A chemist who researches carbohydrates with medical applications and a statistician who studies human evolution have been awarded Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships each worth $50,000 over two years. They are Xi Chen, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Chemistry, and Katherine Pollard, assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and at the UC Davis Genome Center.

Chen joined UC Davis in 2003 after postdoctoral research at Wayne State University, Detroit. She carries out research on the chemistry of carbohydrates and sugarlike molecules, especially related to their biological and medical properties. Many infectious bacteria are coated in carbohydrates that play an important role in causing disease, but they can also be used as vaccines. Sugarlike molecules made by cancer cells, for example, could be targets for therapy or diagnostic tools.

Chen received her bachelor's degree in chemistry from Xiamen University, China, in 1994 and her Ph.D. in chemistry from Wayne State University in 2000.

Pollard uses computational methods to study areas of rapid evolution in the human genome. With colleagues at UC Santa Cruz, she has identified specific areas of human DNA that have undergone the most rapid change since humans and chimpanzees separated from a common ancestor.

Pollard received her bachelor's degree from Pomona College in 1995, and a master's and doctorate in biostatistics from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 2003, respectively. She carried out postdoctoral research at UC Santa Cruz, where she was part of the consortium that sequenced the chimpanzee genome. Pollard joined the faculty at UC Davis in 2005.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards 118 Sloan Research Fellowships each year to young scientists in the areas of chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. The fellowships are aimed at helping scientists at an early stage in their careers who show outstanding promise for making fundamental contributions to knowledge.