Yan earns prestigious Sloan Foundation fellowship

Hao Yan, a Biodesign Institute researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been named the recipient of a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship.

The Sloan research fellow awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science.

“The Sloan research fellowships support the work of exceptional young researchers early in their academic careers, and often at pivotal stages in their work,” says Paul Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “I am proud of the foundation’s rich history in providing the resources and flexibility necessary for young researchers to enhance their scholarship, and I look forward to the achievements of the 2008 Sloan research fellows.”

Yan is a researcher in the fast-moving field known as structural DNA nanotechnology, which assembles the molecule of life into a variety of nanostructures with a broad range of applications, from human health to nanoelectronics.

Once chosen, Sloan research fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them, and they are permitted to employ fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to advance their research aims.

Yan’s fellowship will support his research in using self-assembled DNA nanostructures to study potential applications in energy and biosensors.

“Both the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Biodesign Institute have been truly supportive of my research over the years,” says Yan, who performs his research in the institute’s Center for Single Molecule Biophysics. “The Sloan research fellowship is a prestigious honor and recognition, and it also will provide some financial freedom for me to work on new ideas that have not been tested before.”

The fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Yan’s was one of 23 awards in chemistry across the United States and Canada.
The fellowship comes with a research grant of $50,000 over two years.

This latest achievement adds to the string of recent honors for Yan, who first joined ASU in 2004. In addition to the Sloan fellowship, Yan has garnered the 2007 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, the 2006 National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the 2006 Arizona Technology Enterprises Innovator of Tomorrow Award.

The Sloan research fellowships have been awarded since 1955, initially in three scientific fields: physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Since then, 35 Sloan research fellows have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in their fields, and 14 have received the Fields Medal, the top honor in mathematics.