Five Princeton faculty members have been selected to receive 2008 Sloan Research Fellowships, highly competitive grants to outstanding scientists and scholars early in their careers.
The recipients are:
• Yueh-Lin Loo, associate professor of chemical engineering, whose research interests focus on materials chemistry and the physics of complex, soft materials. A faculty member since 2007, she received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton in 2001.
• Ulrich Müller, assistant professor of economics. A faculty member since 2003, his research interests include econometrics.
• Jason Petta, assistant professor of physics. His research focuses on quantum control of solid state systems. He has been a Princeton faculty member since 2007.
• Roman Rafikov, assistant professor of astrophysical sciences. A specialist in theoretical astrophysics, he joined the faculty in 2007. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2002.
• Joshua Shaevitz, assistant professor of physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. A faculty member since 2007, he conducts research on the role that mechanical forces play in biology.
They are among 118 scientists, mathematicians and economists selected from 64 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada conducting research at the frontiers of knowledge, according to officials at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which manages and funds the program.
Winners receive grants of $50,000, to be administered by each fellow's institution, to support two years of research along any avenue of inquiry of interest to the researcher.
Since the program started in 1955, 35 fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes and 14 have earned Fields Medals, widely viewed as the top honor in mathematics. The foundation started bestowing economics fellowships in 1983. Since then, Sloan Fellows have accounted for eight of the 13 winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, generally considered the top honor for young economists.
