The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has chosen six Princeton faculty members to receive Sloan Research Fellowships this year. The fellowships are highly competitive grants for outstanding scientists and scholars early in their careers.
The recipients are:
• Boaz Barak, assistant professor of computer science, whose research interests include cryptography and complexity theory. Barak joined the Princeton faculty in 2005 following two years as a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study.
• Frans Pretorius, assistant professor of physics, who specializes in theoretical cosmology. Pretorius came to Princeton in February after two years on the faculty at the University of Alberta.
• Jacob Rasmussen, assistant professor of mathematics, who specializes in topology and homology. The salutatorian of Princeton's class of 1998, Rasmussen spent two years as a research instructor on campus and at the Institute for Advanced Study before joining the faculty in 2005.
• Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, assistant professor of economics and international affairs, who studies international, urban and macroeconomics. Rossi-Hansberg was on the faculty at Stanford University for three years before coming to Princeton in 2005.
• Anatoly Spitkovsky, assistant professor of astrophysics, whose research concerns phenomena associated with neutron stars and pulsars. Spitkovsky joined the faculty in 2006 after postdoctoral work at Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley.
• Simone Warzel, assistant professor of mathematics, who specializes in mathematical physics. Warzel came to Princeton as a research assistant in 2004 and has been a faculty member since 2006.
The fellowships are among 116 the foundation currently awards yearly to young specialists in the fields of chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Each winner will receive $45,000 of largely unrestricted research support to be used over a period of two years.
