Five graduate students receive research awards from Heinz Foundation

Five graduate students at the Cornell Center for the Environment are among 16 nationwide to receive 2001 Teresa Heinz Scholars for Environmental Research awards.

The awards from the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation provide $10,000 to Ph.D. candidates and $5,000 to master's degree candidates to pursue critical environmental research. Also receiving Heinz Scholar awards were graduate students at Yale, Princeton, Carnegie Melon, Florida A&M and Texas A&M universities.

Receiving Heinz Scholar awards at Cornell are:

• Lori L. Driscoll, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology, for her project, "A Cognitive and Neurochemical Profile of Developmental Lead Exposure: Alterations in the Cholinergic and GABAergic Modulation of Sustained Attention."
• Jennifer A. Fox, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, for her project, "Trajectories of Genetic Change in Populations with Different Founding Sizes: Recovery of Daphnia Populations in Two Upstate New York Lakes."
• Eloise Kendy, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, for her project, "Policies Drain the North China Plain: Attaining Sustainable Water Use in an Over-allocated Region."
• Jianguo Ma, a master's degree candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, for his project, "A GIS-based Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) for Sustainable Watershed Management."
• Theodore S. Eisenman, a master's degree candidate in the Department of Landscape Architecture, for his project, "Interpretive Mapping: A Tool for Building Watershed Stewardship and Designing for Watershed Protection."

Announcing the awards, Heinz Foundation Chair Teresa Heinz said the foundation "is honored to help these students conduct research on today's crucial environmental issues."

"We believe the solutions can be found in new ideas -- and the new ideas can be found in the ingenuity and imagination of a new generation of scientists," Heinz said.