The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 16 faculty members, including one full professor and 15 assistant professors.

Professor

Joshua Winn, in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, joined the faculty this fall from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 2006 and earned his B.S. and Ph.D. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.

Winn specializes in exploring the properties of planets around other stars, understanding how planets form and evolve, and seeking to answer the age-old question of whether other planets are capable of supporting life.

Assistant Professors

Rhae Lynn Barnes, in history, will join the faculty in fall 2018. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, Barnes’ area of focus is American cultural and intellectual history. She earned her B.A. at the University of California-Berkeley and Ph.D. at Harvard, and co-founded U.S. History Scene, a multimedia website that expands access to cutting-edge history scholarship.

Pierre-Thomas Brun, in chemical and biological engineering, will join the faculty in fall 2017 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been an instructor since 2014. Prior to completing a postdoctoral fellowship at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Brun earned his B.S.E. and M.S.E. at École Polytechnique, M.Phil. at Cambridge, and Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. His research focuses on the dynamics of fluids and flexible solids.

Nicholas Buchholz, in economics, will join the faculty in fall 2017 after completing a postdoctoral year at Princeton. He received dual undergraduate degrees from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas. Buchholz’s areas of focus are industrial organization and applied microeconomics.

Minjie Chen, in electrical engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, will join the faculty in February 2017. A specialist in the design of high-performance power electronics for emerging and high-impact applications, Chen was awarded a B.S. from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is a postdoctoral fellow.

Yuxin Chen, in electrical engineering, will join the faculty in February 2017. Presently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, where he received his Ph.D., Chen received B.S.E degrees from Tsinghua University and an M.S. from the University of Texas. His research examines convex and nonconvex optimization, structured estimation, and information theory and wireless communications, among other areas.

Gregory Conti, in politics, will join the faculty in fall 2018. His work explores the philosophy of toleration and freedom of opinion, systems of representation, and deliberative democracy and theories of deliberation. Conti earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from Harvard.

Martin Jonikas, in molecular biology, joined the faculty this fall from the Carnegie Institution for Science, where he served as a Young Investigator. An expert in enhanced photosynthetic efficiency, he was awarded a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the University of California-San Francisco.

Zachary Kincaid, in computer science, joined the faculty this fall following the completion of his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. Kincaid conducted his undergraduate studies at Western University and specializes in program analysis and programming languages.

Ralph Kleiner, in chemistry, joined the faculty this fall. A specialist in chemical biology and synthetic polymers, he earned his A.B. from Princeton and Ph.D. from Harvard, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University.

Andrew Leifer, in physics and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, joined the faculty this summer. An associate research scholar and lecturer at Princeton since 2012, Leifer earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and B.A. from Stanford. His research combines techniques from neuroscience, physics, engineering and computer science to study the dynamics of neural circuits in awake moving organisms.

Anirudha Majumdar, in mechanical and aerospace engineering, will join the faculty in fall 2017. Having received his B.A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Majumdar is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford, where he focuses on algorithmic tools for controlling highly agile robots.

Mikkel Plagborg-Møller, in economics, will join the faculty in summer 2017 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. An expert in econometrics, he completed his B.S. at the University of Copenhagen and Ph.D. at Harvard.

Olga Russakovsky, in computer science, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from Carnegie Mellon University, where she is a postdoctoral fellow. A bachelor’s and doctoral degree recipient from Stanford, Russakovsky focuses on artificially intelligent systems that are able to reason about the visual world.

S. Matthew Weinberg, in computer science, is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and will join the faculty in January 2017. An expert in algorithmic game theory, Weinberg received his B.A. from Cornell University and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Arlene Wong, in economics, will join the faculty in summer 2017. A scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Wong earned her B.Com. from the University of New South Wales and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her areas of focus include macroeconomics, monetary economics, household consumption and labor dynamics.