March 9, 2004

UC San Diego Places In Top Tier Of Institutions
Awarded 2004 Sloan Research Fellowships

By Doug Ramsey

Six faculty members of the University of California, San Diego have been selected as Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows in 2004 – double the number in the period 1999-2002 combined. They are among the 117 academics receiving the distinction this year, and UCSD ranked among the top tier of academic institutions winning Sloan awards: Stanford led with eight, UC Berkeley and Princeton tied for second place with seven fellows each, and UCSD tied for third place with Caltech. The fellowships are awarded each year to young academics who “show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge,” according to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Two of the new Sloan Fellows at UCSD are assistant professors in the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department. Stefan Savage is an expert in computer networking and security, and Henrik Wann Jensen’s primary work is in computer graphics.

Also winning Sloan fellowships in 2004: Karsten Meyer, whose specialty is the inorganic and organometallic coordination chemistry of highly reactive transition and actinide metal complexes (Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry); and Emanuel Todorov, who investigates the neural control of movement (Department of Cognitive Science). Two members of UCSD’s Department of Mathematics also made the grade. Lei Ni’s research includes differential geometry and Riemannian geometry, and Li-Tien Cheng specializes in level set methods, visualization, and scientific computation.

The Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship is an extraordinarily competitive award, involving nominations for most of the very best young scientists from around the country. Sloan Research Fellows, once chosen, are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of the most compelling interest to them. The fellowship carries with it a grant of $40,000, to be used over a two-year period in support of research.

The Sloan Research Fellowships were established in 1955 to provide support and recognition to young scientists, often in their first appointments to university faculties. Over the first 17 years of the program, Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Additional fields were added in subsequent years: neuroscience in 1972, economics in 1980, computer science in 1993, and computational and evolutionary molecular biology in 2002.

Twenty-six Sloan Fellows have won Nobel Prizes later in their careers, and hundreds have received other honors.

Media Contacts:
Doug Ramsey, (858) 822-5825
Kim McDonald, (858) 534-7572
Barry Jagoda, (858) 534-8567