Recently the Alfred P.Sloan Foundation announced the winners of 2016 Sloan Research Fellowships. Seventeen Chinese scholars were listed as Sloan research fellows, including two alumni of Wuhan University, Qiu Wang and JianPeng.
Among these 17 Chinese fellows, 3 received their bachelor degrees from Tsinghua University. There were also two fellows each who graduated from Peking University, Wuhan University and Nanjing University. Besides, Fudan University, China Science and Technology University and Zhejiang University respectively have one alumnus among the fellows. The rest of the fellows have Taiwanese or overseas background.
Qiu Wang received her bachelor degree from School of Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University in 1999, and acquired the doctoral degree of Organic Chemistry in Emory University six years later. She accomplished her postdoctoral research in Harvard University and the Broad Institute. Now she is an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department of Duke University. Her research mainly focused on bioactive molecules as probes in human biology and disease, epigenetic modifying enzymes as novel therapeutic targets, and new chemical tools for biomolecule labeling and target identification. Wang is also a member of American Chemical Society, American Association for the Advanced of Science and the recipient of Boehringer-Ingelheim Scholarship.
Jian Peng gained his bachelor and master degree in Computer Science in Wuhan University in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Five years later, he accomplished his PHD studies in Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago University. Peng committed his postdoctoral research in Berger Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then between 2010 and 2012, he became a researcher of Microsoft Research. Now he is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Illinois. His major research field concerns Machine Learning, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics and Data Mining. Peng has also won the CROI Yong Scholar Prize.
The Alfred P.Sloan Research Fellowships was founded in 1955 to encourage young scholars with great achievements or huge potential in the fields of physics, math and chemistry. Each fellow was awarded ＄50 thousand to support their early career development. Awards were later added in neuroscience, economics, Computer Science and computational and evolutionary molecular biology. Since the beginning of the program in 1955, 43 fellows have won the Nobel Prize in their respective field, 16 have received the Fields Medal in mathematics, and many have became eminent talents of their fields.
“Getting early-career support can be a make-or-break moment for a young scholar. These scholars have pushed the border of human knowledge in an unprecedented way,” said Pual L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P.Sloan Foundation.
(Rewritten by Yedan Tang, edited by Yinglun Liu, Mark & Sijia Hu)
