Two Sloan Fellows
April 2006
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced that Eric Meggers, an assistant professor of chemistry, and Evelyn Thomson, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, would receive a 2006 Sloan Research Fellowship. The fellowship program recognizes the very best young American scientists and provides research grants over a two-year period. Candidates are nominated by department heads and senior researchers.
Meggers, who came to Penn in 2002, received his undergraduate education at the University of Bonn in Germany and earned a PhD. in bioorganic chemistry at the University of Basel in Switzerland. His research spans the boundaries of chemistry, biology and materials science. The Meggers laboratory group works on novel chemical tools for the manipulation of biological processes and biological tools for the creation of molecules and materials with new properties and functions.
Thomson works on precision measurements of top quark properties with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, which is an experiment at Fermilab near Chicago, home of the Tevatron, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. The top quark is the most massive of the 16 known fundamental particles. Thomson is analyzing the largest data sample of top quarkes ever collected by the CDF. The experiment is scheduled to run through at least 2008.
Sloan Research Fellowships are intended to "stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise" for making contributions to new knowledge. Currently, 116 fellowships are awarded annually in chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.