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The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced 126 new fellows today, recognizing the most innovative young scientists across the US and Canada. These two-year fellowships honor outstanding early-career researchers in seven fields and have become one of the most prestigious and sought-after awards available to young scholars.
Founded in 1934 by industrialist Alfred P. Sloan Jr., the Foundation is a not-for-profit grantmaking institution that supports high quality, impartial scientific research; fosters a robust, diverse scientific workforce; strengthens public understanding and engagement with science; and promotes the health of the institutions of scientific endeavor.
“Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving the nominations of the most inventive and impactful early-career scientists across the U.S. and Canada,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how Fellows take leading roles shaping the research agenda within their respective fields.”
Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 award which can be used flexibly to advance their research.
The Indian American fellows are— Priyanka Raina, Stanford University and Arvind Satyanarayan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Computer Science); Dipti Nayak, University of California, Berkeley (Earth System Science); Aaditya Ramdas, Carnegie Mellon University, and Ananth Shankar, Northwestern University (Mathematics); Vineet Augustine, University of California, San Diego; Vijay Mohan K Namboodiri, University of California, San Francisco; and Preeya Khanna, University of California, Berkeley (Neuroscience); and Karan K. Mehta, Cornell University (Physics).
A Sloan Research Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards available to young researchers, in part because so many past Fellows have gone on to become distinguished figures in science. Renowned physicists Richard Feynman and James Cronin were Sloan Research Fellows, as was mathematician John Nash, one of the fathers of modern game theory. To date, 57 Fellows have received a Nobel Prize, including Moungi Bawendi, last year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 71 have won the National Medal of Science, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, and 23 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.
