Five Yale scholars named Sloan fellows for early-career excellence
Top row from left, Eduardo Dávila, Stavroula Hatzios, and Ryota Iijima. Bottom row from left, Junliang Shen and Zhou Fan.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has named five Yale scholars as recipients of a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship, an honor that recognizes early-career scientists and scholars.
The Yale honorees, all members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, are Eduardo Dávila, assistant professor of economics; Zhou Fan, assistant professor of statistics and data science; Stavroula Hatzios, associate professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and of chemistry; Ryota Iijima, associate professor of economics; and Junliang Shen, assistant professor of mathematics. Each new Sloan Research Fellow will receive a two-year, $75,000 award.
This year’s cohort of Sloan Research Fellows include 126 researchers from 53 institutions in the United States and Canada. The fellowships are open to scholars in seven fields: chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.
Dávila, whose research focuses on how financial and macroeconomic policies affect individuals, received a fellowship for economics. His work has included analysis of an array of topics, from monetary policy and housing to insurance and taxation.
He joined the Yale faculty in 2018 and is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Fan’s research interests straddle the intersection of mathematical statistics, probability theory, and computational algorithms. He received a fellowship in mathematics.
Fan, who has been a member of Yale’s faculty since 2018, was awarded a Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research in 2023. In his work, he is particularly interested in inferential problems that arise in statistical genetics, computational biology, and other scientific applications.
Hatzios, whose research focuses on host-microbe interactions in the gastrointestinal tract, received a fellowship in chemistry. Her lab endeavors to understand how infection-associated oxidative stress influences host signaling and microbial adaptation to the host environment and aims to develop new probes and antimicrobials for the detection and inhibition of disease-causing bacteria in the gut.
Hatzios joined the Yale faculty in 2017 and was named an ACS Infectious Diseases Young Investigator in 2023.
Iijima received a fellowship in economics. His research interests include microeconomic theory, game theory, decision theory, information economics, and networks.
His work has examined how biased or incorrect information can significantly affect the predictions of traditional economic models of individual and social learning. He joined the Yale faculty in 2017.
Shen, whose research explores algebraic geometry and related fields, received a fellowship in mathematics. He uses tools from algebraic geometry to solve questions and conjectures rooted in topology, geometry, and mathematical physics.
Shen joined the Yale faculty in 2021. He was awarded the SwissMAP Innovator Prize in 2018.
Since the first Sloan fellowships were awarded in 1955, 139 faculty from Yale have received a fellowship, including this year’s winners.
Other scientists nominate candidates for the fellowships. Winners are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars on the basis of the candidates’ research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become leaders in their field.
