Two Cornell faculty members in Ithaca and two at the New York Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City have been selected to receive Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships, the foundation has announced.
The new fellows are: Piet W. Brouwer, assistant professor of physics, and H. Floyd Davis, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, both at Cornell in Ithaca; and Jon S. Thorson, assistant professor in the programs of pharmacology and in biochemistry and structural biology at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences and assistant member in molecular pharmacology and therapeutics at the Sloan-Kettering Institute (SKI), and Gero Miesenbock, assistant professor in the programs of cell biology and genetics and in neuroscience at Weill Cornell Graduate School and assistant member in cellular biochemistry and biophysics at SKI.
The four were among the 104 outstanding young scientists and economists selected as Sloan Fellows this year, representing faculty from 53 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. The fellows are engaged in research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, neuroscience and economics. The fellowships allow scientists to continue their research with $40,000 each over two years administered by the fellows' home institutions. Fellows can pursue lines of inquiry of most interest to them.
Brouwer joined the Cornell faculty in 1999 from Harvard University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow (1997-1999). He obtained his M.S. in physics (1993) and in mathematics (1994) and his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics (1997)at Leiden University, Holland. His research concerns theoretical meso-scopic physics, a subfield of condensed matter physics that deals with the properties of small, mostly electronic systems, such as semiconductor or metal wires, small metal grains or semiconductor quantum dots. In particular, his focus is on transport and thermodynamic properties of disordered or chaotic electronic systems and how these are affected by interactions, the proximity of a superconductor, variations (random or nonrandom) of the environment and type of disorder.
Davis, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1994, was educated at the University of Waterloo, Canada (B.Sc., applied chemistry, 1986), and the University of California--Berkeley (Ph.D., physical chemistry, 1992). In 1992 he was a postdoctoral research associate at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and from 1992 to 1994 he was a researcher at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is a past winner of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award and of an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.
His current research involves experimental studies of the dynamics of chemical reactions relevant to catalysis, combustion and atmospheric chemistry using crossed molecular beams methods. His research group's current areas of interest include transition metal chemistry -- the bimolecular reaction dynamics of ground state and electronically excited transition metal atoms with hydrocarbon molecules -- and polyatomic free radical chemistry. Other research involves measurements of product angular and velocity distributions from bimolecular reactions of free radicals prepared by laser photolysis.
Thorson has been an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Graduate School and assistant member at SKI since July 1996. He graduated from the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., chemistry, 1993) and was a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley, from 1993 to 1996. His main research interests are the biosynthesis of natural products and mechanistic enzymology.
Miesenbock has been assistant professor at Weill Cornell Graduate School and assistant member at SKI since 1998. He graduated from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, (M.D., 1993) and was a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry and biophysics at SKI from 1992 to 1998. He has been named a Searle Scholars Award winner for 2000-2003.
His main research focuses on the ways in which populations of neurons encode information, a subject he has studied in the odor-detecting mechanism of the fly Drosophila melanogaster.
Selection of young scientists as Sloan Fellows is based on exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. More than 400 scientists were nominated this year by department chairs and other senior scholars familiar with the researchers' talents. A committee consisting of 18 distinguished scientists, which this year included Jon C. Clardy, Cornell professor of chemistry and chemical biology, reviewed the nominations.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |