Eight Princeton professors were elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year: Cliff Brangwynne, Chris Chang, Maria Chudnovsky, Jianqing Fan, Sabine Kastner, Sebastian Seung, Daniel Sigman and Christopher Skinner. This marks the largest number of new academy members from Princeton University in at least a century.
These eight professors are among the 120 new members and 25 international members chosen in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, according to the academy’s announcement.
Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States. Established in 1863, the academy now has 2,705 active members and 557 international members, who are nonvoting members of the academy with citizenship outside the United States.
Cliff Brangwynne is Princeton’s June K. Wu ’92 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the director of the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute.
Brangwynne’s research focuses on teasing apart the fundamental principles behind biological organization, particularly the membrane-less organelles that form inside living cells. Despite having no surrounding cell walls, these tiny condensates contain RNA, proteins and complex processing bodies. His research team is also engineering entirely new kinds of intracellular organelles for biomedical applications. Brangwynne joined the Princeton faculty in 2011. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the co-director of the seven-week summer physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Chris Chang is the Edward and Virginia Taylor Professor of Bioorganic Chemistry at Princeton.
Chang studies the chemistry and biology of the elements, working to advance new concepts in imaging, proteomics, drug discovery and catalysis. With his research team, he has developed new strategies to identify transition metals, reactive oxygen species and one-carbon units. These chemical tools also reveal unique disease vulnerabilities as targets for innovative drug discovery efforts to treat neurodegeneration, cancer and metabolic disorders. Chang joined the Princeton faculty in 2024. He is also the editor-in-chief of Accounts in Chemical Research and on the editorial boards of Chemical Science and the Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. from the California Institute of Technology.
Maria Chudnovsky is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.
Chudnovsky studies graph theory and combinatorics, with a particular interest in perfect graphs. Prior to coming to Princeton, she was a professor of mathematics and industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. After completing her Ph.D. at Princeton in 2003, she was a Veblen Research Instructor at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study from 2003 to 2005, then she spent a third year as an assistant professor at Princeton. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton and a B.A. and M.Sc. in mathematics from the Israel Institute of Technology.
Jianqing Fan is Princeton’s Frederick L. Moore, Class of 1918, Professor in Finance and a professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering.
Fan’s research includes statistics, financial econometrics, computational biology and artificial intelligence. One of the most highly cited data scientists in the world, he has co-authored four highly regarded books and monographs: “Local Polynomial Modelling and Its Applications” (1996), “Nonlinear Time Series: Nonparametric and Parametric Methods” (2003), “The Elements of Financial Econometrics” (2015), and “Statistical Foundations of Data Science” (2020). Fan came to Princeton in 2003. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, a master’s degree in probability and statistics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a B.S. from Fudan University.
Sabine Kastner is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and the scientific lead of the human neuroimaging facilities in Princeton’s Scully Center for the Neuroscience of Mind and Behavior.
Kastner studies the neural basis of visual perception, attention, awareness and cognition using neuroimaging in humans and monkeys, intracranial electrophysiology and studies in patients with brain lesions. Her research team seeks to better understand how large-scale networks operate during cognition, with particular emphasis on interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Kastner came to Princeton in 2000. She earned an M.D. from Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany and a Ph.D. in neurophysiology from Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany.
Sebastian Seung is Princeton’s Anthony B. Evnin Professor in Neuroscience and a professor in the Department of Computer Science.
Seung, a pioneering neuroscientist and computer scientist, has been called a cartographer of the brain. He spent more than a decade building the tools to map the branches and connections between neurons in the brain. He and his collaborators have completed maps of an entire fruit fly brain and a cubic millimeter of mouse brain. Using these hyper-precise wiring diagrams, his team is making rapid strides into understanding and predicting brain function and development. His book “Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are,” published in 2012, been translated into more than 25 languages. He joined the Princeton faculty in 2014. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Daniel Sigman is Princeton’s Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences.
Sigman’s research team studies the cycles of biologically important elements and their interaction with changing environmental conditions through the course of Earth history. He also studies the oscillations into and out of ice ages over the last two million years. His team is building the case that biogeochemical changes in the polar ocean are responsible for the large swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration between ice ages and interglacial periods, amplifying glacial cycles and converting ice ages into global phenomena. Sigman received a B.S. from Stanford University in 1991 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Joint Program in Oceanography in 1997.
Christopher Skinner is a professor of mathematics and the current chair of the Department of Mathematics.
His research focuses on algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry and arithmetic aspects of the Langlands program. He has collaborated with many other notable mathematicians, including Andrew Wiles, Eric Urban, Manjul Bhargava and Wei Zhang. Skinner received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1997 under Wiles’ mentorship and then joined the Institute for Advanced Study. He taught at the University of Michigan for six years, then joined the Princeton faculty in 2006. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.
