John Haldon, the Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History and professor of history and Hellenic studies;
- Gilbert Harman, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, effective Sept. 1, 2017;
- Robert Kaster, the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature and professor of classics;
- Elliott Lieb, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and professor of mathematical physics, effective Sept. 1, 2017;
- Angel Loureiro, professor of Spanish and Portuguese;
- François Morel, the Albert G. Blanke, Jr., Professor of Geosciences, professor of geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute, effective Sept. 1, 2018;
- Thomas Romer, professor of politics and public affairs and director of the Research Program in Political Economy, effective Sept. 1, 2018;
- Gertrud Schüpbach, the Henry Fairfield Osborn Professor of Biology and professor of molecular biology;
- Alexander Smits, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering;
- Jeffrey Stout, professor of religion;
- Gang Tian, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics and visiting research scholar, effective Sept. 1, 2017;
- Edmund White, Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, effective Feb. 1, 2018; and
- Christian Wildberg, professor of classics.
Frank Calaprice
Frank Calaprice is a leading researcher in the area of experimental nuclear and particle astrophysics. He came to Princeton in 1970 to continue research on time reversal invariance in nuclear beta decay. Calaprice’s interests fit well with Princeton’s then-new cyclotron, and he worked in the Princeton nuclear physics group on research that advanced understanding of particle behavior.
Since the 1990s, Calaprice has led the design, operation and interpretation of data from the Borexino experiment, a scintillator detector operating at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy. It is designed to measure solar neutrinos — neutrinos emitted during the fusion cycles that fuel the sun. Through his contributions, Borexino has become one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors in the world.
Calaprice is widely recognized as one of the few authorities in the field of very low-background, low-counting rate experiments. More recently, he has played a role in two dark-matter searches: the DarkSide program and the SABRE program, both of which utilize LNGS.
Calaprice received his B.A. and his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley.
Sarah Jane Flint
Sarah Jane Flint is a leader in the field of virology. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from University College London, then joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York as a postdoctoral researcher, helping to develop the first transcriptional map of the human adenovirus DNA genome.
She continued to investigate adenoviral gene expression in productively infected and transformed cells as a postdoctoral fellow with Phillip Sharp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, beginning in 1977, as an assistant professor of biochemical sciences at Princeton. Flint served as associate chair of the biochemical sciences department and director of the Program in Molecular Biology from 1982 until the Department of Molecular Biology was formed in 1984.
Her publications include “Principles of Virology: Molecular Biology, Pathogenesis and Control,” a classic virology text that is being prepared for its fifth edition. She is a co-author of “Human Adenoviruses: From Villains to Vectors,” which details her research system.
Flint has served on various editorial boards and several National Institutes of Health (NIH) study sections, including chair of biochemistry, and other review panels. She is a member of the Biosafety Working Group of the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee. Flint was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2000.
John Haldon
John Haldon studies the socioeconomic, institutional, political and cultural history of the Early- and Middle Byzantine empire from the seventh to the 11th centuries.
Haldon came to Princeton in 2005 after working at the universities of Athens and Munich, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, and the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, where he was director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies and head of the School of Historical Studies. He has served as director of graduate studies for the history department at Princeton since 2009 and as director of the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
The author or co-author of more than two dozen books, Haldon oversees two long-term projects to enrich understanding of the environmental history of the late Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk/Ottoman periods: the PIIRS Climate Change and History Research Initiative and the Avkat Archaeological Project, an archaeological and historical survey in north central Turkey.
From 2007 to 2013, Haldon was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, D.C. He is president of the Association Internationale des Études Byzantines, a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a member of the editorial boards of several scholarly journals in Europe and the United States.
Haldon earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, as well as a magister from Fachbereich Byzantinistik und griechische Philologie.
Gilbert Harman
Gilbert Harman joined Princeton’s faculty in 1964. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College, he earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and was named an instructor in Princeton’s Department of Philosophy, where he spent his entire 52-year career.
Harman has worked in virtually every area of systematic philosophy — philosophy of language and linguistics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and moral philosophy — and has made major contributions to each.
