The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded two of its 2000 Sloan Research Fellowships to Penn faculty members. The new Sloan Fellows from Penn are:

Sanjeev Khanna, Ph.D., the Skrikanich Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science, whose work focuses on complexity theory, approximation algorithms, network design and information dissemination;

Mark Devlin, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics and astronomy, whose work focuses on measuring small temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background in order to determine how mass was distributed in the early universe.

The Sloan Research Fellowships support fundamental research by young scholars of outstanding promise in the fields of applied mathematics, economics, physics, chemistry, mathematics and neuroscience. The Sloan Foundation awards 100 fellowships annually to researchers at U.S. and Canadian universities.

Spencer Fellowship for Katz

Michael Katz, Ph.D., the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History, has been named a Spencer Foundation Senior Fellow. The award is an invitational award; the Chicago-based foundation invites distinguished scholars to submit applications, which are voted on by the foundation’s board of directors.

Katz’s fellowship, the fourth awarded by the foundation in the past 12 months, carries with it $400,000 in research funding, which Katz intends to use on several projects, including a book on the 2000 Census he is writing with Mark Stern, Ph.D., professor of social work, and several articles based on previously unpublished data on adolescence, schooling and race in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia.