image: NYU's 2025 Sloan Foundation Fellows (clockwise from upper left): Corina Boar, Glen Hocky (photo by Catherine Triandafillou), Chao Li (photo courtesy of Princeton University), Lerrel Pinto, and Tania Lupoli.
Credit: Image courtesy of New York University
Five New York University faculty have been awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: Corina Boar, an assistant professor of economics, Glen Hocky and Tania Lupoli, assistant professors of chemistry, and Chao Li and Lerrel Pinto, assistant professors in NYU’s Courant Institute of 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.
Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 98 faculty from NYU have been selected as recipients.
“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.”
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Corina Boar studies how differences among consumers and firms shape aggregate consumption and capital accumulation, as well as wealth and income inequality. She combines rich models of firm and household decision making with microeconomic data to analyze stabilization policies, wealth and income taxation and market power regulation. Her recent research develops models of price adjustments to better understand the underlying sources of inflation dynamics.
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Glen Hocky develops computational approaches to predict how interactions between many molecules produce complex and surprising behavior when assembled together. With research at the intersection of chemistry, physics, biology, and materials science, his recent work seeks to predict how molecules in cells change their behavior while experiencing mechanical tension and to design the interactions between larger particles to self-assemble materials with desired properties. Future research will combine these two areas to design mechanically responsive, self-assembled materials by taking advantage of our understanding of how microscopic interactions change when feeling a force.
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Chao Li’s research centers on the interface between physics and mathematics—the study of shape and curvature. A major tool of his work is geometric variational theory, which investigates how surfaces, such as soap bubbles and black holes, interact with the space around them. In his recent work, he used such variational objects to reveal connections between curvature conditions and topological structures of high-dimensional spaces.
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Tania Lupoli’s research aims to develop substances to inspire new antibiotics and diagnostics for hard-to-treat infections, leveraging interdisciplinary approaches from chemistry and microbiology. One current project develops probes to modulate protein folding in cells in order to combat drug resistance. Another project creates tools to study the assembly and interactions of unique sugar motifs found on bacterial surfaces that are required for infection.
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Lerrel Pinto focuses on building general-purpose robots that learn in the natural, messy world we live in. This involves solving a gamut of research problems, from designing new sensors and accumulating large datasets of robot data for everyday tasks to learning robotic behaviors from this data and developing algorithms to quickly adapt in the face of new challenges. To make further progress in these areas, his research group’s work is designed to be low-cost and open-sourced to the scientific community.
Fellows receive $75,000, over a two-year period, to further their research. Overall, 58 Sloan Fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective fields, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 72 have received the National Medal of Science, and 24 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2009. A database of all Sloan Research Fellows can be found on the foundation’s website.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Founded in 1831, New York University is one of the world’s foremost research universities (with more than $1 billion per year in research expenditures) 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 has 13 other 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, law, medicine, business, dentistry, engineering, education, nursing, the cinematic and performing arts, music and studio arts, public administration, social work, public health, and professional studies, among other areas.
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 its website.