Niehaus '77 funds center for globalization

The Wilson School's three-year-old Center for Globalization and Governance got a naming sponsor yesterday with the announcement of the Niehaus family's donation of a "substantial gift" to endow the center.

Though the center was created in 2004, the gift from Robert Niehaus '77 and his wife Kate expands the center's offerings to include undergraduate policy task forces and a postdoctoral fellowship program for the study of international political economies, with a focus on the Middle East.

"Kate and I are thrilled to be able to support an initiative that is equally critical to Princeton students' international experience and Princeton's leadership in the forefront of global policy," Niehaus said in a statement. "We are especially excited to support groundbreaking research and debate on the Middle East, a particularly important area of study right now."

The center, directed by politics department chair Helen Milner, will host events and collaborate on research projects with the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and think tanks and academic programs. Milner was unavailable for comment.

The center will sponsor task forces at universities abroad, allowing Wilson School juniors to study abroad in more locations than are already available. A task force in Cairo will be added next spring. One in China may follow in the fall of 2008.

"The Niehaus gift opens the overseas policy task forces to non-Woodrow Wilson School majors, making it possible to include students from engineering, the natural sciences, other social sciences, and the humanities, as examples, depending on the nature of the policy problem under study," Wilson School spokesman Steve Barnes said in an email.

Because the task forces guide junior paper research for Wilson School students, accommodations will be made for non-Wilson School members' independent work.

"The plan at the moment is to include some Princeton students that are presumably in departments related to the social sciences," Wilson School undergraduate program chair Stan Katz said. "Probably other departments could accept [the policy task force] as JP work or they could make other arrangements."

Barnes explained that Niehaus "has a strong interest in increasing both the scholarship and undergraduates' awareness of the complex issues surrounding the Middle East today."

He has endowed a professorship for contemporary Muslim studies with a focus on the Middle East, a chair held by religion and Near Eastern studies professor Qasim Zaman.

Development Office communications director Wendell Collins said Niehaus' interest in the Middle East stems from his undergraduate years at the University. Collins added that Niehaus "has been an active member of Annual Giving, both as a donor and a volunteer."

Niehaus was a Wilson School major who went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a managing director of Greenhill & Co. and the founder of private equity manager Greenhill Capital Partners. His sons John and Peter are Princeton undergraduates.