Five CAS assistant professors were named Sloan Research Fellows for their accomplishments in the fields of economics, chemistry and mathematics — from scholarship on the physical connections between shapes to the newfound abilities of robots. The faculty members are among 126 early-career researchers in the United States and Canada who earned the fellowship this year, with each receiving $75,000 to fulfill a two-year research project.
This year’s NYU recipients include chemists Tania Lupoli and Glen Hocky, economics assistant professor Corina Boar and mathematicians Chao Li and Lerrel Pinto.
Lupoli, an assistant professor of chemistry and NYU alum, received the recognition for her research on infectious diseases that are notably challenging to cure. In an interview with WSN, she said that she and her team hope to use the Sloan grant to investigate how scientists can engineer the surface of bacterial cells to create more effective antibiotics.
“The Sloan fellowship is really prestigious and I feel really lucky that we were awarded one — it gives you a lot of freedom with the funding that it provides to work on big projects in your lab that may be more risky and may not be funded by traditional funding mechanisms,” Lupoli said. “It also gives us motivation to continue to work on the problems that we’re working on, because we have support from our community.”
Since founding the fellowship in 1955, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded over 50 scholars who earned Nobel Prizes in their fields, as well as recipients of the National Medal of Science, the Abel Prize for mathematicians and the John Bates Clark Medal for economics. In total, NYU has seen 98 of its faculty members named Sloan Fellows, including a neuroscience professor and a mathematics professor last year and one physics professor in 2023.
Hocky, an assistant professor in chemistry and fellowship recipient, studies how varying the relationship between molecular cells can create unexpected behavioral results. In the future, Hocky aims to explore how molecules can form complex structures with specific properties, independent of human interference.
Boar, who teaches economics at NYU, researches the specific roles of both firms and consumers to create macroeconomic trends in areas like consumption, capital accumulation and income inequality. She told WSN that her current work focuses specifically on the different forces that influence firms, such as inflation and economic success, and their impact on society’s overall economic output. Boar added that with her resources as a Sloan Fellow, she wants to investigate new data on economic trends and involve graduate students in her research.
Two faculty members from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences received the Sloan fellowship this year — including Li, who examines the spatial connections between different structures depending on differences in shape and curvature, and Pinto, who is interested in how newfound robotics technology can learn and develop independence in the real world.
Nur Muhammad “Mahi” Shafiullah, a Ph.D. candidate who works in Pinto’s lab, said that the team aims to develop low-cost, general-purpose robots that can operate even in unpredictable situations. Looking to the future, Shafiullah said that the researchers want to create robots that are entirely autonomous — a step currently impossible because of limitations to hardware and robot intelligence.
“The Sloan Foundation Fellowship will definitely be a breeze in the sails of this exploration,” Shafiullah said in a statement to WSN. “Robotics is resource constrained in a physical way that much of computer science is not, so we are grateful to the support we have received from NYU.”
Contact Lekhya Kantheti at lkantheti@nyunews.com.
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