This year, 126 outstanding US and Canadian researchers received the 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship, including CAS’ own Assistant Professor of Astronomy Catherine Espaillat and Assistant Professor of Physics Alex Sushkov. Sloan Research Fellowships “honor early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as the next generation of scientific leaders.”
Espaillat’s research focuses on understanding how planets form, “particularly by characterizing the ‘footprints’ that nascent planets leave behind in protoplanetary disks surrounding young stars.” She joined BU as a faculty member in 2013, and previously was a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Prior to being a Sagan Fellow, she served as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at CfA.
Sushkov’s Quantum Lab “focuses on small, table-top scale experiments, developing quantum tools for precision measurements to address key problems in fundamental and applied science.” He and his lab search for dark matter using precision nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques, and use nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds to perform magnetic imaging and study the fundamentals of statistical mechanics and many-body physics of interacting spin systems.
Those who receive the Fellowship—which is awarded in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics—have gone on to be extremely successful in their careers. According to the Sloan Foundations press release, 43 fellows have received a Nobel Prize, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 68 have received the National Medal of Science, and 15 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics.