PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded three Brown University faculty members — an economist and two mathematicians — with 2025 early-career research fellowships.
The foundation on Tuesday, Feb. 18, named Brendan Keith, an assistant professor of applied mathematics, Eric Larson, an assistant professor of mathematics, and Jonathan Roth, an assistant professor of economics, among 126 researchers from across the United States and Canada to receive the prestigious fellowships this year. Each scholar will receive $75,000 over two years to advance their research.
Brendan Keith: Addressing engineering challenges through computation
Keith said the Sloan Research Fellowship will help advance his work developing new numerical methods for scientific computing and optimal design. He leads the METHODS group at Brown, a research team using numerical analysis and optimization principles to develop computer algorithms and data-driven mathematical models. He uses these algorithms, or numerical methods, to tackle challenging engineering problems written as partial differential equations, which are equations used to model physical systems. In particular, Keith’s work focuses on creating numerical methods that can be used to simulate complicated physical environments, such as turbulent wind interactions with high-rise buildings.
“The Sloan Fellowship will allow me to develop numerical methods for variational inequalities, which are used to model physical processes when the solution variables — such as displacements, temperatures, budgets and phases — are constrained,” Keith said.
In a recent study that Keith said helped him win the fellowship, he and his co-author, Visiting Scholar in Applied Mathematics Thomas Surowiec, introduced a new nonlinear numerical method that provides a promising alternative to more classical procedures for addressing industrial-scale problems. Each of the numerical experiments in the study is accompanied by an open-source implementation to facilitate the reproduction of the results and broader adoption of the numerical method by the scientific community.
“I am inspired by engineering applications that require deep mathematics to truly understand,” Keith said. “I have had a passion for mathematics all of my life.”
Keith, who earned a Ph.D. in computational science, engineering and mathematics from the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California before joining the faculty in Brown’s Division [MOU1] [MOU2] of Applied Mathematics in 2022.
Eric Larson: Exploring algebraic curves
Larson said the Sloan Research Fellowship will offer him the flexibility to focus on ambitious long-term projects related to his research on algebraic curves, which are one-dimensional sets of points that can be described by polynomial equations.
“Algebraic geometry is a central field of study in mathematics, with connections to many other fields of mathematics, from combinatorics and complex analysis to number theory,” Larson said. “Even though algebraic curves are the simplest objects in algebraic geometry, there are still many deep unanswered questions about them.”
Through his research, Larson is exploring what sorts of algebraic curves exist and what they look like.
“Formalizing this leads to the notion of moduli spaces of curves, which are among the most-studied objects in algebraic geometry over the past century,” said Larson, who wrote a paper giving the first calculation of the integral intersection theory of a moduli space of stable curves. “Some of my research focuses on their intersection theory, which describes how various conditions you might put on curves interact — and I also study Brill-Noether theory, which describes how these curves can be embedded in space.”
In 2022, Larson and Brown Associate Professor of Mathematics Isabel Vogt solved the interpolation problem — a centuries-old question about some of the most basic objects in geometry. While predicting the real-world applications of pure math research can be challenging, Larson noted that earlier work on the very same interpolation problem in the 1700s by mathematicians like Edward Waring and Joseph-Louis Lagrange laid the groundwork for practical applications in the 20th century.
“It turned out to have incredibly important practical applications in the 1900s — which those earlier researchers absolutely did not foresee — to the construction of Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes, which currently power most digital storage media,” he said.
Larson, who holds a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University before joining the faculty in Brown’s Department of Mathematics in 2021. Long before his professional pursuits, Larson discovered a passion for math as a child.
“My excitement about mathematics first developed in elementary school, when I learned from Euclid’s proof that there were infinitely many prime numbers,” Larson recalled. “This initial spark of excitement grew into a deep passion in middle and high school, primarily through participating in and training for math competitions, and mathematics has been a central part of my life ever since.
“I enjoy thinking about difficult problems for years on end,” he said.
Jonathan Roth: Analyzing how policies impact people
Roth said the Sloan Research Fellowship will help advance his research in econometrics, which is the statistical toolkit economists use to evaluate economic policies and interventions, such as law changes that increase the minimum wage or expand Medicaid, or personalized interventions that provide job training programs or a subsidy to go to college.
“My goal as a researcher is to help make social science research as credible and informative as possible,” Roth said. “Social scientists study so many different programs that can have a big impact on people’s lives, and I try to give them statistical tools that help them credibly learn as much as possible about social programs and interventions.”
In one study, Roth and his co-author developed a methodology to analyze the outcome of an experiment with a staggered, randomized rollout in which police officers in Chicago received a training meant to reduce police misconduct. In another study, he and his co-authors examined the outcomes of training programs that target low-wage workers. For much of Roth’s research, the goal is to help determine the causal effect of a policy.
“A fun feature of working on statistical methodology is that it can be applied in a large range of empirical settings,” Roth said. “The methodologies have been used to analyze a huge range of policies and interventions, including the training for police officers, the expansion of Medicaid, tax reform in France and a policy meant to increase women’s labor supply in Saudi Arabia, among many other applications.”
For someone with an aptitude and passion for math, science, history and politics, Roth said the field of economics enables him to combine his quantitative skills with his interest in public policy.
“There is some really good theoretical statistical work out there that’s not necessarily written or packaged in a way that can be immediately understood and used by the people actually analyzing data in practice,” Roth said. “My research helps bridge the gap between statistical theory and what applied economics researchers are actually doing in practice.”
Roth has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and served as a senior researcher at Microsoft before joining the faculty in Brown’s Department of Economics in 2021.
About the Sloan Fellowships
The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually to early-career scientists and scholars identified as the next generation of scientific leaders. Past fellows include mathematician John Nash, widely regarded as a father of modern game theory, and Nobel Prize-winning elementary particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
According to the Sloan Foundation, more than 1,000 scholars across seven scientific and technical fields were nominated by their fellow scientists this year. A panel of senior scholars selected the 126 fellows from a diverse range of 51 institutions across the U.S. and Canada based on their research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become leaders in their field.
Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 75 faculty from Brown have received the prestigious award.