Two engineering faculty members have been named to endowed professorships, effective July 1: Michael Freedman of computer science and Ronnie Sircar of operations research and financial engineering.

Freedman has been named the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science, established by a gift of Robert E. Kahn, who earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1964 and is widely known as a “father of the internet.” Freedman received his doctorate in computer science from New York University and joined the Princeton faculty in 2007.

His work broadly focuses on distributed systems, networking and security, both across today’s massive datacenters, global internet infrastructure, and even peer-to-peer environments. It has led to commercial products and deployed systems reaching millions of users daily, including time-series databases, content distribution networks and robust cloud storage services.

He was named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2019. Among other honors, he is a recipient of the 2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a SIGCOMM Test of Time Award, and a Sloan Fellowship.

Sircar has been named the Eugene Higgins Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE), one of several professorships in the natural and physical sciences supported by a trust fund established by the will of Eugene Higgins. Sircar, who is currently chair of the ORFE department, received his doctorate from Stanford University and joined the Princeton faculty in 2000.

His research interests include financial mathematics, stochastic volatility models, portfolio optimization, energy markets and electricity grids, cryptocurrencies and stochastic games. He was named a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2020 for “contributions to financial mathematics and asymptotic methods for stochastic control and differential games.”