The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded six University of Chicago scholars— Maureen Coleman, Daniel Fabrycky, Zhiguo He, Maryanthe Malliaris, Brent Neiman, and Eric Glen Weyl—with 2014 Sloan Research Fellowships.
Awarded annually to 126 early-career scientists of outstanding promise in science, mathematics, economics and computer science in the United States and Canada, the fellowship program provides two-year grants of $50,000 to support original research and broad-based education related to science, technology and economic performance.
Maureen Coleman, assistant professor of geophysical sciences, studies microbial ecology and population genetics, genome structure and evolution, and the roles of microbes in biogeochemical cycles. Her research has explored the selective forces shaping microbial genomes in natural environments, the mechanisms by which genes are transferred between microbial groups, and the co-evolution between bacteriophages and their hosts.
Coleman earned a PhD in civil and environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a recipient of the Agouron Institute Geobiology Fellowship for postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology.
Daniel Fabrycky, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics, focuses his research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planets and stars; exoplanet detection and characterization techniques, particularly for multi-planet systems; and time-domain photometric surveys. In his current research he combines dynamical and statistical models to infer the architecture of planetary systems discovered by the Kepler space mission.
Fabrycky, who holds a PhD in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University, received a Hubble Fellowship from NASA for research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Michelson Fellowship from NASA for research at Harvard University.
Zhiguo He, an associate professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, researches how agency frictions affect the functioning of financial markets, with a special focus on contract theory. He has been working on the burgeoning field that introduces financial intermediation into macroeconomic workhorse models. His recent research on “rollover risk” studies the debt maturity structure and its implications on the recent financial crisis.
With a PhD from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, He is a faculty research fellow in the Corporate Finance Group of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research has won the Smith-Breeden First Prize from the American Finance Association, the Swiss Finance Institute’s Outstanding Paper Award, and the Lehman Brothers Fellowship for Research Excellence in Finance.
Maryanthe Malliaris, assistant professor of mathematics, works in model theory. She is developing a new viewpoint, tools and a theoretical framework, which will make it possible to detect and classify gradations in complexity across first-order theories in a more uniform way. A focus of her research is the structure of Keisler's order, a large-scale program of comparing the complexity of theories proposed in 1967.
Malliaris, who received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded a Godel research prize fellowship in April 2011 for the first breakthroughs on Keisler's order in several decades. In recent joint work, Malliaris and another mathematician have discovered new dividing lines in this order and have applied tools developed for the study of Keisler's order to solve a 60-year-old problem in general topology.
Brent Neiman, associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is an expert on international macroeconomics, a field he was drawn to after a stint working at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2003-04. In one of Neiman’s papers, he and his co-authors examine prices of the same good sold in different countries and demonstrate that prices are generally equalized across countries within a currency union, like the Eurozone, even though they differ greatly across pegged and floating exchange rate regimes. In another paper, Neiman and a co-author challenge the established empirical fact that the labor share is relatively stable.
With a PhD from Harvard University, Neiman is a faculty research fellow in the International Finance and Macro and International Trade and Investment groups of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
E. Glen Weyl, assistant professor in economics, studies pure and applied price theory, with a focus on industrial and public economics as well as the intersection between economics and other disciplines, particularly law and the history and philosophy of economics. His research addresses topics ranging from the implications of the career choices of talented students for tax policy to designing new voting procedures.
Weyl, who received his PhD from Princeton University, is an associate editor for the International Journal of Industrial Organization and director of a start-up, Collective Decision Engines. He has received grants from the Milton Fund, the Harvard Real Estate Academic Initiative, the Microsoft Corporation, the Kauffman Foundation and the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
