McGill researchers awarded Sloan Fellowships
McGill tops Canadian universities with four awards to young scientists
McGill University is proud to announce that four of its Faculty of Science researchers have been named 2007 recipients of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship. The winners were announced by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on February 20.
Established in 1955, the Sloan Fellowships provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars, often in their first appointments to university faculties, who are working to set up laboratories and establish independent research projects.
Mathieu Blanchette, Aashish Clerk, Patrick Hayden and Jacques Verstraete will each receive two-year fellowships and a $45,000 U.S. award. The funds can be used for any research-related purpose, including equipment purchases, technical assistance, professional travel and trainee support.
Professor Blanchette, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Bioinformatics of the McGill School of Computer Science, is responsible for several highly cited contributions to the field of bioinformatics, including pioneering work on developing algorithms for reconstructing ancestral mammalian genomes.
Professor Clerk, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, is a theoretical condensed matter physicist. His main interests concern the complex quantum-mechanical behaviour of electrons in nanostructures.
Professor Hayden, Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science, is a Rhodes Scholar and a McGill graduate. He is developing new ways to manipulate quantum information with the ultimate aim of helping to make quantum computers a reality.
Professor Verstraete, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, is researching the relatively new areas of extremal and probabilistic combinatories, with a particular emphasis on Turán-type problems, models of random graphs, probabilistic methods and extremal problems for sets of integers.
"I am particularly proud and gratified that all of McGill's 2007 Sloan Fellows come from our Faculty," said Professor Martin Grant, Dean of the Faculty of Science. "this demonstrates that our commitment to recruit the best and the brightest young researchers from around the world is bearing fruit."
McGill edged out the other three Canadian schools honoured with Sloans: the University of British Columbia, with three recipients, the University of Toronto, with two, and the University of Alberta, with one. McGill outperformed many top research-intensive U.S. universities as well, including Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Yale.
