12 researchers of Indian-origin win prestigious Sloan fellowships

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The New York-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced Feb. 19, the names of 126 “outstanding” U.S. and Canadian researchers as the recipients of its 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships.

Twelve of the awardees of this prestigious fellowship are of Indian origin from top universities in the United States. They span almost all the categories under which scholars were selected. The two-year fellowship is in the amount of $70,000.

The fellowships, awarded yearly since 1955, honor early-career scholars whose work shows the most promise in their fields, a press release from the Foundation, said.

“Sloan Research Fellows are the best young scientists working today,” Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is quoted saying in the press release. “Sloan Fellows stand out for their creativity, for their hard work, for the importance of the issues they tackle, and the energy and innovation with which they tackle them. To be a Sloan Fellow is to be in the vanguard of twenty-first century science,” Falk added.

Past Sloan Research Fellows, including some of Indian origin, have gained renown in the years following the grant. Forty-seven fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics including Akshay Venkatesh of New York University who got the Sloan fellowship in 2007 and the Fields Medal in 2018.

Sixty nine Sloan fellows have received the National Medal of Science including the 1969 recipient of the Sloan Foundation fellowship in Mathematics, S.R. Varadhan, who was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2011. Eighteen Sloan fellows have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including Parag Pathak of MIT, who got the Sloan fellowship in 2012, and the John Bates Clark Medal in 2018; and Raj Chetty of the University of California, Berkeley, who was selected for the Sloan fellowship in 2008, and went on to get the John Bates Clark Medal in 2013.

This year’s 12 researchers of Indian-origin in various disciplines include:

Chemistry

Alison Narayan, University of Michigan

Sandeep Sharma, University of Colorado, Boulder

Diwakar Shukla, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology

Priya Moorjani, University of California, Berkeley

Computer Science

Reetuparna Das, University of Michigan

Economics

Nikhil Agarwal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mathematics

Shirshendu Ganguly, University of California, Berkeley

Barna Saha, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Neuroscience

Arjun Krishnaswamy, McGill University

Chethan Pandarinath, Emory University

Kanaka Rajan, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Physics

Aaswath Raman, University of Pennsylvania