Six awarded Pyne Prize, Jacobus Fellowship

Alex Barnard ’09 and Andy Chen ’09 received the Pyne Prize, the highest general award given by the University to an undergraduate for displaying outstanding scholarship, character and leadership.

Graduate students Daniel Bouk, Hannah Crawforth, Peter DiMaggio and Jianfeng Lu won the Jacobus Fellowship, which supports the final year of graduate study and recognizes the four students who demonstrate the highest scholarly excellence in their graduate studies.

Barnard, a sociology major whose thesis focuses on freeganism, said he was “ecstatic” to receive the award.

“It feels really amazing to have been recognized this way,” he said.

Barnard has served as vice president of the Princeton Animal Welfare Society, which he co-founded, president and drillmaster of the Princeton University Band and a captain of Princeton’s mock trial team. He is also a member of the Princeton Coalition Against Capital Punishment and the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Barnard explained that he began researching the freegan movement for his junior paper and found the topic inspiring. Freegans aim to reject capitalism by using discarded food and goods to limit their consumption of resources.

“As a society, I think we think very small,” Barnard said, “but the freegans think really big. They have big aspirations and big ideas.”

He added that he thinks the movement is “particularly relevant in this economic crisis,” adding that freegans “are pushing [an] alternative to our economic model.”

Sociology professor Mitchell Duneier, Barnard’s thesis adviser, explained that Barnard’s thesis would contribute to both environmental sociology and social movement theory.

“Barnard’s participant observation is an innovative probe that rigorously relates the situational meanings for the dumpster divers he studies to the broader context in which their scavenging takes place,” Duneier said in an e-mail.

Barnard also received the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship in December. He said he is planning to pursue a master’s degree at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Worcester College at Oxford University. He has also twice received the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence.

Chen is a sociology concentrator who is pursuing an East Asian studies certificate. He said that he was shocked upon learning that he had received the award.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

“Neither of us really expected it,” he said.

Chen created designs for the “Own What You Think” campaign and is the co-founder and manager of the Student Design Agency. He has also been student administrator and webmaster for the Student Volunteers Council, publicity chair of the Taiwanese American Students Association, publicity chair of the Princeton University Gospel Ensemble, a peer academic adviser and an LGBT peer educator, according to the University statement.

Chen explained that his thesis examines how economic liberalization in China has affected problems in its population.

“I’m basically investigating — taking a more human look at — how inequality works in China, particularly in Shanghai,” he said. “A lot of people point to the success of the middle class just to show that the city is prosperous, when in fact a lot of inequalities exist in the middle class.”

Chen said that he is in the process of applying to graduate schools to study graphic design. He added that he thinks the Pyne Prize was not “an end in itself,” but that he plans to “keep fighting for ideals that Princeton has really impressed upon me.”

He received a Martin A. Dale ’53 Summer Award in 2007 and used the award to train to become a yoga instructor at the Yoga Vidya Gurukul ashram in Nasik, India. He was also one of eight students to be given the Spirit of Princeton award in 2008.

Duneier, who is also the department representative for the sociology department, praised both Barnard and Chen as social activists on campus and social scientists in the classroom.

“These things do not always go well together,” he said, “but both have succeeded admirably in bringing their ethical-political commitments into dialogue with the most systematic scholarship to produce first rate sociological understanding.”

The four Jacobus Fellowship winners were also honored for their outstanding academic work.

Crawforth, a doctoral student in English, said that receiving the fellowship was “a fantastic honor.”

“I was completely surprised,” she said. “It was very wonderful. It was very nice to have that kind of encouragement.”

She explained that her dissertation, “ ‘True Expounding’: English Etymologies in Renaissance Poetry,” looks at how the emergent study of English words in the English Renaissance impacted the poets Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Ben Jonson.

She said that she hopes to find an academic job as an assistant professor next year.

DiMaggio, a graduate student in chemical engineering, said he was “shocked” and “very humbled” to receive the Jacobus Fellowship.

“[The other recipients] are very bright individuals, very motivated, and it was an honor for me to be selected and included with them,” he said.

His dissertation, “Discovery Through in Silico Approaches for Mass Spectrometry-Based Proteomics,” focuses on peptide and protein identification and quantification, he said.

“My research is focused on the algorithmic side of things with regards to rigorously analyzing data,” he explained.

He is currently interviewing for post-doctoral positions, with the long-term goal of going into academia, he said.

Lu, who is a Ph.D. candidate in applied and computational mathematics, said he felt “honored, of course, and excited [and] very lucky to be supported by the fellowship.”

His dissertation, “Mathematical Analysis and Numerical Algorithms for Density Functional Theory,” analyzes mathematical models arising from the electronic structure of materials and explores methods for finding the algorithms that may be used to solve these models, he said.

Lu added that he will continue his research and work as an instructor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences after graduation.

Bouk, a doctoral student in the Program in History of Science, was unavailable for comment. His dissertation work looks at the role that science has had in the American life-insurance industry, according to the University statement.