Board approves new faculty appointments
The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of these six faculty members, including two full professors and four assistant professors.
Professor
Christopher Chang, in chemistry, specializes in chemical biology. His appointment to be the Edward and Virginia Taylor Professor of Bioorganic Chemistry is effective July 1, 2024.
Chang comes to Princeton from the University of California-Berkeley, where he has taught since 2004, most recently as the Class of 1942 Chair Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology. He is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
He has published more than 200 papers and holds 15 patents, and he is a founding senior editor at ACS Central Science, the new American Chemical Society flagship journal for open-access publishing. His many awards include the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2015 Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry, the 2013 Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and a 2006 NSF CAREER Award. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator from 2008 to 2019.
Chang earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S. and a B.S. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology.
Michelle Chang, in chemistry, specializes in biochemistry, chemical biology and synthetic biology. She joins the Princeton faculty from her professorship at the University of California-Berkeley, where she has taught since 2007, most recently as a professor of chemistry and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. She will begin at Princeton as the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Chemistry, effective Jan. 1, 2024.
Chang has published more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, holds six patents, and has given some 200 invited talks and symposia. She is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the 2022 Centenary Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry, a 2013 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award and a 2011 New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health.
Chang holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. and B.S. from the University of California-San Diego.
Assistant professor
Joshua Atkinson, in civil and environmental engineering and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, joins the faculty in January 2024. He specializes in bioengineering and holds a Ph.D. from Rice University and a B.S. from the University of Michigan.
Peter Henderson, in computer science and the School of Public and International Affairs, joins the faculty in January 2024. He specializes in natural language processing and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and an M.Sc. and B.Eng. from McGill University.
Mae Milano, in computer science, joins the faculty in January 2024. A specialist in programming languages and distributed systems, she holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and a B.S. from Brown University.
Tiago Simões, in ecology and evolutionary biology, specializes in zoology. He joins the faculty in January 2024 and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta and an M.S. and a B.S. from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
