image: SueYeon Chung, assistant professor, NYU's Center for Neural Science
Credit: Image courtesy of New York University
Two New York University faculty have been awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: SueYeon Chung, an assistant professor at the Center for Neural Science, and Jinyoung Park, an assistant professor at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
The fellowships recognize “exceptional U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders,” the Sloan Foundation said in announcing this year’s 126 fellows.
A full list of the 2024 Fellows is available on the Sloan Foundation website.
“Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving the nominations of the most inventive and impactful early-career scientists across the U.S. and Canada,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how Fellows take leading roles shaping the research agenda within their respective fields.”
Chung’s research explores how neuronal activities drive brain functions, laying the groundwork for a better understanding of both healthy and disordered brains. She develops mathematical models to understand the structure of collective activities of neurons and their role in cognitive processes like image and speech recognition. Her findings show that the geometry of neural population responses can predict their information storage capacity, providing a way to examine brain information structure and its changes during learning. Chung employs an interdisciplinary approach by using methods from statistical physics, machine learning, and high-dimensional geometry to investigate the structure of neural data, brain-like neural network models, and their information storage capabilities.
Park’s research includes deepening our understanding of random discrete structures. Her work uses tools from several areas, including combinatorics, probability theory, and information theory, to analyze the location of phase transitions (e.g. molecular changes that occur when water turns to ice), important phenomena in physics and social networks characterizing the boundary between connected and disconnected phases. In her recent work, she provided a unified characterization for many such transitions by exploiting tools from the aforementioned areas that seemingly had no connection to phase transitions.
Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 93 faculty from NYU have been selected as recipients.
Overall, 57 Sloan Fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective fields, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 71 have received the National Medal of Science, and 23 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007. A database of former Sloan Research Fellows can be found on the foundation’s website.
Fellows receive $75,000, over a two-year period, to further their research.
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EDITOR’S NOTE:
Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the world’s foremost research universities and is a member of the selective Association of American Universities. NYU has degree-granting university campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai and numerous global academic sites, including London, Paris, Florence, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, and Accra. Through its numerous schools and colleges, NYU is a leader in conducting research and providing education in the arts and sciences, engineering, law, medicine, business, dentistry, education, nursing, the cinematic and performing arts, music and studio arts, public administration, social work, and professional studies, among other areas. For more, please visit www.nyu.edu.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. For more, please visit https://sloan.org.