The University has a total of seven professors named as Sloan Research Fellows, and along with MIT, has the most faculty in the 2025 cohort.
Seven Northwestern faculty members have been awarded a prestigious 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship. Gifted by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the honor highlights the creativity, innovation and research accomplishments of early-career researchers.
Northwestern was the educational institution with the most faculty in the 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship honorees, a distinction it shares this year with MIT, which also has seven fellows. The fellows are chemists Linsey C. Seitz and Roel Tempelaar, computer scientist Xiao Wang, economist Matthew Rognlie, mathematicians Rachel Greenfeld and Niall M. Mangan, and physicist Jason Wang.
The seven faculty, each a part of the McCormick School of Engineering or Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, are among 126 of the most promising young scientists across the U.S. and Canada who make up this year’s class. The annual fellowships are awarded to scholars in seven scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Candidates are nominated by their fellow scientists.
The two-year $75,000 fellowship is one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to young researchers, and many past fellows have gone on to become distinguished figures in science. The financial support can be used flexibly to advance the fellow’s research. They are also often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising early-career researchers to its ranks.
Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 169 faculty from the University have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Linsey Seitz
Linsey Seitz was awarded a fellowship in chemistry and is an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering in McCormick. Her group aims to transform global chemicals and fuel industries to achieve deep decarbonization by advancing electrocatalytic technologies that use increasingly accessible and inexpensive renewable electricity. Her work is motivated by a desire to understand complex phenomena that are influenced by the application of electric potentials and to apply these insights to design. Work from the Seitz lab brings critical insights to both model systems and applied technologies to drive better performance in emerging sustainable technology solutions.
Roel Tempelaar
Also awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in chemistry, Roel Tempelaar is an assistant professor of chemistry in Weinberg. Tempelaar aims to unravel the mysteries of quantum mechanics and their impact on the properties of emerging materials. Quantum-mechanical interactions among a material’s electrons and nuclei can give rise to unexpected behaviors that defy intuition. The Tempelaar group develops new numerical and theoretical tools to understand such behaviors and advance the basic understandings of chemistry and physics at the nano scale.
Xiao Wang
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Xiao Wang was selected as a research fellow in computer science. He is also a part of McCormick and is interested in computer security, privacy and cryptography. In his research, Wang focuses on applied cryptography and designs efficient privacy-preserving systems based on secure multi-party computation. His early research in this area earned him numerous accolades and awards.
Matthew Rognlie
Matthew Rognlie was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow in economics and is an assistant professor in Weinberg’s economics department. Rognlie focuses on macroeconomics and international economics. He studies the implications of heterogeneity for the economy, including its interaction with fiscal and monetary policy and inflation dynamics, as well as its effects on long-run interest rates, particularly as the population ages. Rognlie’s research agenda has also included the creation of new computational methods to analyze economies with heterogeneity.
Rachel Greenfeld
Rachel Greenfeld became a Sloan Research Fellow in mathematics. She is an assistant professor of mathematics within Weinberg. Among her research interests are harmonic analysis, arithmetic combinatorics, discrete geometry and related areas. She is recognized for her works in tiling theory and her contributions to the study of integer distance sets. Her research is interdisciplinary, bridging gaps between several mathematical fields.
Niall M. Mangan
Also a mathematics Research Fellow, Niall M. Mangan is an assistant professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics in McCormick. Her primary goal as a researcher is to connect speed and automation from top-down data modeling with explanatory power from bottom-up mechanistic modeling. She then rapidly develops new models that she uses to understand complex systems and design engineering solutions. Mangan’s research allows her to infer things like structure and dynamics of biological and chemical networks and sets up potential to engineer products such as biofuels and high-value decarbonized chemicals.
Jason Wang
Finally, assistant professor Jason Wang teaches in Weinberg’s department of physics and astronomy as a core faculty member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), and received a fellowship in the area of physics. Wang takes faint images of exoplanets and removes the glare coming from host stars by using techniques like coronagraphy, spectroscopy and interferometry, developing new techniques to measure the signal and properties of distant exoplanets. He monitors exoplanets over time to trace orbits and infer dynamic histories, and studies atmospheres to infer what they are made of. His current research focuses on the gas giant exoplanets, but he ultimately hopes to find habitable exoplanets.
“The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best of early-career science, embodying the creativity, ambition and rigor that drive discovery forward,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “These extraordinary scholars are already making significant contributions, and we are confident they will shape the future of their fields in remarkable ways.”
Story posted on Northwestern Now, written by Win Reynolds.