Release: Eight UChicago scholars awarded prestigious Sloan Fellowships in 2026

Eight University of Chicago scholars have earned Sloan Research Fellowships, which recognize early-career scholars' potential to make substantial contributions to their fields.

Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. This year's class of 2026 fellows, announced Feb. 17, will receive two-year fellowships in the amount of $75,000 to further their innovative research.

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 229 faculty from UChicago have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Learn more about this year's winners:

Chibueze Amanchukwu is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory.

His research is focused on developing earth-abundant and intrinsically safe batteries for the electric grid; inventing new methods for integrated carbon capture and electrochemical conversion to valuable fuels and chemicals; and accelerating energy materials discovery using artificial intelligence/machine learning.

Amanchukwu received his PhD in chemical engineering from MIT and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge (UK).

Aloni Cohen is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Data Science Institute.

Cohen is at the forefront of the emerging discipline of computer science and law, where rigorous computer science engages directly with legal questions. With a focus on data privacy and AI, he aims to understand and resolve the tensions between the theory of privacy and cryptography and the laws that govern the use of data in the real world. To do so, Cohen develops and studies computational frameworks to operationalize challenges from personally identifiable information, the right to be forgotten, the right to silence, and copyright.

By bridging conceptual gaps between computer science and legal approaches to data privacy and AI regulation, Cohen's work lays firm foundations for the development of socially beneficial data-driven technologies.

Cohen received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and previously held a postdoctoral appointment at Boston University.

Peter Maurer is an assistant professor of molecular engineering in the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Maurer focuses on the development and application of novel imaging and sensing modalities that enable the investigation of biological systems that are not accessible by conventional techniques. To this end, the lab explores coherent control techniques and quantum algorithms that harness solid state spin systems of increasing complexity and combines them with state-of-the-art biophysics tools. Physics World named his creation of a first-of-its-kind biological qubit one of the top 10 research breakthroughs of 2025.

Maurer received his PhD in physics from Harvard University and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

Jack Mountjoy is an associate professor of economics and the Robert H. Topel Faculty Scholar at the Booth School of Business.

His research explores the economics and econometrics of education, labor markets and social mobility.

Mountjoy earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Chicago Booth, Mountjoy completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He also worked as an economic research analyst at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Christina Patterson is an associate professor of economics and the Robert King Steel Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth.

Patterson studies macroeconomics and labor economics, focusing on how inequality across workers and firms can affect the economy's response to shocks. Her research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, AEJ: Macroeconomics, and European Economic Review. She also serves as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Patterson earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. Prior to joining Booth, Patterson was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Prior to entering academia, Patterson served as a research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Shaoda Wang is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Wang is an applied economist whose research spans political economy and development and environmental economics, with a regional focus on China. He investigates how political institutions shape policy design, implementation and outcomes, and the implications for economic performance, environmental regulation and governance.

A notable strand of his work explores the political economy of environmental regulation to understand how incentives faced by officials and citizens influence regulatory enforcement and environmental quality. Wang conducted one study in this area that provided one of the first rigorous estimates of the overall costs of environmental regulation in China.

In addition to his faculty role at Harris, Wang serves as deputy faculty director of the Energy Policy Institute at UChicago (EPIC-China), helping to advance interdisciplinary research on energy and environmental policy relevant to China and beyond. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Anna Wuttig is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry.

The Wuttig Group is building a catalyst development platform aimed at synthesizing value-added products, from fuels to complex molecules, using readily available electricity and underutilized yet abundant feedstocks.

All electrochemical systems include a structurally complex, electrified interface, a dimension that challenges predictive design of efficient and selective electrocatalytic synthetic sequences. This challenge is amplified in the pursuit of scalable, reusable, and durable technologies; on the essential heterogeneous electrocatalysts, only a fraction of the surface sites is catalytically active. We advance in-situ spectroscopic and synthetic methods to distinguish and target scattered active sites. Combining these advances with mechanistic studies, we introduce a new conceptual catalyst development framework where the inherent structural disorder of heterogeneous electrocatalysts systems is a feature, not a deterrent.

Her previous honors include the Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award in Chemistry and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She received her Ph.D. from MIT and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley before joining UChicago in July 2021.

Zoe Yan is an assistant professor at the James Franck Institute and the Department of Physics. She studies experimental quantum many-body physics using the platform of ultracold atoms and molecules. Her experiments combine cutting-edge technologies in trapping and imaging particles and tailoring their interactions to study emergent phenomena of strongly interacting quantum systems.

Before joining UChicago in 2023, Yan earned her Ph.D. from MIT and was a Dicke Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. She has also been honored with the Packard Foundation Fellowship and the Air Force Young Investigator Program.