Expanding spaces, expanding knowledge

Visiting Princeton today, you’ll see a landscape of expansion. At construction sites across campus, we are adding four science and engineering buildings, a new home for the Princeton Art Museum, and new residences and facilities for graduate and undergraduate students.

Physical growth often mirrors other types of growth that are essential to what it means to be a university – a place that fosters the expansion of the boundaries of knowledge, as well as personal and professional growth through research, teaching and learning. Over the years, Princeton has balanced its comparatively small size with a remarkable level of research impact, as measured by journal citations and other metrics that indicate the degree to which its contributions to human knowledge influence the scholarly community and the world at large. Princeton is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 research universities in the world.

Research spending at Princeton on awards funded by the federal government, industry and foundations has increased steadily over the past decade, enabling new projects and research directions across the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences and engineering. Reflecting this exciting growth in the scope and intellectual diversity of our research programs, Princeton is now home to the Space Physics laboratory, which is developing NASA-funded instruments to study the sun and solar corona, with the goal of understanding the universe and helping to protect earthly communications against solar storms. Growth is also occurring in research areas such as the humanities; artificial intelligence, through the hiring of new faculty in the Department of Computer Science; and development economics, as reflected by the joint program between the Department of Economics and the School of Public and International Affairs.

Through these pages, we invite you to meet our faculty members and their teams who work to expand knowledge, and in so doing strengthen the vitality of Princeton’s commitment to education, research and service. As the jackhammers and construction vehicles continue their work, we look forward to the new opportunities that our campus expansion will bring to reaffirming and strengthening Princeton’s commitment to research in the service of humanity.

Pablo G. Debenedetti
Dean for Research
Class of 1950 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering