AUSTIN, TexasThree outstanding young professors at The University of Texas at Austin have been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships. The grants total $40,000 each and are given for a two-year period. The UT Austin recipients and their fields include:
- Chemistry: Dr. Angela M. Belcher, an assistant professor in UT Austin’s department of chemistry and biochemistry and a member of the UT Austin Texas Materials Institute. Belcher, who has done pioneering research in combining organic and inorganic substances to produce new materials, recently won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
- Computer science: Dr. Lorenzo Alvisi, assistant professor in the department of computer science. Alvisi’s research focuses on building reliable distributed computer systems, with the goal of making these systems resistant to hardware and software failures, as well as to security attacks.
- Computer science: Dr. Anna Gal, assistant professor in the department of computer science. Gal’s main research interest is the study of mathematical properties of computational problems, specifically properties that determine their computational difficulty.
The Sloan Research Fellowship Program is one of the oldest fellowship programs in the nation. The fellowships are designed to identify individuals who demonstrate outstanding potential to make fundamental contributions to new knowledge. Sloan Fellowships go to young scientists and economists engaged in research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computer science, math, neuroscience and economics.
The fellowships have been awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation this year to 104 outstanding young scientists and economists who are faculty members at 51 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada and who will share $4.16 million in research awards. With the current awards, the Sloan Foundation has spent nearly $92 million for support of more than 3,600 researchers.
