New Faculty

The University trustees have approved the appointments of 11 full professors to the faculty:

JOSHUA AKEY (ecology and evolutionary biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics), from the University of Washington, researches the human population and evolutionary genomics. 

NOGA ALON (mathematics and applied and computational mathematics) will join the faculty in 2018 from Tel Aviv University. He studies combinatorics and graph theory and their applications in theoretical computer science.

LEAH PLATT BOUSTAIN ’00 (economics), from the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets. 

MATTHEW DESMOND (sociology), studies urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory, and ethnography. He joins the faculty from Harvard University.

JENNIFER JENNINGS ’00 (Woodrow Wilson School), from New York University. She specializes in analyzing racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in educational and health outcomes. 

HENRIK KLEVEN (Woodrow Wilson School) combines empirical evidence and economic theory to show ways of designing more effective government policies. He joins the faculty from the London School of Economics. 

YIYUN LI (creative writing and the Lewis Center for the Arts) was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2010 and comes from the University of California, Davis. Her books include The Vagrants and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.

AMILCARE PORPORATO (civil and environmental engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute) studies nonlinear and stochastic dynamical systems, soil biogeochemistry, and ecohydrology. He joins the faculty from Duke University.

FREDERICK WHERRY *00 *04 (sociology) comes from Yale University. An economic and cultural sociologist, his research explores domestic and global investigations of money, value, and social life.

NIENG YAN *05 (molecular biology) was a postdoc at the University from 2005 to 2007. She joins the faculty from Tsinghua University, and her research focuses on the combination of structural biology and biochemistry to elucidate mechanisms of substrate recognition and transport. 

LEEAT YARIV (economics) will join the faculty in 2018 from Caltech. She is an expert in applied theory and experimental economics and studies game theory, political economy, psychology, and economics.