Research center has been home to 35 Nobel Laureates including Albert Einstein
Physicist Albert Einstein was one of the Institute’s first faculty members, serving from 1933 until his death in 1955. Five School of Arts and Sciences professors have received fellowships with the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and will spend the 2024-2025 academic year pursuing research at the renowned center in Princeton.
“This prestigious membership allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry,” the institute said in a statement.
The IAS was established in 1930 and supports research across historical studies, mathematics, natural sciences, and social science. Each year, it welcomes more than 250 scholars from around the world to advance research in an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process by the permanent faculty.
The SAS faculty members selected for fellowships represent departments across the humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and mathematical and physical sciences. Their research topics range from the transatlantic slave trade to the origins of galaxies to theoretical mathematics to U.S. immigration policy.
Ulla Berg, Department of Anthropology and Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies
Ulla D. BergBerg, a cultural anthropologist and scholar of migration, has long studied U.S. immigration and enforcement policies and their impact on Latino immigrants. She organized a major symposium at Rutgers in 2023 that shined a light on the Elizabeth Detention Center. At the IAS, Berg will research deportation and its aftermath between the Andean region of South America and the United States.
Jessey Choo, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
Jessey J. ChooChoo is a historian specializing in China’s medieval period, focusing on cultural and religious practices related to childbearing, death, and memory, as well as women’s acquisition and exercise of personal agency in everyday life. While at IAS, she will work on her second book, tracing the development and consequence of a popular Buddho-Daoist doctrine of salvation that centers on childbirth and women's damnation because of menstrual flow and bleeding during pregnancy.
Marisa J. Fuentes, Department of History and Department of Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies
Marisa J. FuentesFuentes is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in the histories of gender, slavery, the Caribbean and Black Atlantic worlds. She is the author of the award-winning book “Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive.” While at IAS, she will work on a her second book entitled: "Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade." This work explores the connections between capitalism, slave trades, and the disposability of devalued African captives on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Eric Gawiser: Department of Physics and Astronomy
Eric J. GawiserGawiser studies galaxies, stars, and black holes to understand how these objects form and to probe fundamental physics. His research at IAS will focus on resolving the mystery where the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that the first galaxies that formed in our universe appear brighter and more massive than predicted.
“A powerful analysis technique developed by my group at Rutgers will allow me to effectively “press rewind” on galaxies seen by JWST a bit later in the evolution of the universe to find out if their more youthful versions match the earliest ones - and to update our models of galaxy formation until we find agreement,” Gawiser said.
Alex Kontorovich, Department of Mathematics
Alex V. KontorovichKontovorich is an analytic number theorist whose research focuses in part on analyzing geometrical spaces to develop theories about whole numbers. At IAS, he will be doing research on applications of geometry and dynamics to number theory, and on mathematics that is rigorously checked by computer software, and the potential applications thereof to AI.