In Short

H. VINCENT POOR *77, dean of the engineering school, and A.J. STEWART SMITH *66, vice president for the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, will step down from their respective positions in 2016. Poor, who joined the faculty in 1990 and has been dean for the past nine years, will end his term June 20. He plans to take a sabbatical and then return to teaching and research.

Smith, who became the University’s first vice president for PPPL in 2012, has held faculty and staff positions at Princeton for almost 50 years. After leaving his post in February, he will continue to chair a committee at the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

Two gifts from alumni were announced during the summer. Investment executive JOHN P. BIRKELUND ’52 donated $5 million to establish a certificate program in history and diplomacy. The program will prepare undergraduates for careers in governmental and nongovernmental organizations. History professor Stephen Kotkin and retired admiral Mike Mullen will co-direct the program.

Investor WILLIAM JANEWAY ’65 gave $5.6 million to study the connections among the financial markets, monetary economics, and the “real economy” — things that affect people such as goods, jobs, and services. The fund also will support new courses at the doctoral level. Janeway is a visiting lecturer in the economics department.

Courtesy Warfield family

IN MEMORIAM GEORGE WARFIELD, who helped integrate solid-state physics instruction into the electrical engineering department, died July 23 at his Vermont home. He was 96. Recruited by astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer *38 in 1950, Warfield taught at Princeton until 1972. He later was executive director of the Institute for Energy Conversion at the University of Delaware. A gift from George Heilmeier *62 dedicated a classroom in the Friend Center to Warfield’s influence on “a whole generation of electrical engineers.”

IN MEMORIAM JAMES McLACHLAN, who contributed to the research of the Shelby Cullum Davis [’30] Center for Historical Studies and worked on a Princeton project of alumni biographies, died June 19 at age 83 in Chapel Hill, N.C., of lung disease. In the 1970s, McLachlan and history professor Lawrence Stone collaborated on a compendium, The University in Society. During the same period he was principal author and editor of the first volume of the five-book Princetonians: A Biographical Dictionary. In the 1980s, McLachlan taught history at New York University.

Courtesy Jacqueline Brown

IN MEMORIAM Russian literature scholar and cartoonist CLARENCE BROWN died July 18 in Seattle after a long illness. He was 86. Brown came to Princeton in 1959 and became a professor in 1969. His scholarship on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam resulted in his book The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (1965), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Meanwhile, Brown, who had pursued art from an early age, served as cartoon editor at the Saturday Review from 1977 to 1984, and his work appeared in Esquire, Playboy, and other magazines. Cartoons often appeared in his column, “Ink Soup,” in The Times of Trenton. Brown retired as professor emeritus in 1999.