Seven faculty members win Sloan Research Fellowships for early-career researchers

Seven Princeton faculty members are among the 126 early-career scientists and engineers who have received this year's Sloan Research Fellowship, recognizing promising early-career researchers. 

This year's fellows are Maria Apostolaki, Benjamin Eysenbach, and Yasaman Ghasempour of the Department of Computer Science; William Jacobs and Erin Stache of the Department of Chemistry; Isobel Ojalvo of the Department of Physics; and Bartolomeo Stellato of the Department of Mathematics.

Sloan Research Fellowships are available in seven fields — chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics — and recipients are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars in each discipline.

“The Sloan Research Fellows are among the most promising early-career researchers in the U.S. and Canada, already driving meaningful progress in their respective disciplines,” said Stacie Bloom, president and CEO of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how these exceptional scholars continue to unlock new scientific advancements, redefine their fields, and foster the well-being and knowledge of all."

Since 1955, 259 Princeton University faculty have received these prestigious fellowships, which come with a $75,000 award that can be used flexibly. 

Maria Apostolaki

Apostolaki, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science. Her work focuses on the design of secure, reliable and high-performance networked systems for the internet and modern data centers. She develops neurosymbolic networking foundations that unify machine learning with formal reasoning to diagnose failures, detect attacks and enforce correctness and safety properties in large, complex network environments. 

Apostolaki joined the Princeton faculty in 2022. She earned her Ph.D. from ETH Zurich and completed postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University. She is associated faculty in the Center for Information Technology Policy, the DeCenter, and the NextG Initiative, Princeton’s program in advanced communications technology. She has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Google Research Scholar Award, two Applied Networking Research Prizes from the Internet Engineering Task Force, and multiple commendations for outstanding teaching from Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS).

Benjamin Eysenbach

Eysenbach, an assistant professor of computer science, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science. His research involves how AI systems learn and explore. Much of his work uses reinforcement learning techniques, a type of machine learning that employs rewards and feedback to teach an autonomous agent to make intelligent decisions through trial and error. His lab is now pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning by exploring ways AI systems can learn without rewards. The goal is to design more robust, simpler methods to address important problems in science and society. 

Eysenbach joined the Princeton faculty in 2023. He is affiliated with the Princeton Program in Cognitive Science, the Princeton Language Initiative and the Natural and Artificial Minds initiative. His work has been recognized by a NeurIPS Best Paper Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and a Hertz Fellowship. He has also received an Alfred Rheinstein Faculty Award and recognition for outstanding teaching from SEAS. He completed a doctorate in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University and spent several years at Google Brain and Google Research before and during his doctoral work. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Yasaman Ghasempour

Ghasempour, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science. She studies the fundamental mechanisms behind wireless communication and sensing, developing advanced tools that use high-frequency signals, especially in the millimeter-wave and terahertz bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Ghasempour has pioneered techniques, systems and protocols to access and efficiently use this part of the spectrum, addressing its unique challenges to enable ultra-fast connectivity and high-resolution sensing for future wireless networks. 

Ghasempour joined Princeton in 2021 after completing her Ph.D. at Rice University. She is associated faculty in computer science and co-directs Princeton’s NextG Initiative. Her awards include a Young Investigator Program Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Marconi Young Scholar Award and two commendations for outstanding teaching from SEAS. She has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering to take part in the U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium and is featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as a change-making innovator in wireless technology. 

William Jacobs

Jacobs, an assistant professor of chemistry, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry. His work brings together theoretical chemistry, biophysics and materials science, using computer simulations and statistical mechanics to study how molecules assemble into more complex structures. He and his research team study the fast and robust self-assembly of living systems in the hopes of optimizing kinetic pathways for molecular self-assembly. 

Jacobs came to Princeton in 2019 after completing his postdoctoral studies at Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. He has a B.S. from the University of Virginia in physics and engineering science, and a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from the University of Cambridge. His previous awards include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2022 and an NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) in 2024. 

Isobel Ojalvo

Ojalvo, an assistant professor of physics, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics. Ojalvo studies particles that decay to Tau leptons. She and her research team collect data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva. She is also developing an anomaly detection algorithm to use AI to identify collision events that are particularly rare or unusual, with the goal of finding the “new physics” needed to complete our understanding of the universe.

She came to Princeton as a Dicke Fellow, a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship, in 2016 and joined the faculty in 2019. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and a B.S. from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Prior to receiving her doctorate, she worked at Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems in El Segundo, California. She has received grants from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund, the Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Traineeship Program and the National Science Foundation Graduate Traineeship Program, among others. 

Erin Stache

Stache, an assistant professor of chemistry, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry. Stache is developing cutting-edge methods to break down, upcycle and chemically recycle commercial plastics. Her approach converts light to heat in order to rapidly and inexpensively break down previously unrecyclable commercial plastics.

Stache joined Princeton in 2023 from Cornell University, where she was an assistant professor of chemistry. She earned her B.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and her Ph.D. from Colorado State University, where she was advised by Tomislav Rovis of Columbia University and Abigail Doyle, then at Princeton. Among her many honors, she won a Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career Research Program award in 2023 and a Marion Milligan Mason Women in the Chemical Sciences Award in 2024 from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Bartolomeo Stellato

Stellato, an assistant professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, received a Sloan Research Fellowship in Mathematics. His work focuses on creating algorithms that can make critical decisions in real time. The decisions, whether guiding drones through a city, dispatching power across an electrical grid or timing a trade in a chaotic market, must be both fast and accurate. 

Stellato has pioneered methods that balance computational efficiency with reliability. A central challenge in mathematical optimization is that classical theory often predicts far worse performance than what algorithms achieve in practice. Stellato's work closes this gap: he develops new analytical frameworks that explain why algorithms work well on real-world problems and uses those insights to design faster ones.

Stellato joined the Princeton faculty in 2020 after earning his doctorate from the University of Oxford and completing a postdoctoral appointment at MIT's Sloan School of Management. His honors include the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society, awarded for outstanding computational optimization software; a National Science Foundation CAREER Award; and a Young Investigator Program Award from the Office of Naval Research. Most recently, he received the Howard B. Wentz, Jr. Junior Faculty Award from SEAS. Affiliated with the Robotics at Princeton and AI at Princeton initiatives, he is a fellow of Whitman and Yeh Colleges.

Liz Fuller-Wright from the Office of Communications, Wendy Plump from the Department of Chemistry and Scott Lyon from the Office of Engineering Communications contributed to this article.