Two Northeastern professors among newest Sloan Foundation fellows
Two Northeastern University professors have received prestigious Sloan Foundation fellowships in recognition of work that could “revolutionize their fields of study.”
Northeastern University professors Soheil Behnezhad and Mona Minkara have been awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The fellowships recognize early-career researchers employed in a higher education institution “who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study,” according to the foundation.
Each year, the Sloan Foundation announces a new cohort of fellows who receive two years of funding. In an announcement yesterday morning, two Northeastern professors were named among the latest recipients.
Graphs and patterns
Behnezhad, assistant professor of computer science, is one of those recipients. He says that he works on the “foundations of large-scale algorithms” that process so much data they can’t fit on a typical computer.
The applications of this foundational work range from analyzing massive social media networks to the way neurons connect in the brain to online labor markets and even kidney exchange, Behnezhad says.
The problems that Behnezhad studies, he continues, have been studied since the beginning of his field — his challenge is to apply those foundations to graphs charting massive amounts of data.
In recent research, he and his collaborators showed how Vizing’s theorem, which concerns how the edges connecting points in a graph can be colored to show relationships, could be solved by a faster method than previously discovered, providing “a near-optimal algorithm for this fundamental problem,” according to the paper.
Behnezhad says that the Sloan Fellowship support will have a very positive impact on his research. He plans to use the fellowship to “recruit more students and support them.”
Behnezhad says that he is grateful for the recognition from the Sloan Foundation, but that it also “motivates me to keep pushing and designing more efficient algorithms.”
“I’m also very grateful to my mentors and students,” he says.
How we breathe
Minkara, an assistant professor of bioengineering, says that her research focuses on computationally modeling the molecules that interface between the lungs and the air we inhale, which allow us to breathe.
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She has also received a 2026 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship.
That interface substance is called the pulmonary surfactant, and is made out of proteins and lipids, she says. Her latest research attempts to model a type of protein within the surfactant called collectins, which Minkara says are “our first line of immune defense.”
In the pulmonary surfactant, collectins identify pathogens attempting to enter the body through the lungs. “I try to understand how they do that,” Minkara says.
“We don’t really know how these collectins work,” she continues. Therefore, “we don’t really know how to enhance innate immunity.”
Both Behnezhad and Minkara have also received NSF CAREER awards — Behnezhad in 2025 and Minkara in 2024 — which also support scientists early in their careers.
The Sloan Foundation describes its fellows as early-career scientists “whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.”
Minkara says that the fellowship will help fund her sabbatical year, during which she is trying out something exciting: moving from pure computation to working in a laboratory.
She says that she and her collaborators will look at a specific collectin, how it binds to bacteria and whether that process could assist the immune system. They’ll perform this experiment in mice.
“I’m a computationalist, this is a big step,” she says with a laugh.
She thinks that this might be one reason why the Sloan Foundation selected her work, “because it’s translational,” she says, and because she herself is at a pivot point moving from theory and computation into the experimental lab.
