MIT faculty members Roger Levy, Tracy Slatyer and Martin Wainwright were among 188 scientists, artists and scholars honored Scholarships 2024 from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Working across 52 disciplines, the fellows were selected from nearly 3,000 applicants for their “prior career achievements and outstanding promise.”
Each scholarship holder receives a cash stipend enabling independent work at the highest level. Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows. This year, MIT professors were recognized in the neuroscience, physics and data science categories.
Roger Levy is a professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. By combining gigantic data computational modeling with psycholinguistic experiments, his work advances our understanding of the cognitive foundations of language processing and helps design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language. He is the winner of a research scholarship named after Alfred P. Sloan, an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Tracy Slatyer is a professor at the Faculty of Physics Center for Theoretical Physics In MIT Nuclear Science Laboratory and MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Her research focuses on murky matter – novel theoretical models, prediction of observable signals, and analysis of astrophysical and cosmological datasets. She co-discovered the giant gamma-ray structures known as “Fermi Bubbles” erupting in the center of the Milky Way, for which she received the 2021 Up-to-date Horizons in Physics Award. She is also the recipient of the Simons Investigator Award and the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers.
Martin Wainwright is the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, affiliated with Laboratory of Information Systems and Decisions AND Center for Statistics and Data Science. He is interested in statistics, machine learning, information theory and optimization. Wainwright has been honored with a Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a Lectureship and Medallion Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Joint Statistical Societies. Wainwright is also the co-author of books on graphical and statistical modeling and the author of a book on multivariate statistics.
“Humanity faces serious existential challenges,” says Edward Hirsch, president of the foundation. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing honor. It is a celebrated investment in the lives and careers of outstanding artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are tackling these challenges while generating new opportunities and paths in the broader culture.”