Princeton University has appointed nine new full professors.
They are: William Bialek, professor of physics; Marina Brownlee, professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures; Benjamin Elman, professor of East Asian studies and history; Bjorn Engquist, the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Mathematics and Applied and Computational Mathematics; David Gabai, professor of mathematics; Philip Pettit, professor of politics; Ricardo Piglia, the Walter Carpenter Professor of Language, Literature and Civilization of Spain and professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures; Valerie Smith, the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and professor of English; and David Tank, professor of molecular biology and physics.
Professor Bialek has worked at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, which conducts long-term, fundamental research in the computer and physical sciences, since 1990. He started there as a senior research scientist, and became a fellow in 1999.
Previously he was an assistant professor of physics and biophysics at the University of California-Berkeley from 1986 to 1991.
He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands and at the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Institute for Theoretical Physics.
The focus of Professor Bialek’s research is the interface between physics and biology. A central theme of that research is an appreciation for how well things "work" in biological systems.
Professor Brownlee returns to Princeton, where she earned her doctorate in 1978. She has been a professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988, and served as chair of that department for three years.
From 1977 to 1988, she taught in Dartmouth College’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and in its comparative literature program.
Professor Brownlee’s fields of interest are medieval and golden age Spanish literature and medieval and Renaissance comparative literature.
Professor Elman has been a Mellon Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies since 1999. He also is a professor in Chinese history at the University of California-Los Angeles, where he has been since 1986.
Previously, he taught at Colby College and Rice University, and he was a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in 1994 and 1995.
Professor Elman’s field of specialization is pre-modern Chinese history.
Professor Engquist arrived at Princeton from UCLA, where he had been teaching since 1977. He had been a full professor there since 1980.
He received his bachelor’s and doctorate degrees from Uppsala University and returned there as a professor from 1981 to 1985.
He also has been a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm since 1992.
Professor Engquist’s research interests are numerical analysis, scientific computing and applied differential equations.
Professor Gabai earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1980. He has taught at the California Institute of Technology since 1986, becoming a full professor there in 1988. Previously he taught at the University of Pennsylvania for three years and Harvard University for two years.
He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1982, 1983 and 1989.
His field of interest is low-dimensional topology and geometry.
Professor Pettit will come to Princeton from Australian National University in Canberra, where he has been a professor since 1983.
He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University since 1997. From 1977 to 1983, he was a professor at the University of Bradford and chairman of the School of Interdisciplinary Human Studies. Previously he was a lecturer at University College in Dublin for two years.
Professor Pettit, whose fields of interest are social and political theory and philosophy, is a fellow of Australia’s Academy of Social Sciences and its Academy of the Humanities.
Professor Piglia arrived from the University of Buenos Aires, where he had been a professor since 1990 and the faculty research director since 1994.
He was a visiting professor at Princeton from 1988 to 1989 and from 1997 to 1999, and a senior fellow in the Council of the Humanities in 1987.
He was a visiting professor at Harvard University in 1990.
Professor Smith previously was a Princeton faculty member from 1980 to 1989, holding positions in English and Afro-American studies.
She joined the UCLA faculty in 1989, and had been a full professor there since 1994.
She was chair of the interdepartmental program in African-American studies from 1997 to 2001 and co-director of cultural studies in the African Diaspora Project from 1996 to 1999.
Professor Smith’s field of interest is African-American literature.
Professor Tank arrived at Princeton from Bell Laboratories at Lucent Technologies, where he had been director of the Biological Computation Research Department since 1991.
He also was co-director of methods in computational neuroscience at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., from 1992 to 1997.
Professor Tank’s field of interest is computational neurobiology.
