CU researchers Apsel, McQuade named among top innovators

By Thomas Oberst and Susan Lang

Technology Review magazine has named Cornell Assistant Professors Alyssa Apsel of electrical and computer engineering and D. Tyler McQuade of chemistry and chemical biology two of the world's 100 Top Young Innovators in 2004.

Apsel

McQuade

Apsel, McQuade and the other 98 honorees -- known as the TR100 -- were chosen by a panel of judges from a field of 650 final candidates under the age of 35 whose innovative work has transformed the nature of technology and business. Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reports on the impact of emerging technology on business and society.

The two Cornell scientists were honored with the other winners at the fourth annual Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT on Sept. 29 and 30. In addition, the TR100 will be profiled in the magazine's October 2004 issue.

Apsel joined the Cornell faculty two years ago after earning her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and quickly was named to the Clare Boothe Luce Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Her field of research is optoelectronic interconnects for high-performance computing and analog VLSI (very large system integration). VLSI involves the placement of 100,000 to a million electronic components, such as complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors, on a single microchip -- a thin rectangle of silicon or sapphire 1/16- to 5/8-inch square and 1/30-inch thick. Apsel uses optical processing and communication to complement the computational power and ubiquity of standard electronic CMOS systems.

McQuade joined Cornell in 2001 after earning his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and then working three years as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral research fellow at MIT. He quickly won several awards, including a $200,000 early career award from the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR) for research that strives to create polymers that mimic biological materials, a Nontenured Faculty Award from 3M Co., a New Faculty Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and a New Faculty Award from the Beckman Foundation.

McQuade's research focuses on creating new approaches to chemical synthesis that are more environmentally benign. Rather than purify reactions one chemical step at a time, which produces a great deal of waste, McQuade seeks to mimic nature's way of running reactions using multiple catalysts in one environment. His research group has created encapsulated catalysts that allow catalysts to work together in the same reaction vessel. McQuade can generate many sets of capsules, each with a different catalyst.

The judges for the 2004 TR100 included Technology Review editors and executives from two dozen universities and companies, including the California Institute of Technology, MIT, the University of Cambridge, Cornell, General Electric, Harvard Medical School, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Xerox.

Technology Review executive editor David Rotman said, "This year's winners were chosen after rigorous selection and judging ... the result is an elite group whose visions will shape the future of technology."