Two Penn professors have been awarded the 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship, which honors early-career United States and Canadian researchers for their potential to substantially contribute to their scientific field.
Physics and Astronomy assistant professor Martin Claassen and Statistics and Data Science assistant professor Jiaoyang Huang are among the 126 recipients of this year’s Sloan Research Fellowship. The winners were selected from over 1,000 nominees across seven fields — chemistry, computer science, earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.
Claassen and Huang will receive $75,000 to fund their research over the next two years. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1934, awards approximately $80 million in grants annually in support of scientific endeavors.
Last year, three Penn professors were awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in mathematics, physics, and neuroscience. 132 Penn faculty members have received fellowship grants since the program's founding in 1955.
Claassen’s research focuses on the theory of non-equilibrium dynamics and correlated phases in quantum materials — a class of materials with emergent properties that arise from the collective behavior of electrons. Using theoretical techniques and numerical simulations, he aims to understand how materials' properties, light, and electronic interactions or topology can conspire to realize new states of matter far from equilibrium. Claassen was also an awardee of the United States Department of Energy Early Career Research Program in 2023.
Huang’s research focuses on random matrix theory to address questions concerning the behavior of sparse random graphs and interacting particle systems, which have implications in graph theory, network theory, and mathematical physics. He has also been recognized with the 2024 Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award, and in 2022, he was a Blavatnik Regional Awards finalist.
The 2024 cohort was drawn from over 50 institutions across the United States and Canada.
“We thank all the outstanding and forward-thinking institutions that nominated faculty for the Sloan Research Fellowship,” Daniel Goroff, director of the Sloan Research Fellowship Program, said in the fellowship announcement. “We are proud to partner with them in recognizing, supporting, and uplifting the next generation of scientific leaders.”
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