Todd Zickler named a 2008 Alfred P. Sloan research fellow

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - February 21, 2008 - Todd Zickler, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), is among the 118 outstanding young scientists, mathematicians, and economists named as Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows.The winners (six, including Zickler, who are from Harvard) are faculty members at 64 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada who are conducting research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and neuroscience.

Zickler conducts research in the field of computer vision -- working to build systems that visually understand and interact with their environment. His interests can be roughly broken into three areas: developing methods to acquire meaningful information about the world from this data; finding efficient representations for this information; and applying these representations to visual tasks such recognition, tracking, surveillance, navigation and human-computer interfaces.

The Sloan Research Fellowships have been awarded since 1955, initially in only three scientific fields: physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Since then, 35 Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in their fields; and 14 have received the Fields Medal, the top honor in mathematics.

Although Sloan Research Fellowships in economics began only in 1983, since then Sloan Fellows have accounted for 8 of the 13 winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, generally considered the top honor for young economists.

Grants of $50,000 for a two-year period are administered by each Fellow’s institution. Once chosen, Sloan Research Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them, and they are permitted to employ Fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims.

For a complete list of winners, visit http://www.sloan.org/programs/fellowshiplist.shtml