Six CICS Faculty and Students Selected as 2023 Sloan Fellows

CICS-affiliated Sloan Faculty Fellows: (left to right) Hui Guan, Dongyhun Kim, Neena Thota, and Yair Zick

CICS-affiliated Sloan Faculty Fellows: (left to right) Hui Gan, Dongyhun Kim, Neena Thota, and Yair Zick

July 27, 2023

Four Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) affiliated faculty and two CICS undergraduate students are among the 29 selected to serve in the inaugural cohort of the Sloan Fellows Program.

Led by the UMass Institute of Diversity Sciences, and with the help of a $499,972 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Sloan Fellows Program is a research-mentoring program supporting Black, Latine, Hispanic, and Indigenous undergraduate students at UMass Amherst and UMass Boston. Undergraduate students are matched and actively mentored by a faculty fellow as they conduct hands-on research in faculty labs for an entire academic year – part of the program’s three-pronged approach to expanding pathways from undergraduate to graduate education for students from historically marginalized identities in STEM.

Sloan faculty fellows from CICS include Hui Guan, assistant professor; Donghyun Kim, assistant professor; Neena Thota, senior teaching faculty and chair of teaching development; and Yair Zick, assistant professor. CICS-affiliated student fellows include Demann Blaise, now enrolled at UMass Amherst, and Kevin Oliveira Downing.

For more information about the 2023-24 Sloan Fellows Program, see https://www.umass.edu/news/article/institute-diversity-sciences-announces-2023-24-faculty-and-student-sloan-fellows.