News: IMES Professor Alex Shalek wins 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship

The Institute for Medical Engineering and Science’s Alex K. Shalek, is among the eight MIT researchers awarded with the 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship. Professor Shalek is the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Career Development Assistant Professor of Health Sciences and Technology as well as an assistant professor of chemistry.

Awarded annually since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars among the next generation of scientific leaders. This year’s recipients are drawn from 53 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada.

“The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best science has to offer,” said Adam Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in a press release. “The brightest minds, tackling the hardest problems, and succeeding brilliantly — Fellows are quite literally the future of twenty-first century science.”

Administered and funded by the foundation, the fellowships are awarded in eight scientific fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. To qualify, candidates must first be nominated by fellow scientists and subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Fellows receive $65,000 to be used to further their research.

Since the beginning of the program, 45 Sloan Fellows have earned Nobel Prizes, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science, and 17 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.

For a complete list of this year’s winners, visit the Sloan Research Fellowships website.