Jonathan Rivnay Named Sloan Research Fellow

Northwestern Engineering’s Jonathan Rivnay has been awarded a prestigious 2019 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

He is among 126 outstanding early-career scholars being recognized for their achievements and potential to contribute substantially to their scientific fields. This year’s recipients were chosen from 57 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Northwestern University’s Bao Le Hung, assistant professor of mathematics in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and Raffaella Margutti, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Weinberg, also received a 2019 fellowship.

The two-year $70,000 fellowship is one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early career researchers. The fellowships are awarded annually in the fields of chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics.

“Sloan Research Fellows are the best young scientists working today,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Sloan Fellows stand out for their creativity, for their hard work, for the importance of the issues they tackle, and the energy and innovation with which they tackle them. To be a Sloan Fellow is to be in the vanguard of 21st-century science.”

Rivnay was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow in chemistry. He is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering. Rivnay is dedicated to developing new materials and devices to bridge the gap between living tissue and traditional electronics. His research group’s aim is to study how these soft, electrically conductive materials work, to guide materials design and to enable and advance bioelectronic systems for diagnosis, therapy, rehabilitation, and tissue regeneration.

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 104 faculty members from Northwestern have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Administered and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships are awarded in close cooperation with the scientific community. Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by their peers and subsequently are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars.