From Centraljersey.com: The Princeton Small Businesses Resiliency Relief Fund launched with a $250,000 commitment from Princeton University, which also provided a dollar-for-dollar match up to $100,000 for additional donations. https://centraljersey.com/2020/09/09/psbrf-distributes-funds-to-70-local-princeton-businesses/

Princeton University has launched “A Year of Forward Thinking,” a community engagement campaign that invites Princetonians and others to join in a conversation focused on responding to the challenges facing the nation and the world. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/09/10/princeton-launches-year-forward-thinking-engagement-campaign

In just one year, Lou Chen, a 2019 alumnus, has orchestrated the expansion of Trenton Youth Orchestra (TYO), which he founded his sophomore year, into Trenton Arts at Princeton — a vibrant, multifaceted service initiative offering arts outreach and orchestral, choral, dance and theater programming for dozens of middle school and high school students — with over 50 Princeton student volunteers. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/09/09/trust-inclusion-imagination-trenton-arts-princeton-connects-and-inspires

The Hispanic National Bar Association honored its past president Ramona Romero, Vice President and General Counsel of Princeton University, with the 2020 HNBA President’s Award.

From HNBA:

Ramona was part of the team at Princeton that worked on a lawsuit filed in November of 2017 by Princeton, Microsoft and Princeton graduate Maria Perales Sanchez, to challenge the federal government’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the program that protects 700,000+ immigrants who came to the United States as children from deportation. The lawsuit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, culminating in the landmark decision on June 18, 2020 that blocked the government’s attempt to end the DACA program.

The HNBA honors Ramona, and our nation’s Dreamers are forever indebted to Ramona, for her instrumental work this year in helping to save DACA. While Dreamers’ futures still depend on legislation that gives them a clear path to citizenship, the litigation that Princeton’s legal team spearheaded under Ramona’s leadership changed the landscape for the better.https://mailchi.mp/hnba/hnbavia-ccc-ac2020-ramona-romero-to-receive-the-2020-hnba-presidents-award?e=3330e59ef8

The Vilcek Foundation announced this week that Mohamed Abou Donia,  an associate professor of molecular biology, was one of three recipients of the 2021 Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science. The prizes are awarded annually to extraordinary early-career scientists whose work represents a profound advance in their respective fields. Like the other Vilcek Prizes, it is awarded to scholars who work in the United States but were born elsewhere.

In a letter to the Princeton community Wednesday, Sept. 2, President Eisgruber outlined measures the University administration will work on now to address systemic racism at Princeton and beyond. He also emphasized that much more conversation and work is ahead:
Over the coming days and months, we will arrange opportunities for community input, dialogue, and discussion.  We are in the process of planning multiple town halls for this purpose during September and October. We need your ideas, and, more than that, we need your engagement to make this University better. While my Cabinet will continue to pursue these measures, to implement other recommendations generated over the summer, and to develop additional ideas, real progress will depend upon continued commitment from throughout the University.
President Eisgruber’s letter can be read in full here.

Endnotes: August marked the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which legally ended the use of sex as a qualification for the right to vote. In this episode of Endnotes, Corrine McConnaughy takes listeners back in time to what gave the movement legs, explaining how “coalition politics” were the lynchpin in women securing the right to vote. https://spia.princeton.edu/news/endnotes-woman-suffrage-movement-america-corrine-mcconnaughy

From Centraljersey.com: Undergraduate student Anna Salvatore created Free Book Day, allowing residents to get rid of unwanted books while bringing together book lovers and enthusiasts throughout Mercer County. The event launched throughout Hopewell Valley in August. The next edition of Free Book Day takes place across homes in Princeton and Lawrence on Sept. 12. https://centraljersey.com/2020/09/02/free-book-day-continues-to-bring-book-lovers-together-in-a-unique-way/

From Town Topics: Preeti Chemiti, a sophomore in Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, has created a free mental health guidebook for students, teachers, and administrators in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eric Lin, also a sophomore at Princeton, is the project’s director of design. http://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2020/09/02/school-matters-9-2-2020/

