Chao Li and Lerrel Pinto Win Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships

Chao Li, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, and Lerrel Pinto, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, have been awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowships recognize “exceptional U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders,” the Sloan Foundation said in announcing this year’s 126 fellows.

Fellows receive $75,000, over a two-year period, to further their research. Five NYU faculty members received fellowships this year. “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.” 

Professor Li's ’s research centers on the interface between physics and mathematics—the study of shape and curvature. A major tool of his work is geometric variational theory, which investigates how surfaces, such as soap bubbles and black holes, interact with the space around them. In his recent work, he used such variational objects to reveal connections between curvature conditions and topological structures of high-dimensional spaces.

Professor Pinto focuses on building general-purpose robots that learn in the natural, messy world we live in. This involves solving a gamut of research problems, from designing new sensors and accumulating large datasets of robot data for everyday tasks to learning robotic behaviors from this data and developing algorithms to quickly adapt in the face of new challenges. To make further progress in these areas, his research group’s work is designed to be low-cost and open-sourced to the scientific community.