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Two Arts and Sciences professors named 2023 Sloan Research Fellows

February 22, 2023

Two Arts and Sciences professors named 2023 Sloan Research Fellows

Christo Sevov and Caroline Terry

Article originally appeared on the College of Arts and Sciences website

Christo Sevov, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Caroline Terry, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, have been named recipients of the 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. The annual honors are awarded to early-career scientists from across the U.S. and Canada whose achievements place them among the most promising researchers in their fields.

The two-year, $75,000 fellowship is granted by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to scientists in eight fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics. Candidates are nominated by senior researchers in their field, and winning fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars.

 “I’m honored to be named a Sloan Research Fellow and am thrilled to see the community’s excitement toward our research on using electricity to synthesize molecules or upconvert chemical wastes and plastics,” Sevov said. “I am extraordinarily grateful to the students, past and present, that have performed all of this amazing research.” 

Research in Sevov’s lab aims to develop strategies for the sustainable use of electricity in material synthesis, without toxic, explosive or expensive reagents. In addition, his team seeks to design large-scale energy storage systems that can assist with the integration of intermittent electrical loads from renewable sources into the electrical grid.

Terry works at the intersection of two fields: combinatorics, which is largely focused on finite objects, and model theory, a branch of mathematical logic traditionally focusing on infinite structures. Terry has shown these fields to be connected in new ways. In particular, her work shows that model theoretic ideas can be translated into the finite setting in order to solve problems in combinatorics.

Terry received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 2010. She completed her PhD in 2016 at the University of Illinois Chicago under the supervision of David Marker and Dhruv Mubayi. She was a Brin Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland from 2016-18, a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in 2017, and an L.E. Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago from 2018-20, after which she joined the Department of Mathematics at Ohio State as an Assistant Professor.

Sevov and Terry join 125 other 2023 Sloan Fellows, as well as 57 past Sloan Research Fellows from Ohio State since 1955. Sevov is also a core faculty member in Ohio State’s Sustainability Institute.

"Sloan Research Fellows are shining examples of innovative and impactful research,” says 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."