In Brief

Two months before their first classes at Princeton, INCOMING FRESHMEN have received some homework: Read a book by Princeton philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, courtesy of President Christopher Eisgruber ’83. ­Eisgruber said that reading The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen would provide common ground for the new class and be a topic of conversations he is planning with groups of students in the coming year. He said it would be an opportunity to discuss ethics and how people should be living their lives, which he called “the central question we need to be addressing as a university.”

Molecular biologist Jason Lieb has left the University of North Carolina, where he was director of the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, to become head of Princeton’s Genomics Institute. He was one of FIVE PROFESSORS TO ACCEPT TENURED POSITIONS at Princeton, effective July 1. The others are ­Professor Charles Barber, art and archaeology, from the University of Notre Dame; Professor Bradin Cormack, English, from the University of Chicago; Professor Regina Kunzel, history and gender and sexuality studies, from the University of Minnesota; and Associate Professor Dara Strolovitch, gender and sexuality studies, from the University of Minnesota. 

Physics professor ALEXANDER POLYAKOV received the 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize for his work in string theory and quantum field theory. The $3 million prize, the highest-paying academic award, was created by Yuri Milner, a Russian physicist and investor.

Four professors have LEFT THE UNIVERSITY for other institutions: Rahul Pandharipande, mathematics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich; Martin Ruef, sociology, Duke; Devah Pager, sociology, Harvard; and Manuel Llinas, molecular biology and the genomics institute, Penn State.

PHOTO: DONALD B. KRAVITZ/DBKPHOTO

Cara McCollum ’14, above, will interrupt her studies for a year to perform her duties as MISS NEW JERSEY, a title she won June 15. She performed on piano during the competition. McCollum, an English major and a PAW On the Campus columnist last year, receives an $11,000 scholarship and the chance to compete in the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in September.

Montero

PHOTO: COURTESY LISA SCHREYER

A.M. Homes, a lecturer in creative ­writing, won the WOMEN’S FICTION PRIZE for her novel May We Be Forgiven. The prize, previously known as the Orange Prize for Fiction, is awarded each June to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman. May We Be ­Forgiven is about a family that seems irreparably broken and the unexpected way it is reassembled. 

The winner of this year’s TONY AWARD for best play, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, was commissioned and developed by McCarter Theatre, where it premiered before moving to New York.