Geneticist Gilad, mathematician Souto receive 2007 Sloan fellowships

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has selected two University scholars to receive 2007 Sloan research fellowships. Yoav Gilad, Assistant Professor in Human Genetics and the College, and Juan Souto, Assistant Professor in Mathematics and the College, are among 118 scholars named Sloan research fellows from colleges and universities in North America.

Now in their 52nd year, the Sloan research fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of the best young faculty members in chemistry, computational and evolutionary biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Each fellowship includes a $45,000 grant.

Gilad compares the genetics of various primate species in order to identify genes in humans that have evolved under natural selection. In a second project, he has been studying human olfactory receptor genes, which govern the detection of odors.

Gilad joined the Chicago faculty in 2005, following a postdoctoral fellowship with Yale University’s Department of Genetics. He received his bachelor’s degree in molecular genetics and biochemistry at Israel’s Ben Gurion University, and his master’s and doctoral degrees at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. At Weizmann, Gilad’s multiple honors included the Feinberg Graduate School’s highest honor, the John F. Kennedy Prize.

Souto’s research is focused on differential geometry and low-dimensional topology. He is especially interested in the relation between geometry and topology of three-manifolds.

A member of the Chicago mathematics faculty since 2005, Souto previously had served as a research associate at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and as an academic assistant at Germany’s Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.

He also has held visiting positions at the Université Paul Sabatier and the Université de Lille in France, and at Chicago.

Souto earned a Diplom in mathematics in 1998 and his Ph.D. in 2001 from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.