PHILADELPHIA Three young scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have been named Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows for 2001. The highly competitive awards will support research by Penn biologist Marc Schmidt and Penn physicists Jay Kikkawa and Matthew Strassler during the next two years.

The Sloan fellowship stimulates fundamental research by young scholars who show outstanding promise to contribute significantly to the advancement of knowledge. Each year, only 100 Sloan fellows in chemistry, physics, mathematics, neuroscience, computer science and economics are chosen na-tionwide.

Jay Kikkawa, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, studies the magnetic properties of materials, with an eye toward using magnetic current as an alternative to electric current for conveying information. Using lasers of polarized light to impart electron spin and thus magnetism in materials, his experiments induce magnetic flow of information between optical electrodes.

In studying how magnetism propagates, Kikkawa is also examining how various non-metallic materials are efficient magnetic conductors. His ex-periments have found that semiconductors can carry magnetic information more than a tenth of a millimeter, a length scale that offers hope for magnet-ism-based microchips. Kikkawa work has also given rise to a new approach to nuclear magnetic resonance using visible light instead of radio waves. This phenomenon enables magnetic resonance imaging of solids with nearly atomic resolution and may have implications for quantum computing.

Marc Schmidt, assistant professor of biology, studies the neural basis of vocal production and learning in songbirds, specifically the zebra finch. The process of vocal learning in songbirds shares many parallels with the way speech is learned in humans. Finches spend about two months creating a "template" based upon the song of their father. Then, during about three months of practice, the song becomes crystallized through auditory feedback.

Schmidt studies one area of the brain, known as the higher vocal complex, that is at the intersection of auditory processing and motor behavior and plays a role in both. He particularly interested in how auditory feedback signals shape the organization of vocal motor command centers during song learning.

Matthew Strassler, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, works in quantum field theory, which successfully describes the universe most fundamental forces and particles. The effects of the forces are often so complex that to understand them fully one must look at them from several points of view that at first seem mutually exclusive but are actually comple-mentary

The equivalence of these distinct perspectives is called "duality." As an analogy, one might describe a city as a large collection of people living in buildings, or as a grid of streets carrying traffic, or as an array of intercon-nected business ventures. Without prior knowledge, a person who had never seen a city might not recognize that all three descriptions refer to the same object that cities are "dual."

In recent years, it has been recognized that dualities are ubiquitous in field theory and in string theory, and that they can be used to solve problems that from another perspective might seem impossibly difficult. Strassler seeks to uncover new examples of duality relations, to learn as much as possible from them about the properties of fields, particles and strings and to obtain from them a more profound understanding of nature.

Including Kikkawa, Schmidt and Strassler, 13 Penn researchers have won Sloan fellowships in the last five years. Since 1955, fellowships have been awarded to more than 3,600 scientists nationwide, accounting for expendi-tures in excess of $85 million.