(L-R) Katie Bouman, Lee McCuller, Vikram Ravi, and Antoine Song (Photos – caltech.edu)
Four Caltech faculty members have been awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship for 2024: Katie Bouman, assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering and astronomy; Lee McCuller, assistant professor of physics; Vikram Ravi, assistant professor of astronomy; and Antoine Song, assistant professor of mathematics.
By Whitney Clavin
The fellowships honor exceptional U.S. and Canadian researchers “whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders,” according to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which has been granting the awards annually since 1955.
The Caltech professors are among 126 early-career scientists who have been selected to receive the fellowships, which come with $75,000 over two years to advance research projects.
Katie Bouman
Katie Bouman is a computational imaging scientist whose methods combine ideas from signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, and physics to bring out hidden signals in scientific and technical data. She is a key member of the Event Horizon Telescope project, which made history in 2019 by unveiling the first image of a black hole, in this case, a supermassive black hole lying at the heart of the M87 galaxy.
Lee McCuller
Lee McCuller is an expert at creating technologies that make the most precise measurements in the world. These quantum measurements are at the heart of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory(LIGO), which has been detecting gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars since it first detected ripples in space-time in 2015.
Vikram Ravi
Vikram Ravi is an astronomer specializing in energetic dynamic events, such as fast radio bursts, or FRBs, which are powerful eruptions of radio waves that originate primarily from remote galaxies and whose cause remains unknown. Ravi co-led the development of the Deep Synoptic Array-110, an array of radio dishes at Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory, which has now identified and pinpointed over 60 FRBs to their galaxies of origin.
Antoine Song
Antoine Song specializes in differential geometry, the study of shapes using analysis and differential equations. For his PhD thesis, Song showed that there are infinitely many minimal surfaces in any three-dimensional space. Recently, Song and his colleague Conghan Dong, a graduate student at Stony Brook University, helped prove an aspect of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
This article has been modified for clarity and brevity. Read the full story at caltech.edu.
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