Northwestern University, along with MIT, has the most faculty in the 2025 cohort
Seven Northwestern faculty members, including CIERA Prof. Jason Wang and CIERA postdoctoral alum Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, have been awarded a prestigious 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship. Gifted by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the honor highlights the creativity, innovation and research accomplishments of early-career researchers.
Northwestern was the educational institution with the most faculty in the 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship honorees, a distinction it shares this year with MIT, which also has seven fellows. The fellows are chemists Linsey C. Seitz and Roel Tempelaar, computer scientist Xiao Wang, economist Matthew Rognlie, mathematicians Rachel Greenfeld and Niall M. Mangan, and physicist Jason Wang.
The seven faculty, each a part of the McCormick School of Engineering or Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, are among 126 of the most promising young scientists across the U.S. and Canada who make up this year’s class. The annual fellowships are awarded to scholars in seven scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Candidates are nominated by their fellow scientists.
The two-year $75,000 fellowship is one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to young researchers, and many past fellows have gone on to become distinguished figures in science. The financial support can be used flexibly to advance the fellow’s research. They are also often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising early-career researchers to its ranks.
Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 169 faculty from the University have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Assistant professor Jason Wang teaches in Weinberg’s department of physics and astronomy as a core faculty member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), and received a fellowship in the area of physics. Wang takes faint images of exoplanets and removes the glare coming from host stars by using techniques like coronagraphy, spectroscopy and interferometry, developing new techniques to measure the signal and properties of distant exoplanets. He monitors exoplanets over time to trace orbits and infer dynamic histories, and studies atmospheres to infer what they are made of. His current research focuses on the gas giant exoplanets, but he ultimately hopes to find habitable exoplanets.
Prof. Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, who also received a fellowship in the area of physics, was a CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Claude-André Faucher-Giguère‘s research group from 2014-2017. Following his time at CIERA, Dr. Anglés-Alcázar became a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics. He is now an an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut.
“The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best of early-career science, embodying the creativity, ambition and rigor that drive discovery forward,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “These extraordinary scholars are already making significant contributions, and we are confident they will shape the future of their fields in remarkable ways.”
Congratulations, Jason and Daniel!
Read the full Northwestern news article.