Aleksandra Korolova awarded 2024 Sloan Fellowship

Aleksandra Korolova

The Fellowship recognizes creative early-career researchers in the sciences and social sciences. Five faculty members from Princeton have been awarded fellowships this year, and 248 Princeton faculty have received Sloan fellowships since they were first awarded in 1955.

Korolova, assistant professor of computer science, researches the impacts of algorithms, AI and data-driven machine learning on society and individuals. All social media platforms use algorithms to curate information, but those algorithms can violate user privacy or be biased in ways that are detrimental to users. Korolova’s research focuses on how to build algorithms and machine learning systems that are fair, preserve privacy and enable data-driven innovations. She also works on building methods for auditing AI systems. She holds a joint appointment in the School of Public and International Affairs and is associated faculty in the Center for Information Technology Policy.

Sloan Fellows receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship which can be used flexibly. Fellowship candidates must be nominated by fellow scientists, and winners are selected based on a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. Former fellows have gone on to receive some of science’s top honors, including Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.

Korolova joined the Princeton faculty in 2022. Prior to Princeton she was an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, a research scientist at Google and a privacy adviser at Snap, Inc. She received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2020 and the PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies in 2011 and was runner-up for the PET Award in 2015. Korolova’s research on discrimination in ad delivery received an honorable mention and recognition of contribution to diversity and inclusion at the 2019 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing and was runner-up for best student paper award at the Web Conference in 2021. She completed a bachelor’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctoral degree at Stanford University, where she won the Arthur L. Samuel award for the best Ph.D. thesis in computer science.