Newsmakers

NARAYANA KOCHERLAKOTA ’83 (left) has become one of 12 voting members of the Federal Open Market Com­mittee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve. The FOMC controls the Fed’s chief tool for implementing monetary policy — purchases and sales of U.S. Treasury and federal-agency securities — and its decisions have a key impact on the nation’s economy.

Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, took one of the four FOMC seats filled on a rotating basis by Federal Reserve Bank presidents. When Kocherlakota was appointed to his Fed post in 2009, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas told The Wall Street Journal that he was “probably the most abstract thinker ever to head a Federal Reserve bank.”

Locomotives   JASON GARRETT ’89 was appointed in January as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys — the first Prince­ton alumnus to hold a top National Football League coaching spot. ... Lawyer CHARLES WIGGINS ’69 was sworn in Jan. 7 as a justice on the Washington State Supreme Court, an elected position. ... An algebraic rating system designed by WES COLLEY *98, who teaches modeling and simulation at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, helped to select the participants in this year’s college football national championship. The “Colley Matrix” is one of six computer models that factor into the Bowl Championship Series rankings. ... GA Voice, an LGBT newspaper in Georgia, named attorney DAN GROSSMAN ’85 its Person of the Year. Grossman, termed “an easy choice” by the paper, was selected for fighting for the civil rights of patrons who were caught up in a 2009 police raid on a bar.