Young faculty members in Newark and New Brunswick receive Sloan fellowships
Archived article from Apr 24, 2006
By Carl Blesch
Two assistant professors have each received one of science’s most prestigious honors – the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation research fellowship, which provides $45,000 to young faculty members to fund research over two years. The fellows – chemist Frieder Jaekle of Newark and physicist Emil Yuzbashyan of New Brunswick/Piscataway – are among this year’s 116 awardees from 56 major North American universities.
Jaekle, traces his early interest in chemistry to one of his high school courses while growing up in Germany. He focuses on the use of multifunctional and polymeric Lewis acids for applications ranging from catalysis to materials chemistry. One of his group’s research projects aims at developing materials that offer brighter and sharper alternatives to current plasma and liquid crystal display technology used in television, computer and cell phone screens.
Jaekle joined Rutgers after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto in 2000. He earned his doctorate in chemistry summa cum laude from Technical University in Munich, Germany, in 1997, and his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1994, also from Technical University.
Yuzbashyan, who joined Rutgers in 2004 after earning his doctorate in physics from Princeton University, is studying properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero – the point where all motion ceases. Atoms at these temperatures interact with each other in unusual ways; understanding those interactions could promote powerful new technologies such as quantum computing and superconductivity.
A native of Armenia, Yuzbashyan earned his master of science degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1995 and later worked at Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. He came to the United States in 1998 to pursue his doctoral studies.
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