Jennfier Dionne, Percy Liang elected Sloan Research Fellows

Jennifer Dionne, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, and Percy Liang, assistant professor of computer science, have been selected as 2015 Sloan Research Fellows.

Dionne investigates metamaterials – engineered materials with optical and electrical properties not found in nature. She is especially interested in plasmonic and colloidal nanocrystal-based metamaterials, including their fundamental electrodynamic properties and applications to solar energy and bioimaging. Active research areas in her group include visible-frequency metamaterials for subwavelength light manipulation, enhanced photovoltaics and photocatalysis, and active neuronal imaging.

Liang studies unsupervised learning, structured prediction, statistical learning theory, grounded language acquisition, compositional semantics and program induction.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s fellowships honor early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as the next generation of scientific leaders. Fellows receive $50,000 to pursue their research.

Past Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to notable careers and include such intellectual luminaries as physicist Richard Feynman and game theorist John Nash. Since the beginning of the program in 1955, 43 fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective fields, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 65 have received the National Medal of Science and 14 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics.

“The Sloan Research Fellowships have become some of the most sought-after fellowships available to early-career scholars,” said Daniel L. Goroff, Vice President at the Sloan Foundation and Director of the Sloan Research Fellowship program. “Becoming a Sloan Research Fellow means joining a long and distinguished tradition of scientific explorers who have gone on to make the most meaningful and significant discoveries.”