New York, NY, February 15, 2018 – The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announces the selection of 126 outstanding U.S. and Canadian researchers as the recipients of the 2018 Sloan Research Fellowships. The fellowships, awarded yearly since 1955, honor early-career scholars whose achievements mark them as among the very best scientific minds working today. A full list of the 2018 Fellows is available at the Sloan Foundation website at https://sloan.org/fellowships/2018-Fellows.
“The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best science has to offer,” says Sloan President Adam Falk, “The brightest minds, tackling the hardest problems, and succeeding brilliantly—Fellows are quite literally the future of twenty-first century science.”
Available to tenure track faculty in eight scientific fields, the Fellowships are awarded at a key moment in a researcher’s career. President Falk, who received a Sloan Research Fellowship in physics in 1995, can attest to their significance. “As a former Sloan Research Fellow, I know firsthand how catalytic this award can be. The Fellowship is an unmistakable marker of quality that makes a young researcher stand out. A Sloan Research Fellow is a scientist to watch.”
Past Sloan Research Fellows include many towering figures in the history of science, including physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, and game theorist John Nash. Forty-five fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science, and 17 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007. More information about former Sloan Research Fellows can be found at https://sloan.org/past-fellows.
Drawn this year from 53 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, the 2018 Sloan Research Fellows represent a diverse array of institutions and backgrounds. “It doesn’t matter what you look like or where you come from,” says Daniel L. Goroff, Vice President at the Sloan Foundation and Director of the Sloan Research Fellowship program. “If you’re doing great science, you can be a Sloan Research Fellow.”
This year’s Fellows include:
- A molecular biologist who studies how birds perceive color;
- A chemist who has developed molecular “printing” techniques that can make flexible solarcells that are twice as efficient as current models;
- A computer scientist who is constructing robots for the home that users can program themselves;
- An environmental economist who is exposing the hidden costs of pollution;
- A mathematician who is trying to explain the remarkable success of neural networks in
performing complicated tasks like recognizing faces; - A neuroscientist whose work is revealing that best friends don’t just think alike; they have similar brains;
- An ocean scientist that has shown how warming currents are leading many marine species to breed early, bringing them out of sync with the plankton blooms on which they feed;
- A physicist who says the structure of the outer solar system makes sense only if there is an undiscovered ninth planet.
Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields—chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics—the Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists and winning fellows are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars in their field on the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become a leader in his or her field. Winners receive a two- year, $65,000 fellowship to further their research.
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The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. https://sloan.org
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