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Professor Sturm joined the faculty in 1986. His teaching and research interests range from advanced materials and nanostructures for integrated circuits and large-area displays to the interface of nanotechnology and biology.

He has revamped or created new courses and laboratories for engineering students as well as for nonengineering students. From 1993 to 1994, he led the complete overhaul of the electrical engineering undergraduate curriculum.

In 2003 he was named director of the new Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM).

“Jim has enriched the edu cational experience of many students at Princeton, both directly through his teaching and mentoring and indirectly through his curriculum and laboratory innovations,” wrote one colleague.

He has won numerous awards for teaching excellence from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Keck Foundation.

“In one of my early electronic device courses with him, I remember the first few lectures were so shockingly lucid that it was like being hit on the head with a hammer,” wrote one former student.

“Jim has a way of explaining things to students that makes us wonder why in the world we hadn’t understood this before.”

Other students wrote of the positive impact Professor Sturm has had on their career choices and their lives.

“Professor Sturm has been one of the most important influences on my career,” wrote another former student. “In many cases, he made comments and suggestions which directed me in my career, many of which I still reflect upon.”

The President’s Awards for Distinguished Teaching were established in 1991 through gifts by Princeton alumni Lloyd Cotsen ’50 and John Sherrerd ’52 to recognize excellence in undergraduate and graduate teaching by Princeton faculty members.

Each winner receives a cash prize of $5,000, and his or her department receives $3,000 for the purchase of new books.

A committee of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and academic administrators selected the winners from nominations by current students, faculty colleagues, and alumni.

Professor Yao transfers to emeritus


Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, and professor of computer science, has transferred to emeritus status.

Professor Yao helped shape the theory of computation. He established new paradigms and effective techniques in many areas, including computational geometry, constant-depth Boolean circuit complexity, analysis of data structures, and quantum communication.

He initiated the field of communication complexity, which measures the minimum amount of interaction two or more parties must have in order to jointly carry out some computation. Professor Yao thus captured the essence of communication cost for distributed computation.

Professor Yao joined the Princeton faculty in 1986 from Stanford University, where he was a professor of computer science. He is an alumnus of the National Taiwan University, and he holds a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois.

He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Sinica.

Professor Yao received a Guggenheim Fellowship; the 2000 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery—considered the Nobel Prize of Computing—the SIAM George Polya Prize; the ACM SIGACT-IEEE TCMFCS Donald E. Knuth Prize; and the George Polya Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2003 he received an Honorary Doctor of Science from the City University of Hong Kong.

Professor Troian named Caltech scholar


Sandra Troian, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, has been named a 2004 Moore Distinguished Scholar by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

The program is named for Gordon E. Moore, chairman of the board of trustees at Caltech. Dr. Moore, who co-founded Intel in 1968, is widely known for “Moore’s Law,” in which he predicted that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on a computer chip would double every two years. Moore’s law has become the guiding principle in the semiconductor industry for delivery of ever-more-powerful chips at proportionate decreases in cost.

Moore scholars reside at Caltech for a period of up to one year, and have no formal duties other than scholarly pursuits and interaction with faculty.

“I am very honored for this wonderful opportunity to interact with so many leading engineering and physics faculty at Caltech,” Professor Troian said. “I hope to devote this time to the study of some fundamental problems involving the stability of microscale flows and to develop some hybrid technologies combining recent advances in microelectronics with microfluidic systems.”

Professor Troian received her B.A. in physics from Harvard University and her M.S. and Ph.D in solid-state physics from Cornell University. From 1989 to 1990, she served as a French Ministry of Science Chateaubriand Fellow, returning to the United States to join the corporate research laboratories at Exxon Corp., where she stayed until 1993 when she moved to Princeton University.

In recognition of her work on free surface flows and thin-film instabilities, she received the Frenkiel Award from the American Physical Society in 1999. Professor Troian is director of the Microfluidics Research and Engineering Laboratory in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and an associate faculty member in the Department of Physics, the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.

Expertise recognized internationally


Robert Tarjan, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science, received the Blaise Pascal Medal in Mathematics and Computer Science from the European Academy of Sciences (EAS).

Professor Tarjan, an expert in the design and analysis of computer algorithms, received the medal for his contributions to computer science and the development of fundamental computer algorithms.

Professor Tarjan joined the Princeton faculty in 1985. Previously, he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, was on the faculty at Stanford University, and was a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. EAS promotes excellence in science and technology and their essential roles in fostering social and economic development and progress.

Great job at mentoring


Niraj Jha, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, is one of this year’s recipients of Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award. The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, together with the Graduate School, instituted the award to honor Princeton faculty members whose work with graduate students is particularly outstanding. The recipients were honored during the Graduate School’s hooding ceremony May 31.

New American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow


Bernard Chazelle, professor of computer science, has been named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is among 202 leaders in scholarship, business, the arts, and public affairs elected in recognition of contributions to their respective fields.

Professor Chazelle came to Princeton in 1986 as an associate professor of computer science. Previously, he was a fellow at the NEC Research Institute and a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Brown University.

Professor Chazelle is also a member of the European Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Election to the Academy of Arts and Sciences has always been one of the highest honors in the United States. Fellows and foreign honorary members include the finest minds and the most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th.

“The American Academy is unique among academies for its breadth and scope,” said Leslie C. Berlowitz, the academy’s executive officer. “Throughout its history, the academy has gathered individuals with diverse perspectives to participate in studies and projects focusing on advancing intellectual thought and constructive action. We know that this year’s members will continue the Academy’s tradition of cherishing knowledge in service to society.”

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 and currently has 4,500 members, including 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Grant funds study of electrets


A team of engineers and scientists at Princeton and Harvard universities are among 24 academic institutions receiving grants from the Department of Defense (DoD) to conduct multidisciplinary research. The grants, averaging $1 million per year over a three-year period, are made under the DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program.

Heading the project are Ilhan Aksay, professor of chemical engineering at Princeton, and George Whitesides, professor of chemistry at Harvard. Working with them are Dudley Saville, professor of chemical engineering at Princeton; Roberto Car, professor of chemistry at Princeton; Zhigang Suo, the Gordon McKay Professor of Mechanics and Materials at Harvard; and Mara Prentiss, professor of physics at Harvard.

The team’s mission is to understand the nature and mechanisms of formation of electrets and to design and fabricate new electret materials and structures. Electrets are defined as almost any material that shows a permanent, fixed electrostatic surface charge or an oriented permanent dipole.

The proposed work seeks to understand the nature of the charge and the mechanisms and limits of materials, building upon new information to develop new electret materials. A significant part of the effort will be laboratory-scale demonstrations of prototypes, aiming to transfer research to useful technology and as a demonstration of new phenomena. The focus will be on micro-xerography, information storage, optical waveguides, and actuation and power generation.

MURI is a program designed to address large multidisciplinary topic areas for future DoD applications and technology options. The awards provide long-term support for research, graduate students, and laboratory instrumentation development that supports specific science and engineering research themes vital to national defense.