Together with Donald Davidson, he co-edited “Semantics of Natural Language,” a collection of seminal papers in the field that gave rise to the modern philosophy of language. His first book, “Thought,” is a classic of epistemology. Harman’s other publications, writing and teaching all have served to build bridges between philosophy and the cognitive sciences at Princeton and beyond, and to convince philosophers of the importance of cognitive science for understanding reasoning and the mind.
In addition to being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harman was named a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the Association for Psychological Science. He received the Jean Nicod Prize and Princeton’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
Robert Kaster
Robert Kaster is a classicist specializing in Latin literature and language. His scholarship focuses on Roman rhetoric, the history of ancient education, Roman ethics and textual criticism. He received his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. at Harvard. He was a teaching fellow at Harvard and an instructor at Colby College before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he was the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities.
Kaster came to Princeton in 1997. In addition to serving on numerous faculty and University policy committees, Kaster was director of the Program in the Ancient World, as well as chair and director of graduate studies for the Department of Classics.
In 2007, Kaster received Princeton’s Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, and in 2017, the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
His first book, “Guardians of Language,” which examines the grammarians of Late Antiquity, received a Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association, which later elected Kaster as its president. Kaster is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Elliott Lieb
Elliott Lieb consistently has broken new ground in physics and in mathematics. Among his many achievements are the solution to the “square ice problem” and the computation of “Lieb’s ice constant,” which opened up a new area of soluble models.
Lieb earned his bachelor’s degree from MIT. He received a National Science Foundation fellowship to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for a postdoctoral stay at Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto.
Lieb worked at IBM and has taught at Yeshiva University, Northeastern University and MIT. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1975.
Lieb is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Danish Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Chilean Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He received the Boltzmann Medal, Max Planck Medal, Norwegian Onsager Prize, Heineman Prize and the Austrian Medal of Honor for Science and Art.
Angel Loureiro
Angel Loureiro teaches contemporary Spanish literature and film and critical theory. He arrived at Princeton in 2001 and was appointed the first chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Language and Cultures after it was created from the Department of Romance Languages.
Loureiro began his studies in Spain, earning a bachelor’s degree from Gijon’s Escuela de Ingenieros Técnicos and a master’s degree at the University of Barcelona. He received a master’s degree from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania before accepting his first academic position as an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was promoted to full professor.
He is the author of “Mentira y seducción: La trilogía fantástica de Torrente Ballester,” a narratological interpretation of the novels of Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, and “Replacing the Subject: The Ethics of Autobiography in Modern Spain.”
François Morel
François Morel is a leading scholar in the chemistry of natural waters and one of the founders of the field of biogeochemistry.
Morel was a faculty member at MIT for more than 20 years before joining the Princeton faculty in 1994. His laboratory research focuses on the interaction of trace metals and microorganisms in the environment, with an emphasis on the role of metals in the global cycles of carbon and nitrogen in marine and terrestrial systems. He has twice served as director of the Princeton Environmental Institute.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere de Arti, and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the Geochemical Society. He received the Patterson Medal from the Geochemical Society, the Urey Medal from the American Geophysical Union, the Distinguished Alumni Award from the California Institute of Technology, and the Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology from the American Chemical Society.
Morel received a B.S. from the University of Grenoble, France, and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
Thomas Romer
Thomas Romer explores the interaction of market and nonmarket forces that influence the allocation of economic resources.
Romer taught at the University of Western Ontario and Carnegie Mellon University before joining the Princeton faculty in the early 1990s. He has served as chair of the Department of Politics and head of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs’ graduate program in public policy. He created and directed the Research Program in Political Economy and the multi-departmental graduate program in political economy.
Romer has served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Trade Commission, Stanford University and the Institute for Advanced Study and is a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He was awarded the Duncan Black Prize of the Public Choice Society for his work on the politics and economics of local governments’ taxation and spending behavior.
He earned his undergraduate degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from Yale University.
Gertrud Schüpbach
Gertrud Schüpbach is world-renowned for her work in developmental biology and genetics. Her lab at Princeton focuses on cell-to-cell communication signaling processes that are involved in pattern formation during development using Drosophila (also known as “fruit flies”) as a model system.
After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich, Schüpbach performed postdoctoral work there and later at Princeton. She was appointed as a research biologist in Princeton’s Department of Biology in 1985 and was promoted to full professor in 1994.
