We are delighted to congratulate Professor Juliana Londoño Vélez, one of the 2026 recipients of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship. These highly competitive fellowships are awarded each year to a select group of outstanding early-career scientists in the United States and Canada. Sloan Research Fellowships recognize exceptional promise in the fields of Chemistry, Computer Science, Earth and Space Science, Economics, Mathematics, Neuroscience, and Physics. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by a committee of distinguished scholars in their respective disciplines.

Juliana is an applied microeconomist studying how tax and social policies can reduce poverty and inequality and promote upward mobility. Her research identifies constraints on governments’ redistributive capacity and evaluates how targeted interventions shape the life trajectories of disadvantaged populations.

She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019 and joined UCLA in 2020 as an assistant professor. She teaches undergraduate Public Economics and a graduate course in the same field.

Juliana joins nine past Sloan fellows in the UCLA Economics Department: Yotam Shem-Tov (2025), David Baqaee (2022), Natalie Bau (2022), Denis Chetverikov (2019), Pablo Fajgelbaum (2017), Jonathan Vogel (2012), Dora Costa (1999), Lee Ohanian (1998), and Andrew Atkeson (1995).

UCLA Newsroom story announcing Juliana’s Sloan Research Fellowship is available here: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/3-ucla-professors-named-sloan-research-fellows-2026.