FOUR PITT PROFESSORS AWARDED SLOAN RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS

PITTSBURGH, April 21 -- Four University of Pittsburgh faculty members were among the 100 outstanding young scientists to be awarded 1999 Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Sloan Foundation annually recognizes 100 scholars "who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge" in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.

Only four institutions had more awardees than Pitt: the University of California at Berkeley (five); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (five); the University of Pennsylvania (five); and Stanford University (six).

The four Pitt professors are:

• Carson Chow, assistant professor of mathematics. Chow's research is in applied mathematics, with an emphasis on computational neuroscience, creating and studying mathematical and computational models of interactions between neurons and how these interactions lead to observable behavior.

• Julie Fiez, assistant professor of psychology. Fiez is studying the neural basis of language processing, including mapping the brain regions involved in coordinating how words look and how they sound. She also is exploring working memory, the ability to maintain and manipulate information over short periods, and the neural basis for changes in the language system based on experience.

• Karl Kandler, assistant professor of neurobiology. Kandler is examining auditory brain cells to learn more about the mechanisms by which inhibitory connections develop and change.

• Tara Meyer, assistant professor of chemistry. Meyer's research is in inorganic polymer chemistry, with an emphasis on creating new polymers using metal-catalyzed reactions.

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