Three Columbia Faculty Members Named Sloan Research Fellows

Three Columbia faculty members have won 2024 Sloan Research fellowships, one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career scholars. Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 181 faculty from Columbia University have received them, including this year’s winners. A total of 57 Fellows have also received a Nobel Prize.

This year, 126 young scientists across the U.S. and Canada were awarded fellowships. The fellowship is open to scholars in chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship.

“Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving the nominations of the most inventive and impactful early-career scientists across the U.S. and Canada,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how Fellows take leading roles shaping the research agenda within their respective fields.”

The Columbia fellows are:

Laura Doval

Doval is the Daniel W. Stanton Associate Professor of Business in the Economics Division at Columbia Business School. She is a microeconomic theorist whose research makes conceptual and methodological contributions to the areas of mechanism design, information design, and market design. Her research focuses on understanding how dynamic environments influence individuals’ incentives and the potential for institutions to align these incentives with the goals of a designer.

Elena Giorgi

Giorgi is an assistant professor of mathematics. Her research interests include general relativity, partial differential equations and differential geometry. In a recent paper, she proved that rotating black holes are stable, settling a long-standing conjecture in the field. Her research focuses on the mathematical description of nonlinear perturbations of black holes and on the interaction between gravitational and electromagnetic radiations on charged black holes.

Daniel Lacker

Lacker, an associate professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia Engineering affiliated with the Data Science Institute, studies probability theory and its applications, with a focus on mathematical models of large-scale systems of interacting individuals. These mathematical models appear in diverse areas of science, where the individuals may represent people, viruses, or particles, and the large systems may be financial markets, epidemics, or fluids. Daniel's work explains theoretical principles of how macro-level structures, such as an epidemic, can emerge from micro-level rules, such as person-to-person transmission and social networks.