Recently, the University of Toronto gained new reasons to boast with the bestowing of Sloan fellowships to five of U of T’s young researchers, an impressive achievement considering that Yale only received two Sloan fellows this year. Each fellow received US$50,000 to pursue their chosen research areas.
The Sloan Research Fellowship is a two year research fellowships awarded yearly to 118 young and promising researchers in the fields of math, physics, chemistry, computational or evolutionary molecular biology, economic and neuroscience. It is the oldest award given by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which started in 1955.
Michael Brudno received the award for his work in computational biological. Brudno’s research involves next-generation sequencing methods that may reliably detect genomic differences among humans. He is an assistant professor at the St. George campus for courses, Introduction to Systems Analysis and Analysis of High Throughput Sequencing Data.
U of T chemist Dvira Segal, an assistant professor, focuses on transport and dissipation on the nano-scale, with implications for molecular charge transfers and energy transmissions.
The remaining three Sloan Fellows received their awards for their contributions to mathematics. Spyros Alexakis studied issues first raised by Stephen Hawking, such as final states of the black hole solution, while Larry Guth specializes in metric geometry.
Balázs Szegedy studied group theory and combinatorics, which focuses on countable discrete structures. The three mathematics fellows set a record for the most Sloan Fellowships going to any single department.
