Madden, 2007 Sloan Research Fellowship recipient

February 22, 2007

Samuel Madden, EECS Assistant Professor, ITT Career Development Professor and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has been named one of 116 recipients of the Sloan Research Fellowship awards for 2007.

Professor Madden received his PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2003 and joined the MIT EECS faculty in January, 2004. His research interests include database systems, specifically as applied to querying data streams and networks of distributed devices such as wireless sensor networks. Madden's current projects related to probabilistic data management, wireless networking, replication, and high-performance database architectures, include CarTel aimed at developing and deploying a mobile distributed sensing computer system. CarTel applications include road traffic monitoring, on-board automotive diagnostics and notification and road condition monitoring.

From the Sloan Research Fellowship website: "The Sloan Research Fellowships were established in 1955 to provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars, often in their first appointments to university faculties, who were endeavoring to set up laboratories and establish their independent research projects with little or no outside support."

"Selection procedures for the Sloan Research Fellowships are designed to identify those who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge. Sloan Research Fellows, once chosen, are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of the most compelling interest to them. Their Sloan funds can be applied to a wide variety of uses for which other, more restricted funds such as research project grants cannot usually be employed. Former Fellows report that this flexibility often gives the fellowships a value well beyond their dollar amounts."

It is interesting to note that well beyond the monetary assistance from the Sloan Fellowship, 32 Sloan Fellows have won Nobel Prizes later in their careers, and hundreds have received other honors. Former recent winners in EECS include Dina Katabi (2006), Fredo Durand (2006) and Erik D. Demaine (2006).

Congratulations Sam!