Young faculty members working in financial engineering, cryptography and machine learning won the three annual junior faculty awards given by the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Alexandre d’Aspremont, assistant professor of operations research and financial engineering, won the Howard B. Wentz Jr ’52 Award. Since coming to Princeton in the fall of 2004, d’Aspremont has published extensively in the areas of mathematical finance, interest rate derivatives and risk-management methods. He also has been an outstanding teacher, earning top student evaluations for his graduate seminar on optimization.
Boaz Barak, assistant professor of computer science, won the Alfred Rheinstein ’11 Award. A faculty member since the fall of 2005, Barak is building a reputation as one of the most creative thinkers in the field of cryptography, inventing methods for circumventing barriers that colleagues had thought were fundamental. He also has developed methods for generating truly random numbers from sources that are not entirely random, a deep and practical problem in cryptography and computer science.
David Blei, assistant professor of computer science, won the E. Lawrence Keyes, Jr./Emerson Electric Co. Faculty Advancement Award. Blei joined the Princeton faculty in January 2006 and has made influential contributions to the field of machine learning, particularly at the intersection of linguistics, neuroscience and computer science. He also has been recognized as an engaging teacher, having been included three times on the dean’s Commendation List for Outstanding Teaching.
