MCS Faculty Member Receives Sloan Research Fellowship
By Ben Panko
Florian Frick, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Mathematical Sciences, is among 126 recipients of 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships, which honor early career scholars whose achievements put them among the very best scientific minds working today.
"Sloan Research Fellows are the best young scientists working today," said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "Sloan fellows stand out for their creativity, for their hard work, for the importance of the issues they tackle, and the energy and innovation with which they tackle them. To be a Sloan fellow is to be in the vanguard of 21st century science."
Frick describes his research as working "at the triple-point of combinatorics, topology and geometry." An example of Frick's research is his work to determine whether it's possible to find four points that form a square within a curve in a plane. Another area of mathematics he's interested in is one that is relatable to many people at some point in their lives: fair rent division.
A native of Germany, Frick came to Carnegie Mellon last year from Cornell University, where he was an H.C. Wang assistant professor. During that time, he also spent a semester as a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in California. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from Technische Universität Berlin, from which he also obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees.
The other Carnegie Mellon recipients this year are Bernhard Haeupler, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, and Hosein Mohimani, assistant professor in the Computational Biology Department
The Sloan Fellowships are open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields — chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. Winners receive a two-year, $70,000 fellowship to further their research.