Princeton University will present its top awards for alumni to Kevin Gover, Class of 1978, under secretary for museums and culture at the Smithsonian, and Terence Tao, a 1996 graduate alumnus, professor of mathematics and the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA).

Gover, who graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in history, will receive the Woodrow Wilson Award. Tao, who earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, will receive the James Madison Medal. These awards will be presented on Alumni Day, to be held on campus on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. 

The University bestows the Woodrow Wilson Award annually upon an undergraduate alumna or alumnus whose career embodies the call to duty in Wilson’s 1896 speech, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.” A Princeton graduate and faculty member, Wilson served as president of the University, governor of New Jersey and president of the United States. 

The James Madison Medal, established by the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni (APGA), is named for the fourth president of the United States, who is considered to be Princeton’s first graduate student. It is presented each year to celebrate an alumna or alumnus of the Princeton Graduate School who has had a distinguished career, advanced the cause of graduate education or achieved an outstanding record of public service. 

Woodrow Wilson Award recipient 

As under secretary for museums and culture at the Smithsonian Institution since 2021, Gover leads the office that oversees the institution’s history and art museums, its cultural centers, and the Archives of American Art, as well as Smithsonian Exhibits and the National Collections Program. 

“Through his extraordinary work as a lawyer, a scholar, a high-ranking government official, and a leader of the Smithsonian museums, Kevin Gover has helped to build a more inclusive America,” said Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83. “Every day, the Smithsonian museums spark new conversations about who we are and who we can be as a people, and Kevin’s thoughtful dedication is crucial to our collective understanding of what America means as it celebrates its 250th anniversary next year.”

Gover grew up in Oklahoma, the son of civil rights activists. After graduating with a degree in public and international affairs from what is now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, he received his law degree from the University of New Mexico School of Law. In 1986, he established a law firm in New Mexico that grew into the largest Native American-owned firm in the country and represented tribes and tribal agencies in a dozen states.

In 1997, Gover was nominated by President Bill Clinton to become assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, a role in which he served until 2001. During his term, Gover led the effort to rebuild long-neglected Indian schools and expand tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police forces throughout the country. He also made news in a 2000 speech in which he apologized to tribes for the BIA’s “legacy of racism and inhumanity.” 

Joining the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in 2003, Gover served on the faculty of its Indian Legal Program and taught courses in federal Indian law, administrative law and statutory interpretation, as well as an undergraduate course in American Indian policy.

Gover served as director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and its George Gustav Heye Center in New York City for 14 years, from 2007 to 2021. He led the museums’ efforts to expand people’s ideas of what it means to be Native American and supervised the creation of the National Native American Veterans Memorial in 2020, the first landmark in Washington to focus on the contributions of American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians who served in the military. “I believe that the museum will redefine who Native Americans were and are and help us dispel a number of the myths, stereotypes and inaccuracies,” he told National Public Radio in 2007. “But even more tellingly, [it] can be a key player in defining the place of these communities in American society, both now and in the future.”

A member of the Pawnee tribe of Oklahoma, Gover has received numerous awards for his work with Native American communities and educational institutions, including an honorary degree from Princeton in 2001, the first such honor ever conferred by the University upon a Native American.

James Madison Medal recipient 

Tao is a professor of mathematics, the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences at UCLA and the director of special projects at UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). He is a Fields Medal winner (2006) and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellow (2007), and his research in both pure and applied mathematics has contributed to compressive sensing (used in signal processing and cryptography) and number theory. When he won the Fields Medal, the International Mathematical Union cited his “other-worldly ingenuity for hitting upon new ideas.”

“Terence Tao is one of the most singular thinkers in mathematics. His technical brilliance, exceptional creativity, wide-ranging curiosity, and collaborative spirit have led to multiple pathbreaking discoveries. Sometimes described as the world’s greatest living mathematician, Terry is admired for his humility, generosity, and integrity as well as for his stunning intellectual achievements,” Eisgruber said.

Tao was a mathematical prodigy growing up in Adelaide, Australia. At 9 years old, he scored 760 on the math portion of the SAT; as a 10-year-old, he embarked on a global tour to meet mathematical royalty — including Charles Fefferman *69 and Enrico Bombieri at the Institute for Advanced Study; at 15, he published a math book to train secondary-school teachers. He attended the Princeton Graduate School on a Fulbright fellowship, received his Ph.D. when he was 20 and earned tenure at UCLA at 24. 

“Math is, to me, is about making connections between things you didn’t know were connected,” he recently told The Washington Post.

In 2006, Tao won the Fields Medal, the exclusive prize given every four years to mathematicians under 40 years of age, for his advances in the fields of partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory. Nine years later, after Tao won the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, he used the $3 million cash gift to endow fellowships for graduate students in developing countries and for gifted American high school students.

Tao’s work is theoretical and has had important real-world applications, none more so than compressed sensing, a process in which digital cameras can use complicated algorithms to create precise images using a tiny amount of data. Working with IPAM, he has helped produce algorithms that can produce MRI scans up to 10 times faster than the previous technology. 

From 2020 to 2024, Tao served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In August 2025, after $584 million of National Science Foundation grants to UCLA were suspended — though later reinstated by a court ruling — Tao became a vocal advocate for academia and science, making the arguments for preserving the productive bonds between government and academia that have strengthened the health, security and competitiveness of the United States for more than 70 years. 

The awards will be presented in Richardson Auditorium during the 111th Alumni Day ceremonies, which also will recognize student winners of the Jacobus Fellowship and the Pyne Honor Prize. The Alumni Day program will also feature the annual Alumni Association luncheon at Jadwin Gymnasium, the Service of Remembrance at the Princeton Chapel that honors members of the Princeton community whose deaths were recorded by the University in 2025, and the kick-off of the 200th anniversary of the Princeton Alumni Association.