Clusters of Excellence
In January 2026, Princeton Engineering funded 11 proposals from faculty members who are exploring new or untested ideas with enormous potential to help humanity and advance science. Each of these Clusters of Excellence integrates multiple disciplines to create positive impact beyond the reach of any single area of expertise.
Advanced Optical Metrology and Ultrafast Dynamics
Advanced Optical Metrology and Ultrafast Dynamics
Visualizing and controlling light-matter interactions is crucial for advances in quantum science, electronics, energy conversion, and advanced manufacturing. Technological breakthroughs in these areas require innovative techniques for observing light-matter interactions on time and length scales down to attoseconds and picometers, and devices for manipulating and sensing light with exquisite precision. Princeton has historic strengths in optical metrology, ultrafast science, spectroscopy, and related areas. Advanced Optical Metrology and Ultrafast Dynamics brings together researchers from across Princeton Engineering and the University, to nucleate collaborations in activities ranging from instrument development and fundamental discovery to technology translation.
Faculty Team: Aditya Sood (Principal Investigator), Craig Arnold, Alice Kunin, Julia Mikhailova, Gregory Scholes, Marissa Weichman, Gerard Wysocki
Complex Connected Systems
Complex Connected Systems
Complex Connected Systems are characterized by emergent behaviors that arise from interactions among components, making them fundamentally irreducible to their parts. These systems appear across domains, from coupled climate dynamics and distributed algorithms to cellular signaling and global markets, where outcomes cannot be predicted by examining individual elements. Understanding such systems requires a shift from reductionist models to integrative, system-level reasoning. Complex Connected Systems creates a hub for integrative research on tightly coupled social, technological, and natural systems, bringing together faculty and students with mission to enhance conceptual and methodological unity in complexity and harness it for real-world impact.
Faculty Team: Jürgen Hackl (Principal Investigator), Maria Apostolaki, Naomi Leonard, Ning Lin, Vincent Poor, Amilcare Porporato, Anu Ramaswami, Clarence Rowley, Bartolomeo Stellato, Howard Stone
Emerging Frontiers in Computer Architecture and Systems
Emerging Frontiers in Computer Architecture and Systems
Computing has entered a new era shaped by AI/ML-driven workloads, massive biological data, and emerging platforms such as quantum and in-memory computing. These shifts introduce critical challenges around performance, sustainability, security, and correctness. Solving these problems requires the vertical integration of the entire computing stack—from applications and algorithms down through compilers, operating systems, hardware, verification and correctness methods. The Emerging Frontiers in Computer Architecture and Systems cluster unifies and further strengthens Princeton’s research community focused on the future of efficient, high performance and reliable computing systems and architecture.
Faculty Team: Sneha Goenka (Principal Investigator), Jialin Ding, Michael Freedman, Kai Li, Wyatt Lloyd, Sharad Malik, Margaret Martonosi, Mae Milano, Hossein Valavi, Naveen Verma, David Wentzlaff
Engineering and Cultural Heritage
Engineering and Cultural Heritage
Historical and modern structures, artifacts, and sites represent important parts of the world’s shared cultural legacy. From bridges and sacred buildings to sculptures and monuments to urban and rural settlements, cultural heritage comprises a staggering range of our societies’ engineering, scientific, economic, artistic, and sociopolitical milestones. Yet historic structures and sites are increasingly vulnerable to environmental threats and policy-driven challenges. Multidisciplinary analysis that combines engineering and the humanities can reveal how cultural heritage can be preserved, enhanced, or repurposed to serve as an inspiration for future generations and contribute to the overall understanding of sustainability, resilience, and well-being of societies, both physical and spiritual.
Faculty Team: Branko Glisic (Principal Investigator), Sigrid Adrieaenssens, Basile Baudez, Caroline Cheung, Maria Garlock, Samuel Holzman, John Sigmier
Engineering Design @ Princeton
Engineering Design @ Princeton
The field of design enables engineers to develop high-impact innovations with true societal benefits by expanding the frame of their work beyond technical considerations and guiding them to solutions amid system complexity. Bringing broader issues and expertise into engineering labs will catalyze new questions while empowering researchers to investigate whether they are creating responsible innovations. Engineering Design@Princeton is developing, testing and evaluating signature techniques for bringing questions of societal relevance and impact into technology research and innovation, in line with our mission of service for humanity.
