Jeffrey S. Lehman

Lehman, 47, is the first alumnus to serve as president of the university, having earned his bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1977. Prior to his appointment, he was the dean of the University of Michigan Law School.

A native New Yorker, Lehman was born in Bronxville and grew up in White Plains and Bethesda, Md. As an undergraduate he majored in mathematics and graduated with distinction in all subjects. His extracurricular activities included active membership in the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity and co-authorship of the book 1000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games . He earned two advanced degrees at the University of Michigan: a J.D. from the Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review , and a master's degree in public policy from the Institute of Public Policy Studies.

Lehman served as law clerk to Chief Judge Frank M. Coffin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and to Associate Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. He then practiced tax law with the Washington, D.C., law firm of Caplin & Drysdale. While there, he prepared an amicus curiae brief for the Supreme Court on behalf of 72 Nobel laureate scientists and 17 state academies of science. In that case, Edwards v. Aguillard , the Court struck down a Louisiana statute that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools unless teachers gave comparable instruction in "creation science."

He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 1987, teaching and publishing about issues of law and public policy, and developing a program of clinical education that offered students an opportunity to represent community organizations in economic development projects. A highly regarded scholar, he has been a visiting professor at the Yale Law School and the University of Paris. When he was named dean of the University of Michigan Law School in 1994, the National Law Journal hailed him as one of 40 "Rising Stars in the Law."

During his tenure as dean, Lehman attracted national media attention as a spokesperson in defense of the University of Michigan Law School's moderate approach to affirmative action in admissions. While explaining the policy to television, radio and newspaper audiences, he also helped shape the legal argument for universities' freedom to consider race as a limited factor in the admissions process, in order to achieve meaningful levels of racial integration. The Supreme Court's opinion affirming that policy, in Grutter v. Bollinger , is considered to be one of the most important decisions in the history of higher education.

Under Lehman's leadership, the University of Michigan Law School launched a range of successful initiatives in legal writing, public service, clinical education and transnational law. He served as president of the American Law Deans Association from 2001 to 2003.

Ron Elber

Elber is a specialist in computational biology and bioinformatics, the fields that use computing and mathematics to study the structure, function and dynamics of biological molecules in plants and animals.

One focus of his computational biology research is the development of scientific tools to simulate the dynamics of biological macromolecules, including proteins, the prime "machines" of all living cells. Elber's bioinformatic investigations focus on protein annotation and the implications of protein shapes on evolution. For example, Elber's bioinformatic analyses linked a plant gene that influences tomato fruit size with a human protein that controls cell growth and cancer -- providing evidence of similar evolutionary pathways in two very different kinds of organisms.

The author of 91 scientific papers, 78 in peer-reviewed journals, Elber attended Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics in 1981 and a doctorate in theoretical chemistry in 1984. He was a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical biophysics at Harvard University from 1984 to 1987, then served on the chemistry faculty of the University of Illinois (1987-1992) and on the chemistry and biology faculty at the Hebrew University before joining the Cornell faculty in 1999. He is a member of Cornell's Department of Computer Science.

Steven Tanksley

In 2004, he was a co-recipient of the 2004 Wolf Foundation Prize in Agriculture for his "innovative development of hybrid rice and discovery of the genetic basis of heterosis in this important food staple." The award will be presented by Moshe Katsav, president of the State of Israel, at the Knesset in Jerusalem, May 9.

Tanksley showed that quantitatively inherited traits spanning an entire genome can be dissected into their corresponding Mendelian factors, called quantitative trait loci (QTL). This allows researchers to identify rate-limiting genes associated with crop performance. His work has been used by other researchers to detect and map QTLs in a wide array of other organisms. In addition, Tanksley's research has led to the discovery of the genetic basis of hybrid vigor in rice, allowing further developments to increase rice yields.

His laboratory also developed the first molecular map of tomatoes, making Tanksley the first plant geneticist to use map-based cloning of a pest-resistance gene in a crop plant. He also developed computer programs and databases for the management and analysis of molecular genetic data.

Tanksley received a bachelor's degree in agronomy from Colorado State University in 1976 and a doctorate in genetics from the University of California-Davis in 1979. He joined the faculty of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell in 1985.

He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1995. He is a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Award and the Martin Gibbs Medal of the American Society of Plant Physiology.