2016 Sloan Fellowships

Three University of Pennsylvania faculty members, two from the Perelman School of Medicine and one from the Wharton School, are among the 126 recipients of this year’s Sloan Research Fellowship. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provides grants annually to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as the next generation of scientific leaders.

Sloan Research Fellows are nominated by their peers and selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Each Fellow receives a $55,000 award to further his or her research.

Matthew Kayser, assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, is a practicing psychiatrist specializing in issues related to sleep and mental health. His lab studies how neural circuits give rise to complex behaviors and how dysfunction of neural processes can cause mental illness. His particular focus is in understanding how sleep—a highly conserved behavior whose core function remains a mystery—contributes to sculpting brain circuits during development and in other times of life.

Zongming Ma, assistant professor in the department of statistics at the Wharton School, conducts research on statistical analysis of high-dimensional and massive datasets, such as those arising from neuroscience and social networks. His research focuses on the core statistical problems that are common to these and other related application areas. By building the mathematical foundation for these problems, his goal is to gain sufficient theoretical insights to design practical algorithms for better data analysis.

Golnaz Vahedi, assistant professor of genetics and a member of the Institute for Immunology at the Perelman School of Medicine, studies the biological circuits that underlie cellular processes in immune cells to uncover the molecular basis of major inherited diseases. Her lab works with vast quantities of rich, high-dimensional data that capture system-wide properties at molecular and cellular resolution in immune cells. A major focus of the Vahedi lab is to deconstruct gene-environment interactions in complex diseases, such as autoimmune disorders, by generating the epigenomic maps of immune cells and developing computational methods to integrate these maps with human genetics.

McCabe Fund Awards

Last year, there were three winners of the McCabe Fund Fellow Awards of $40,000 each:

Yi Fan, radiation oncology

Marc V. Fuccillo, neuroscience

Matthew C. Good, cell & developmental biology

There were 19 McCabe Fund Pilot Award winners, who received $19,323 each:

Jorge Ivan Alvarez, pathobiology

Agata M. Bogusz, pathology & laboratory medicine

Joshua M. Diamond, medicine

John P. Fischer, surgery

David S. Goldberg, medicine

Surbhi Grover, radiation oncology

Blanca E. Himes, biostatistics & epidemiology

Vandana Khungar, medicine

David K. Kung, neurosurgery

Meghan B. Lane-Fall, anesthesiology & critical care

Lisa D. Levine, obstetrics & gynecology

Shana Erin McCormack, pediatrics

Kenji Murakami, biochemistry & biophysics

Susanna M. Nazarian, surgery

Alexis Ogdie-Beatty, medicine

Mitesh S. Patel, medicine

Michael Povelones, pathobiology

Danielle K. Sandsmark, neurology

Delia Maria Talos, neurology

Related: McCabe Fund Awards for FY 2017 Call for Applications: May 16

Individual Dignity Project: 2016 Penn Public Policy Challenge Winner

A team of Penn students has proposed a policy initiative to help re-entering citizens access an ID as soon as they are released from prison. Their proposal, also designed to combat Philadelphia’s recidivism crisis, won the 2016 Penn Public Policy Challenge, presented last month by the Fels Institute of Government. The Philadelphia Individual Dignity Project team proposal seeks to implement a pilot program at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Northeast Philadelphia that would enable eligible exiting prisoners to receive a state-issued ID card on site upon release. The team received $5,000 to help develop the pilot plan.

The team is comprised of Salomon Moreno-Rosa, a dual-degree candidate at the Fels Institute of Government and the Graduate School of Education; Samantha Waxman, a student in the master of science in social policy program at the School of Social Policy & Practice; and Sarai Williams, a master’s dual-degree candidate in the city & regional planning and landscape architecture departments at PennDesign. They were among only ten teams of students from across the country to move on to the National Invitational Public Policy Challenge earlier this month.