Tamara Bogdanovic, assistant professor in the School of Physics, was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders.

“It is quite an honor to receive one of the Sloan Research Fellowships, which I see not only as a recognition of my research activities, but also as an invitation to do bigger and better things,” said Bogdanovic.

Bogdanovic came to Georgia Tech last August where she works on the astrophysics of supermassive black holes and the physics of the intracluster medium.

With black holes, she said her main objective is to understand how these massive bodies interact with stars and gas in the centers of their host galaxies in order to predict the observational signatures of these interactions, so that they can be recognized in the future.

“I also study the hot, x-ray emitting gas, the intracluster medium, that resides in the clusters of galaxies. This medium is an unmistakable tracer of the massive dark matter potentials of galaxy clusters,” she said.

The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in eight scientific fields - chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics. Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists and are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. This year, 126 scholars from 61 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada were awarded these fellowships of $50,000.

“The Sloan Research Fellows are the best of the best among young scientists,” said Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “If you want to know were the next big scientific breakthrough will come from look to these extraordinary men and women. The foundation is proud to support them during this pivotal stage of their careers.”