Sloan Research Fellowship

The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States.^[1]

This article is about the fellowship for early-career scientists. For the management program for business leaders, see Sloan Fellows.

Sloan Research Fellowships
Awarded for	recognition of distinguished performance by early career researchers and their unique potential to make substantial contributions
Country	Worldwide
Presented by	Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
First awarded	1955
Website	sloan.org/fellowships

Fellowships were initially awarded in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Awards were later added in neuroscience (1972), economics (1980), computer science (1993), computational and evolutionary molecular biology (2002), and ocean sciences or earth systems sciences (2012).^[2] Winners of these two-year fellowships are awarded $75,000, which may be spent on any expense supporting their research. From 2012 through 2020, the foundation awarded 126 research fellowship each year; in 2021, 128 were awarded, and 118 were awarded in 2022.^[3]

Eligibility and selection

To be eligible, a candidate must hold a Ph.D. or equivalent degree and must be a member of the faculty of a college, university, or other degree-granting institution in the United States or Canada. The candidate must have teaching responsibilities and must be tenure-track but untenured as of September 15 of the nomination year. Only candidates with letters of nomination from department heads or other senior researchers are considered.

The foundation has been supportive of scientists who are parents by allowing them extra time after their doctorate during which they remain eligible for the award.^[4]

An independent committee of distinguished scientists in each field selects the fellows based upon their research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become leaders in their chosen field.

Since the inaugural class of 1955, 6,144 fellowships have been awarded, with faculty from the top ten universities representing over 35% of all fellows. MIT counts the most fellows at 309, followed by Berkeley at 291, Harvard at 242, Stanford at 237, and Princeton at 236.^[5]

Institution	Fellows (1955–2022)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology[6]	309
University of California, Berkeley[7]	291
Harvard University	242
Stanford University[8]	237
Princeton University[9]	236
The University of Chicago[10]	204
University of California, Los Angeles	176
Columbia University[11]	172
Cornell University	159
California Institute of Technology	154

Notable award recipients

Since the beginning of the program in 1955, 53 fellows have won a Nobel Prize,^[12] and 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics.^[13]

Sloan Fellowship recipients who became Nobel or Fields Medal laureates

Name	Field[n 1]	Sloan year	Prize year[n 2]
Richard Feynman	Physics	1955	1965
Murray Gell-Mann	Physics	1957	1969
Leon N. Cooper	Physics	1959	1972
Sheldon Glashow	Physics	1962	1979
Steven Weinberg	Physics	1961	1979
Val L. Fitch	Physics	1960	1980
James W. Cronin	Physics	1962	1980
Kenneth G. Wilson	Physics	1963	1982
Jack Steinberger	Physics	1958	1988
Melvin Schwartz	Physics	1959	1988
Frederick Reines	Physics	1959	1995
Alan J. Heeger	Chemistry	1963	2000 (Physics)
Carl E. Wieman	Physics	1984	2001
David J. Gross	Physics	1970	2004
H. David Politzer	Physics	1977	2004
Frank Wilczek	Physics	1976	2004
Theodor W. Hänsch	Physics	1973	2005
Donna Strickland	Physics	1998	2018
Roald Hoffmann	Chemistry	1966	1981
Dudley R. Herschbach	Chemistry	1959	1986
Yuan T. Lee	Chemistry	1969	1986
John C. Polanyi	Chemistry	1959	1986
Elias J. Corey	Chemistry	1955	1990
Rudolph A. Marcus	Chemistry	1960	1992
Mario J. Molina	Chemistry	1976	1995
Robert F. Curl, Jr.	Chemistry	1961	1996
Richard E. Smalley	Chemistry	1978	1996
Ahmed H. Zewail	Chemistry	1978	1999
Alan G. MacDiarmid	Chemistry	1959	2000
K. Barry Sharpless	Chemistry	1973	2001
Robert H. Grubbs	Chemistry	1974	2005
Richard R. Schrock	Chemistry	1976	2005
Martin Karplus	Chemistry	1959	2013
Arieh Warshel	Chemistry	1978	2013
John Forbes Nash	Mathematics	1956	1994 (Economics)
Eric Maskin	Economics	1983	2007
Roger Myerson	Economics	1984	2007
Alvin E. Roth	Economics	1984	2012
Lars Peter Hansen	Economics	1982	2013
Jean Tirole	Economics	1985	2014
Stanley Prusiner	Neuroscience	1976	1997 (Medicine)
Paul Lauterbur	Chemistry	1965	2003 (Medicine)
Linda B. Buck	Neuroscience	1992	2004 (Medicine)
John Milnor	Mathematics	1955	1962
Paul Cohen	Mathematics	1962	1966
Stephen Smale	Mathematics	1960	1966
Heisuke Hironaka	Mathematics	1962	1970
John G. Thompson	Mathematics	1961	1970
David Mumford	Mathematics	1962	1974
Charles Fefferman	Mathematics	1970	1978
Daniel G. Quillen	Mathematics	1967	1978
William Thurston	Mathematics	1974	1982
Shing-Tung Yau	Mathematics	1974	1982
Michael H. Freedman	Mathematics	1980	1986
Vaughan Jones	Mathematics	1983	1990
Curtis T. McMullen	Mathematics	1988	1998
Andrea M. Ghez[14]	Physics	1996	2020
Vladimir Voevodsky	Mathematics	1997	2002
Andrei Okounkov	Mathematics	2000	2006
Terence Tao	Mathematics	1999	2006
Larry Guth	Mathematics	2010	2014
David MacMillan	Chemistry	2002	2021
Guido Imbens	Economics	1995	2021
Moungi Bawendi	Chemistry	1994	2023
John Hopfield	Physics	1962	2024

Notes

1. Field of the Sloan fellowship
2. Unless stated, the prize was awarded in the same field as that of the Sloan fellowship

See also

• List of chemistry awards
• List of computer science awards
• List of economics awards
• List of mathematics awards
• List of physics awards

References

1. "90 Scientists and Economists Win Sloan Research Awards". The New York Times. March 10, 1985. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 27, 2019.
2. "History". www.sloan.org. Archived from the original on September 8, 2012. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
3. "Sloan Research Fellowships". www.sloan.org. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
4. "FAQ | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation".
5. "Sloan Research Fellows Database". sloan.org. Retrieved February 15, 2022.
6. "Eight from MIT Named Sloan Research Fellows". MIT News. February 19, 2021. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
7. "Nine Young Faculty Named 2020 Sloan Fellows". Berkeley News. February 12, 2020. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
8. "2022 Stanford Sloan Research Fellows". Stanford News. February 15, 2022. Retrieved February 15, 2022.
9. "Five Princeton Faculty Members Named 2021 Sloan Fellows". Princeton News. February 17, 2021. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
10. "Five University of Chicago Scientists Awarded Prestigious Sloan Fellowships". uchicago.edu. February 15, 2022. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
11. "Five Columbia Researchers Named 2022 Sloan Research Fellows". Columbia News. February 15, 2022. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
12. "Nobel Laureates". www.sloan.org. Archived from the original on January 27, 2016. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
13. "Fields Medalists". www.sloan.org. Archived from the original on September 8, 2012. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
14. "UCLA Galactic Center Group / SELECTED HONORS & AWARDS". www.astro.ucla.edu. 1995–2017. Retrieved October 4, 2021.

External links

• Sloan Research Fellowships official site
• 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships brochure