Three Yale scholars win prestigious Sloan fellowships
Three members of the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences have received 2023 Sloan Research Fellowships, a prestigious award that recognizes early-career scientists and scholars who have potential to make important contributions to their field.
The three Yale honorees — Roy Lederman, assistant professor of statistics and data science, Lidya Tarhan, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, and Jing Yan, assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology — will each receive two-year, $75,000 fellowships.
They are among 126 researchers from the U.S. and Canada selected to receive a fellowship.
Lederman, whose research interests range from the mathematics of data science to the imaging of molecules and the geometry of data, received a fellowship for mathematics. His work is often motivated by applications in cryo-electron microscopy.
Lederman, who earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 2015, is a member of the Quantitative Biology Institute and the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale.
Tarhan’s fellowship was awarded in Earth system science. In her research she focuses on Earth’s sedimentary record, with an eye toward developing a multidisciplinary understanding of ancient life during key intervals in the planet’s history.
She conducted her postdoctoral studies at Yale, including as a National Science Foundation-EAR postdoctoral fellow, focusing on the fossilization of Earth’s earliest animal communities. She joined the Yale faculty in 2019 and is also an assistant curator in the division of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Yan’s fellowship was awarded in physics. His research looks at the interface between microbiology, molecular biology, physics, and engineering — specifically the formation of biofilms, which are surface-attached bacterial communities embedded in an extracellular matrix.
He is a member of the Quantitative Biology Institute.
Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in eight scientific and technical fields: computer science, neuroscience, physics, economics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, mathematics, and Earth system science.
Other scientists nominate candidates for the fellowships. Winners are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars on the basis of the candidates’ research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become leaders in their field.
Since the first Sloan fellowships were awarded in 1955, 134 faculty from Yale have received a fellowship, including this year’s winners.