Fu awarded Sloan Research Fellowship

Kevin Fu, assistant professor of Computer Science, has been selected by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as a Sloan Research Fellow for 2009.

Grants of $50,000 for a two-year period are administered by each fellow’s institution. Once chosen, Sloan Research Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them, and they are permitted to employ fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims.

The 118 winners of these two-year fellowships are faculty members at 61 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada who are conducting research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and neuroscience.

A member of the faculty since 2005, Fu investigates how to ensure the security and privacy of pervasive devices that must withstand determined, malicious parties. His primary focus is on improving the security and privacy of pervasive healthcare and energy-constrained computational architectures such as RFIDs and implantable medical devices. His research received best paper awards from USENIX Security and the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

“The Sloan Research Fellowships support the work of exceptional young researchers early in their academic careers, and often at pivotal stages in their work,” says Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “I am proud of the foundation’s rich history in providing the resources and flexibility necessary for young researchers to enhance their scholarship, and I look forward to the future achievements of the 2009 Sloan Research Fellows.”

Sloan Research Fellowships have been awarded since 1955, initially in only three scientific fields: physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Since then, 38 Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in their fields and 14 have received the Fields Medal, the top honor in mathematics. Although Sloan Research Fellowships in economics only began in 1983, Sloan Fellows have subsequently accounted for eight of the 13 winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, generally considered the top honor for young economists.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit, grant-making institution based in New York City. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of the General Motors Corporation, the foundation makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic performance.

More Information

List of fellowship recipients

February 17, 2009.