Faculty Team: Sigrid Adriaenssens (Principal Investigator), Parastoo Abtahi, Jurgen Hackl, Lydia Liu, Andrés Monroy-Hernandez, Carolyn Rouse, Janet Vertesi, Aimy Wissa
Land-to-Ocean Contaminant Modeling
Land-to-Ocean Contaminant Modeling
Across the globe, water systems are under increasing stress from climate change, land-use change, and emerging contaminants. From nutrient loading and harmful algal blooms to PFAS, microplastics, and pharmaceuticals, the movement of contaminants through watersheds into coastal and oceanic environments poses complex challenges to ecosystems and human health. Addressing these issues requires not only technical expertise but also systems thinking and collaborative approaches. The cluster participants house complementary strengths that, when brought together, can lead to more holistic and impactful engagement. Land-to-Ocean Contaminant Modeling provides a timely opportunity to bridge disciplinary boundaries and cultivate a shared vision for understanding and impact.
Faculty Team: Gabriele Villarini, Josh Atkinson, Ryne Beeson, Jürgen Hackl, Ryan Kingsbury, Amilcare Porporato, Laure Resplandy, Bartolomeo Stellato, Gabriel Vecchi
Microbial Interactions
Microbial Interactions
Microbial communities are essential for food production, human health, ecological restoration, resource extraction, and clean water. Interactions between microbes shape the structures of communities and impact their functional activity and robustness to changing environmental conditions. Advancing our fundamental understanding how microbial communities assemble and persist will enable rational engineering of microbiomes to address the most pressing challenges facing society today. Princeton is poised to tackle this challenge because of the strengths of research groups dispersed across campus, including the natural sciences and the genomics institute, environmental institute, and bioengineering institute.
Faculty Team: Joshua Atkinson (Principal Investigator), Jose Avalos, Jonathan Conway, Mohamed Donia, Peter Jaffe, Jessica Metcalf, Andrew Moeller, Satish Myneni, Josh Shaevitz, Ned Wingreen
Millimeter-Terahertz Light Communications and Sensing
Millimeter-Terahertz Light Communications and Sensing
Whether the task is seeing the world, sensing the world, or communicating in the world, research that previously focused on either visible light or radio waves is increasingly converging, as researchers utilize similar—or in some cases identical—techniques. This convergence has accelerated in recent years as radio communication moves into ever-higher frequencies. The push of convergence of thinking as well as the pull of applications leveraging radio and light spans the departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and highlights a clear and pressing need for a dialog between our two research communities.
Faculty Team: Kyle Jamieson (Principal Investigator), Adam Finkelstein, Yasaman Ghasempour, Felix Heide, Vince Poor, Kaushik Sengupta, Pramod Viswanath
Porous Materials for Sustainable Development
Porous Materials for Sustainable Development
The pressures of increasing global population, climate change, and related geopolitical complexities require fundamentally new, scalable processes to stabilize and support the food-water-energy nexus. In response to this challenge, porous materials have emerged as a key enabler of transformative solutions, offering distinct performance advantages in critical minerals recovery, carbon capture, and water purification applications, among others, due to the unique phenomena that occur in confined environments. Led by faculty across engineering, chemistry, and computer science, Porous Materials for Sustainable Development serves as a platform to advance the fundamental understanding and design of diverse classes of porous materials.
Faculty Team: Marcella Lusardi (Principal Investigator), Adji Bousso Dieng, Mircea Dinca, Kelsey Hatzell, Ryan Kingsbury, Andrew Rosen Michele Sarazen, Lilia Xie
Princeton ImageX Lab
Princeton ImageX Lab
PIXL (Princeton ImageX Lab) serves as an interdisciplinary research cluster with a mission to explore “Image + X” — the intersection of images and domains such as artificial intelligence, computer graphics, robotics, human-computer interaction, and scientific imaging. It approaches this vision through the lens of visual computing, encompassing the full spectrum of image science — from capturing physical signals, learning and understanding images, and synthesizing visual content, to enabling interaction between humans, machines, and environments.
Faculty Team: Adam Finkelstein (Principal Investigator), Parastoo Abtahi, Jia Deng, Jason Fleischer, Felix Heide, Anirudha Majumdar, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Dhruv Shah, Tom Silver
Space Engineering, Technology, and Policy
Space Engineering, Technology, and Policy
A paradigm shift in space activity, capabilities and infrastructure has occurred in the past decade. Princeton Engineering and the University beyond have strengths in core engineering domains needed to revolutionize space architectures, technology and science, while taking into consideration broader questions of space governance and policy. This cluster of excellence is bringing together faculty from engineering and Princeton more broadly to understand where our impacts can be most successful in the space domain, to form internal networks of collaborators to initiate multi-disciplinary work in the identified areas, and to chart a vision towards external networks that enable institutional partnerships and long-term funding.
Faculty Team: Ryne Beeson (Principal Investigator), Sigrid Adriaenssens, Christine Allen-Blanchette, Yasaman Ghasempour, Alexander Glaser, Kelsey Hatzell, Marcella Lusardi, David McComas, Michael Mueller, Claire White