CORPORATIONS AND GOVERNMENT AGENCIES, COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, AND PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS ARE ACTIVE TO ENCOURAGE STUDENTS IN THE SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING AND MATHEMATICS (STEM) FIELDS.

 

126 TALENTED YOUNG SCHOLARS AWARDED SLOAN RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS

 

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced the selection of 126 outstanding U.S. and Canadian researchers as recipients of the 2016 Sloan Research Fellowships. Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships honor early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders.

 

Fellows receive $55,000 to further their research. A full list of this year's Fellows is available at the Sloan Foundation website at www.sloan.org/sloanresearch-fellowships/2016-sloanresearch-fellows.

 

“Getting early-career support can be a make-or-break moment for a young scholar,” says Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “In an increasingly competitive academic environment, it can be difficult to stand out, even when your work is first-rate. The Sloan Research Fellowships have become an unmistakable marker of quality among researchers.”

 

Past Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to notable careers. They include such intellectual giants as physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, as well as game theorist John Nash.

 

Since the beginning of the program in 1955:

 

• Forty three fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective fields.

 

• Sixteen have won the Fields Medal in mathematics.

 

• Sixty eight have received the National Medal of Science.

 

• Fifteen have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.

 

“Alfred P. Sloan was an industrialist who witnessed first-hand how science transformed the automobile industry,” says Daniel L. Goroff, vice president at the Sloan Foundation and director of the Sloan Research Fellowship program.

 

“He started the Sloan Research Fellowships to make sure the most brilliant young stars in academia continue pursuing research that can transform their fields and eventually improve the quality of our lives,” he adds.

 

Drawn from 52 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, the 2016 Sloan Research Fellows represent a diverse variety of research interests. Fellows this year include:

 

• An economist who studies what makes rich countries rich and keeps poor countries poor.

 

• A chemist who is attempting to craft efficient nanoscale batteries.

 

• A molecular biologist who has uncovered how changes in social status can affect primates at the genetic level.

 

• A computer scientist who is the co-creator of Hadoop, the dataprocessing system behind Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook.

 

• An ocean scientist who is pioneering the deployment of mobile “marineprotected areas” that move with the endangered marine species they are designed to protect.

 

• A mathematician who is untying the knotty math of black holes.

 

• An astronomer who has developed innovative new ways to image extra solar planets.

 

• A neuroscientist who is unveiling the complicated ways in which the bacteria in our bodies affect how our brains work.