Two VU investigators land Sloan Foundation fellowships
Human geneticist Marylyn Ritchie, Ph.D., and physicist Andreas Berlind, Ph.D., have each won two-year, $50,000 research fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation aimed at encouraging promising young scholars.
Ritchie is associate professor of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics and of Biomedical Informatics, director of the program in Computational Genomics and an investigator in the Vanderbilt Center for Human Genetics Research.
Marylyn Ritchie, Ph.D.
Since she joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2004, she has focused on development of new computational and statistical methods to identify genes that increase the disease risk and which influence response to medications.
Last fall she received a two-year, $1.8 million federal stimulus grant to use Vanderbilt's supercomputer to help identify connections between inherited and environmental factors that contribute to common, complex diseases like diabetes.
Berlind collects universes: the assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy studies the formation of the large-scale structure of the universe by analyzing simulated universes that begin under slightly different conditions.
Andreas Berlind, Ph.D.
This allows the physicist to study issues such as the relationship between galaxies, which are observable, and the underlying dark matter, which is not. He runs these large simulations at supercomputer centers around the country.
He also studies the clustering of galaxies using data from large observation surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a collaboration that Vanderbilt recently joined. Comparing the results of the simulations with observational data places important constraints on cosmology and galaxy formation physics. Berlind joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2007.