Board approves 22 new faculty appointments

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 22 faculty members, including five full professors, one associate professor and 16 assistant professors.

Professor

Mircea Dincă, in chemistry, specializes in inorganic and materials chemistry. He is joining the University as the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Chemistry, effective Jan. 16, 2025.

Dincă joins Princeton from his position as a professor of chemistry and the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was named an assistant professor there in 2010 and promoted to full professor in 2020, when he was also named to the Keck professorship.

In 2021, Dincă delivered the Kurt Mislow Annual Lecture in Stereochemistry at Princeton. Among his many other awards and honors are a Brown Foundation Investigator Award in 2023, a Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry in 2021, the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry in 2018, and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

He has authored more than 165 journal articles and holds 10 patents.

Dincă earned a B.A. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.

Navroz Kersi Dubash, in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, specializes in environmental policy. His appointment became effective Sept. 1.

Dubash joins Princeton from a professorship at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, where he has taught since 2009. He previously researched and taught at the University of Maryland, the World Resources Institute in D.C., the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and the National University of Singapore.

Dubash served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for both the 2014 and 2022 IPCC reports, and he has served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the United Nations Secretary General. He has written and edited more than 100 journal articles, book chapters and policy briefs, and published two books.

He earned an A.B. from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.

Mira Frick, in economics, specializes in microeconomics. Her appointment became effective July 1.

Frick comes to Princeton from Yale University, where she has taught since 2017, most recently as an associate professor. Prior to that, she was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University in 2021 and a visiting fellow at Princeton from 2018 to 2019.

Her research interests include microeconomic theory, decision theory, game theory, informational economics and behavioral economics. She is a frequent collaborator with Ryota Iijima, who also joined the University’s economics department from Yale on July 1 (see below).

Frick is an associate editor at Theoretical Economics and the Journal of Political Economy and is on the editorial board at American Economic Review: Insights. Her academic honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics at the University of California-Berkeley, and a Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics fellowship at Yale. She is a Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) fellow in organizational economics.

Frick earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.Sc. from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris & Université Paris VI, and an M.A. from the University of Oxford.

Ryota Iijima, in economics, specializes in microeconomics. His appointment became effective July 1.

Iijima comes to Princeton from Yale University, where he has taught since 2017, most recently as associate professor. Previously, he was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University in 2021 and a visiting fellow at Princeton from 2018 to 2019.

He and fellow microeconomic theorist Mira Frick, who also joined the University as a professor of economics on July 1 (see above), are co-principal investigators on the National Science Foundation grant “Biased Beliefs and Social Interactions.” Their research explores decision-making, bias and the factors that influence these actions. The two scholars have authored numerous papers together. 

Iijima is a recipient of a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He serves as an associate editor at the Japanese Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Theory. From 2016 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral associate at Yale’s Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics.

Iijima earned a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Tokyo and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, in African American studies and public affairs. His appointment is effective Jan. 1, 2025.  

Muhammad comes to Princeton from Harvard University, where he was the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He previously taught at Indiana University and is the founding director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.  

He is the author of “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America” (Harvard University Press, 2010; second edition, 2019) and, most recently, served as co-editor of “Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy” (National Academies Press, 2023).

His current book project is "Bootstrapped: Lessons Learned from Fifty Years of Civil Rights and Wrongs." His writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Nation, and he has been a guest on PBS Newshour, MSNBC, and Moyers & Company, among other national broadcasts.

He earned his B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Rutgers University. 

Associate professor

Simon Jäger, in economics and public affairs, specializes in microeconomics. His appointment is effective Jan. 16, 2025.

He comes to Princeton from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 2017, most recently as an associate professor. From 2022 to 2023, Jäger was the CEO of the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a nonprofit economic research institute and network in Bonn, Germany.

Jäger is the recipient of a 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship and a 2024 Gustav Stolper Award from the German Economic Association.

He earned a B.S. and M.S. from the University of Bonn, as well as a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Assistant professor

Daniel Chen, in economics, joined the faculty in July. Chen specializes in theory and finance and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and an A.B. from Princeton.

Jialin Ding, in computer science, joins the faculty in September 2025. Ding specializes in machine learning and optimization and holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. from Stanford University.

George Ghanim, in molecular biology, joins the faculty in January 2025. Ghanim specializes in structural biology and nucleic acid biochemistry and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.S. from Rutgers University.

Sneha D. Goenka, in electrical and computer engineering, joins the faculty in January 2025. Goenka specializes in computer systems design and computer architecture and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, as well as a B. Tech. and M. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Christina Kim, in the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, joins the faculty in January 2025. Kim specializes in cellular engineering and comes to Princeton from the University of California-Davis, where she has been an assistant professor since 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and an A.B. from Princeton.

Jamil Kochai, in creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, joins the faculty in July 2025. Kochai specializes in creative writing and holds an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.A. from the University of California-Davis and a B.A. from California State University-Sacramento. Kochai was an assistant professor at California State University-Sacramento from 2022 to 2023.

Liuchi Li, in civil and environmental engineering, joins the faculty in January 2025. Li, who specializes in granular physics and mechanics, has a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and a B.S. from Tongji University in Shanghai.

Zhuang Liu, in computer science, joins the faculty in September 2025. Liu specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning and has a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.S. from Tsinghua University. He has been a research scientist with Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team since 2022. 

Kailin Mesa, in molecular biology, joins the faculty in January 2025. Mesa specializes in immunology and has a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from the Yale University School of Medicine, as well as a B.S. from the University of California-Berkeley.

Manoel Horta Ribeiro, in computer science, joins the faculty in January 2025. Ribeiro specializes in data science and computational social science and has a Ph.D. from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and an M.S. and B.S. from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

Fedor Sandomirskiy, in economics, joins the faculty in January 2025. Sandomirskiy specializes in microeconomic theory and has a Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences and a M.Sc. and B.Sc. from St. Petersburg State University.

Rachel Saunders, in art and archaeology, joined the faculty in September. Saunders, who specializes in Japanese art history, comes to Princeton after serving as a curator at Harvard Art Museums since 2015. She has a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.A. from the University of London, and a B.A. from the University of Oxford.

Dhruv Shah, in electrical and computer engineering, joins the faculty in January 2026. He specializes in artificial intelligence and has a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Ravi Shankar, in mathematics, joined the faculty in July. Shankar, who specializes in inverse problem and applied mathematics, has a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and a B.A. from California State University. He has been an instructor at Princeton since 2021.

Evan Soltas, in economics and international affairs, joins the faculty in July 2025. Soltas specializes in public finance, urban economics and labor economics. He has a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and an A.B. from Princeton.

Paul Vierthaler, in East Asian studies, joined the faculty in July. Vierthaler specializes in Chinese studies and comes to Princeton from the College of William & Mary, where he has been an assistant professor since 2019. He has a Ph.D. from Yale University and a B.A. from the University of Kansas.