Early-career scholars recognized for pioneering work in statistics, physics, chemistry, astrophysics and computer science
Six University of Chicago scholars have earned prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships, which recognize early-career scholars’ potential to make substantial contributions to their fields.
Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. This year’s winners, announced Feb. 18, will receive two-year fellowships in the amount of $75,000 to further their innovative research.
Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 221 faculty from the University of Chicago have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Learn more about this year’s winners:
Luca V. Delacrétaz is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics, the James Franck Institute, and the Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics.
Delacrétaz is a theoretical physicist studying collective and emergent phenomena in condensed matter physics through the lens of quantum field theory. Some of his more specific research foci include Fermi and non-Fermi liquids, fluctuating hydrodynamics, thermalization of quantum many-body systems, and effective field theories.
Delacrétaz earned a BSc and an MSc in physics from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and a Ph.D from Stanford University.
Raul Castro Fernandez is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science.
His research agenda, data ecology, explores how data affects our technological, economic, social, and cultural ecosystems. Data ecology studies data ecosystems and proposes technical and multi-disciplinary interventions to control dataflows and improve how data ecosystems work. In addition, he is interested in designing and implementing systems for data discovery and processing and, more generally, all things data.
Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT CSAIL and received his Ph.D from Imperial College London.
Jeremy Hoskins is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and a member of the Committee on Computational Applied Mathematics.
He is interested in problems at the interface between physics, computation, and mathematics. A major theme is developing and analyzing numerical algorithms for simulating large-scale and complex physical systems, particularly those involving acoustic or electromagnetic waves. He also works on studying the mathematical foundations of problems arising in imaging, particularly what happens in highly-scattering and quantum systems.
He obtained his Ph.D. in 2017 at the University of Michigan and previously served as Gibbs Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Yale.
Alexander Ji is an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Ji's research interests are in a field called near-field cosmology. He studies the elemental composition of the oldest surviving stars (“stellar archaeology”) to learn about the first stars and galaxies, the origin of the elements, the history of the Milky Way, and the nature of dark matter. He is especially known for using relics of the first galaxies to understand the cosmic origin of heavy elements like gold and platinum.
Ji received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT and previously held Hubble and Carnegie postdoctoral fellowships at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Sarah King is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and the James Franck Institute.
King investigates condensed phase and interface dynamics using the tools of ultrafast spectroscopy, surface science, and materials science. Her research group focuses on understanding the ultrafast dynamics of non-equilibrium excited electronic states on tens of femtosecond to picosecond timescales in order to determine the mechanisms of energy transfer in polycrystalline and heterogeneous materials and across interfaces. Additionally, her team develops and uses various ultrafast spectroscopic techniques, including electron microscopy and optical spectroscopy, to selectively investigate heterogeneous and polycrystalline materials, surfaces, and interfaces.
King previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Weixin Tang is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry.
Tang develops and applies new chemical tools to study and manipulate the biological system. Her group aims to uncover the mechanisms of formation and regulatory roles of known and novel epigenetic modifications in DNA. Tang also develops synthetic biology tools that enable the construction of complex synthetic memories in live cells for various applications, such as single-cell lineage tracing and continuous evolution. Additionally, the Tang Group takes up the mission of exploring unconventional compound categories for drug development using highly functionalized cyclic peptide libraries derived from ribosomal natural products.
Previously, Tang was an HHMI fellow of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Tang holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a BS from Tsinghua University.
