Amongst 126 researchers awarded from the US, Canada.
AB Wire
WASHINGTON, DC: Nine Indian Americans are among the 126 US and Canadian researchers selected by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as recipients of the 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships.
Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships honor early career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders, according to a press release. Fellows receive $50,000 to further their research.
“The beginning of a one’s career is a crucial time in the life of a scientist. Building a lab, attracting funding in an increasingly competitive environment, and securing tenure all depend on doing innovative, original high-quality work and having that work recognized,” said Dr. Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in a statement.
“For more than 50 years the Sloan Foundation has been proud to celebrate the achievements of extraordinary young scientists who are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge,” he added.
Past Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to notable careers and include such intellectual luminaries as physicist Richard Feynman and game theorist John Nash. Since the beginning of the program in 1955, 43 fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 65 have received the National Medal of Science, and 14 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.
Hailing from 57 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, the 2015 Sloan Research Fellows represent a diverse variety of research interests. Fellows this year include: a synthetic biologist who has developed a revolutionary new method to engineer precise genetic changes in micro-organisms; an ocean scientist who examines how human activity shapes the diversity and behavioral dynamics of reef ecosystems; a mathematician who is devising new algorithms that pull information out of compressed signals; a chemist who is working on ways to deliver drugs and other therapeutic molecules into heretofore inaccessible regions of mammalian cells; a computer scientist who is designing software to help inhibit state level censorship of the Internet; an economist who studies the factors that drive innovation in health care; a neuroscientist who studies the neuronal basis of depression and how to develop drugs that address it without side effects; an astronomer who studies the properties of faraway exoplanets.
Awarded in eight scientific and technical fields – chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics – the Sloan Research Fellowship Program runs in close cooperation with the scientific community.
The 9 Indian Americans are:
- Nandini Ananth, Cornell University, Chemistry
- Prabal Dutta, University of Michigan, Computer Science
- Shyam Gollakota, University of Washington, Computer Science
- Shantanu Jadhav, Brandeis University, Neuroscience
- Hemamala Karunadasa, Stanford University, Chemistry
- Neal Mankad, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chemistry
- Suresh Naidu, Columbia University, Economics
- Padmini Rangamani, University of California, San Diego, Computational and evolutionary molecular biology
- Vivek Shende, University of California, Berkeley, Math.