Three scientists named Sloan fellows

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has selected three Chicago scientists to receive 2001 Sloan Research Fellowships. Alexander Kiselev, Assistant Professor in Mathematics; Ka Yee Lee, Assistant Professor in Chemistry; and Savdeep Sethi, Assistant Professor in Physics, are among 104 new Sloan Fellows named from 51 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.

A committee of distinguished scientists, including Lars Hansen, the Homer J. Livingston Professor and Chairman of Economics, reviewed more than 400 nominations for the 2001 awards.

“The Sloan Research Fellowships were created by Alfred P. Sloan Jr. in 1955 to provide crucial and flexible funds to outstanding researchers early in their academic careers,” said foundation President Ralph Gomory.

Kiselev, who joined the Chicago faculty as an L.E. Dickson Instructor in 1997, uses partial differential equations to model combustion–in particular, the influence of fluid motion on the reaction process. Such phenomena are relevant to many processes in nature, from burning in stars to internal combustion engines. He also works on questions related to quantum mechanics.

Lee, a faculty member since 1998, conducts research on lung surfactant, a complex mixture of lipids and proteins that assists the breathing process, and on beta amyloid, a plaque-forming substance responsible for killing brain cells in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Sethi, who joined the Chicago faculty in 2000, focuses his research on answering basic questions about the nature of space time and gravity.

To answer these questions, he is studying quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of the subatomic world, and Einstein’s general theory of relativity in a unified framework known as string theory.