Four professors win prestigious Sloan awards for early-career researchers
Alexandra Amon, Jason Klusowski, Lue Pan and Maria Micaela Sviatschi
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has announced that four Princeton professors — Alexandra Amon, Jason Klusowski, Lue Pan and Maria Micaela Sviatschi — have been selected as 2025 Sloan Research Fellows.
"The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best of early-career science, embodying the creativity, ambition and rigor that drive discovery forward,” said Adam Falk, president of the foundation, in a press release. “These extraordinary scholars are already making significant contributions, and we are confident they will shape the future of their fields in remarkable ways.”
The fellowship recognizes creative early-career researchers in seven scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. This year's cohort includes 126 researchers. More than a thousand are nominated each year. Winners receive $75,000, which may be spent over a two-year term on any expense supportive of their research.
Including this year’s recipients, 252 Princeton faculty members have received Sloan fellowships since they were first awarded in 1955. Fellows are nominated by their institutions, and winners are selected by an independent panel based on "their research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field," the press release said. Sloan Research Fellows who have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize include John Hopfield, last year’s Nobel laureate in physics and an emeritus Princeton professor.
Alexandra Amon
Amon, an assistant professor in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in physics.
As a cosmologist, she uses large-scale surveys of galaxies to study dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe, specifically the clustering of galaxies and the subtle distortion of their shapes due to the bending of their light by gravity.
Her previous honors include the Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship, the Winton Award of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Tollestrup Award and the Royal Astronomical Society's Early Career Award. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Edinburgh, then pursued postdoctoral studies as a Kavli Fellow at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge.
Jason Klusowski
Klusowski, an assistant professor in the Department of Operations Research & Financial Engineering, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in mathematics.
Klusowski's research uses statistical machine learning for complex, large-scale models, with special interest in data science, statistical learning, deep learning, decision tree learning, high-dimensional statistics, information theory, statistical physics and network modeling. Recently, his research has expanded to include the study of transformers and large language models.
His previous honors include an NSF CAREER Award, the Howard B. Wentz Jr. Junior Faculty Award from Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and a Project X innovation grant.
Prior to joining Princeton, Jason was an assistant professor of statistics at Rutgers University. He completed his Ph.D. in statistics and data science at Yale University in 2018 and his bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics from the University of Manitoba. From 2017 to 2018, he was a visiting graduate student in the Statistics Department at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Lue Pan
Pan, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in mathematics.
He is interested in algebraic number theory, especially p-adic aspects of the Langlands program, and has worked in fields including cohomologies, Galois and Banach representations, residuals, and irreducibles.
Pan completed his undergraduate degree at Peking University before coming to Princeton as a graduate student in mathematics, completing his Ph.D. in 2018. He then pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago before returning to Princeton to join the mathematics faculty. He currently serves as the assistant director of graduate studies for the department.
Maria Micaela Sviatschi
Sviatschi, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in economics. She researches labor and development economics, with a focus on human capital, gender violence and crime.
Some areas of her research include exploring how children start a criminal career in drug trafficking and gangs; the consequences of organized crime on economic development and state capacity; and the role of state capacity to deter and improve service delivery to reduce gender-based violence. She has researched the development of criminal skills in drug trafficking organizations in Peru and gangs in El Salvador, and is studying the impact of female police officers in Peru and India. In addition to this research, she has ongoing collaborative research projects in the U.S., Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Colombia and Jordan.
Sviatschi received her bachelor's degree in economics from the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires and her Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in New York.
