This year five faculty from UC San Diego, and 18 from the system-wide University of California are being honored by the Arthur P. Sloan Foundation with Sloan Research Fellowships for 2015. And only 16 computer scientists from the U.S. and Canada made the cut.
Indeed, only one professor of computer science among the 18 UC honorees was named, when the foundation singled out UC San Diego's Shachar Lovett. The expert in computational complexity studies the foundations of computer science, and how computational problems can be efficiently solved. "As the scientific, engineering and life sciences communities continue to be transformed by new, ever larger data sets, the motivation for designing very efficient algorithms to manipulate, store and transfer data is becoming ever more clear," said Lovett in his research statement to the Foundation. "Specifically I study how the interplay between structure and randomness plays a central role in algorithm design and analysis."
The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. The two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field, in Lovett's case, computer science. Other UC San Diego researchers named Sloan Fellows included Padmini Rangamini (Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology), Paul Niehaus (Economics), Andrea Tao (Chemistry) and Bradley Voytek (Neuroscience).
"Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada," noted the Foundation in a full-page New York Times advertisement, adding that since 1955, "Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medal, 65 National Medals of Science" and numerous other honors.
In addition to Lovett. the CSE department claimed another of its own in the form of University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Thomas Ristenpart, a relatively recent alumnus from UC San Diego (Ph.D,, 2010). Ristenpart also is a frequent co-author on cyber security or cryptography papers with current CSE faculty including Hovav Shacham, Mihir Bellare and Stefan Savage.