Four Yale faculty members are among the recipients of 2025 Sloan Research Fellowships, which recognize early-career scientists and scholars whose research accomplishments make them stand out as future leaders in their field.
The quartet of Yale honorees — Amir Haji-Akbari, an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS); Tristan Geiller, assistant professor of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine; Ian Moult, assistant professor of physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and Shreya Saxena, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and electrical engineering at SEAS — will each receive two-year, $75,000 fellowships.
They are among 126 researchers from the United States and Canada to receive a fellowship.
Since the first Sloan fellowships were awarded in 1955, 143 faculty from Yale have received a fellowship, including this year’s winners.
Haji-Akbari’s fellowship was awarded in chemistry. He joined the Yale faculty in 2017 and leads the Computational Soft Matter Group in the Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering.
His research leverages the latest theoretical and computational tools rooted in statistical physics, to study rare event transitions in a range of biological and soft matter systems.
Geiller received a fellowship in neuroscience. He is a member of the Wu Tsai Institute and joined the Yale faculty in 2024.
His lab searches for a mechanistic explanation to explain how everyday experiences are learned, stored in the brain, and used to guide future behaviors. His research develops state-of-the-art techniques for accessing and identifying specific neuron types.
Moult’s Sloan fellowship is for physics. He has been a faculty member in the Department of Physics since 2021.
His research looks at new techniques in quantum field theory for describing high energy particle physics experiments. He has also played a prominent role in the development of Jet Substructure, which applies patterns in the structure of energy flow in particle collisions to maximize the discovery potential for new physics.
Saxena’s fellowship was awarded in neuroscience. She joined the Yale faculty in 2023 and is a member of the Wu Tsai Institute and the Institute for Foundations of Data Science.
Saxena’s lab at Yale incorporates constraints from anatomy and physiology to improve machine learning models of neural activity and behavior — and predictively understand that relationship.
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.
