The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has named Jeffrey Bigham, associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, as a winner of a 2014 Sloan Research Fellowship.

The prestigious fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars and the next generation of scientific leaders. The foundation this year selected 126 U.S. and Canadian researchers as fellowship recipients.

Bigham, who joined Carnegie Mellon last year from the University of Rochester, investigates crowd-powered technologies, enabling groups to do things individuals can’t and leveraging the on-demand labor of people to perform tasks beyond the capability of today’s computers.

His other interests include accessible technologies. He is the scientific director of the Disability Rehabilitation Research Project (DRRP) on Inclusive Cloud and Web Computing, a five-year project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to develop methods that enable people with disabilities to take full advantage of the resources available on the Internet.

Bigham earned his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. In 2009, MIT Technology Review named him among the Top 35 Innovators Under 35. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2012.

“For more than half a century, the Sloan Foundation has been proud to honor the best young scientific minds and support them during a crucial phase of their careers when early funding and recognition can really make a difference,” said Dr. Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “These researchers are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge in unprecedented ways.”

The fellowships, each worth $50,000, are awarded in eight scientific and technical fields—chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. For a complete list of winners, visit: www.sloan.org/sloan-research-fellowships/2014-sloan-research-fellows