Samuel Wang:A second coronavirus wave is likely coming to N.J. this fall. The question: How big? (Nj.com) 
Nyle Fort, Ph.D candidate: Will the Pandemic Mean Justice in America? (The Open Mind) 
Andy Dobson:Rampant destruction of forests ‘will unleash more pandemics’ (The Guardian) 
William Dudley: Dudley: The Fed’s Done All It Can Do, Recovery Depends On Stimulus (Forbes) and The Fed’s New Approach Won’t Help the Economy Now (Bloomberg Opinion) 
Julian Zelizer: Politics of fear finds home in 2020 campaign (The Hill) 
Kevin Kruse: AP Analysis: Trump’s 2020 mantra channels Nixon, Wallace (Associated Press) 
Gary J. Bass: The Terrible Cost of Presidential Racism (The New York Times)
LaFleur Stephens-Dougan:What’s The Connection Between Civilian Militias And The Police? (WBUR) 
Susan Fiske and Xuechunzi Bai, graduate student researcher: Ethnic diversity on campus helps break down stereotypes (The Conversation) 
Pablo Debenedetti:Simulation says supercritical water has no hydrogen bonds (Chemistry World)

From TAPinto: The League of Women Voters of Berkeley Heights, New Providence & Summit is co-hosting a program with the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University on September 17th. The program is entitled,”What can we do as voters to protect our elections and our representative government?”. Princeton’s Andrew Appel, will offer his thoughts and insight on the 2020 election. https://www.tapinto.net/towns/mountainside/sections/elections/articles/princeton-professor-to-speak-at-lwv-meeing-sept-17

From The Daily Princetonian: Last week, over 140 students and community members attended a virtual book talk with University professors Imani Perry and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. GS ’97. The talk was a culmination of an anti-racist book initiative launched by the Undergraduate Student Government (USG). USG provided anti-racist literature to almost 1300 students. Each undergraduate was offered a free digital copy of Perry’s “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons” or Glaude’s “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.” https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/08/princeton-usg-book-talk-imani-perry-eddie-glaude-initiative-race

From PPPL: Electric current is everywhere, from powering homes to controlling the plasma(link is external) that fuels fusion(link is external) reactions to possibly giving rise to vast cosmic magnetic fields. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found that electrical currents can form in ways not known before. The novel findings could give researchers greater ability to bring the fusion energy that drives the sun and stars to Earth. https://www.pppl.gov/news/2020/09/researchers-find-unexpected-electrical-current-could-stabilize-fusion-reactions

From PPPL: World-class expertise in confining and stabilizing the plasma that fuels fusion reactions has brought two new public-private collaborations to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). The new awards, made by the DOE’s Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) program, will bring together PPPL physicist Walter Guttenfelder with Britain’s Tokamak Energy, and PPPL’s Zhirui Wang and Dylan Brennan with General Fusion of Canada. https://www.pppl.gov/news/2020/09/new-public-private-projects-speed-fusion-energy-production-come-pppl

From Forbes: Adji Bousso Dieng is an incoming computer science faculty at Princeton who works in an area of Artificial Intelligence called generative modeling. She is currently a researcher at Google. She will be Princeton’s School of Engineering’s first Black female faculty. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewwight/2020/08/30/this-ai-expert-from-senegal-is-helping-showcase-africans-in-stem/#48a5c25a7481

Translation — that movement between languages, cultures, and ultimately, meaning — has been a fact of Lahiri’s entire life. As a writer, Lahiri said she finds the act of translating to be “extraordinarily powerful and regenerative.” It’s an experience she has shared with her students at Princeton since joining the faculty in 2015. Lahiri will discuss issues of translation in Aristotle’s “Poetics” as part of the Humanities Council’s 14th annual Humanities Colloquium, “Things As They Should Be? A Question for the Humanities,” which will be held as a webinar from 4:30 to 6 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 9. Her talk is titled “Not should but might: notes of a would-be translator.” Advance registration is required. More information can be found on the Humanities Council website. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/09/04/jhumpa-lahiri-champions-writerly-art-translation

From Planet Princeton: Princeton University researchers Jessica Metcalf and Julien Ayroles are conducting a study on COVID-19 in the Princeton community. Goals of the study include determining how many people in the community are currently infected with COVID-19, and how many have COVID-19 antibodies that indicate previous exposure and may help protect against reinfection. https://planetprinceton.com/2020/08/31/university-researchers-are-studying-covid-19-in-the-princeton-community/