PASADENA, Calif.- The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation named Caltech's Christina D. Smolke, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Christopher M. Hirata, assistant professor of astrophysics, as Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows. They are among 118 faculty members from 64 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada who were honored because they are conducting research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, and neuroscience.
"The Sloan Research Fellowships support the work of exceptional young researchers early in their academic careers, and often at pivotal stages in their work," says Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "I am proud of the foundation's rich history in providing the resources and flexibility necessary for young researchers to enhance their scholarship, and I look forward to the future achievements of the 2008 Sloan Research Fellows."
Smolke's work involves understanding how cells respond to their environment and tapping into that knowledge to make them change their function. She builds cells that eventually will be able to reprogram the immune system to recognize a specific cancer cell and remove it from the body or construct molecules that can attack only diseased cells.
Hirata's research interests are in the area of cosmology, i.e. the study of the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe. His current projects involve observations that help test cosmological models; these mostly involve large research collaborations. Others involve figuring out how to analyze the current and future cosmological data sets.
The Sloan Research Fellowships were first awarded in 1955. Since then, 35 Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in their fields.
Grants of $50,000 for a two-year period are administered by each fellow's institution. Once chosen, Sloan Research Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of the most interest to them, and they are permitted to employ fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims. For a complete list of winners, visit www.sloan.org/programs/scitech_fellowships.shtml.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes grants in science, technology, and the quality of American life. For additional information visit www.sloan.org.
