Amid uncertainty surrounding federal funding, four Princeton professors were awarded the 2025 Sloan Fellowship Awards to continue their research for at least the next two years.
The application for a Sloan Fellowship requires a nomination from a fellow faculty member, submission of reference letters and personal work, and a decision by the Sloan Fellowship Selection Committee. According to the website, awards are granted “annually to early-career researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.” The award is a two-year, $75,000 fellowship that was first awarded in 1955.
To date, researchers at Princeton have won 264 of the fellowships, including five last year and six the year before. Princeton had 10 Sloan Fellows in 2019, the most of any year this century.
The four winners from Princeton this year are Jason Klusowski, Maria Micaela Sviatschi, Alexandra Amon, and Lue Pan GS ’18.
According to Ellora Derenoncourt, assistant professor of economics and a 2024 Sloan Fellowship recipient, the award is notable for “freeing [researchers] up to explore big questions that we might have been constrained in exploring again, because of any financial constraints.”
Klusowski, an assistant professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, found out he had won the 2025 award while on the train home from Princeton to Manhattan.
“I was in Penn Station, and right as I was getting off the train, I checked my email,” Klusowski told The Daily Princetonian. “It was like, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been selected.’ I was literally shaking. I was just ecstatic. Of course, I called my wife, and it was exciting to be able to share it with her.”
Klusowski’s research is primarily concerned with how AI systems use data for decision-making and improving the transparency, reliability, and effectiveness of these methods.
“The award will allow me to hire more students and more postdocs and pay for research dissemination — traveling to conferences and giving talks,” Klusowski said. “I would say the majority would be spent on training students, because, by far, that’s the most rewarding and important aspect of my job.”
Sviatschi, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs, wrote to the ‘Prince’ about how the fund will help advance her research of “how individuals’ lives and well-being[s] are shaped by the presence of non-state violence” and seeks “to identify policies to reduce exposure to non-state violence.”
“I am planning to use the funds to advance my research in organized crime and gender-based violence,” Sviatschi said. “In particular, I will use it to collect data on how criminal organizations work in Latin America and the role of children, as well as to understand how police officers’ attitudes towards gender-based violence affect their performance in India.”
Pan, a Princeton 2025 winner and assistant professor of mathematics, expressed to the ‘Prince’ in an emailed statement, “It is a great honor for me to be awarded the Sloan Fellowship of this year, both as a Princeton alumnus and as a Princeton researcher! I am very much looking forward to a productive time as a Sloan Research Fellow in the next few years.”
Assistant professor of astrophysics Amon, another 2025 winner, shared in an interview how the award will help her research on the composition of galaxies. Because many groups that gather these surveys of galaxies “have a very strict requirement of what we have to deliver,” Amon said, “the funding is fairly unrestricted, so it gives us an opportunity to try out new methods and new techniques that are a bit more blue sky thinking.”
Amon noted that joining the line of recipients for this award is a great honor. “There are many people who’ve gotten this award that I really respect, and I feel very honored to be considered among them,” she said. “We have a bit of a higher risk, but a higher reward, and that’s quite hard to do on typical funding routes for these experiments.”
Derenoncourt expressed that a decrease in federal grants could affect how researchers search for funding, telling the ’Prince,’ “Unfortunately, there will be an even greater reliance potentially on foundation grants as opposed to federal grants.”
“They’ll focus on specific areas, for example, and those priority areas are going to come from the people at the foundation that they’re interested in,” she added. ”If foundations ever were to narrow the set of topics that they’re interested in, then it’ll be harder for some researchers to find funding for their projects.”
When asked whether the Sloan Award and other awards granted by private foundations make it easier for researchers, Amon told the ‘Prince,’ “I certainly hope so … It’s such a competitive field every time we apply for funding, that any additional recognition or backing that you have is a good sign.”
For Derenoncourt, “The nice thing about the Sloan award, specifically, is it’s really ‘to the researcher.’ It’s not tied to a specific project.”
“It’s hard to predict when you’re starting out on a bunch of different research projects what the needs will be in each one,” she added.
Columbia is the Ivy League school with the most Sloan Research awards in 2025. The University of California system won the most awards at 16, with Berkeley and Los Angeles each winning the most, with six each.
Luke Grippo is a staff News writer for the ‘Prince.’ He is from South Jersey and usually covers administrative issues, including USG, the CPUC, and institutional legacy.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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