Sloan Fellowships for UC Davis Mathematician Laura Starkston, Neuroscientist Rishidev Chaudhuri

By Andy Fell

Two faculty members at the University of California, Davis, have been named as 2021 Sloan Research Fellows by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Considered one of the most prestigious fellowships given to young researchers, the Sloan fellowship includes $75,000 over two years to support the fellow’s research.

“A Sloan Research Fellow is a rising star, plain and simple,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in a statement announcing this year’s fellowships. “To receive a fellowship is to be told by the scientific community that your achievements as a young scholar are already driving the research frontier.”

Here are the UC Davis honorees:

Rishidev Chaudhuri is an assistant professor with a joint appointment between the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, College of Biological Sciences; and the Department of Mathematics, College of Letters and Science. He studies how the brain processes information, drawing on ideas from information theory, dynamical systems and machine learning, and using them to build mathematical models of brain function and analyze large-scale recordings of brain activity. 

Laura Starkston is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, College of Letters and Science. Her research is in symplectic topology and low-dimensional topology. For example, she studies how four-dimensional spaces, or manifolds, can be represented in two or three dimensions. One approach to that, Starkston said, is to construct a series of two-dimensional pieces that fit together in a specific way to define a four-dimensional object, much as a floor, walls and roof can fit together to define a three-dimensional house. 

The four-dimensional spaces Starkston studies are abstract, but could represent anything with four parameters — such as a three-dimensional object that changes over time. 

The foundation awards 128 Sloan Research Fellowships a year in eight fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.