Texas State’s Hiro Lee Tanaka named 2023 Sloan Research Fellow in mathematics

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has named Hiro Lee Tanaka, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Texas State University, a 2023 Sloan Research Fellow in mathematics.

Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships honor extraordinary U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.

Tanaka came to Texas State in 2019 from Harvard University, where he was a Benjamin Peirce Fellow. He has also served as a visiting researcher at the Isaac Newton Institute, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics. In 2021, he was awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant by the National Science Foundation for work on symplectic geometry and spectral algebra.

"Sloan Research Fellows are shining examples of innovative and impactful research,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We are thrilled to support their groundbreaking work and we look forward to following their continued success."

A Sloan Research Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards available to young researchers, in part because many past Fellows have gone on to become towering figures in science. Renowned physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann were Sloan Research Fellows, as was mathematician John Nash, one of the fathers of modern game theory. Sloan fellows have received 57 Nobel Prizes in their respective fields, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics and 22 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.

Fellows from the 2023 cohort are drawn from a diverse range of 54 institutions across the U.S. and Canada, from large public university systems, to Ivy League institutions, to small liberal arts colleges.

Open to scholars in seven scientific and technical fields—chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics—the Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Candidates are nominated by fellow scientists and winners are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. More than 1,000 researchers are nominated each year for 126 fellowship slots. Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship which can be used flexibly to advance the fellow’s research.

A full list of the 2023 Fellows cohort is available at https://sloan.org/fellowships/2023-Fellows.