Jennifer Rexford Named Provost at Princeton University

Jennifer Rexford will be the next provost at Princeton University in New Jersey. She will begin her new duties on March 13, taking over for Deborah Prentice, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, who will be the next Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in England. (See WIAReport post.)

Dr. Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor in Engineering and a professor and chair in the department of computer science at the university. She joined Princeton’s faculty as a full professor in 2005. Earlier, Dr. Rexford worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs for more than eight years, creating techniques for monitoring, traffic engineering, and router configuration deployed in AT&T’s backbone networks.

Professor Rexford is a 1991 graduate of Princeton University, where she majored in electrical engineering. She received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan

“Being chair of the computer science department for the last seven plus years, I have found it very rewarding to help my department through a period of unprecedented growth in student interest, in faculty, and in research connections all across campus,” Dr. Rexford said. “Being named provost feels like the same thing on a different scale. The university is going through so much expansion physically and intellectually. And so, I feel similarly, that being part of shepherding that process is really exciting.”

Professor Rexford added that “Princeton is a place where I grew up both as a student and a faculty member, so it feels very rewarding to have a chance to give back and at a much larger scale.”