Two Cornell faculty members and one new hire who will join the faculty this summer have been named 2014 Sloan Research Fellows by the Sloan Foundation.
Sloan Research Fellowships “seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.” The two-year, $50,000 fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of performance and potential in their fields.

Lionel Levine, assistant professor of mathematics, studies belian networks, which are discrete dynamical systems with a strong convergence property. They can also be considered a means of associating algebraic invariants to graphs, as well as being a model of asynchronous computation. In this definition, nodes of a network pass messages along edges to perform a computation that requires no central control over timing.

David Steurer, assistant professor of computer science, investigates the computational complexity of optimization problems at the core of computer science and its applications. He also recently received a National Science Foundation early career award for his research on the Unique Games Conjecture and the sum-of-squares method, two central developments toward the effort of uncovering the power and limitations of efficient algorithms for such problems.

Charles Smart, assistant professor of mathematics at MIT who will join the Cornell faculty this July, studies nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) that lead to probabilistic settings, typically as the scaling limit of a discrete stochastic process or game. His recent work in PDEs focuses on the macroscopic effects of random microscopic structure in materials. He has also collaborated with Levine on two projects studying algebraic and geometric aspects of the “Abelian sandpile.”