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Four Princeton scientists have been selected to receive 2009 Sloan Research Fellowships, highly competitive grants given to outstanding scholars who are conducting research at the frontiers of their fields.

The recipients are:

• Andrei Bernevig, a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, who is studying different topics in condensed matter physics — from aspects of the quantum Hall effect to iron high-temperature superconductors. He has been a junior fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics since 2006 and will join the Department of Physics as an assistant professor in September.

• Zahid Hasan, an assistant professor of physics, who uses high-energy accelerators to study fundamental quantum effects in exotic superconductors, topological insulators and quantum magnets in connection with developing new methods of quantum computing. He joined the faculty in 2002.

• Andrew Houck, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, who is researching the properties of electronics on a quantum level. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton, graduating as the valedictorian of the class of 2000. He joined the Princeton faculty this past September.

• William Jones, an assistant professor of physics and specialist in observational cosmology. He is using the large-scale polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation as a laboratory for probing the physics of the embryonic universe. A 1998 Princeton graduate, he joined the faculty this past September.

They are among 118 scientists, mathematicians and economists chosen for the award. Sloan Research Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them, and they are permitted to employ the funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims. The grants of $50,000 each for a two-year period are administered by their institutions.

2009 Guggenheim Fellowships

Six Princeton faculty members are among the 180 artists, scholars and scientists selected from nearly 3,000 applicants for the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowships. Each Guggenheim Fellow, appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment, receives a grant to support his or her work.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has distributed more than $273 million in fellowships since its establishment in 1925. The 2009 Princeton recipients and their proposed projects are:

• Caryl Emerson, the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and professor of Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature, for “The Theater and Literary Essays of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.”

• Jianqing Fan, the Frederick L. Moore, Class of 1918, Professor in Finance and professor of operations research and financial engineering, for “Feature Selection and Statistical Learning in Ultrahigh Dimensional Space.”

• Denis Feeney, the Giger Professor of Latin and professor of classics, for “The Invention of Roman Literature.”

• Susan Fiske, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, for “Envy and Scorn: How Power Divides Us.”

• Steven Gubser, professor of physics, for “String Theory and Strongly Coupled Phenomena.”

• Muhammad Zaman, the Robert H. Niehaus ’77 Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion, for “Islam in Pakistan.”

2009 Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Award

Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics, has been awarded the 2009 Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics by the American Mathematical Society.

Presented every four years, the award recognizes an individual deemed to have made the most substantial contribution in research in the field of pure mathematics and one with the potential for future production of distinguished research in the field. To fulfill the criteria, the prize committee has decided to grant the award for the most substantial Ph.D. thesis produced in the four-year interval between awards.

Mirzakhani’s work was cited as being exceptionally creative and highly original. Her efforts combined tools as diverse as hyperbolic geometry, classical methods of automorphic forms and symplectic reduction to obtain results on three different mathematical questions. She is best known for her advances in hyperbolic geometry, including her solution of a problem that involved calculating the volumes of moduli spaces of curves. These are geometric objects whose points each represent a different hyperbolic surface. Examples in the real world include doughnuts and amoebae but the implications are largely theoretical. She solved the problem by drawing a series of loops on the surface of the shapes and calculating their lengths.

Mirzakhani, a graduate of the Sharif University of Technology in Iran, joined the Princeton faculty after earning her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004.

The society also recognized two other mathematicians with Princeton ties.

Aaron Pixton, a 2008 graduate, was named the winner of the 2009 Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research by an Undergraduate Student for five papers in addition to his Princeton thesis. One paper has already appeared in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, two others have been accepted by Forum Mathematicum and the International Journal of Number Theory and two others have been submitted. Pixton currently is studying mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He will return to Princeton next fall to enter the Ph.D. program.

Another 2008 Princeton graduate, Andrei Negut, earned an honorable mention for the Morgan Prize for his senior thesis.