Sloan fellowships awarded to two faculty

Two UW–Madison faculty members, a physicist and an economist, have been named fellows by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Cary B. Forest, an assistant professor of physics, and Derek A. Neal, an associate professor of economics, are among 100 young scientists and economists in the U.S. and Canada to receive the highly competitive fellowships.

The Sloan Research Fellowship Program is among the oldest of its kind in the country. It was initiated in 1955 as a means of encouraging and supporting young scholars at a critical time in their careers. Each fellowship includes an unrestricted grant of $35,000 administered over a two-year period.

Forest joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1997. His studies are focused on current and magnetic field generation in plasmas, phenomena of importance to understanding many aspects of space physics, astrophysics and geophysics.

Neal, newly hired from the University of Chicago by the UW–Madison economics department, will join the faculty here next fall. Among other things, Neal’s work focuses on studies of wages and the performance of private schools.