Veronica Augustyn named Sloan Research Fellow

Veronica Augustyn, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University, has been awarded a 2019 Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry. Augustyn’s research focuses on the electrochemistry of materials. This research has important implications regarding how energy is converted and stored in devices such as batteries, electrochemical capacitors, and fuel cells.

Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields – chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics – the two-year Sloan Research Fellowships are given to U.S. and Canadian researchers whose achievements mark them as among the very best scientific minds working today, the foundation said in a press release. Fellows receive $70,000 for research-related expenses from the foundation.

Augustyn is the fifth NC State faculty member to receive the prestigious award, which has been given annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Chemist T. Brent Gunnoe was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2004, mathematician Jonathan Hauenstein received the award in 2014, biomedical engineer Zhen Gu received it in 2016, and mathematician Tye Lidman received the award in 2018.

Past Sloan Research Fellows include physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, and game theorist John Nash. Forty-five fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science and 17 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.

In addition to her research on energy technologies, Augustyn also leads the SciBridge project, which develops renewable energy research and education collaborations between universities in Africa and the U.S.

This post was originally published in NC State News.