Four faculty members at the 天美影视传媒 have been awarded early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The new Sloan Fellows, announced Feb. 12, are and , both assistant professors in the School of Oceanography and the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences in the聽College of the Environment, respectively; and and , both assistant professors in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering in the College of Engineering.
Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields 鈥� chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics 鈥� the fellowships honor those early-career researchers whose achievements mark them among the next generation of scientific leaders.
The 126 Sloan Fellows for 2020 were selected in coordination with the research community. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate鈥檚 research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. Each fellow will receive $75,000 to apply toward research endeavors.
This year鈥檚 fellows come from 60 institutions across the United States and Canada, spanning fields from evolutionary biology to data science.
Armour is an assistant professor in the School of Oceanography and Department of Atmospheric Sciences. He is studying the role of the ocean in climate change using a combination of oceanographic and atmospheric observations, numerical climate model simulations and theory. Among his research topics is the role of oceanic and atmospheric circulations in moving heat around the climate system and how ocean currents interact with atmospheric processes to set the rate and magnitude of global warming. Armour is a lead author on the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report.
鈥淢y group works on a variety of topics in oceanography and atmospheric sciences, but as a collection they focus on how the large-scale dynamics of the Earth system influence the spatial pattern of climate variability and change, and how that spatial pattern in turn influences global warming through the activation of various feedback processes,鈥� Armour said. 鈥淎 major focus is to provide an improved understanding of global and regional climate predictably on timescales of decades to centuries.鈥�
笔补诲颈濒濒补-骋补尘颈帽辞听is an assistant professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. She is an environmental physiologist with a background in photobiology, reproduction, molecular ecology and oceanography. She studies the ecophysiology and reproductive biology of algae and marine invertebrates in a changing environment.聽By combining field and laboratory techniques, she聽examines the importance of transgenerational effects in acclimatization and local adaptation, and聽she investigates the synergistic effects of multiple stressors on coastal ecosystems.聽Padilla-Gami帽o is interested in science communication and community engagement and is the author of the bilingual children鈥檚 book “,” which has been translated in five languages.
鈥淢y research has uncovered fundamental insights on global change biology, parental effects, symbiosis, coral reproduction and the effects of ocean acidification and microplastics in seafood,鈥� she said.
Hajishirzi is an assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and an AI research fellow at the . She addresses foundational problems in natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Her goal is to develop general-purpose algorithms that can represent, comprehend and reason about diverse forms of data efficiently and on a large scale. Hajishirzi鈥檚 research spans multiple domains, including representation learning, question answering, knowledge graphs, and applications such as conversational dialogue and knowledge extraction from unstructured text.
鈥淓normous amounts of information are available online in multiple forms across diverse resources; for example, in news articles, web pages, textbooks and technical documents,鈥� she said. 鈥淎n important challenge in AI is how to represent and integrate diverse resources to facilitate further comprehension and reasoning. It is the right time to address this challenge at large scale and in real-world settings, using a unified representation that combines the best features of deep neural models and symbolic formalisms.鈥�
Lee is an assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and a visiting researcher at . He combines ideas from continuous and discrete mathematics to produce state-of-the-art algorithms for solving optimization problems that underpin the theory and practice of computing. His work encompasses multiple domains, including convex optimization, convex geometry, spectral graph theory and online algorithms.
“From machine learning and experiment design, to route planning and medical imaging, convex optimization is used everywhere,鈥� Lee said. 鈥淢y group develops new techniques and algorithms to optimize faster, with the goal to design a universal optimization algorithm without compromising performance.鈥�
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For more information, contact Jackson Holtz at jjholtz@uw.edu.