Three Stanford researchers awarded Sloan Fellowships

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has chosen three Stanford scholars to receive Sloan Research Fellowships.

Chao-Lin Kuo, Maxence Nachury and Michèle Tertilt are among the 118 early-career scientists, mathematicians and economists in the United States and Canada to receive $50,000 in unrestricted research grants over the next two years. The fellowships, which have been awarded since 1955, are designed to help promising scholars pursue their research interests.

CHAO-LIN KUO is an assistant professor of physics and a researcher at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. His research deals with a profound question: How did the universe begin? He is concerned with the cosmological interpretation of the research, as well as with developing the technology that captures clues from the far reaches of the universe by studying the most ancient light, the cosmic microwave background. His group is involved in a South Pole-based telescope survey of the polarization of the microwave background. Kuo earned a physics degree from National Taiwan University and his doctorate in astrophysics from the University of California-Berkeley.

MAXENCE NACHURY earned his doctorate in molecular and cellular biology from the University of California-Berkeley and the Université Paris-Orsay in 2001, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech in 2007. He came to Stanford as an assistant professor of molecular and cellular physiology in 2008. His research focuses on the recently discovered role of cilia—short, tentacle-like projections on eukaryotic cells—in many cell-signaling pathways. Abnormal ciliary function is implicated in a variety of hereditary disorders characterized by retinal degeneration, kidney cysts and obesity. Nachury and his lab are working to characterize these disorders at the molecular and cellular levels to gain insight into the basic mechanisms of primary cilium biogenesis and to discover novel ciliary signaling pathways.

MICHÈLE TERTILT is an assistant professor of economics. She focuses on macroeconomics, family economics, consumer credit, growth and development, and demography. She is a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and is affiliated with the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Tertilt is also a research affiliate at the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research and a faculty research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The School of Medicine Office of Communications and Public Affairs contributed to this article.

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