NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Rutgers physicist Kristjan Haule has won a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a highly competitive award intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members working in seven fields of science in the United States and Canada.
An assistant professor of physics in his third year in the School of Arts and Sciences, Haule plans to use the $50,000 fellowship to develop computer simulations that predict properties of materials with layers only a few atoms thick. These new materials have the potential to replace traditional semiconducting devices for solar energy conversion from heat into electricity.
Haule is one of 118 outstanding young faculty members at 64 major North American universities to receive an award this year. The Sloan fellowship, designed to identify those who show the most outstanding promise of fundamental contributions to new knowledge, provides broad-based research funding for a two-year period.
Haule does research in condensed matter physics, which deals with the physical properties of solid and liquid matter. He specializes in computer simulations of novel materials, which in-turn help scientists better understand newly observed behaviors of these materials and how they interact. The materials he focuses on include radioactive actinides, transition metal compounds and materials with rare earth atoms.
“There are many uses for these so-called strongly correlated materials, such as giant magnetoresistive recording heads in computer disk drives that boost data storage while driving down size and cost,” Haule said. “But there are other materials such as cuprate-based high temperature superconductors that we need to understand better before we can realize their promise in real-world products.”
The Sloan Foundation established its research fellowship program in 1955 to support and recognize early-career scientists and scholars, often in their first appointments to university faculties. Recipients typically have more flexibility with Sloan funding than they would with project grants or other more restricted funding sources. In the program’s history, 35 recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes and hundreds have received other prestigious awards and honors.
A native of Slovenia in southern central Europe, Haule earned his bachelor of science degree in 1997 and his doctor of philosophy degree in 2002 from the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia’s capital city. He did postdoctoral research at Rutgers in 2002 and 2003, and returned to Ljubljana as a research scientist at the Josef Stefan Institute. He accepted an academic appointment at Rutgers in 2005, noting that Rutgers’ research effort in condensed matter theory is highly regarded among physicists worldwide.
During his three years at Rutgers, Haule has been the lead author of two research articles in Nature and Science, both prestigious international scientific journals. He teaches graduate-level courses in computational physics and many-body physics. He lives in Highland Park, N.J.