Seventeen University of California faculty have been named 2025 Sloan Research fellows, a prestigious award that recognizes promising early-career scientists and scholars, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today (Feb. 18).
More Sloan fellows are affiliated with UC than any other institution granted the awards this year. UC’s fellowship-winning faculty represent 5 campuses, as shown in the table below.
| 2025 Sloan fellows | |
|---|---|
| UC Berkeley | 6 |
| UC Irvine | 1 |
| UCLA | 6 |
| UC San Diego | 2 |
| UC San Francisco | 2 |
| Total fellows | 17 |
Fellows receive a two-year, $75,000 award which can be used flexibly to advance their research.
This year, Sloan fellowships were granted to 126 early-career scientists across 51 institutions in the United States and Canada in recognition of their innovative and promising research. These awards are regarded as a marker of the quality of an institution’s science faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising junior researchers to its ranks, as Sloan fellows have gone on to earn Nobel Prizes (58), National Medals of Science (72), and Fields Medals in Mathematics (17).
Among the 930 UC faculty named Sloan fellows since the program’s 1955 inception are luminaries such as the late UC San Diego professor Mario J. Molina (also a UC Berkeley alumnus), who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering the threat posed to the Earth’s ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases, and Andrea Ghez, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020. Sloan fellow and UCLA mathematician Terence Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014.
“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.”
The awards are open to scholars holding a Ph.D. or equivalent in seven different scientific and technical fields — chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics — with nominations made by fellow scientists. Winners are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a scientific pathbreaker.
The 2025 UC Sloan fellows are:
UC Berkeley
Natacha Crooks, computer science
Chen Lian, economics
Tony Feng, mathematics
Song Mei, mathematics
James K. Nuñez, neuroscience
Raúl A. Briceño, physics
UC Irvine
Lauren V. Albrecht, neuroscience
UCLA
Yotam Shem-Tov, economics
Anton Bernshteyn, mathematics
Ernest K. Ryu, mathematics
Chuchu Zhang, neuroscience
Hao Cao, physics
Alvine C. Kamaha, physics
UC San Diego
Xiaolong Wang, computer science
Vashan Wright, Earth system science
UC San Francisco
Qili Liu, neuroscience
Wendy W. S. Yue, neuroscience
