University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Mathematics Lei Chen received a 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This two-year, $75,000 fellowship is awarded annually to early-career researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. 

“We are very proud to see three of our faculty members recognized in the same year,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS). “Lei [Chen], Alicia [Kollár] and Pratyush [Tiwary] have very bright futures ahead of them and we appreciate the Sloan Foundation recognizing their potential and supporting them now during their early careers.”

Chen, who arrived at UMD in 2021, will use the fellowship to further her research on problems that connect group theory, geometric topology and dynamics.

The field of topology generally aims to classify different kinds of geometric objects called manifolds. For example, mathematicians see a ball and a cube as the same manifolds because they can be continuously reshaped to each other, but a ball and a donut are two different manifolds because they cannot. Chen focuses her research on the symmetry of manifolds. She and her collaborators have successfully classified all the relationships between the total symmetry of all manifolds.

“I am very excited and honored to receive this award and funding,” Chen said. “I will use this funding to travel and invite people to UMD to expand my research. Also, big thanks to UMD and all my letter writers for supporting me and sharing their mathematical world with me!”

This semester, Chen is working at Brown University’s Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics as a semester participant for a special program on “braids.” Chen joined UMD following a postdoc position as Noether Instructor at Caltech. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 2018 and her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from China’s Peking University in 2013.

Awarded this year to 118 of the brightest young scientists across the U.S. and Canada, the Sloan Research Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. They are also often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s science faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising junior researchers to its ranks. 

“Today's Sloan Research Fellows represent the scientific leaders of tomorrow,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “As formidable young scholars, they are already shaping the research agenda within their respective fields—and their trailblazing won't end here.”

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 68 faculty members from UMD have received a Sloan Research Fellowship. A dozen CMNS faculty members have been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships since 2015.