SCWIST member Laurel Schafer receives prestigious Sloan Fellowship

This year, for the first time, 2 women from UBC have been awarded Sloan Fellowships for 2007. Sloan fellowships are “are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Currently a total of 116 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics” (from the Sloan Foundation Website).

These are highly competitive awards, for example, the last Sloan Fellowship awarded to a faculty member at UBC in the department of chemistry was approximately 25 years ago, in spite of 3 faculty members being nominated each year. It is amazing and gratifying that this year, two members of the department won in the same year, Ruth Signorell and Laurel Schaffer. This may be the first time that women from UBC have ever received this award.