Mangan, Seitz, Wang Named Sloan Research Fellows

Northwestern Engineering faculty members Niall Mangan, Linsey Seitz, and Xiao Wang have been awarded a prestigious 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship. Gifted by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the honor highlights the creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments of early-career researchers. 

With seven new fellows total, Northwestern was the educational institution with the most faculty in the 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship honorees, a distinction it shares this year with MIT, which also has seven fellows. Outside of Mangan, Seitz, and Wang, Northwestern’s new fellows are mathematician Rachel Greenfeld, economist Matthew Rognlie, chemist Roel Tempelaar, and physicist Jason Wang.

The seven faculty, each a part of the McCormick School of Engineering or Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, are among 126 of the most promising young scientists across the US and Canada who make up this year’s class. The annual fellowships are awarded to scholars in seven scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Candidates are nominated by their fellow scientists.

The two-year, $75,000 fellowship is one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to young researchers, and many past fellows have gone on to become distinguished figures in science. The financial support can be used flexibly to advance the fellow’s research. They are also often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising early-career researchers to its ranks.

“The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best of early-career science, embodying the creativity, ambition, and rigor that drive discovery forward,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “These extraordinary scholars are already making significant contributions, and we are confident they will shape the future of their fields in remarkable ways.”

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 169 faculty from the University have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Niall M. Mangan 

Niall Mangan

A mathematics Research Fellow, Mangan is an assistant professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics. Her primary goal as a researcher is to connect speed and automation from top-down data modeling with explanatory power from bottom-up mechanistic modeling. She then rapidly develops new models that she uses to understand complex systems and design engineering solutions.

Mangan’s research allows her to infer things like structure and dynamics of biological and chemical networks and sets up potential to engineer products such as biofuels and high-value decarbonized chemicals.

Linsey Seitz 

Linsey Seitz

Seitz was awarded a fellowship in chemistry and is an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering. Her group aims to transform global chemicals and fuel industries to achieve deep decarbonization by advancing electrocatalytic technologies that use increasingly accessible and inexpensive renewable electricity. Her work is motivated by a desire to understand complex phenomena that are influenced by the application of electric potentials and to apply these insights to design.

Work from the Seitz lab brings critical insights to both model systems and applied technologies to drive better performance in emerging sustainable technology solutions. 

Xiao Wang 

Xiao Wang

An assistant professor of computer science, Wang was selected as a research fellow in computer science. He is interested in computer security, privacy, and cryptography. In his research, Wang focuses on applied cryptography and designs efficient privacy-preserving systems based on secure multi-party computation.

His early research in this area earned him numerous accolades and awards.