Five UChicago scholars receive Alfred P. Sloan fellowships

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has selected five young UChicago scholars to receive 2011 Sloan research fellowships. The five UChicago faculty members are among 118 early career scientists, mathematicians and economists at 54 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada.

Sloan fellowships support the work of exceptional young researchers who work at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, and neuroscience. Each fellow’s institution administers a $50,000, two-year grant to the fellow to conduct research.

The 2011 UChicago fellows are:

Julia Chuzhoy is Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, a research and educational institution, separate from, but affiliated with the University.

She is interested in theoretical computer science and especially in approximation of intractable optimization problems.

Chuzhoy's research interests include designing approximation algorithms with provable performance guarantees for problems emerging from various areas of computer science, including scheduling, graph partitioning, network design, and routing.



Chuzhoy received a BA in 1998 and a PhD in 2004, both in computer science from Technion in Israel.

Veronica Guerrieri, Associate Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, is a macroeconomist who specializes in search theory, labor and financial market frictions, dynamic contracting, and economic growth.

One of Guerrieri’s areas of research is the role of informational asymmetries in decentralized markets.  Her recent work on this topic includes “Adverse Selection in Competitive Search Equilibrium,” with UChicago Professor Robert Shimer and Randall Wright, published in Econometrica, 2010, and “Inefficient Unemployment Dynamics Under Asymmetric Information,” in the Journal of Political Economy, 2008.

She earned a BA in 2000 in economics from Bocconi University in Milan, an MA in 2001 in economics from Bocconi University, and a PhD in 2005 in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She joined the Booth faculty in 2006.

Azeem Shaikh, Assistant Professor and the Thornber Research Fellow in Economics, studies econometric theory. 

Much of his recent research has focused on multiple hypothesis testing and partially identified models.

Some articles he has co-authored in these areas include “Step-up Procedures for Control of Generalizations of the Family-wise Error Rate,” published in the Annals of Statistics, “Inference for the Identified Set in Partially Identified Econometric Models,” published in Econometrica, and “Partial Identification in Triangular Systems of Equations with Binary Dependent Variables,” also published in Econometrica.



Before coming to Chicago, Shaikh was a postdoctoral associate at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University.  
 
He received a BS in Mathematics from Duke University in 2000 and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 2006.

Jesse Shapiro, Professor in Economics at Chicago Booth, studies the economics of communication and persuasion in industrial organization and political economy.

Shapiro collaborates on much of his research with Matthew Gentzkow, also a Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth and a 2009 Sloan fellow. Their recent joint research includes the paper, “What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers,” published in the journal Econometrica, 2010.

Before joining the Booth faculty in 2007, Shapiro was the inaugural Becker fellow at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at Chicago Booth. He attended Harvard University, where he earned an economics BA in 2001, and a statistics MA and economics PhD in 2005.

Amir Sufi is an Associate Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth and studies the broad areas of financial intermediation, corporate finance, and household finance.

His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He won the Brattle Prize from the Journal of Finance and the inaugural Young Researcher Prize from the Review of Financial Studies.

A member of the Chicago Booth faculty since 2005, Sufi graduated from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1999 with a BA in economics.  He earned a PhD in 2005 in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.