Four NYU assistant professors each won $75,000 to complete a two-year research project after being named Sloan Research Fellows this year. The faculty members — recognized for their accomplishments in computer science, neural science and organic chemistry — are among 126 recipients across the United States and Canada, tapped from over 1,000 nominations each year.
With its 71-year-old fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation aims to fund promising early-career researchers studying science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics. WSN spoke with this year’s NYU recipients about receiving the competitive acclaim last month and how they plan to further discoveries in their fields with the grant.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Joseph Tassarotti, a Courant computer science professor, earned the grant for his research on constructing mathematical proofs to reduce bugs in computer programs.
WSN: What inspired your interest in this field?
Tassarotti: We use a specialized piece of software that allows you to carry out mathematical proofs, then the software checks them — so you write a proof that a program is correct, in a certain sense. I got interested in this when I was taking undergraduate math and computer science classes where I had to write mathematical proofs. But it wasn’t clear to me if the TAs were actually carefully checking our work. So, I was curious if it was possible for a computer to check these bugs, and it turns out, it is. There was a professor at my undergrad who worked on this stuff, so I started working with him on this and continued on it independently.
WSN: How will the grant help further your research?
Tassarotti: There’s been a lot of challenges with funding because of the federal government currently. The Sloan fellowship is flexible in the way that you can use it. I don’t have concrete plans yet, but it’s good to have it to help because of the special circumstances that are going on now. I’ve been enormously lucky to have fantastic mentors, collaborators and students, and it’s kind of a cliche to say it, but it really is true that none of this stuff is possible without the network of people that you work with.
For a chance to become Sloan Research Fellows, a scholar’s department head or senior researcher must nominate them for the award. At an institution, each STEM and economics department can only nominate up to three of its faculty members. Over 100 NYU faculty members have scored the grant since the fellowship was founded in 1955.
Danique Jeurissen, a CAS neural science professor, researches how information flows through the brain and how it can find alternative pathways when certain parts are inactive or damaged. She said that she hopes to understand how the brain will respond after a stroke or traumatic brain injury to inform future treatments.
WSN: Tell me about your research and what inspired it.
Jeurissen: As a postdoc, I actually stumbled on a surprising result in one of the experiments that we did. When we inactivate part of the brain that is important for decision making, we see that the animals initially have an impairment in a decision making task. That’s exactly what you would expect if you inactivate part of the brain. But then we were surprised to see that the animal recovered within about an hour, even though we confirmed that the neural activity in that area was still fully suppressed. That means the brain is capable of finding alternative pathways and it can flexibly send information through other areas in the brain as needed. We perform large scale neural recordings to understand how the brain can recover from damage.
WSN: How have your past experiences helped you win the grant?
Jeurissen: I see this award more as a recognition of the team that we have in the community, instead of just me on my own. So I’ve enjoyed the past year, setting up the lab and working with everyone. The Center for Neural Science is a good place to be because we have this beautiful lab space. It’s an inspiring intellectual community.
As of last year, 58 Sloan Fellows have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes, such as last year’s Nobel Laureate in physics, John Clarke. Recipients have also won prestigious medals in science, mathematics and economics.
Florian Schäfer, a Courant computer science professor, told WSN that he appreciated receiving recognition with the opportunity to pursue new research ideas. With his research, Schäfer develops algorithms to improve computer graphics and aircraft designs.
WSN: How does your research link physics and computation?
Schäfer: Whenever we’re doing a numerical computation, we have to do it justice to the physical problem because we cannot resolve it in all its details, so we somehow always have to work with a limited amount of information. We believe this physical object will evolve based on the limited information we can resolve in our simulation. That is exactly what statistics is about and that’s why there’s this natural connection that links these two fields and that oftentimes can give new interesting insight into how to better design algorithms. This initial thought of wanting to link or to explore the relationship between physics and computation, and these ideas from statistics to quantify what we know, has been a throughline that I started getting interested in way back in during my masters degree.
Last year, the Sloan Foundation funded nearly $700,000 to Tisch students who made science and technology related films, as well as over $500,000 for scientific and historical research grants.
Marvin Parasram, a CAS chemistry professor, is developing a sustainable and economically conscious way to transfer heteroatoms — which are present in all life saving drugs — from stable molecules to trigger therapeutic activation. His lab work could potentially result in sustainable ways to chemically create medicine.
WSN: Tell me more about your research.
Parasram: I’m a synthetic organic chemist, and in my lab we develop synthetic methods. Synthetic methods are like tools that we provide to the community to help build molecules, molecular fragments or therapeutics, and the key bond forming events we focus on are transferring heteroatoms from stable molecules. So heteroatoms are important because they’re featured in all life saving drugs and they are non-carbon, non-hydrogen based atoms. They have lone pairs. They can bind to receptors, and that’s how therapeutic activation is often triggered. The challenge with incorporating these heteroatoms is that they often require expensive transition metals or harsh oxidants. So we’re trying to develop sustainable and economical routes to do this heteroatom transfer event. And we found that using one three dipoles, which are molecules that are very stable, and upon photo excitation, they become reactive.
WSN: What does winning this grant mean to you?
Parasram: When I was a student, we all had our heroes in our field. I can go to that database, and I can see those individuals that have also won the grants in years past. So it’s nice to know that when I was a young investigator, I was inspired by many of the faculty that have won the grant, and now I’m part of that family, which I think is really special. I hope one day, a student that will win this in the future, maybe I’m their scientific hero, and they can reach out to me and can connect over this.
Contact Ashlie West at [email protected].