Math prof wins Sloan fellowship

Math prof wins Sloan fellowship

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Shelly Harvey, assistant professor of mathematics, has won a prestigious research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Shelly Harvey

Harvey is one of 116 young researchers in the nation selected to receive the award, which includes a two-year $45,000 grant that may be used in a largely unrestricted manner. The Sloan fellowships are among the most highly sought because the fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of research are of most interest to them.

“I am very honored and encouraged to have received this recognition,” Harvey said. “The award will give me a rare opportunity to make significant progress on my research.”

This year’s Sloan fellows came from the fields of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and neuroscience at 55 of North America’s top research universities.

“We are very grateful for the support the Sloan Foundation has given the junior faculty in our department,” said Michael Wolf, professor and chair of mathematics at Rice University. “Since I was hired at Rice 18 years ago, every assistant professor we’ve appointed has received this fellowship from the Sloan Foundation, and I have seen the tremendous positive effect that the encouragement to do truly original work that comes with this award has had on all of these mathematicians. I’m sure that this will be extraordinarily helpful to Professor Harvey’s career as well.”

Wolf said Harvey’s work is characterized by the complex and inventive use of algebra, which she brings to bear in surprising ways on problems of central importance in topology.

“We’re very fortunate to have Shelly Harvey on our faculty,” he said. “She brings an impressive depth and breadth of tools to the study of low-dimensional topology, and her work is already attracting international attention.”