Seven members of the MIT faculty are among 118 early-career researchers recently named recipients of the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Representing the departments of Chemistry, Economics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics, the honorees will each receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship to advance their research.
Including this year’s recipients, a total of 309 MIT faculty have received Sloan Research Fellowships since the first fellowships were awarded in 1955.
"Today‘s Sloan Research Fellows represent the scientific leaders of tomorrow," says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "As formidable young scholars, they are already shaping the research agenda within their respective fields — and their trailblazing won‘t end here."
2022 Sloan Fellow Netta Engelhardt, the Biedenharn Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics, is a researcher in the Center for Theoretical Physics. She researches the dynamics of black holes in quantum gravity, and uses holography to study the interplay between gravity and quantum information. Her primary focus is on the black hole information paradox — that is, black holes seemed to be destroying information that, according to quantum physics, cannot be destroyed. She also studies the thermodynamic behavior of black holes and the validity of so-called cosmic censorship conjecture, which hypothesizes that singularities that result from gravitational collapse are always hidden behind event horizons.
Manya Ghobadi is a TIBCO Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. A computer systems researcher with a networking focus, she has worked on a broad set of topics; many of the technologies she has helped develop are part of real-world systems. Her research interests include reconfigurable networks, networks for machine learning, data center networks, high-performance cloud infrastructure, network optimization, hardware-software co-design, optical networks.
Phillip Isola, the Bonnie and Marty (1964) Tenenbaum Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He explores why we represent the world the way we do, and how we can replicate these abilities in machines through computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. His group’s current research topics include representation learning, generative modeling, and multiagent systems — as well as the applications and misuses of these systems.