Two Colorado State University Professors Awarded Prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship

Note to Editors: Please contact Brad Bohlander at (970) 491-1545 or brad.bohlander@colostate.edu to obtain print-quality photographs of Dr. Bartels and Dr. Rovis.

Two Colorado State University professors have been selected to receive the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship, the oldest and one of the most competitive fellowship programs in the United States. The fellowships are awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to honor and promote the science of outstanding researchers early in their academic careers.

Randy Bartels, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Tomislav Rovis, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, were awarded the Sloan Fellowships. Other universities with more than one professor awarded the fellowship include Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, the University of Washington and MIT. No other Colorado university was awarded a Sloan Fellowship this year.

"Early in their careers, Dr. Bartels and Dr. Rovis are already recognized as innovators and national leaders in their fields," said Colorado State University President Larry Edward Penley. "We are proud to have these outstanding young professors as members of our faculty and pleased that they have been honored with this well-deserved fellowship."

Grants of $45,000 for a two-year period are provided to the fellows who are free to use the funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims. Selection procedures for the Sloan Research Fellowship are designed to identify professors who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge. In the 50 years that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has been awarding research fellowships, 32 Sloan Fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes and hundreds have received other prestigious awards and honors.

"Dr. Bartels and Dr. Rovis were chosen from a large pool of outstanding young professors from throughout the nation. The selection process is rigorous and this fellowship is given only to the best of the best," said Anthony Frank, interim provost and senior vice president at Colorado State. "Our undergraduate students, like students at Harvard, Yale and the nation’s other top research universities, have the opportunities to learn directly from the brightest minds and best scholars of their time."

The Sloan Foundation announced yesterday that 116 outstanding young scientists from 54 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada have been selected to receive the prestigious fellowship. A complete listing of winners is available on the Web at www.sloan.org/programs/fellowshiplist.shtml.

Before joining the electrical and computer engineering department in 2003, Bartels earned his doctoral degree in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2002.

Bartels heads the Colorado State University Laboratory for Ultrafast and Nonlinear Optics. His research concentrates on the generation and control of short laser pulses and their use for the control of quantum and extreme nonlinear optical systems.

In 2004, Bartels was awarded prestigious national awards from two prominent scientific organizations. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and the Optical Society of America Adolph Lomb Medal. Bartels received both honors for his exceptional achievements and contributions in the early stages of his career.

Bartels has received numerous other awards and was selected as a member of the U.S. delegation to attend the 51st annual meeting of Nobel laureates in Lindau, Germany. He also has published more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and has been invited to speak at more than 25 conferences. His research has been widely reported in trade publications and the popular press. Bartels is a member of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society and the Laser and Electro-optics Society/ Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

For more information on Bartels and his research, visit the Web at www.engr.colostate.edu/ultrafast.

Rovis joined Colorado State in 2000 after earning his doctoral degree from the University of Toronto in 1998 and serving as a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard University.

Rovis leads the Rovis Organic Chemistry Research Group at Colorado State which focuses on the use of asymmetric catalysis in tackling problems of molecular complexity. Rovis and his team place emphasis on developing innovative means to solve difficult chemistry problems for which a general solution is lacking in the field.

In 2004, Rovis was awarded the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award that supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century, and the Amgen Young Investigator Award. He was honored with the GlaxoSmithKline Young Faculty Award in 2003.

Rovis has received several other awards and accolades including recently being awarded the Johnson & Johnson Focused Giving Grant and the 2004 Eli Lilly Granteeship. Since beginning at Colorado State, he has received four Merck Laboratories grants as well as grants from the American Chemical Society and the National Institutes of health to support his research. Rovis has published more than 25 peer-reviewed journal articles and has given more than 35 invited seminars with another 14 scheduled for this year.

More information about Rovis and his research is available on the Web at www.chem.colostate.edu/rovis.

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