Two Penn faculty named 2022 Sloan Research Fellows

Deep Jariwala and Yuxin Chen of the University of Pennsylvania are among the 118 recipients of the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship.

Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships honor extraordinary early-career researchers in the United States and Canada whose creativity, innovation, and research make them stand out as the next generation of leaders. A Sloan Research Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards available to young researchers, and recipients receive a two-year, $75,000 award to support their research.

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 126 faculty from University of Pennsylvania, including this year’s winners, have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science in the Wharton School and holds a secondary appointment in the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. His research includes statistics, optimization, reinforcement learning, statistical learning theory, and information theory and their applications to medical imaging, power electronics, and computational biology. Chen, who has authored more than 30 journal articles and more than 30 conference papers, is the recipient of the Army Research Office and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program awards and the International Consortium of Chinese Mathematicians Best Paper Award Gold Medal.

Jariwala is an assistant professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. Focused on the study of nanometer and atomic scale devices, materials and interfaces for applications in computing, sensing, information technology, and renewable energy, Jariwala combines new techniques to assemble, grow, and integrate nanostructured materials to create novel electronic and photonic devices. He has previously been recognized for his groundbreaking work with the Frontiers of Materials Award, as well as Young Investigator awards from the Army Research Office, the journal Nanomaterials, the IEEE Photonics Society, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

Open to scholars in chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics, the Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Candidates must be nominated by fellow scientists, and winning Fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become leaders in their fields.