New professors fill vacancies left by departing faculty members

As academic years come and go, the University sees many professors enter and leave through its gates. This year was no exception.

The politics and economics departments and the Wilson School have introduced two new professors to fill vacancies left by professors Jennifer Hochschild and Stephen Holmes.

During the summer, Hochschild moved with her son to Boston to join her husband, former University Registrar C. Anthony Broh. Broh accepted a new position in Boston last year as Director of the Research Consortium on Financing Higher Education.

"We're very excited about the change and we're working on moving into our new house," Broh said. Hochschild still is officially on leave at Princeton, but this spring she will join Harvard's government and African-American studies departments.

Politics professor Stephen Holmes transferred from Princeton to teach at New York University's law school. "He was a valued colleague and a tremendous friend to many of us," said politics department chair Jeffrey Herbst.

To fill the vacancies left by Hochschild and Holmes, the University has hired Paul Krugman and Eric Thun. Krugman, hired jointly by the politics department and the Wilson School, is a world-renowned economist and a columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed page.

Krugman came to Princeton from MIT and will teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in economics and the Wilson School, including ECO 102, according to economics department chair Ben Bernanke. "[Krugman] is a wonderful scholar, a great teacher and another star to add to our firmament," Bernanke said.

Classics professor Richard Martin left Princeton last spring to teach at Stanford University, and the Classics department has hired Denis Feeney from New College in Oxford, England to replace him.

The computer science department bid farewell to Richard Lipton last spring and recently welcomed Brian Kernighan from Bell Labs.

"Kernighan is well-known in the field of specialty software engineering and has authored books that have profoundly influenced students of software construction for 25 years," computer science department manager Michele Brown said.

Athanassios Panagiotopoulos, a new chemical engineering professor, is teaching a graduate course this semester and will teach molecular modeling methods as an undergraduate elective this spring, according to department chair Pablo Debenedetti.

Panagiotopoulos came from the University of Maryland's Institute for Physical Science and Technology. "He is a world authority on computational modeling of material and complex fluids," Debenedetti said.

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Professor Mete Soner, former joint professor in the applied and computational mathematics and operations research and financial engineering departments returned this year to his native Turkey to teach at Koc University, according to ORFE department manager Fanny Chouinard-Gandy.

The physics department lost professors Gordon Cates and Bernhard Keimer. Psychology professor Marcia Johnson did not return this semester, and the psychology department has hired Susan Fiske to fill her position.