Frédéric G. Gibou, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is among this year's 116 national winners of prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The new Sloan Fellows are engaged in research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, and neuroscience. The new Sloan Research Fellows were selected from among hundreds of highly qualified scientists in the early stages of their careers on the basis of their exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. In the 50 years that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has been awarding research fellowships, 34 former Sloan Fellows have received Nobel Prizes. Gibou's research is focused on the design of new computational algorithms for a variety of applications including materials science, computer vision with an emphasis on the segmentation of medical images, and computational fluid dynamics. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA and did postdoctoral research at Stanford University. He joined the UCSB faculty in 2004. The Sloan Fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. The award is for $45,000 over a two-year period. Funds are awarded directly to the Fellow's institution and may be used by the Fellow for such purposes as equipment, technical assistance, professional travel, trainee support, or any other activity directly related to the Fellow's research. The Sloan Research Fellowships were established in 1955 to provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars, often in their first appointments to university faculties, who were trying to set up laboratories and establish their independent research projects with little or no outside support. Financial assistance, even in modest amounts, in the careers of promising young scientists is seen as critically important.