Simons Society of Fellows Welcomes 15 New Junior Fellows
Supporting early career researchers and encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration are critical to accelerating scientific discovery. These values are at the heart of the Simons Society of Fellows, which recently welcomed 15 new junior fellows from fields such as neuroscience, astrophysics, microbiology, mathematics and immunology.
Formed in 2014, the Simons Society of Fellows encourages intellectual interactions across disciplines and research centers around New York City. Fellows attend dinners, annual retreats, conferences and workshops. The society comprises both Junior and Senior Fellows, with Junior Fellows receiving support from the Simons Foundation for up to three years of independent research with no teaching obligations.
Meet the new fellows:
Andrew Bahle
New York University School of Medicine
Bahle aims to understand how vocal flexibility arises from a small network of interconnected brain regions and to explore the limits of avian vocal abilities.
Angus Beane
New York University
Beane studies the present-day properties of stars to understand the origins of the Milky Way.
Sydney Blattman
Sloan Kettering Institute
Blattman is studying cell state transitions in cancer and developing single-cell technologies to enable new insights.
Adam C. Burnett
New York University
Burnett is interested in large-scale atmospheric dynamics, tropical meteorology and climate model improvement.
Hector Afonso Cruz
New York University
By constructing novel analytical tools, Cruz seeks to probe the fundamentals of different luminous populations, the nature of the universe’s early structure formation and departures from concordance-model physics.
Charles Dowell
Rockefeller University
By using neurogenetic tools and the complete wiring diagram (known as the connectome) of the fruit fly brain, Dowell hopes to build a detailed description of how spatial memories of odor structure an animal’s navigational objectives.
Asma Farhat
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Farhat aims to understand how inflammatory events and the crosstalk between immune cells and tissues shape tissue resilience or dysfunction, particularly during critical windows of life such as early development and aging.
Kevin Hu
Columbia University
Hu’s research interests lie broadly at the intersection of probability theory and mathematical physics.
Elise LePage
Columbia University
LePage’s research lies at the intersection between string theory, low-dimensional topology and categorical representation theory.
Alexis Stutzman Lewis
Columbia University
Lewis investigates the molecular mechanisms by which stress influences olfactory sensory neuron development and how learned experiences are passed through generations.
Noam Mazor
New York University
Mazor’s research focuses on complexity-based cryptography and its connections to meta-complexity.
Maëla Paul
Columbia University
Paul is investigating how single neurons establish complex connection patterns with multiple targets across different brain regions.
Hamish Swanson
Research Foundation of the CUNY, The Advanced Science Research Center
Swanson seeks to elucidate how the molecular architecture of peptide amino acid sequences influences their intermolecular interactions and how these interactions, in turn, affect material properties such as solubility and the tendency to self-assemble.
Thomas Werkmeister
Columbia University
Werkmeister’s research focuses on creating high-quality electronic devices to enhance our understanding of fundamental physics and ultimately develop new technologies utilizing quantum coherence.
Jessica Lauren Zung
Columbia University
Zung studies how flies process visual features and how the underlying neural circuits evolve.
