Five receive Sloan fellowships

Five Cornell University scientists receive Sloan Research Fellowships

By Susan S. Lang

Five members of the Cornell faculty, from the United States, Canada, Romania and Sweden, have been awarded prestigious Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships.

Clancy

Crane

Mueller

Muscalu

Ryd

They are Colleen E. Clancy, assistant professor of physiology and biophysics, Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Weill Cornell Medical College; Brian Crane, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology; Erich Mueller, assistant professor of physics; Camil Muscalu, assistant professor of mathematics; and Anders Ryd, assistant professor of physics.

The five are among 116 young scientists and economists selected as 2005 Sloan Fellows, representing faculty from 54 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. The fellowships, totaling $5.2 million this year, allow scientists to continue their research with awards of $45,000 each over two years. Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them.

Clancy received her B.S. in mathematics and biology from Union College in 1994 and her Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics at Case Western Reserve University in 2001. She was a postdoctoral fellow in 2001-03 and was appointed an associate research scientist in pharmacology in 2003 at Columbia University. She joined the Cornell faculty in 2004. Clancy was profiled in The Chronicle of Higher Education's annual "Rising Stars: Ph.D.s to Watch" in 2001 and was the recipient of a Junior Investigator Research Grant from the National Epilepsy Foundation in 2004-05.

Her previous research focused on cardiac genetics and abnormal rhythms. She is now expanding her laboratory focus to genetic mutations in neuronal ion channels that have been linked to epilepsy. Recent work focuses on developing more detailed models of hippocampal neurons. Her long-term goal is to improve understanding of the underlying ionic mechanisms of excitable systems and to determine how genetic defects in ion channels may disrupt the balance of membrane ionic currents at the cellular level.

Crane obtained his B.Sc. at the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 1990 and his Ph.D. in macromolecular and cellular structure and chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in 1996. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 2000, he was a research associate at the California Institute of Technology's Beckman Institute. He is the recipient of a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Young Faculty Award, a Research Corp. Research Innovation Award, a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program award and a Searle Scholars Program grant.

His research focuses on the structural principles of redox- and photo-chemistry in biological catalysis and regulation. Specifically, he seeks better understanding of how metallo-enzymes stabilize transient intermediates during catalysis, how protein structure controls long-range electron transfer and how photo and redox processes are used in biological signal transduction.

Mueller received his B.Sc. in mathematics and physics from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 1996 and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2001. He was a postdoctoral fellow in physics at Ohio State University in 2001-03 and joined the Cornell faculty in 2003.

His research involves the theory of ultracold alkali vapors. These atomic vapors are cooled to such low temperatures that quantum mechanics dominates over more mundane thermal effects. Recently, his predictions about vortex structures in rotating clouds have been experimentally confirmed, and his ideas for imaging spin structures have been implemented.

Muscalu received his B.S. in mathematics in 1993 from Bucharest University, Romania, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Brown University in 2000. He joined the Cornell faculty in 2003. Previously, he was a Hedrick Assistant Professor in mathematics at the University of California-Los Angeles in 2000-03 and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during the academic year 2003-04. He won an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in 2000.

His research focuses on harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. More particularly, in recent years he has worked on the "modern theory" of multilinear singular integrals, which includes operators whose complexity goes beyond the complexity of the famous Carleson operator.

Ryd received his B.S. in physics from the University of Lund, Sweden, in 1991 and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1996. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 2003, he first worked as a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar, then as a senior postdoctoral scholar and then as a staff scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

His research has been in the area of weak decays of heavy mesons. At CalTech, he studied the rare flavor changing neutral current decays of B mesons. At Cornell's CLEO particle detector, he is currently involved in studies of D meson decays. A detailed understanding of the strong dynamics in D decays can be used to validate the lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculation, which will allow stringent tests of the Standard Model of particle physics. Currently, he is getting involved with the compact muon solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva.

April 7, 2005