University of Georgia faculty member Pierrick Bousseau has been awarded a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship to support his research for the next two years, the Sloan Foundation announced on Feb. 18.
Bousseau, assistant professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of mathematics will receive $75,000 from the two-year fellowship. One of 126 early-career researchers selected as 2025 Sloan Fellows nationwide, Bousseau is the 15th Sloan recipient from UGA since the organization began its fellowship program in 1955.
“The ambitious, exceptional curiosity of creative inquiry among our faculty continues to resonate across the nation, as this newest Sloan Fellowship for Dr. Bousseau confirms,” said Anna Stenport, dean of the Franklin College. “This important honor and critical research support marks a signal career achievement for an innovative young faculty member as well as a prominent distinction for the university. We congratulate Dr. Bousseau on his extraordinary achievement.”
Bousseau’s research in the area of algebraic geometry focuses on moduli spaces of curves and sheaves, Gromov-Witten and Donaldson-Thomas invariants, tropical geometry and cluster varieties. He was one of two winners of the 2024 Dubrovin Medal, a special prize that recognizes promising young researchers who have made exceptional contributions to the fields of mathematical physics and geometry.
“It is a great honor to be selected as a Sloan fellow,” Bousseau said. “I appreciate the support of my colleagues in our department for nominating me. I am thrilled that our research program received this recognition from the Sloan Foundation.”
A Sloan Research Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards available to young researchers, in part because so many past Fellows have gone on to become distinguished figures in science. To date, 58 Fellows have received a Nobel Prize, including John Hopfield, the 2024 Nobel laureate in physics. Seventy-two Fellows have won the National Medal of Science, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics and 24 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2009.
“This award will allow us to advance research in the intersection of geometry and physics. My collaborators and I will continue to explore the conjectural dualities predicted by the physics of string theory, with applications to classical questions in algebraic geometry,” Bousseau said.
Sloan Fellowships are open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics. Candidates are nominated by fellow scientists, and winning Fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on candidates’ research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field.
