Today, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced the recipients of the 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship, an award that honors exceptional early-career researchers across North America.
David Clewett, an assistant professor of psychology, is among the three UCLA researchers named in this year’s cohort of Sloan Fellows.
Since the fellowship program began in 1955, 59 Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes and 72 have received the National Medal of Science. To date, 187 UCLA faculty members have earned the distinction of being named Sloan Fellows.
Excerpt from today’s UCLA Newsroom article:
David Clewett
Assistant professor of psychology
UCLA College
Time flows in a continuous stream, yet our memories are divided into separate episodes that become part of our personal narrative. Cognitive neuroscientist David Clewett is unraveling the mystery of how — and where — this process occurs in the brain. Using advanced imaging, behavioral experiments and physiological measurements, he studies how feelings such as excitement, stress or joy shape what we remember, helping identify the neural systems that play a role in memory formation and explain why experiences like music or major life events can make memories especially vivid and enduring.
At UCLA, Clewett has built a dynamic research lab focused on this intersection of cognition, memory and emotion. His work on understanding the brain’s memory systems, honored with a 2022–23 UCLA Hellman Fellowship, may one day help improve learning and resilience, with implications for education, mental health and healthy cognitive aging.
***
Read more about UCLA’s 2026 Sloan Research Fellows in the UCLA Newsroom.