Six professors win Sloan fellowships

Six junior University faculty members were awarded 2006 Sloan Research Fellowships, which provide them with $45,000 in unrestricted funding to be used over the next two years.

The fellowships, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance the careers of young scientists, were conferred upon a total of 116 faculty members from 55 colleges and universities. Only the University of Wisconsin, with seven recipients, boasts a greater number than Princeton. Harvard had two winners and Yale one.

"There are no strings attached," astrophysics professor Alice Shapley, one of the recipients, said.

"Maybe I'll buy a nice car," she laughed.

Like Shapley, all the winners this year are assistant professors: Marco Battaglini in economics, Niklas Beisert in physics, Simon Brendle in mathematics, Coleen Murphy in molecular biology and Li-Shiuan Peh in electrical engineering.

Battaglini received his bachelor's degree at Bocconi University in Italy. He joined the economics department in 2000, immediately after completing his graduate work at Northwestern University. He currently teaches ECO 310: Intermediate Microeconomics, as well as a graduate class on economics and politics.

"My work is about applying game theory to studying social interactions," he explained. "For example, models that study public decisions like taxation."

Beisert received his bachelor's degrees from the Munich University of Technology and the Humboldt University in Berlin. After joining the University as a lecturer in 2004, he became assistant professor in 2005. His research focuses on high energy theory.

Brendle, who received his Ph.D. from Tuebingen University in Germany, joined the Princeton faculty in 2003. His field of expertise is differential geometry and his research deals with geometric partial differential equations, conformal and complex geometry and nonlinear wave equations.

Brendle said in an email that he has accepted a position as assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford University, as of August 2005.

Murphy received her undergraduate degree at the University of Houston and her Ph.D. from Stanford. After completing her postdoctoral work at UC San Francisco, she came to Princeton last July. Murphy, who is also affiliated with the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, will be teaching the Integrated Science lab course for juniors next fall.

"What I'm interested in is the molecular mechanism underlying the aging process. We do a lot of experiments with the worm C. elegans, which have many genes that we see in humans," she explained, adding that she is currently engaged in a neuroscience project that studies "genes involved in preserving memory with age."

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"Experiments take time and money," she said. "We'll use it to support this."

Peh joined the faculty in 2002 after receiving her B.S. from the National University of Singapore and her Ph.D. from Stanford. Her work focuses on interconnected networks in the Internet and other communication systems, and specifically a method that connects computer processors in one chip.

Shapley currently teaches a graduate seminar on observational cosmology and has taught AST 105: Our Place in the Universe. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1997 and her graduate degree from Caltech in 2003. She was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley until the fall of 2005, when she joined the Princeton faculty.

"Recently I've been studying how galaxies contribute to the re-ionization of the universe ... as well as how galaxies are growing in size and their contents," she explained.

Shapley noted that she will use some of the fellowship money to travel to observational facilities and make use of resources such as the Hubble Space Telescope. "I'm also buying a computer," she said. "That's serious!"

Thirty-two former Sloan fellows have won the Nobel Prize, including John Nash GS '50, who received his Sloan Research Fellowship in mathematics. Frank Wilczek GS '74 and professor emeritus David Gross, who were Sloan fellows in 1976 and 1970, respectively, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. James Cronin, who taught in the physics department from 1958 to 1971, was a Sloan fellow in 1962 and Nobel Laureate in 1980. Richard Smalley GS '74 received the Sloan Prize in 1978 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996.