Printer-friendly versionNew Trustees Appointed to the Board of Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study has appointed Dr. Eric Schmidt and Dr. Curtis Callan to its Board of Trustees, effective July 1, 2008. Dr. Schmidt is Chief Executive Officer of Google Inc., and Dr. Callan, who has been nominated by the Institute's School of Natural Sciences, is the J. S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He succeeds Dr. Andrew Strominger, Professor of Physics at Harvard University, who served a five-year term on the nomination of the School of Natural Sciences.
Dr. Schmidt took his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Princeton University (1976), and obtained a master's degree (1979) and a Ph.D. (1982) in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1983, he joined Sun Microsystems and rose to become its Chief Technology Officer. He was named Chairman and CEO of Novell in 1997, where he led the company's strategic planning, management and technology development. Dr. Schmidt was recruited by Google in 2001. He became Chairman of the Board of the company in March of that year, and was named CEO in August.
An internationally recognized technologist and business leader, Dr. Schmidt serves on the Board of Directors of Apple Inc., the Board of Trustees of Princeton University and is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New America Foundation. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.
Dr. Callan, winner of the Dirac Medal in 2004, was a Member in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute on three occasions, in 1969-72, 1983 and 1993-94, and has been a frequent Visitor in recent years.
Well known for the Callan-Symanzik equation, Dr. Callan was recently elected Vice President of the American Physical Society (APS). Dr. Callan was awarded the 2000 Sakurai Medal for Particle Theory of the APS and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1987.
After receiving an AB in physics from Haverford College in 1961, he pursued graduate study in physics at Princeton, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1964. From there, he became assistant professor in physics at Harvard University. In 1972, he joined the faculty of Princeton, where he became J. S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics in 1995. He currently serves as chair of the Physics Department at the University. Dr. Callan is the founding director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics, which works to promote interaction among theorists and seed new directions in research, especially in areas cutting across traditional disciplinary boundaries.
About the Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute exists to encourage and support fundamental research in the sciences and humanities—the original, often speculative thinking that produces advances in knowledge that change the way we understand the world. Work at the Institute takes place in four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Science. It provides for the mentoring of scholars by a permanent Faculty of no more than 28, and it offers all who work there the freedom to undertake research that will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of fields in the sciences and humanities studied at the Institute.
The Institute, founded in 1930, is a private, independent academic institution located in Princeton, New Jersey. Its more than 6,000 former Members hold positions of intellectual and scientific leadership throughout the academic world. Some 33 Nobel Laureates and 38 out of 52 Fields Medalists, as well as many winners of the Wolf or MacArthur prizes, have been affiliated with the Institute.