Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announces recipients of 2012 Sloan Research Fellowships

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of 126 outstanding U.S. and Canadian researchers as recipients of Sloan Research Fellowships for 2012. Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders.

"Today's Sloan Research Fellows are tomorrow's Nobel Prize winners," said Dr. Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "These outstanding men and women are responsible for some of the most exciting science being done today. The Foundation is proud to support them during this pivotal stage of their careers."

Drawn from 51 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada, the 2012 Sloan Research Fellows represent a variety of research interests, including:

• An astrophysicist who searches for extrasolar planets;
• A chemical oceanographer who dove into the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill;
• An economist who studies how socialism works on Israeli kibbutzim;
• A chemist who examines how tiny metal particles in your brain may contribute to Alzheimer's;
• A mathematician who models water waves, from ripples to tsunamis;
• A computer scientist who is teaching computers to identify the content of pictures by programming them to ask humans for help;
• A molecular biologist who studies how errors that accumulate when the body makes proteins contribute to diseases like ALS and Parkinson's; and
• A neuroscientist who investigates what it is about the brains of some monkeys that make them such reckless gamblers.

Historically awarded in seven scientific fields — "chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, and physics" — the fellowships were expanded this year to include awards to eight young researchers working in the ocean sciences. The new field was added in recognition of the extraordinary work performed, much of it by young scientists, during the ten-year Census of Marine Life.