Board approves 24 faculty appointments

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 24 faculty members, including six full professors and 18 assistant professors.

Professor

Sylvain Chassang, in economics, specializes in economic theory. He rejoins the Princeton faculty this summer from his professorship at New York University, having previously taught at Princeton from 2007 to 2016. From 2104-16, he served as director of Princeton’s Dietrich Economic Theory Center.

Chassang has published numerous papers and serves as associate editor of four economics journals. He holds master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Pablo Fajgelbaum, in economics, studies international trade. Fajgelbaum has a Ph.D. from Princeton and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. He has taught at the University of California-Los Angeles since 2011, and was promoted to associate professor in 2017.

He is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate with the International Growth Centre. He also serves on the advisory committee of the Trade, Integration and Growth Network. He is an associate editor of the Journal of International Economics.

David Graves, in chemical and biological engineering, joins Princeton this summer from the University of California-Berkeley, where he has served on the faculty since 1986, being promoted to professor in 1997.

Graves specializes in low temperature plasma science. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Arizona. He is a founding member of the Society for Plasma Medicine and is senior editor of IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Science. He has published numerous papers and is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Vacuum Society. 

Reed Maxwell, in civil and environmental engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute, comes to Princeton in the fall from the Colorado School of Mines, where he has been on the faculty since 2009. He was promoted to professor in 2013. Since 2011, he has served as director of the Integrated Groundwater Modeling Center.

Maxwell studies watershed hydrology and groundwater-surface interaction. He was a physicist with the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 2000 to 2009. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, a master’s from the University of California-Los Angeles, and B.S. from the University of Miami.

Maria (Layna) Mosley, in politics and international affairs, joins Princeton this summer from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she has been a professor since 2011, and where she joined the faculty in 2004. From 1999 to 2004, she was a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame.

Mosley studies international political economy. She is editor of “Interview Research in Political Science” (2013), and author of “Labor Rights and Multinational Production” (2011) and “Global Capital and National Governments” (2003). She is a current editorial board member of four journals and has served on several professional organizations in her field. She also is an executive committee member of the Women Also Know Stuff initiative. Mosley’s Ph.D. is from Duke University and her B.A. is from Rollins College.

Eliot Quataert, in astrophysical sciences, joins the Princeton faculty this summer. A theoretical physicist, Quataert has been on the faculty at the University of California-Berkeley since 2001, where he was promoted to professor in 2008. Since 2019, he has served as chair of the Department of Astronomy. From 2008 to 2014, he was the Thomas and Alison Schneider Chair in Physics at UC Berkeley. From 1999 to 2001, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Quataert is co-author of more than 300 publications on topics including compact objects, plasma astrophysics, stellar physics and galaxy formation.

Quataert has received many accolades for his work. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year. In 2018, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2012, he has been a Simons Investigator in Physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and serves on the board of several organizations, including the Space Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2010, he received the Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from UC Berkeley. Quataert has a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Assistant professor

Emily Davidson, in chemical and biological engineering, joins Princeton in winter 2021.

Davidson’s area of research is hierarchical polymers. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.S.E. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Theodore Drivas, in mathematics, joins the Princeton faculty this summer. He has served as an instructor at Princeton since 2017.

Drivas studies mathematical fluid dynamics and turbulence theory. He earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and his B.S. from the University of Chicago.

Jaime Fernández Fisac, in electrical engineering, joins the faculty in the fall. He studies robotics, control and artificial intelligence.

He received his Ph.D. this year from the University of California-Berkeley. He has master’s degrees from Cranfield University and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Hanna Garth, in anthropology, joins the faculty next summer.

Garth, a cultural anthropologist, earned her Ph.D. from the University of California-Los Angeles, an M.P.H. from Boston University School of Public Health, and a B.A. from Rice University.

Boris Hanin, in operations research and financial engineering, joins the faculty in the fall from Texas A&M University, where he has been an assistant professor since 2017.

Hanin’s field is data science. He has a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

Jason Klusowski, in operations research and financial engineering, joins the faculty in the fall from Rutgers University, where he has been an assistant professor since 2018.

Klusowski, whose field of specialization is statistics, has a Ph.D. from Yale University and a B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba.

Mirjam Kotwick, in classics, specializes in ancient Greek language and literature and ancient philosophy. She joins the Princeton faculty this summer.

Since 2019, she has been an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

Biao Lian, in physics, joins the faculty this fall. Lian is a specialist in condensed matter theory.

His Ph.D. is from Stanford University and his B.S. is from Tsinghua University.

Xiaosheng Mu, in economics, joins the faculty this summer from Columbia University, where he has been an assistant professor since 2019.

Mu’s field is economic theory. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree from Yale University.

Rebecca Perlman, in politics and international affairs, joins the faculty this summer. Perlman is a political economist.

She holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton, a master’s degree from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Robbie Richardson, in English, joins the Princeton faculty this summer from the University of Kent, where he has been a senior lecturer since 2013.

A scholar of 18th-century literature, he has a Ph.D. from McMaster University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Winnipeg.

Bartolomeo Stellato, in operations research and financial engineering, joins the faculty this summer.

He studies optimization and has a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, a master’s from ETH Zürich, and a B.S.E. from Politecnico di Milano.

Yunqing Tang, in mathematics, joins the faculty this fall. Currently, Tang, who studies number theory, is an instructor in the mathematics department at Princeton.

She has a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree from Peking University. From 2106-17, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Marissa Weichman, in chemistry, joins the Princeton faculty this summer.

Weichman studies physical chemistry and has a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.S. from the California Institute of Technology.

Cong Xue, in mathematics, studies number theory. She joins the faculty in the fall.

Xue has a Ph.D. from Université Paris Sud, a Cycle Ingénieur Polytechnicien from École Polytechnique, and a B.S. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Jerry Zee, in anthropology and the Princeton Environmental Institute, joins the faculty in the fall from the University of California-Santa Cruz, where he has been an assistant professor since 2016.

Zee studies the environmental humanities and has a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.A. from Stanford University.

Ian Zemke, in mathematics, studies topology. For the past two years, he has been an instructor at Princeton, and will join the faculty this summer.

Zemke has a Ph.D. from the University of California-Los Angeles and a B.S. from the University of Washington.

Ruobing Zhang, in mathematics, joins the faculty this fall. He studies differential geometry and has been an instructor at Stony Brook University for the past four years.

Zhang earned his Ph.D. from Princeton and his B.S. from Yantai University.