February 18, 2025 | UW News
CEI Member Faculty Dianne J. Xiao, Assistant Professor and Klaus & Mary Ann Saegebarth Endowed Faculty Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington (UW), is one of three UW faculty members to have been awarded 2025 early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, and including this year’s fellows, 131 UW faculty have received a Sloan Research Fellowship, according to the Sloan Foundation.
Sloan Fellowships are open to scholars in seven scientific and technical fields — chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics — and honor early-career researchers whose achievements mark them among the next generation of scientific leaders.
The 126 Sloan Fellows for 2025 were selected by researchers and faculty in the scientific community. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. Each fellow will receive $75,000 to apply toward research endeavors.
This year’s fellows come from 51 institutions across the United States and Canada.
Xiao’s research program designs new porous materials to address unsolved challenges in clean energy and chemical sustainability. These include developing new porous adsorbents that can use renewable electricity to drive chemical processes, as well as new porous catalysts that can convert sustainable feedstocks into useful products.
“Porous materials are the bedrock of industrial heterogeneous catalysis and chemical separations. Many of the chemicals we use in our daily lives have, at some point, been purified or chemically transformed within nano-sized pores,” Xiao said. “Going forward, new breakthroughs in porous materials synthesis are needed to harness renewable energy sources and chemical feedstocks. With the support of this award, along with the collaborative ecosystem at the UW, we hope to realize these synthetic breakthroughs faster, better and more cheaply.”
Contact Prof. Xiao at djxiao@uw.edu.
