April 6, 1995 Contact: Robert Irion (408/459-2495)

SLOAN FOUNDATION RECOGNIZES UC SANTA CRUZ PHYSICIST

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Physicist Onuttom Narayan, who will join the UC Santa Cruz faculty in July, is one of 100 outstanding young scientists and economists who have won prestigious fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the foundation announced last week. The fellowship is worth $30,000 per year for two years.

Narayan, age 30, currently is a junior fellow at Harvard University. He accepted a faculty position at UCSC last year, but he deferred his appointment until July 1995 to complete his work at Harvard. Narayan holds an M.S. in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He will be an assistant professor of physics at UCSC.

Narayan studies disordered systems that are unstable for long periods. The presence of "dirt," or impurities, in such systems makes them behave in different and more complex ways than uniform systems. Using mathematical analysis, Narayan strives to understand those behaviors. Applications include high-temperature superconductors, which hold promise for carrying electricity cheaply and efficiently, and the extraction of oil from porous rocks.

Since 1955, the Sloan Foundation has awarded nearly $69 million to more than 3,000 young researchers. Seventeen former Sloan Fellows have received Nobel Prizes. The average age of the 1995 fellows is about 32 years. They were selected from among hundreds of scientists in the early stages of their careers, based on their exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. Candidates are nominated by department chairs and other senior scholars familiar with their talents.

Sloan Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them, and they are permitted to use fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims. This flexibility often is of great value to young scientists who are at a pivotal stage in establishing their own independent research projects.

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