Visiting faculty enliven the classroom

Visiting faculty members from other academic institutions, non-profits and industry, spend time teaching and participating in research at Princeton, bringing fresh ideas and initiatives. The following are a few of the recently appointed visitors at Princeton Engineering.

Faith MorrisonWilliam R. Kenan, Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching of Chemical and BiologicalEngineering and the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education

It has been a busy year for Faith Morrison.

Morrison, a professor of chemical engineering at Michigan Technological University, began her visiting year at Princeton by teaching a course in polymer rheology (the study of how matter flows). Along the way, she produced an episode on the subject for her YouTube channel with her co-instructor Rodney Priestley, an assistant professor of chemical engineering.

She also helped update the curriculum for the chemical engineering core lab, incorporating recent industry procedures for process safety. Morrison, whose work at Michigan Tech has focused on the topic, said students are well versed in laboratory safety, but also need to “get a good understanding of safety culture and how it works in industry.”

Morrison also finished her book, “An Introduction to Fluid Mechanics,” and attended the 30th reunion of her class at Princeton.

“It’s been busy,” she said, “but very enjoyable.”

Daniel GiammarWilliam R. Kenan, Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

Often analysts take a narrow view of energy sources, focusing on the carbon efficiency of nuclear power or the availability of wind. Daniel Giammar, a visiting professor from Washington University in St. Louis, is spending his time at Princeton trying to broaden that perspective by examining the impacts of energy sources on a much wider scale.

A specialist in water quality and water treatment, Giammar spent the fall semester assisting Princeton’s Sankaran Sundaresan and Eric Larson teach their course on the “energy-water nexus.” In the spring, he developed a new course on the environmental implications of energy technologies.

“Princeton has quite a few courses focused on energy, mostly from the perspective of energy technology or energy policy,” he said. “The idea of looking at energy as a cycle, both upstream and downstream, fills a niche.”

Joel ReidenbergMicrosoft Visiting Professor of Information Technology Policy

An expert in the laws that govern the often fractious intersection of privacy and technology, Joel Reidenberg’s contribution to Princeton’s Center for Information and Technology Policy could not be timelier.

“The whole firestorm over the National Security Administration’s (NSA) data access is a current event,” said Reidenberg, who will join the faculty as a visiting professor in the fall. “The deeper issue is what does the law allow, and what are the policy rationales for access to citizens’ personal information.”

A professor of law and the director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham Law School, Reidenberg will be Princeton’s first Microsoft Visiting Professor of Information Technology Policy, starting this fall.

Besides his academic work, he has served as an adviser to the Federal Trade Commission and the European Union. At Princeton, Reidenberg plans to lecture and conduct scholarly research in the fall semester and teach a course in the spring.

Derek LidowProfessional Specialist, Electrical Engineering and the Keller Center

While most entrepreneurship classes focus on starting a new company, Derek Lidow spends most of his time discussing the next stage: the time between a new company’s first steps and when it begins to run on its own.

“Growing an enterprise is actually much more perilous than starting one,” said Lidow, whose long business career includes the successful startup iSuppli, a supplier of business information for the global electronics

industry. “Getting a company to the point at which it is value-producing and self-sustaining is something that maybe one in 10 entrepreneurs succeed in doing.”

When Dean H. Vincent Poor asked him to come to Princeton as a visiting professor after the successful sale of iSuppli in 2010, Lidow, a 1973 alumnus, said he wanted to focus on that critical second stage of a new company’s life. His highly popular course, “Entrepreneurial Leadership,” is one of the Keller Center’s offerings for students interested in a future career in business.

“I try to teach them something that will make them more successful,” Lidow said. “If I can help people take their ideas – and they don’t necessarily have to be a for-profit company – and create a tangible reality, that is about as fulfilling as it gets.”