Evan Schneider , assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, earned a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The prestigious fellowship recognizes promising early-career research scientists for their creativity, innovation and research accomplishments.
Schneider uses supercomputers, including the world’s first and fastest exascale supercomputer, to understand the processes responsible for shaping galaxies. The code she developed, called Cholla, was used to perform early tests on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s exascale Frontier supercomputer before it was officially deployed.
In 2022, her Cholla code, which models galaxies over a nearly unfathomable range of time and distance scales, earned Schneider a Packard Fellowship , making her the first Pitt faculty member to earn the distinction in 25 years, and the first woman at the University to ever do so.
Schneider developed Cholla as part of her thesis at the University of Arizona. She continues to keep the GPU-based hydrodynamics code free and open source on GitHub .
She is particularly interested in gas dynamics when it comes to galaxy formation. Her code models star formation, supernova explosions and other astrophysical phenomena in order to answer fundamental questions about galaxy formation, growth and evolution.
The Sloan Research Fellowship is awarded annually to 126 non-tenured professors. It comes with a $75,000 grant that can be used over two years to support research activities.