Two Northwestern Faculty Named Sloan Fellows

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Two Northwestern University mathematics professors, Nir Avni and Aaron Naber, each has received a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship for 2014 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The $50,000 fellowships are awarded in eight scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics.

Avni and Naber are among 126 outstanding early-career scientists and scholars being recognized for their achievements and potential to contribute substantially to their fields. The recipients were chosen from 61 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.

Avni is an assistant professor of mathematics, and Naber is an associate professor of mathematics; both are in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Avni studies group theory, specifically algebraic and arithmetic groups. His research interests include representation theory, the study of abstract algebraic structures by representing their elements as linear transformations of vector spaces, and motivic integration, a branch of algebraic geometry.

Naber works on geometrically motivated equations and their applications. His research primarily focuses on the study of manifolds with Ricci curvature bounds and their possible degenerations in limit spaces. In addition to the Sloan honor, Naber will give an address at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, South Korea.

The Sloan Research Fellowships have been awarded annually since 1955. Administered and funded by the Sloan Foundation, the fellowships are awarded in close cooperation with the scientific community. Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by their peers and subsequently are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars.