USC Marshall

USC Marshall Assistant Professor of Data Sciences and Operations Adel Javanmard has been selected to receive a Sloan Research Fellowship—one of the most prestigious awards a young researcher can earn.

Javanmard was awarded a research fellowship in the mathematics category. 

Awarded annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships honor extraordinary U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments distinguish them as the next generation of scientific leaders.

Past fellows such as physicist Richard Feynman and mathematician John Nash have become giants in the field. Fifty-one fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, and 69 have received the National Medal of Science.

On receiving the news, Javanmard said, “It is an honor to be placed among such distinguished ranks. I would regard this achievement not only as a great honor, but also as a great commitment to work harder to uphold the illustrious legacy of the previous august Sloan fellows.”

Javanmard received his Ph.D. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2014 and 2010, respectively. His research interests are broadly in the area of high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, optimization, and graphical models. His other recent awards include the IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award (2020), the Adobe Data Science Faculty Research Award (2020), the NSF CAREER Award (2019), and the Google Faculty Research Award (2016).

“We were delighted to hear about this news,” said Greys Sošić, chair and professor of Marshall’s Department of Data Sciences and Operations. “Adel is a young researcher in the DSO Department with very broad research interests including statistics, machine learning, operations research, and information theory. While usually having papers in many different areas might seem unfocused, the impressive thing about Adel’s research is that he actually has impact in multiple areas.”

The Sloan Research Fellowship is open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields —chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Candidates are nominated by fellow scientists, and winners are selected by independent panels of senior scholars. Each year, more than 1,000 researchers are nominated for just 128 fellowship slots.

The 128 fellows from the 2021 cohort represent 58 higher education institutions. Fellows receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship that can be spent to advance their research.

“As our society today increasingly relies on statistical learning algorithms to support human decisions, the reliability of such systems is of crucial importance,” Javanmard said. “I plan to use the Sloan fellowship to pursue my current research on reproducibility, scalability, and robustness of machine learning algorithms.”