Seven faculty members from MIT and 21 other alumni are included among 126 early-career scholars recognized with 2025 Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The awardees span across various MIT departments including Biology; Chemistry; Civil and Environmental Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences; Economics; Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Mathematics; and Physics, along with the Music and Theater Arts Section and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The fellowships celebrate outstanding researchers from U.S. and Canadian academic institutions whose ingenuity, innovative spirit, and scholarly achievements mark them as the upcoming leaders in their respective fields. Recipients receive a flexible two-year fellowship totaling $75,000 to advance their research efforts.

“The Sloan Research Fellows epitomize the pinnacle of early-career science, showcasing the creativity, ambition, and steadfastness that propel discovery,” comments Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “These remarkable scholars are already making notable contributions, and we believe they will influence the future of their disciplines in extraordinary ways.”

With this year’s honorees, a cumulative total of 333 MIT faculty members have been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships since the program began in 1955. MIT and Northwestern University share the distinction of having the most faculty in the 2025 cohort, each with seven fellows. The MIT awardees include:

Ariel L. Furst is the Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Her laboratory integrates biological, chemical, and materials engineering to tackle challenges in human health and environmental sustainability, allowing lab members to devise technologies for use in low-resource contexts to guarantee fair access to technology. Furst obtained her PhD in the laboratory of Professor Jacqueline K. Barton at Caltech, focusing on new cancer diagnostic approaches based on DNA charge transport. Subsequently, she served as an A.O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow in Professor Matthew Francis’s lab at the University of California at Berkeley, developing sensors for monitoring environmental contaminants. She is a recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award, NSF CAREER Award, and the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. Furst is dedicated to STEM outreach and promoting the involvement of underrepresented groups in engineering.

Mohsen Ghaffari SM ’13, PhD ’17 is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) as well as at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research delves into the theory behind distributed and parallel computation, delivering influential contributions to various algorithmic challenges, encompassing generic derandomization techniques for distributed systems and parallel computing (resolving several long-standing unresolved issues), enhanced distributed algorithms for graph-related problems, sublinear algorithms established through distributed approaches, along with algorithmic and impossibility outcomes in massively parallel computation. His work has been acknowledged with numerous best paper accolades at forums such as the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), and International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), as well as receiving the European Research Council’s Starting Grant, and a Google Faculty Research Award, among others.

Marzyeh Ghassemi PhD ’17 is an associate professor in EECS and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). Ghassemi obtained dual bachelor’s degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from New Mexico State University, being recognized as a Goldwater Scholar; her MS in biomedical engineering from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar; and her PhD in computer science from MIT. After serving as a visiting researcher with Alphabet’s Verily and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Ghassemi started her position in EECS and IMES as an assistant professor in July 2021. (IMES is home to the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.) She is connected to the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and CSAIL. Ghassemi’s research through the Healthy ML Group develops a rigorous quantitative framework for designing, developing, and deploying machine learning models that are robust and applicable, particularly in health contexts. Her work spans from socially conscious model construction to enhancing subgroup- and shift-robust learning strategies and uncovering significant insights in deployment scenarios that influence policy, health practices, and equity. Among various accolades, Ghassemi has been named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 and an AI2050 Fellow, in addition to receiving the 2018 Seth J. Teller Award, 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data, a 2024 NSF CAREER Award, and the Google Research Scholar Award. She established the nonprofit Association for Health, Inference and Learning (AHLI), and her endeavors have been highlighted in prominent media outlets such as Forbes, Fortune, MIT News, and The Huffington Post.

Darcy McRose holds the position of Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. An environmental microbiologist, she applies methodologies from genetics, chemistry, and geosciences to examine how microbes influence nutrient cycling and plant wellness. Her laboratory employs small molecules, or “secondary metabolites,” produced by plants and microbes as manageable experimental tools to investigate microbial activity in intricate environments like soils and sediments. This work ultimately seeks to reveal the essential controls on microbial physiology and community assembly, which may aid in fostering agricultural sustainability, ecosystem vitality, and human welfare.

Sarah Millholland, an assistant professor in physics at MIT and a member of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, is a theoretical astrophysicist focused on extrasolar planets, including their origins and evolution, orbital dynamics, as well as their interiors and atmospheres. She investigates patterns in observed planetary orbital architectures, looking into characteristics like spacings, eccentricities, inclinations, axial tilts, and planetary size correlations. Her specialization lies in exploring how gravitational interactions—such as tides, resonances, and spin dynamics—affect observable properties of exoplanets. She is the recipient of the 2024 Vera Rubin Early Career Award for her contributions to understanding the formation and dynamics of extrasolar planetary systems. Millholland plans to leverage her Sloan Fellowship to examine the impact of tidal physics on the diversity of orbits and internal structures of exoplanets that orbit closely around their stars.

Emil Verner serves as the Albert F. (1942) and Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Associate Professor of Global Management and is also an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research combines finance and macroeconomics, concentrating on understanding the factors behind financial crises over the past 150 years. Verner’s current studies delve into the catalysts of bank runs and insolvency during banking crises, the role of debt surges in exacerbating macroeconomic fluctuations, the efficacy of debt relief measures during tumultuous periods, and the impact of financial crises on political polarization and support for populist movements. Prior to his tenure at MIT, he attained a PhD in economics from Princeton University.

Christian Wolf, the Rudi Dornbusch Career Development Assistant Professor of Economics and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, specializes in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometrics. His work is centered on developing and applying innovative empirical techniques to tackle classic macroeconomic inquiries and assess how robust the findings are against various widely-used modeling assumptions. His research has offered pioneering insights into monetary transmission mechanisms and fiscal strategies. In another area of research, Wolf has greatly enhanced our understanding of the suitable methodologies macroeconomists ought to employ for estimating impulse response functions—how critical economic variables react to policy alterations or unforeseen shocks.

Additionally, the following MIT alumni have also been awarded fellowships:

Jason Altschuler SM ’18, PhD ’22
David Bau III PhD ’21 
Rene Boiteau PhD ’16 
Lynne Chantranupong PhD ’17
Lydia B. Chilton ’06, ’07, MNG ’09 
Jordan Cotler ’15 
Alexander Ji PhD ’17 
Sarah B. King ’10
Allison Z. Koenecke ’14 
Eric Larson PhD ’18
Chen Lian ’15, PhD ’20
Huanqian Loh ’06 
Ian J. Moult PhD ’16
Lisa Olshansky PhD ’15
Andrew Owens SM ’13, PhD ’16 
Matthew Rognlie PhD ’16
David Rolnick ’12, PhD ’18 
Shreya Saxena PhD ’17
Mark Sellke ’18
Amy X. Zhang PhD ’19 
Aleksandr V. Zhukhovitskiy PhD ’16