UIC mathematician selected for Sloan fellowship

University of Illinois Chicago mathematician Nicole Looper has been selected to receive a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Sloan Research Fellowships honor extraordinary U.S. and Canadian early career researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders in their field. Awarded annually since 1955, the two-year, $75,000 fellowship is among the most prestigious awards for young researchers in seven scientific and technical fields.

Looper, whose research interests involve arithmetic dynamics and arithmetic geometry, is among 126 members of this year’s cohort, drawn from a diverse range of 54 institutions across the U.S. and Canada.

She is the 20th faculty member from UIC’s department of mathematics, statistics and computer science to receive a Sloan fellowship since the program began. Prior to becoming an assistant professor at UIC in 2022, Looper was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge and Brown University. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and received her master’s and PhD from Northwestern University.