The University Board of Trustees approved at its November meeting the appointments of five veteran scholars.
Linda Colley, Daniel Garber, Daniel Osherson, Nicholas Pippenger and Robert Shapire will be welcomed into the University community as full professors.
Because of the depth and prestige of their credentials, a more gradual transition was not considered necessary.
"We were looking for a good place to spend our horizon years," Pippenger said about his initial reasons for becoming a professor.
Although each scholar abandons an esteemed post at another location, the new professors have asserted a common interest in experiencing fresh opinions and personalities.
Garber, who headed the philosophy department and twice chaired the Conceptual Foundations of Science during his 25 years at the University of Chicago, applied the word "adventure" several times in explaining what induced him to transfer.
Garber said he is simply prepared for a change, especially one that places him within his home state New Jersey.
As it happens, Pippenger also makes some tribute to his roots in accepting Princeton's offer.
A native of nearby New Hope, Pa., he has been awarded a Canada Research Chair in Computer Science and published the paper "Theories of Computability" in the course of a very active career at the University of British Columbia.
While he admits a certain degree of ambivalence about leaving Vancouver, he said he welcomes the move, if only for the sake of his wife Maria Klawe, who was named this year dean of Princeton's engineering school.
For Osherson, who is lecturing for his sixth year at Rice University, Princeton is the most recent destination in a diverse succession of universities: the Universita Vita-Saluta San Raffaele in Italy, the Institut d'Intelligence Artificielle in France, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.
He specializes primarily in psychology and computer science.
In stark contrast, Princeton does not draw Schapire from academia but directly from the field as a a member of the technical staff at AT&T.
Recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the MIT thesis Award for "The Design and Analysis of Efficient Learning Algorithms" he has concentrated on artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Historian and author Linda Colley will fill a new position in the history department, becoming the Shelby M. C. Davis Professor of History chair.
Colley taught at Yale University from 1982 to 1998 before moving to England for a research position at the London School of Economics.
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