Four members of the MIT faculty representing the departments of Economics, Mathematics, and Physics were recently named recipients of the 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The recipients, all early-career scholars in their fields, will each receive a two-year, $70,000 fellowship to further their research.
This year’s MIT recipients are among 126 scientists who represent 57 institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada. This year’s cohort brings MIT’s total to nearly 300 fellows — more than any single institution in the history of the fellowships since their inception in 1955.
Sloan Fellows are nominated by their fellow researchers and selected from an independent panel of senior scholars on “the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become a leader in his or her field.”
2019 Sloan Fellow Nikhil Agarwal, the Castle Krob Career Development Assistant Professor of Economics in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, studies the empirics of matching markets.
“In these marketplaces, agents cannot simply choose their most preferred option from a menu with posted prices, because goods may be rationed or agents on the other side of the market must agree to a match,” Agarwal says of markets that include medical residency programs, kidney donation, and public school choice. “My research interests lie in how the market structure, market rules, and government policies affect economic outcomes in these settings. To this end, my research involves both developing new empirical techniques and answering applied questions,” he says…