UCLA Scholars Awarded 2013 Sloan Research Fellowships

University tied for second in number of new fellows selected this year

Five outstanding young professors from UCLA are among 126 scientists and scholars in the United States and Canada to receive 2013 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Two of the five UCLA recipients are members of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research Center.

UCLA is tied for second in the number of new fellows selected this year, along with Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is first, with six.

The fellowships are awarded to exceptional young researchers who "represent the very best that science has to offer" and are "the next generation of leaders in the natural sciences, economics, and mathematics," according to the New York–based foundation.

UCLA's 2013 recipients are:

Jason Ernst
Ernst is an assistant professor in the department of biological chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and in the computer science department at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is also a member of UCLA's Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research Center and UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Ernst conducts research in computational biology and bioinformatics, developing and applying computational methods to better analyze and model high-throughput experimental data in order to address problems related to epigenomics and gene regulation.

Yi Xing
Xing is an associate professor in the department of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, a member of UCLA's Institute for Molecular Medicine and UCLA's Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research Center. His laboratory studies gene regulation at the RNA level using computational and experimental approaches, and Xing and his colleagues develop novel methods for the analysis of massive genomic data. They integrate computational studies with high-throughput and experimental research to investigate the variation and dynamics of RNA regulatory networks among species, within human populations, and in response to developmental and disease signals.