Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions; Branko Glišić, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus; John B. Londregan, Professor of Politics and International Affairs; Margarita A. Mooney, Visiting Associate Professor of Sociology; Michael A. Reynolds, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies

A public discussion for Freshman Families Weekend with Princeton Faculty. The topic will be Think For Yourself! Some Thoughts and Advice for Our Students and All Students.

Robert P. George is McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), on the President’s Council on Bioethics, and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. His most recent book is Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism (ISI Books, 2013). Professor George is a recipient of many honors and awards, including the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. He holds honorary doctorates of law, ethics, science, letters, divinity, humanities, law and moral values, civil law, humane letters, and juridical science. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., and D.C.L. from Oxford University.

Branko Glišić is Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University. He does research on structural health monitoring, fiber optic sensors, advanced sensing technologies, and heritage structures, and is the author of Fiber Optic Methods for Structural Health Monitoring. Professor Glišić is also a faculty fellow in Wilson College. He received his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and his B.S. and M.S. from the University of Belgrade.

William Happer *64, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University, is a specialist in modern optics, optical and radiofrequency spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, radiation propagation in the atmosphere, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at Columbia University and Princeton University, and has served as Director of Energy Research in the Department of Energy under President George Bush. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1966, an Alexander von Humboldt Award in 1976, the 1997 Broida Prize and the 1999 Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society, and the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in 2000. He received his B.S. in Physics from the University of North Carolina and his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University.

John B. Londregan *88 is Professor of Politics and International Affairs. He is a specialist in the development and application of statistical methods in political science. He has also done extensive analysis of Chilean legislative and electoral politics since the transition from the Pinochet dictatorship to democracy. Londregan is the author of Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile, as well as a contributor to numerous journals and edited volumes. He received the Miller Prize for Best Paper in Political Analysis, Vol. 8 in 2000. Ph.D., Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton and his B.A. from the University of Washington. 

Margarita A. Mooney *05 is Associate Professor of Practical Theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary and Visiting Associate Professor of Sociology, Princeton University. She directs the Scala Foundation, which promotes classical liberal arts education and supports research on human flourishing. She previously taught at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Yale University. She is the author of Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Living a Broken Life Beautifully: Rediscovering the Soul in Social Science.” She received her B.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Michael A. Reynolds *03 is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His research areas include Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history, Russian and Eurasian history, the Caucasus, international relations, empire, nationalism, Turkish foreign policy, and US foreign policy. He is the author of Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), co-winner of the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize, a Financial Times book of the summer, and a Choice outstanding title. He is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and in 2016-17 was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He received his B.A. in Government and Slavic Languages and Literature from Harvard University, his M.A. in Political Science from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.