Schüpbach is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She also is an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University.
Schüpbach has served as the president of the Genetics Society of America and president of the Drosophila board. She was elected to the European Molecular Biology Association and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Alexander Smits
Alexander Smits’ research spans the field of fluid mechanics, including fundamental turbulence, supersonic and hypersonic flows, bio-inspired flows, sports aerodynamics, and novel energy-harvesting concepts.
Smits earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London and the University of Melbourne before coming to Princeton in 1981.
He served as chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering for 13 years and was director of the Gas Dynamics Laboratory on the Forrestal Campus for 33 years. During that time, he received several teaching awards, including the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Smits has written more than 240 articles and three books, and edited seven volumes. He was awarded seven patents and helped found three companies. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Australasian Fluid Mechanics Society.
Jeffrey Stout
Jeffrey Stout has worked at Princeton for his entire career as a professor of religion. After attending Brown University, he came to Princeton in 1972 as a graduate student and joined the faculty in 1975.
Stout twice served as chair of the religion department. He received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Graduate Mentoring Award. He also was an assistant coach of men’s soccer and a co-sponsor of the faculty Resolution on Divestment in support of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He played a role in the founding of the University Center for Human Values and the Center for the Study of Religion. He was a member of the editorial board of Princeton University Press.
A past president of the American Academy of Religion and an inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Stout’s interests include theories of religion, ethics, social criticism, political thought, modern theology and film.
His books include “The Flight from Authority,” “Ethics After Babel” and “Democracy and Tradition” — the latter two received the Award for Excellence from the American Academy of Religion.
Gang Tian
Gang Tian has made fundamental contributions to geometric analysis, complex geometry and symplectic geometry. Among his many results, he proved the existence of Kahler-Einstein metrics on compact complex surfaces with positive first Chern class, as well as what is now known as the Bogomolov-Tian-Todorov theorem for Calabi-Yau manifolds.
He worked as an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton from 1988-1990, returning as a full professor in 2003 after appointments at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York University and MIT, where he held the chair of Simons Professor of Mathematics.
Tian received the Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States’ highest honor for young scientists, and the Oswald Veblen Prize in geometry from the American Mathematical Society. He was elected to the National Academy of China and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as editor for a number of journals including Annals of Mathematics, and on many mathematics advisory boards.
Tian holds the position of vice president of Peking University and professor and director of the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research. He also is a member of the scientific council of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics.
He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Nanjing University, his master’s degree from Peking University and his Ph.D. from Harvard.
Edmund White
Edmund White is the author of more than 20 books, including about a dozen works of fiction. He is perhaps best known for his biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He also is the author of a trilogy of autobiographical novels — “A Boy’s Own Story,” “The Beautiful Room is Empty” and “The Farewell Symphony.”
White began his career as an editor and writer, working at Time-Life Books, Newsweek, The Saturday Review and Horizon. He also served as director of New York University’s New York Institute for the Humanities.
After working at Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Brown universities, White joined Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing in 1998. He served as the program’s director from 2002 to 2006.
White was appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 he was named state author of New York, and he has received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Career Achievement in American Fiction. White holds a B.A. in Chinese from the University of Michigan.
Christian Wildberg
Christian Wildberg is a scholar of ancient philosophy, with a focus on the history of Platonism. His interests include Greek literature, especially tragedy, and Greek religion.
He taught at the University of Texas-Austin and Freie Universität Berlin before joining the Princeton faculty in 1996. In addition to his work as director of the Program for Hellenic Studies, Wildberg is involved with the Program in Classical Philosophy, the Center for the Study of Religion and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity. From 2006 to 2010, he served as master of Forbes College.
Among his publications are two works on Philoponus’ criticisms of Aristotle, “Philoponus Against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World” and “John Philoponus’ Criticism of Aristotle’s Theory of Ether.” He is editing a “Handbook of Neoplatonism.” He is an editor of the leading journals of ancient philosophy, Apeiron and Philosophia Antiqua, and co-edits two monograph series, Philosophia Antiqua and Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum.
Wildberg received a master’s degree from the University of Marburg, Germany, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
