Showing posts with label Princeton University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Princeton University. Show all posts

Monday, May 11, 2020

Nicholas Johnson: Princeton University's First Black Valedictorian



Nicholas Johnson is the first black valedictorian in Princeton’s history.
He said he appreciates the encouragement he has received at Princeton in developing his academic interests. The University’s support through opportunities including international internships and cultural immersion trips to Peru, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom were especially significant, Johnson said. But most of all, he treasures his relationships with his classmates.
“My favorite memories of my time at Princeton are memories of time spent with close friends and classmates engaging in stimulating discussions — often late at night — about our beliefs, the cultures and environments in which we were raised, the state of the world, and how we plan on contributing positively to it in our own unique way,” Johnson said.
Johnson plans to spend this summer interning as a hybrid quantitative researcher and software developer at the D. E. Shaw Group before beginning Ph.D. studies in operations research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in fall 2020.
Along with his concentration in operations research and financial engineering, he is pursuing certificates in statistics and machine learningapplied and computational mathematics, and applications of computing.
His research has focused primarily on sequential decision-making under uncertainty, optimization, and the ethical considerations that must be made given the increasing role of algorithmic decision-making systems.
His senior thesis, “Sequential Stochastic Network Structure Optimization with Applications to Addressing Canada’s Obesity Epidemic,” focuses on developing high-performance, efficient algorithms to solve a network-based optimization problem that models a community-based preventative health intervention designed to curb the prevalence of obesity in Canada.
This work, supervised by Miklos Racz, assistant professor of operations research and financial engineering, also has applications to public health interventions designed to increase adherence to strict social distancing to curb the spread of COVID-19.
Johnson has another ongoing research project supervised by Yacine Ait-Sahalia, the Otto A. Hack ’03 Professor of Finance and professor of economics, in which he is developing a reinforcement learning agent to execute large financial trade orders with minimal market distortion.
During his junior year, Johnson conducted an independent research project, “Generating Privacy Preserving Synthetic Datasets,” supervised by Prateek Mittal, associate professor of electrical engineering, in which he developed a machine learning system to more robustly anonymize datasets than existing alternatives. He presented this work at the spring 2019 Electrical Engineering Symposium and the 2019 Center for Statistics and Machine Learning Symposium.
Among his other professors, William Massey, the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, and Dannelle Gutarra Cordero, a lecturer in African American studies, were also influential.
“Professor Massey inspired me by sharing his ever-present love for operations research and through his advocacy for black and African American students in STEM fields,” Johnson said. “He encouraged me to pursue increasingly ambitious research projects and to share my work at academic conferences. Professor Gutarra introduced me to academic writing during my first-year Writing Seminar. She was instrumental in helping me develop my skills as an effective academic writer and communicator, and she motivated me to become a writing fellow.”
In addition to serving as a writing fellow at Princeton’s Writing Center, Johnson is editor of Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy. He is a member of Whitman College, where he has served as a residential college adviser. He is also a member of the Princeton chapter of Engineers Without Borders and served as its co-president in 2018.
As a rising senior, Johnson worked as a software engineer in machine learning at Google’s California headquarters.
He previously interned at Oxford University’s Integrative Computational Biology and Machine Learning Group, developing and implementing a novel optimization technique under the supervision of Aleksandr Sahakyan, principal investigator and group head. He presented the project at Princeton’s inaugural Day of Optimization in October 2018 and at the 25th Conference of African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences in June 2019, where his project was recognized with the Angela E. Grant Poster Award for Best Modeling.
Johnson has interned at Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, and he participated in Whitman’s exchange program with Morningside College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in March 2017.
Among his academic honors, Johnson is a recipient of the Class of 1883 English Prize for Freshmen in the School of Engineering, a two-time recipient of the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence, and co-recipient with Sommers of the Class of 1939 Princeton Scholar Award. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in fall 2019 and to Tau Beta Pi in 2018, where he served as president of the Princeton Chapter in 2019.
Johnson is a graduate of Selwyn House School and attended Marianopolis College, both in Westmount, Quebec.


Saturday, June 17, 2017

Princeton professor named country's next poet laureate

Tracy K. Smith has a long list of accomplishments, from publishing three books of poetry to winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, and she just added one more prestigious achievement.

The Library of Congress named Smith its 2017-18 Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, an honor she shares with only 21 others.

"I am profoundly honored," sad Smith, a creative writing professor at Princeton University. "As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture."

"I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future readers across this marvelously diverse country," she said.

Smith is the author of the poetry books "Life on Mars"; "Duende"; and "The Body's Question"; all of which have won awards. Her memoir, "Ordinary Light", was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction and recognized as a notable book by The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Smith was appointed by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on Wednesday, and is succeeding Juan Felipe Herrera.

Hayden called Smith a "poet of searching," and said she has a way with her poems.

"Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and memory to life; calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion and pop culture," Hayden said.

[SOURCE: NJ.COM]

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Essence Magazines 50 best colleges for African Americans list


Choosing a college is one of the most important decisions Black students will make in their lifetime. ESSENCE partnered with MoneyMagazine to create a definitive list of the schools that serve African Americans most. The following factors were used when making the list. Representation (African-Americans had to make up at least 5 percent of each college’s student body.)  , affordability, and Postgrad earnings.
Here are the top 50 colleges and universities in the country: 
1. Princeton University 
2. Harvard University
3. Duke University 
4. Cornell University
5. Florida A&M University 
6. Spelman College
7. University of Pennsylvania
8. Yale University
9. North Carolina A&T State University 
10. University of Maryland, College Park
11. Columbia University 
12. Georgia Institute of Technology
13. Georgetown University 
14. University of Florida
15. Hampton University 
16. Bowie State University 
17. Wellesley College
18. Berea College 
19. Amherst College
20. Virginia State University 
21. Xavier University of Louisiana 
22. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
23. Rice University 
24. Vanderbilt University 
25. Brown University
26. University of Richmond
27. Dartmouth College
28 Howard University 
29. University of Virginia 
30. Davidson College
31. The College of William and Mary 
32. Alcorn State University 
33. Williams College
34. Trinity Washington University
35. Jackson State University
36. Johns Hopkins University 
37. Elizabeth City State University 
38. Prairie View A&M University 
39. Pomona College
40. Northwestern University 
41. Binghamton University 
42. Emory University
43. North Carolina Central University 
44. Tennessee State University 
45. Towson University 
46. Stony Brook University 
47. Barnard College
48. Winston-Salem State University 
49. Talladega College
50. Rutgers University-Newark