Math Prof Named Sloan Research Fellow
An NC State mathematician whose creation of new algorithms has helped researchers studying fields as diverse as biology, chemistry, engineering, physics and statistics, is one of 126 early-career scholars to receive the 2014 Sloan Research Fellowship.
Jonathan Hauenstein is only the second NC State faculty member to ever receive the prestigious award, which has been given annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Chemist T. Brent Gunnoe was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2004.
The two-year fellowships are given to young scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders, the foundation said in a full-page ad in Tuesday’s New York Times. Fellows receive $50,000 for research-related expenses from the foundation.
“For more than half a century, the Sloan Foundation has been proud to honor the best young scientific minds and support them during a crucial phase of their careers when early funding and recognition can really make a difference,” said Sloan Foundation President Paul L. Joskow. “These researchers are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge in unprecedented ways.”
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Past Sloan Research Fellows include physicist Richard Feynman and game theorist John Nash. Since the beginning of the program, 42 fellows have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 13 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, and 63 have received the National Medal of Science.
Hauenstein is a member of NC State’s Symbolic Computation Group, which is concerned with the design, analysis and implementation of algorithms for algebraic problems as they relate to mathematics and computer science. He received a 2013 Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency last fall for his research involving numerical algebraic geometric methods for data analysis.
Hauenstein received a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2009 and was a visiting assistant professor at Texas A&M University before joining NC State in 2012 as an assistant professor of mathematics.
