Five professors awarded Sloan prize

Five faculty members received Sloan Research Fellowships, which recognize promising young scientists and provide them with unrestricted financial assistance, the University announced yesterday.

Lynn Loo GS ’01, Jason Petta, Ulrich Mueller, Roman Rafikov GS ’02 and Joshua Shaevitz joined 113 peers at North American universities — chosen out of more than 600 nominees — to receive $50,000 each for further research in their respective fields.

The funds are granted by “[monitoring] the science field for where the need is,” fellowship administrator Erica Stella said. Senior faculty members from each of the seven fields considered choose the winners, she explained.Petta, an assistant professor of physics, plans to use the grant funds to employ a graduate research assistant.

“It is great to have your life’s work and future potential recognized by such an award,” he said in an e-mail. “The award spans many disciplines, and the competition is intense,” he added.

Ulrich Mueller, an assistant professor of economics, also plans to hire a research assistant.

“Fortunately, at Princeton it’s not as if we have a lack of money, so for me it’s really more about the honor than the money,” he said.

Mueller made especial note of how ecstatic he was to learn of his win. His first thoughts were “wow this is great! Academia always has its ups and downs — it’s great if it pans out.”

“The list of previous recipients is almost a who’s who of economics, so it’s a great honor, and I’m thrilled,” Mueller added. Like the other 2008 fellowship recipients, he expressed gratitude for his department’s nomination, noting that it “means that I can deduce that people really like my work. It feels really great, and at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.”

Shaevitz, an assistant professor of physics, plans to use the grant “to learn more about ... exciting topics” such as cytoskeletal filaments and bacterial motility.

Yi Deng GS, who works in Shaevitz’s lab, described him in an e-mail as “very talented and easygoing.”

Shaevitz is the junior paper and senior thesis advisor to Hugo Arellano Santoyo ’09, who also works in Shaevitz’s lab and said that Shaevitz is great to work with and is “very dynamic.”

“[Shaevitz] and the other lab members make the laboratory a great place to do science. We work as a group, each on different aspects of molecular biophysics, and we are a very united group that Prof. Shaevitz encourages,” Arellano Santoyo said in an e-mail.

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Arellano Santoyo was also excited about the Sloan Fellowship, which will enable the lab group to “push the boundaries,” and explained that the group is “free to take our imagination (within the limits of the physically possible, and reasonable) where we want.”

Sloan fellows from the University who have gone on to win the Nobel Prize include economist and mathematician John Nash GS ’50, chemist Richard Smalley GS ’74 and three physicists: Frank Wilczek GS ’74 and professors emeriti David Gross and James Cronin.

The Sloan Research Fellowships were created in 1955 with the specific goal of aiding promising young scientists.

The Sloan Foundation website states that “strong evidence — in submitted publications and supporting letters — of the nominee’s independent creativity is one of the most important considerations in the review process.”

The awards are given in seven categories: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Candidates must hold a Ph.D. in one of these fields and must work on the faculty of an American or Canadian college or university. All of this year’s award recipients from the University joined the faculty in 2007 besides Mueller, who joined in 2003.