New York Times: A Princeton Dean Is Named to Lead Brown

March 2, 2012

Christina Hull Paxson ['82], the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, will become president of Brown University on July 1. She succeeds Ruth J. Simmons, who said in September that she would step down.

Dr. Paxson, 52, is an economist who began teaching at Princeton in 1986. In 2000, she founded the Wilson School's Center for Health and Wellbeing, serving as its director until 2009, when she became dean. Her work in recent years has focused on the relationship of economic factors to children's health and welfare.

Dr. Paxson has served as chairwoman of Princeton's economics department. She is also a senior editor of The Future of Children and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is probably best known in the popular media for her research, with Anne Case, on the relationship of children's height to status, intelligence and earnings. ...

An alumna of Swarthmore College who earned her graduate degrees at Columbia, Dr. Paxson is married to Ari Gabinet, executive vice president and general counsel of Oppenheimer Funds. They have two sons, ages 14 and 22.

(Note: This story also appeared in the Providence Journal, The Brown Daily Herald, and State News Service.)