CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Three University of Illinois faculty members are recipients of 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The recipients - Ryan J. Foley, Alison R. Fout, and Thomas E. Kuhlman - stand beside 126 other early-career scientists and scholars from 57 colleges and universities chosen for the fellowship. The two-year program awards the fellows $50,000 to pursue their choice of research topics and gives the researchers flexibility in applying funds toward their research.
Foley, a professor of astronomy and of physics, studies exploding stars and other celestial transient objects. He discovered and characterized a peculiar class of exploding stars, Type Iax supernovae. He also uses Type Ia supernovae, more abundant and homogenous cousins of Type Iax supernovae, to measure the expansion and investigate the content of the universe. Foley uses more than a dozen telescopes around the world and in space, including the Hubble Space Telescope, to improve our knowledge of the universe.
Foley earned his doctorate in astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2008. Prior to coming to Illinois in 2013, he held a Clay postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Fout, a professor of chemistry, focuses on addressing environmental, biological and energy problems by designing transition metal complexes and catalysts to understand the activation and transformation of greenhouse gases into novel compounds.
Fout earned her doctorate from Indiana University in 2009. Prior to coming to Illinois in 2012, she held a postdoctoral position at Harvard University. She also has received a 2014 National Science Foundation CAREER award.
Kuhlman, a physics professor, works at the intersection of theoretical physics and molecular microbiology, particularly studying gene expression in E. coli. He observes interactions of proteins with DNA in living bacterial cells, and then uses these theoretical models in further experiments.
Kuhlman earned his doctorate in physics from the University of California at San Diego in 2007. Prior to coming to Illinois in 2012, he held a postdoctoral fellowship with the department of molecular biology at Princeton University.