The Sloan Foundation selected 126 individuals for the Sloan Research Fellowship this year, including eight professors from the University of Chicago, the foundation announced on February 17.
The two-year, $75,000 fellowship is awarded to early-career researchers in chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. The Maroon spoke with four recipients about their research and reactions to the award.
Chibueze Amanchukwu is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering with a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. Amanchukwu researches electrochemistry. His projects include developing safer batteries for the electrical grid, using machine learning to discover new materials, designing methods for carbon dioxide capture and conversion, and breaking down per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or “forever chemicals.”
His research in one area informs his research in others. “Half my group works on batteries, the other half works on CO2 capture [and] conversion,” he said. “We take ideas from [battery research] that have been developed over decades but have not been studied in other research areas, like CO2 capture and conversion, and try to take advantage of existing phenomena,” Amanchukwu said.
Amanchukwu became interested in electrochemistry during a summer internship at the chemical company DuPont de Nemours.
“If I discover a new material, someone will be willing to commercialize it tomorrow. Studying fundamental sciences has led me to real-world impact,” Amanchukwu said. “It didn’t directly motivate my work day to day, but when I take a step back and say, ‘Why am I doing what I’m doing?’ [W]hen you do that in this space, you get excited that there can be impact.”
Amanchukwu said the fellowship increased his lab’s visibility and provided greater funding flexibility. “Even the students and postdocs in my lab have gotten attention, which elevates their work,” Amanchukwu said. “These fellowships are really important for early-career people, because this type of fellowship gives our work visibility.”
He intends to use the fellowship award to support ongoing research or hire a postdoctoral fellow.
Zoe Yan, an assistant professor at the James Franck Institute and the Department of Physics, researches experimental quantum many-body physics. She uses ultracold atoms and molecules to study quantum systems, including how materials behave as conductors or insulators. “The name of the game in my lab is to study quantum matter with simpler, easy-to-understand quantum systems that we can build from the bottom up. We can actually build very pristine, defect-free quantum simulators, which are kind of like special-purpose computers in our laboratories as they simulate quantum mechanics,” Yan said.
In college, Yan did not know what she wanted to study. “I didn’t know that I wanted to do physics as a research career until late into my undergraduate years,” Yan said. “I had done an internship at a large national lab doing plasma research, and I quickly found out that was not the style of science that interested me. I definitely preferred to work in small teams where I had full control from A to Z over the experiment, rather than in large collaborations where I was only working on 1 percent, or maybe even 1 percent of 1 percent, of the entire effort,” Yan said.
Her lab at UChicago allows her to oversee her research projects in much greater detail. She said that although her work may seem abstract, similar experiments are crucial to technological developments. “Like the physics of materials, the physics of emergent phenomena have paid incredible dividends for our country and our society over the past 100 years,” Yan said.
Yan said the Sloan Research Fellowship provided recognition and a morale boost for her lab. “Investing in early-career researchers, in my view, is very high-risk because we are kind of untested and, by nature of the position, a lot of us try to swing for the fences. Without support in the early stages of the career, it would simply not be possible to have a full, functional, mature research program and compete among the very established senior researchers,” Yan said. She plans to use the financial support to invest in improved equipment.
Jack Mountjoy is an associate professor of economics and the Robert H. Topel Faculty Scholar at the Booth School of Business. Mountjoy researches labor economics and the economics of education. His last paper analyzed the returns from higher education for economically disadvantaged students. He studies long-term life outcomes beyond income, including marriage, fertility, crime, voting, and location. “The key challenge in answering these [outcome] questions credibly is to actually try to tease out causal effects from correlations.… Often answering these questions requires following the outcomes for a long time,” Mountjoy said. “I want to make sure that I can track people for as long as possible to really let these causal effects play out.”
In college, Mountjoy planned to study political science or political economy. This changed during a study-abroad program in Egypt, where he learned about extreme price differences between locals and tourists. “I remember going to the pyramids while I was in Egypt and just kind of being flabbergasted by how they were running the pricing at the gate. That moment was the moment I realized economics is just really interesting, and it really is everywhere,” said Mountjoy.
After college, Mountjoy worked at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission before receiving a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
Mountjoy said he was surprised to receive the Sloan Research Fellowship because he produces fewer papers than some of his peers. His “style of research is to take things very thoroughly, deeply, and slowly. That’s part of the surprise. I don’t think I have the sheer quantity of output that a lot of fellows have. I try to make up for it in some depth, to produce a small number of research papers that I’m really proud of and really stand behind,” said Mountjoy.
Shaoda Wang is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, focusing on applied economics in political economy and environmental economics. He studies China’s economy to understand how political institutions and incentives shape economic outcomes. “Economics is a very U.S.-centric field. Most of the studies are about the U.S., and then you see something about Europe, and then you see something about Africa, India, but China is extremely underrepresented in that whole field, partly because China is just so different and people don’t really understand it,” said Wang. He credits one recent paper, “Policy Experimentation in China: The Political Economy of Policy Learning,” with earning him the fellowship.
Growing up in China, Wang wanted to become a physicist. “Physics is so beautiful and elegant. You can use simple models to explain the universe. But there was a genius in my cohort, and he made me realize that I could never become a physicist that I aspire to become,” said Wang. “Economics is like physics, but studying human society. It came more intuitively to me, but it was equally stimulating and beautiful.”
At the University of Chicago, Wang focuses on policy issues. “Government is responsible for half of society. It dictates what kind of policies we get, what businesses we run, and how we run them. So we really need to understand the fundamental problem; how the government works, and how it interacts with the economy,” said Wang. Wang will use the fellowship funding for continued field work in China.
“In academia, most of the feedback you get is negative. That is very healthy for intellectual development, but it’s useful once in a while to get some recognition for what you’re doing,” said Wang. “[The fellowship] made me realize that there are people doing broader, more conventional economics research that appreciate what I’m doing. It gives me confidence to keep doing what I’m doing. I hope there will be other students like me who see this and realize that this is something that’s also appreciated.”
