Owen Zidar was among the 126 researchers from more than 60 research institutions in the United States and Canada named as 2020 Sloan Research Fellows. He joins Aleksandr Logunov, S. Matthew Weinberg, also of Princeton.

Sloan Research Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early career researchers, often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s science faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising junior researchers to its ranks.  Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 229 faculty from Princeton University have received a Sloan Research Fellowship. 

Awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the two-year, $75,000 grants recognize outstanding scientists and scholars early in their careers. Recipients can use the grants as they wish to further their research.

Zidar, an associate professor of economics and public affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, joined the faculty in 2018. He also is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and he has been an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, and an analyst at Bain Capital Ventures. Zidar earned a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and B.A. from Dartmouth College.

Sloan Research Fellowships are available to scholars in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists, and winning fellows are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars in their field on the basis of the nominee’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in the field.